While I was born in Kansas City, the first place I remember living was Longmont Colorado. Longmont is a front-range city just north of Denver and a short drive from the Rocky Mountains. Quite a few of the children I went to school with were Latino; but it was not until fourth grade that I remember having a Black classmate. His name was DJ and he had blue eyes. A lot of the girls thought he was cute.
My mom's family is from eastern, coal country, Kentucky. One summer she and I road the Greyhound bus to Kentucky and during one stretch she sat with an African American lady to talk and I sat with the lady's young daughter. I do not remember the girl's name; but, I do remember tight braids with little white beads. I remember chatting with her and goofing around with her while we looked out the window.
In 3rd or 4th grade my mother read to me the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. She talked with me about a very specific word that Mark Twain's characters used in his books and that while that word had been used at the time it was written it was not a good word; rather, it was a word that was used to hurt Black people. I filed that information away in my head, my young heart not fully comprehending.
One day at school I heard that specific word used. It was not directed at any particular individual; rather it was sung as part of a rhyme girls said as they slapped hands. I was completely unaware that this was one of my first encounters with culturally-embedded racism.
When I was eleven years old we moved from Longmont, Colorado to the small town of Mexico, Missouri. With the move I instantly traded an eighth of my classmates that were Latino for an eighth of my classmates that were Black. Along with this change in racial context also came an intensification in the contrast between ethnicities. The town had clear geographic lines inside which many of the black citizens of the town lived. Mexico, Missouri had vestiges of the old south still in-tact. The marching band I was a member of in high school was named 'The Dixie Grey' for crying out loud.
Indulge me a brief history lesson. Missouri was one of the slave states prior to the Civil War; however Missouri itself did not secede from the union. There were however many pockets of southern sympathy and many a Missouri man journeyed south to fight for the confederate cause. Just south of Mexico, Missouri there is a county called Callaway and briefly during the Civil war it established itself as its own sovereign The Kingdom of Callaway and maintained a militia of farmers in alliance with the confederacy. As the union troops strengthened their control of Missouri the militia was held in a stand-off with the union army and had to negotiate a truce.
The word I had learned back in Colorado, the one said to hurt Black people, the one sung by girls innocuously on the playground took on a whole new meaning in Mexico. In Mexico, it was used by my Black classmates, it was used by my white classmates, it was used by adults in my community, and most specifically it was used by adults in my church. That word was part and parcel of the culture of the place and its meaning was clear. Black people are not very valuable. Black people are not very smart. Black people should know their place. Black lives do not really matter.
Well, except for one context. Sports; however that will be saved for another post on another day...
I am not writing about all of this to bag on the home of my teenage years specifically because the culture I experienced in Mexico Missouri was not marginally different from almost any other mid-western town that thrived on white family connections, white family history, and a very clear implicit understanding of who was in charge, white people. And it is this shared culture that negatively shaped my unconscious biases against people of color, and black people specifically. It is that culture of implicit white dominance that created patterns of understanding in me about how the world works for which I have had to repent, to ask forgiveness of others for, to educate myself out of, and due to which I now have to scrutinize my implicit assumptions for racist patterns.
So, where is the through line to my story? Despite all best efforts, and despite being raised to understand racism as wrong and evil, I was still taught racism implicitly. Despite my parent's best effort; racist beliefs, racist presumptions, and racist practices were imparted to me simply by living in a broader culture in which racism was and is continually present. Combating racism, and being non-racist are not and cannot be passive activities. If we want to not be racist, to no longer unconsciously perpetuate racist patterns, and to raise children who are conscious of racist patterns and fight against them it requires action and effort on our part to be consciously anti-racist.
The statement Black Lives Matter is a simple step in actively confronting implicit racism. It is a simple and elegant statement that confronts the implicit racism in our culture and reminds us that among all the other things that matter in this world Black lives matter too.