Why white people don’t want to live among racists, either ~ (part 1)

As we continue to settle in to our home in Virginia, people will sometimes ask ~ Wasn’t it hard to leave your home of 20+ years in Oklahoma? Don’t you miss it? 

I don’t really know how to respond, truthfully. Of course I miss people I love, who remain in that proudly scarlet state. I miss prairie skies, and a July abloom with crape myrtles. Not to mention scissortailed flycatchers, and even the occasional road runner down by my inlaws’ farm. The land itself? Sure.

But as a white woman who tries verrry hard to be a voice for engaged Buddhism, for the social justice so painfully absent in today’s government, I’m glad to be out of there. I used to have a bumper sticker: Bright Blue Dot in a Very Red State. Which grew increasingly hard to live with. And today I read an article that said, far more articulately than I’m able to, just how Tulsa in particular is such a racist mess. And why I don’t have faith it will change much, despite the many wonderful progressives I know there.

I don’t personally know the author of the article, Caleb Gayle. His piece in the Guardian, “How America’s heartland loses black people” might not seem relevant to a very white woman, aging nicely into her Gigi-hood. But it resonated with me on so many levels.

I would guess Mr. Gayle is younger than the close friends from Oklahoma I’m so grateful for. The ones I’m thinking of specifically are the African American scholars & teachers who have helped me understand the impact of racism on their daily lives. Who, through their very presence at a restaurant with me (I’m looking at you, Ben & Dewayne), have made Tulsa’s racism manifest and tangible. It’s so very different to go to a nice restaurant in midtown (old money Tulsa) with Ben and/or Dewayne than it is to go with a white male friend. Service is cooler, more distant. No one sits by us, even if that choice inconveniences them. And the glances from the other restaurant patrons? Beyond ‘just curious.’ Seeing is definitely believing.

Perhaps because I grew up the odd person out — a blonde white girl in ViệtNam, a blonde white girl in Thailand, a blonde white woman in Algeria & Saudi Arabia, and the many places we traveled — I didn’t grow up thinking white was better. In Algiers, men tried to fondle me daily. The little boys threw rocks at me. As a young girl in ViệtNam, I grew accustomed to people tugging at my pale blonde ponytail, so rare in those days. I never understood why anyone would think ‘we’ were superior. We certainly weren’t as pretty as the Việtnamese girls, nor do we have the lengthy culture of Arab science. And we are no better, morally, than either Muslims or Buddhists.

In fact, I know American history well, and it’s rife with thousands of horrific racist actions. By white people. By Christian white people (full disclosure here: I don’t know that I was ever a Christian after 9th grade, when my youth group refused to let me bring in friends who weren’t ‘like us’). And given the stats on how white American males are our most likely ‘terrorists’? We certainly have nor legitimate moral high ground on criminal terrorism.

At 18 I fell in love with a young man whose father was from Sierra Leone, and whose mother was African American. It netted me a deportation. My father saw that official act as the only way to be certain I didn’t return to ‘engage’ with the enemy.

This is all by way of trying to answer a question a new FB acquaintance asked me recently, referencing my passionate rejection of this administration & government: Why would a middle aged white woman care so much about all this? Even if my background hadn’t influenced me so profoundly, my two beautiful brown grandsons surely would. I will never, thankfully, share the sleep-shattering fears black mothers I know have told me they suffer. But as my grandsons grow to school-age, I worry. Will someone say something hurtful? When they’re older, will someone hurt them?

Caleb Gayle has, I’m sure, hundreds of stories of such experiences. The young man I loved at 18 had one leg 2 inches shorter than the other, from being run off the road on his motorcycle. A laughing white driver of a car, he told me. In Philadelphia, the land of brotherly love. My friends Ben, Dewayne, Sylvia, Shanedra, Deborah, & others could chill your blood with what they encounter daily

My beloved of 40+ years is white. Or at least Oklahoma white, meaning he’s part Native American, but has no tribal knowledge. Forefather kicked off the Indian rolls for beating up the agent, according to family lore. Which the agent probably deserved, my readings in history tell me. So racism doesn’t ‘overtly’ affect him or us. And yet…

How can white people pretend that racism doesn’t diminish us, the whites who benefit from it? And how can they pretend it’s a ‘post-racial’ society, as I heard knee-jerk liberals assert following Obama’s first election? Really? If so, why would the same judge sentence a black teenager to 26 years for the same offense he sentenced a white man to 2 years??? There are so very many instances of these racist judgements that I just don’t understand how white people DON”T SEE THEM. They don’t want to…?

We moved from Oklahoma to be by our children, and our grandchildren. It wasn’t simply that the political climate had grown so awful. It  was all the ‘side issues’ common to neo-con politics: funding for public schools put Oklahoma at the bottom of the nation. Crime is high, as it usually is when poverty is rampant.  And yes: politics are as deeply red as the spilled blood of Jeremy Lake (an unarmed black teen killed by his white girlfriend’s policeman father), or Terence Crutcher, another unarmed black man killed by another Tulsa policeman. Or Joshua Barre, also shot by Tulsa police in a hotly disputed case. And that’s just in the last couple of years. But Tulsans will assure that race was no issue.

My religion is one of peace & non-violence. In my next post, I’m hoping to move forward to how to deal with all of today’s overt hate, and increasingly systemic racism (which is, by definition, a system for those whites who put it in power). Maybe you have some ideas to contribute?