My Complicated Relationship with Race
Photo by Ylanite Koppens from Pexels
I was 12. My mom and I were sitting in my room and just chatting. It was one of those cherished moments of just the two of us - mother and daughter - bonding over conversation.
She told me of her life growing up in the Bronx and then in North Jersey. She told me that when it would rain, she and her sisters would play out on the driveway, and my grandfather would sit in the garage and watch them. She told me of the time she stood up to her future father-in-law, the pastor of her church, and told him that what mattered was in her heart, not in what she wore. Each time my mom tells me a story of her life, I am enraptured. Her strength, dignity, and humor are woven through every word.
This one story was no different. She told me that when she was a kid in North Jersey, her Puerto Rican skin was darker than her classmates’, and she was an outcast for it. Each morning she would walk into school, and the kids would spit on her. She would go to the bathroom, wash up, and then go to class. She told me this in the plainest language, with little emotion. It was so matter of fact. But of course, I’m weeping now as I type - hurt by the pain she must have felt. As I grew up and I experienced my own form of bullying, my mom would tell me, “Kids are mean.” She said it with total empathy and practicality,: there are mean people in this world, but stay tough and stay strong.
This attitude carried throughout my life as I heard bits and pieces of racial prejudice carried out against people closest to me. I remember that my sister, who’s 100% Puerto Rican, was forbidden from dating a white boy in the neighborhood because his mom didn’t want him to date a Puerto Rican girl. When my former brother-in-law, who’s black, would come to visit, I remember my sisters warning him to be on the look out when he got a haircut because cops in the neighborhood were not nice to people of color.
Looking back, I remember how these moments were almost treated with humor.. I don’t remember anger or frustration. It was almost like, “This is the way life is, so we have to deal with it the best way that we can.” There was no call to change. No rebellion. We lived in the way of my mother: “People are mean, but you stay tough and strong.” We changed what we could and stood up to the people we needed to, but there was no talk of the systemic racism of our country.
History was History
I grew up in New Jersey, so my education was different than that of my southern friends, but it was in no way perfect. When we learned about racism, we learned that it was in the past. Slavery was abolished; Jim Crow was over; Martin Luther King had won. Look at the two black kids we have in our school! Isn’t that progress?
My father, who’s white, told me stories of how his father hired one of the first black people in a southern town. Rocks were thrown at the office, but my grandfather stood his ground. He told me this story with pride, and I am proud of my grandfather, but I was told this story like, “We don’t have those issues anymore. Everything’s fine. Look at how peaceful everything is.”
When you think history is in the past, you tend to look at the present with an air of superiority. It seems disconnected from all the moments that led up to it. You think, “I’m different. We’re different. Things are different now. My world isn’t their world.” But I was wrong.
My White Complacency
I went to a high school that looked integrated but was incredibly segregated. I remember only one or two African American students who were in my honors and AP classes. The overall population of African American students was small. In the cafeteria, I remember for each lunch period, our groups of African American students would take up only a table or two out of the 50 that were there.
I didn’t realize it, but “truths” started to form in my mind: “black students are trouble;” or “black students aren’t as capable as white students.” I remember my friend telling me the difference between the two n-words and how it was okay to refer to black people as one or the other based on what they were like. Ugh. It disgusts me to write it now, and I repent of not speaking up in that instance.
Because I thought that racism was over, I didn’t know that it could also be in my own heart, even if I had family who were black. I didn’t know that biases and prejudices were taking root in my heart. I knew that racists were bad, but I thought they just lived down south and that they carried Confederate flags. The stories of my mother and sisters were in the past. How could I be a perpetrator of their pain?
Tearing Down my Walls
My senior year of high school I received a lot of letters from colleges about my being Puerto Rican. To comply with their affirmative action initiatives, I seemed like a great candidate, and they invited me to sessions for women like me - women of color. When I saw that phrase, I was taken aback. My skin was white. How could I be a woman of color?
I brought this confusion up to my Spanish teacher who was Filipina. I said, “Can you believe it? These colleges called me a woman of color.” She responded, “Well that’s what you are.” Her frankness caught me off guard, so I mulled it over some more. How could I be a woman of color with white skin? What did that mean for me?
I continued to grapple with my Puerto Rican/White identity as I went to college. My friends were all white girls who grew up in white families, and boy did I feel different. My Puerto Rican side slapped me in the face as I realized that my upbringing was more Latina than I knew. And then I started to realize that even though my skin was white, I was carrying around the history of my family. I began to see my mom’s stories in a different light. I realized that the reason that my white grandfather was an officer in the military and my Puerto Rican grandfather was a cook was not because of their preferences.
As these realizations hit me, I took classes in sociology, world literature, and literary analysis. Through their lectures, assignments, and discussions, my professors began to show me how my world was designed to let white people win and people of color lose. I learned about voting laws, gentrification, colonialism, and inherent biases. I learned that I was both complicit in and the beneficiary of systemic racism, and I was angry and hurt. I wanted to protect every person of color I knew. I wanted to change the world and fix hearts. I wanted to be on the good side of history.
Tough Lessons
College graduates are incredibly eager and passionate, but they are also inexperienced and foolish. I was no exception.
My second year of teaching I transferred to a school that was majority African American and Latino. Through my education classes, I had already learned about cultural differences of the black community and how to teach based on those differences, but I wasn’t really prepared for how these differences would collide with my cultural upbringing. I realize now that I was taught like a white girl. I was told, “You have these privileges. Your students won’t. You don’t understand, so be sensitive.” I knew I had to use more books written by minorities and that I needed to have my students read texts critically so that they understood each writer had some type of inherent bias, but I didn’t know how my mixed identity would clash with teaching. I thought the fact that I was mixed was going to just be an advantage, but what I didn’t realize was that just because my family had adjacent experiences to those of my students, it doesn’t mean that they’re the same. Well, those ideas were kicked out of me real quick.
To put it bluntly, there were some really bad days and some really great days. There were so many things I wanted to teach, and there were so many things I was struggling to learn. Because I came from a family that said, “You keep moving. You keep learning. You stay strong and fight,” I expected my students to have the same attitude. Some of them did, but some were in the middle of their own life crises. Some had tried, but they gave up. Some were undocumented, so they didn’t think they had a future since they couldn’t go to college. Some decided to fight, but they were fighting me instead of their fears. Which, really, I get, since here was this teacher with white skin who seemed like she didn’t understand. And I didn’t. Not always. Instead of approaching them with empathy, I was frustrated that they weren’t meeting my expectations. There were moments I let my temper get the better of me, and I repent of that too. I didn’t stop and listen to what they were saying, and it really hurt how I taught.
When I finally did stop, though, I did see some change. It’s crazy what can happen when you treat someone’s feelings and experiences as just as valid and valuable as your own. This was exemplified in my lesson on an essay written by a slave’s experience on the Middle Passage - the route slave ships would take between Africa and the Americas. The essay detailed the brutal conditions of the ship and how some people decided to commit suicide by throwing themselves overboard instead of giving themselves up to a life of slavery. It was rough.
This essay is great for white audiences because it checks them into discomfort. It turns their brains from, “Some masters were nice to slaves!” to “Slavery was always brutal and a horrible atrocity committed by our nation.” For black audiences, however, I learned it was a different experience. A student raised his hand and said, “Can’t we learn about something good about black people? I’m sick of hearing all the bad things.” I didn’t really know what to say. This is how I was taught about slavery, but I was raised in an all white school. How could I not think of how this would hit my students? They lived out discrimination and the effects of systemic racism every day. They might not have known the full history, but they could feel the aftermath.
From that moment on I’ve rethought how I talk about race, diversity, and representation. I will expand on this more in a future post, but dear reader, I encourage you to look beyond riots and protests. To understand someone, lean into their stories, both good and bad. Sit with them as they speak their hurts and joys. Celebrate milestones and lament atrocities. Be who Christ made you to be and honor His image in people who don’t look like you. If you are going to worship Him, worship His creativity and brilliance in each person you meet.
A Time to Mourn. A Time to Dance. A Time to Listen.
Ecclesiastes 3 tells us that there is a time for everything;
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
As I sit here straddled between two worlds - my Puerto Rican and white cultures - I ask God for wisdom to know when the time is right to speak and when the time is right to listen. I am white. I am Latina. I have been the oppressor, and I am knit with the stories of the oppressed.
I know that no matter what my skin color is, that I am a daughter of God, and I am called to live my life in a way that glorifies Him. So, I will listen to my black brothers and sisters and mourn with them. I will hear my white brothers and sisters and speak truth into their lives. And I will sit with my biracial brothers and sisters and empathize with the complexities of their identities.
Final Prayer
Father, You created each one of us with a purpose to glorify You
You painted us with different shades and hues
You gave us curly hair and straight hair and some inbetween hair
You designed some of us to be hands and some of us to be feet,
But we are all part of the Body of Christ
I pray that as we lean into the gifts You have given us,
That we honor the gifts You have given to others
We live in a world that ran away from Your plan
Where we saw our differences and said
”God made you inferior.”
Our misunderstandings turned to hatred
Your body was broken because we idolized power
The church became a weapon of division
I repent of my complacency and of my silence
I repent of my biases and prejudices
I repent of my anger, my hard heart, and my closed mind
Father, forgive me. Forgive us.
I pray our hearts are softened and our minds opened
Let us once again see the beauty in Your creation
Let us glorify You by loving one another,
And let us call one another out in truth and love
So that hurts may heal and we can move forward together
In Jesus’ name,
Amen
