I look back on my childhood as coming from the generation of black and white. TV shows were black and white. Most of the photographs in our family collection were black and white. And the many “White Only,” and “Black Only” signs seen in the marketplace. The latter was not anything I understood.
As a young boy, I would watch my grandpa hitching and handling his mules. Watching him farm row crops, I’d see him stop his two mules mid-row, take off his straw hat, wipe the sweat off his bald head, fill and relight his pipe, and then return to gee-hawing on.
My other grandpa had retired from full-time farmer and leased the land to a sharecropper. I’d sit on the back porch gazing across the pasture toward the tenant house and see the activity of the black family who lived there. It was all a curious mystery to me.
I remember my father talking to me about how he grew up working in the field alongside the black man, as equals. Considering that his parents owned the land maybe it seems a bit idealistic. Regardless, it says something about how his parents raised him. And it also says something about how I and my five siblings were raised to think of other people.
I was 52 when my dad passed, and I never saw him or my mom contradict this ideal in raising their six children. I am grateful to both and hope my children take the same from me.
Yes, there is individual and systemic prejudice, … without a doubt. In ways that I have experienced and quite sure, so have everyone else. But I cannot imagine its roots exist in the color of skin.
We don’t pick the culture we were born into, nor our parents. And there is no justice by holding guilt nor taking the blame for what someone else has done. Justice is rendering to another human being what they are due; a basic dignity.
The only thing that we can positively change about the past is a “letting go” of what is not life-giving and living our lives forward.
Both justice and injustice are sourced in one’s heart and lived out as a choice of one’s (free) will.
We will not resolve social injustices by allowing ourselves to be distracted by media falsification that looks or feels like the truth?
Let us recollect, why do we harm others?
Continue reading “Black and White”
