A
friend argues that you can’t have real convictions on a social issue until you’ve
experienced the matter personally. For example, you can’t claim a solid opinion
on capital punishment until you’ve seen a few heads roll (maybe your own?) or
demand racial tolerance until you’ve lived side by side with people of other
races.
I
wish my friend’s word were accurate. Then I could rid of the uneasy feeling
that I have no responsibility with regard to both issues. I have never seen a
person guillotined or had blacks living next door. But to say I have no
convictions would be untrue. The headline news these days is much about the
racial unrest in a St. Louis community: white cop shoots black young man.
I
can’t remember when I didn’t hold to the position to some extent that all races
are born equal before God. My attitude
was molded to a large extent by my father’s influence during my childhood. He grew up on the steppes of South Russia as
a descendant of the Mennonite settlers who migrated there from Holland and
northern Germany in the late 1700s and early 1800s. A sturdy, industrious
people, they prospered and became wealthy landowners in their adopted land,
living in self-contained, isolated villages, thereby preserving their culture
successfully.
The
poorer neighboring Russian peasants, not as successful materially or
culturally, became objects of prejudice on the part of some Mennonite settlers.
My father’s bitter denunciation of this down-your-nose attitude and how Russian
stable boys were sometimes denied the warmth of a bed in the attic of the
landowner’s house and sent instead to the hayloft on cold winter nights is an
impression I can’t erase.
I
knew my father as one who, in his own way, always helped those being stepped on
by others – the poor, people without work, social outcasts and others. He had
seen too much mishandling of others because of prejudice.
As
the son of an Einwohner rather than a
landowner my father shared the misery of these Russian peasant boys. He learned
to love them and also formed a basic attitude toward the wealthier and more
highly educated people that he carried with him throughout life. He found some experiences hard to forget. As
a young man he completed burial arrangements of four close relatives in a
two-week period, one of them his father – washing the bodies, prying boards from fences to make coffins, arranging for
transportation to the graveyard on a makeshift cart, and saying the prayer over
the grave—during the typhus epidemic and famine. No preacher, no horse-owner, answered his plea for help.
As
children we relived the Russian Revolution through our parents’ eyes. We heard how the battlefront of the Reds and
the Whites shifted through Rosenthal,
the anarchist raids, the courage of individuals, and the struggle of all to
survive the famine.
Yet
in northern Saskatchewan we lived far removed from the race issue as it
affected people living in the southern United States. Of course, we Canadians had our Indians, but
that was another matter. Indians were simply Indians, and didn’t actually count
as people. They lived on reservations
because they had no other place to go.
Negroes,
as we knew them as children, were the objects of jest and a source of
amusement. The only African-Americans we
knew were the jolly minstrels, faces darkened with burnt cork, who gave our
recreation-starved community an opportunity to laugh. Mother had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in a German
translation. Her re-telling of the slave
girl Eliza’s flight over the ice floes with hounds and bounty hunters in full
pursuit became etched in my young mind. It was therefore a simple transfer of
sympathy from the exploited Russian masses to the discriminated Negroes of the
slave era when our family lived in Canada. But it was harder to see them as
people like us only with a different skin color
when they lived in our little village.
One
day an odd family moved into a shack at the edge of town: A white man whose
youth had long left him, a white woman, much younger than the man, tired
looking and unkempt, and an assortment of children – two white, two black, dark
as the night, and one who was neither black nor white. Their sudden presence in
school was both a novelty and embarrassment. What should we do with them? In early spring, when the snow melted and
roads opened, they were gone. I think we
were glad.
At about
age 15 I attended a United Church girls’ summer camp. One leader, a national from
Trinidad, probably knew the meaning of the word “prejudice” more deeply than we
girls grasped at the time. She patiently taught us its meaning: Being down on what you are not up on.
She also taught us her name, syllable by syllable: Wilma Samlallsing. After 70-some years hers is the only name I
remember of the more than a hundred people I met at that camp.
An
experience with deeper impact on my attitude toward other races occurred when
my husband attended graduate school at Syracuse University in 1961-62. I and the children remained in Kitchener,
Ontario, for the winter. He shared an
apartment near the campus with a Chinese student from Formosa and a young
Nigerian, both in America under the sponsorship of the Laubach Literacy
Foundation.
My
husband told me about the “little League of Nations” in that apartment. Both men were intelligent, outstanding
individuals. Sometimes by comparison American students lacked their caliber of
character.
Lucky,
the Nigerian, more so than Larry, the Formosan, suffered from the blight of
racial intolerance. We suffered with
him. He related how one summer he motored
with friends to the West Coast to find employment. En route he was denied
admittance to some restaurants because the proprietors thought was an American
black. With the hurt rankling in him, he
tested a hunch on the return trip. He traveled the same route and stopped at
the same restaurants, but with a difference. This time he was decked out in the
outstanding agbada of a Nigerian, a
long, full-flowing gown of brightly-checked cloth, embroidered and closely
fitted about the neck. The result? All
doors swung open before him.
Together
with Lucky we drove through the black section of Syracuse. Large, unpainted
apartment buildings lay muddled
together, with children and adults lolling around on the rickety verandahs.
They looked indifferent and indolent. I wondered if the bars of prejudice that
imprisoned them were broken, would they rise to the stature of our friend
Lucky?
The
full seriousness of the race issue stunned me when we moved to Kansas in
1962. In Canada we heard only faint
rumblings of the racial unrest, but now it was a full-blown issue with riots,
marches, bombings and killings.
Every
time I saw a black man on the streets of Wichita I took a second look. I read
books like Black Like Me, Cry the Beloved Country, To Kill a Mockingbird and other strong
opinion molders. When I taught minority literature at college I studied black
history and literature intensely, reading, sorting, thinking. I researched Christian
theology that supported slavery. I was forced to confront the issue of Black
English in classes. Was it a dialect or
another language? Would students speaking only Black English successfully navigate
the business and academic worlds of their future as Americans?
A
student told me she had learned in grade school that if you touched a black
person you would break out in a rash. I
recalled her comment on a trip to Chicago sitting in a bus with a large black man next to me. Would my skin
break out in red welts?
In
the late 1960s at an open air meetings Rev. Vincent Harding, black Mennonite
minister, related his experiences traveling in the deep South. Like our friend Lucky, he was denied use of
rest rooms, privilege of entering certain restaurants, hotels, and the
like.
At
the close of the service, he taught the audience the civil rights song, “We
shall overcome.” Slow, dirge-like we
sang it but without depth of feeling. I sensed a strange restraint in myself
and others in that almost completely white audience that seemed to say, “Blacks
should have civil rights, but must I, a white person, identify completely with
them to help them achieve freedom? If so, how does one do that?”
I
have often told writing classes that it is possible to trace the evolution of
any attitude we hold, even the pathway to or away from prejudice. So, my friend, I have had experience with
prejudice and I am entitled to an opinion.
People of other races are my brothers and sisters. They deserve to be
treated like equals.
