Why It Matters to Me, Part 1: Race

As originally posted on:
http://www.troyduanesmith.com/Blog10a.html

I often find myself, in loosely constructed essays that begin as tirades on Facebook and turn into posts on my (erratically amended) blog, addressing social issues which are very important to me: they are more often than not race, class, and sexuality issues. I suppose one could frame them generally as social justice concerns. In debating people with opposite views it becomes increasingly clear to me that one’s stand on these issues is informed largely by one’s own experiences. Duh, you say. Well, yeah… that statement does reflect perception of the obvious. But knowing that your experiences inform your politics, spirituality, and et cetera, is one thing- truly understanding it is another thing entirely.

My focus on social justice has informed my whole adult life. The volunteer work I did with Haitian immigrants in the late ‘80s, the ministries I undertook when I was a young man, the poetry and fiction I continue to write, the themes I explore as a professional historian, the approaches I take in the classroom, all have been driven in whole or in part by the fuel of my social passions. So have my efforts to understand my own place in the universe; who I am, and who I aspire to be.

In my first year of grad school, I took a course on the Black Freedom Movement taught by Professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, whom I greatly respect and admire. One of the first assignments seemed, on the surface, ridiculously simple, and yet turned out to be so complex that it still echoes in my thoughts several years later. The professor instructed us to write a short paper addressing the earliest moments in our lives when we fully realized that there were race and class differences in our society. The very act of sifting through my memories for those epiphanies made me think about my life, and myself, in ways I never had before. I have cared about these things for most of my life –but why? I think a similar exercise would help anyone develop better understandings of themselves and of these particular issues. Perhaps you are a person who does not particularly care; well, why not? Maybe isolating the answer to that question can lead you to future experiences which will make you care more.

I intend to structure this endeavor in three parts, and explain the moments in my life that have made me care about race, class, and sexuality. It may seem like a self-absorbed endeavor, and the first time I did it, privately, it was. In this case, though, I hope that seeing how someone else’s thought processes led them to a position might give you a starting point to find where you are on the spectrum of opinion/engagement, and why. I am going to start with race.

I come from a small town in Appalachian Tennessee (Sparta- population when I was a kid, it has not changed much, was 5,000, or about one-quarter of the people in the county. The rest lived in one of a handful of hamlets, or in the rurals.) There were two or three hundred black people (the 2000 census recorded close to 250), making the town 5% black and 95% white back when I was growing up. It may sound weird, but that gave Sparta the highest percentage of black citizens of any town in the whole Upper Cumberland Region- Cookeville has more numerically, but they make up a smaller percentage of the overall population (in 2000, about 700 individuals making up 3% of the population.) No other nearby town was even close; in fact, two –Crossville and Gainesboro –were “sundown towns” and when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s had virtually no black inhabitants at all. My point is, Sparta TN has a black community, and small as that community is it is one of the biggest in the area. Very few of those African Americans lived in the rurals (virtually none, in fact.) Most of them lived in two distinct neighborhoods in town: one was referred to as Bluff City (not on maps- none of these black neighborhoods were ever marked on maps.) The other, larger neighborhood was in the center of town. It was known, to every white person in the county, as Nigger Hill. Forgive my use of that word- I hate it, but I fear that euphemisms or asterisks will weaken the impact of knowing that such a term could be tossed around so lightly so recently. Over the years most folks –except some, in private conversation- have shortened that offensive title to just “The Hill.” There was a third, much smaller, neighborhood not far from Bluff City called Black Bottom. All three neighborhoods were clustered around the Calfkiller River.

I noticed when I was a teenager that white folks from the rurals were much more likely to be vocally prejudiced than white folks from town, and I have always suspected that it was because they rarely interacted with black people. My mom was raised in town- her family had been extremely poor, and they lived on the outskirts of the Bluff City / Black Bottom area. Her childhood friends, neighbors, and babysitters had been black, and she knew them as people instead of scary “others.” There were still social differences, of course; my mom didn’t have to sit in the balcony at the movies or drink from a different fountain. But she did not raise me to think of black people as inferior, scary, or even different- and I suspect many of my white rural classmates had a different perspective offered to them at home. A few years ago I attended a Black History Month expo in Sparta, organized by my friend Louvenia Gardenhire, and couldn’t help noticing that half the audience was black and half was white, and I noticed that the majority of whites I recognized were “townfolk.” This is not to say the townfolk weren’t prejudiced, I just think it was a smaller percentage and more subtly presented. When I was a teenager in the mid-80s one my biggest influences was an elderly black man in the Bluff City area who had been childhood friends with my maternal grandfather. I used to sit and talk with him for hours, and I learned a lot.

None of that, however, answers the question asked of me by Professor Cha-Jua. When was the first time I really, really saw and understood the significance of race? The answer lay, not in personal experience, but on television.

It was 1980, and I was not quite twelve years old. The family was gathered around the set –I believe we were watching 60 Minutes, but it may have been a similar news anthology program. The program did a piece on Emmett Till, who had been murdered twenty-five years before.

If you are not familiar with the case of Emmett Till, he was an African American teenager from Chicago. In 1955 he visited relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Accounts vary, but the 14-year-old Emmett –unversed in “proper” behavior for blacks in the 1950s South –managed to offend a 21-year-old married white woman. Some reports were that he whistled, others that he called her baby, others that he put an arm around her waist and asked her for a date using “lewd” language. Whatever it was he did, it offended the woman and her relatives; Till was later abducted from his great-uncle’s house, taken to a barn in the next county, beaten and tortured, and murdered. His body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River. His mother insisted on an open casket; photos of his terribly disfigured body, and details of his death, were in newspapers all around the country, leading many Americans to reflect on the racial problems of Mississippi and the country in general. Despite an abundance of evidence, an all-white jury acquitted the two accused murderers.

I watched the 1980 news segment in horror. The infamous open casket photo was shown; relatives of Till were interviewed, and I remember one woman –I assume it was his mother but am not certain now –broke down in sobs. I was overwhelmed. I quickly ran and locked myself in the bathroom because I didn’t want anyone to see me cry, and held in the deep, painful sobs that welled up from my soul. I prayed, silently, fervently and desperately: Why, God? How could the world be such a place –how could people do something like that, because of the color of someone’s skin? I prayed that the Lord would help me understand. And I prayed, with all the sincerity of an 11-year-old, that He would somehow let me do something someday –even if it were only a little something –to help improve that world, to help set those balances straight. It was not until I thought back, while working on Cha-Jua’s essay, that I realized how profoundly those moments affected me.

Concern for racial justice became an ingrained part of who I was. A few years later, when I was in high school and looking for a church to attend (my family was not religious at the time), one of the things that attracted me most to Jehovah’s Witnesses (a religion I would join as a teen and leave when I was in my late 20s) was the racial harmony I saw at their meetings –this when I was from a town where churches self-segregated. Once, when I was 18 or so, I heard a sermon about “Freedom as the Children of God” in which the speaker pointed out that many people thought they were free, but were not. That set me to thinking about freedom- what it is, where it’s found –and (history nerd that I was) I was reminded of how the slaves were freed after the Civil War, yet both the Reconstruction South and the industrial North were not really havens of freedom for them. I decided I wanted to write a book someday –not about slavery, but about freedom. First, though, I spent several years in the full-time ministry. Two of those years I worked exclusively with Haitian immigrants (this was the late 80s, and unrest in Haiti brought a large number of Haitians to America –looking for freedom.) The first year was spent in South Florida, and the second was in New York City. I was living and working at Bethel, the Witnesses’ world headquarters, while serving and preaching in a French-speaking congregation comprised almost wholly of Haitians (La Congregation Francaise Centrale de Brooklyn.) It was while I was there, going door to door in Bedford-Stuy and Crown Heights, that I had another epiphany about race.

There was a lot of racial unrest in Brooklyn in the late 80s and early 90s –ever hear of the Crown Heights riot, or see the film Do the Right Thing? When I was working in those neighborhoods, I was often the minority. On many occasions, angry black people called me names, swore at me, threw glass bottles at me, and on two occasions threatened to kill me… because I was white. It hurt, terribly. I was trying to be a good person. I was trying to help people. I hated racism with every fiber of my being. And yet, there were people who despised me and threatened me –because just from looking at my skin, they thought they knew who I was. It was so unfair. It burned like nothing I had ever experienced. And then, one day, something dawned on me. If I wanted to avoid such treatment, all I had to do was leave that neighborhood and go –almost anywhere in the country. The unfairness would melt away, and I would once more be treated like a person. But if I had been born black instead of white, there would be nowhere I could go in the entire United States where I could completely escape that horrible feeling. And all of a sudden –even though I could never fully understand –I understood better. A few years later, I did write that book about the meaning of freedom: Bound for the Promise-Land. It won Western Writers of America’s Spur Award, and was complimented by many who read it for its verisimilitude. The truth is this: when I wrote that book, the story of a former slave who spends his whole life looking for peace and trying to understand freedom, and tried to put myself in that character’s place, all I had to do was call up the memory of the feelings I had on that day in Brooklyn when people were throwing glass bottles at me from their cars as they drove by. And I had an inkling of how my character felt, and of how the bottle throwers felt.

Flash forward now to the past few years. While at grad school I worked for awhile, as part of a teaching fellowship, at the University High School. Every year a group of those Uni High kids take a weeklong trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi to work for Habitat for Humanity there. That is a noble goal in itself, but the experience involves much more than just that. The teachers –particularly Dr. William Sutton –make the whole thing an educational experience, spending the evenings after a hard day’s work discussing race and class issues with the kids, most of whom are from privileged middle class homes in Illinois, and to whom the poverty and even the history of the rural Mississippi Delta are so foreign as to be virtually incomprehensible. I have accompanied my friend Bill Sutton on many of those trips now, both with student and church groups, and Clarksdale almost seems like a second home to me –it feels more like home, to a Southerner such as myself, than Champaign, Illinois ever could. I have discovered that my own background of poverty has helped me be able to present fresh perspectives to those students, and some have told me they were encouraged by my words to aspire to lives of greater public service. Those are some of the most wonderful words I have ever heard in my life.

On the last such trip, this past spring, I realized something. I was at the Habitat dorm, at a singalong with the young college students from my church group and several of my Clarksdale friends, and a couple of the songs we sang were old Civil Rights standby’s: “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” It dawned on me while singing those songs that I was only a few miles away from the spot where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. In a way, I had come full-circle… and along the way, maybe, just maybe I have done a little something to make a difference. I keep trying.

And that’s why race matters to me.

In a week or so I’ll talk about class. Right now I better get back to work on that almost-finished dissertation before I get grounded. It’s about race, by the way.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

I promise I'll write about something other than "Days" again eventually but this one is close to my heart not because I have experienced it myself but because I have so many friends that have and because I have seen those losses handled so poorly by the Christian community.

We live in a time when we know very early on, sometimes even before our cycles stop, that we are pregnant. This new knowledge comes with a downside in that we also know where perhaps we might not have before that that "late period" is actually a very EARLY pregnancy loss. I am on a message board GCM for Christian mommies and "Cradled in our Wombs" is a very active forum there, unfortunately so is "Empty Arms". Over the decade I've been on GCM I've celebrated many BFP's (big fat positive test results) only to have to turn around and grieve the loss of those babies. It is constantly in my awareness. For most of us though its not...we have have no idea how many of our friends hold their breath until that magical second trimester is reached before sharing their news with the world. Or how many of them grieve quietly and alone because that little one will never be. Even when these moms do speak of their grief they find it too often dismissed because it was "just a miscarriage"...ask nearly any mom who has experienced one if the dismissive little four letter word "just" ever belongs in the same sentence as the word "miscarriage".

I have a very close friend who has lost 11 children prior to their birth. Unless you know her very well you would never know that about her. I am honored to be one of the ones that not only knows but knows all their names. This time of year is especially hard for her because over half of her losses happened around this time. Four of them happened just two weeks before my own daughter's birth...so I am always aware...always...that she should have quads just months younger than my daughter. She came to my house directly from the doctor the day she lost the quads. We cried together and she stayed with me until her husband could come and get her. I remember standing at the sink, my hand resting on my hugely pregnant belly, and crying and asking God "WHY?" Yet as close as we are I had somehow never understood, never realized, that losing a 16 week pregnancy isn't passing some tissue...its birthing a perfectly formed tiny person too small to survive outside the womb. Times four. And because it's a 16 week pregnancy rather than a 21 week pregnancy, it's "just" a miscarriage. No birth/death certificates, no burial, nothing except painful memories to prove that those children ever lived. And a wall of silence where there should be others to mourn with those who mourn.

Thankfully there are now days like today...and websites like silent griefor miscarriage support and for later term miscarriages/losses where memorial photography is a possibility there is now I lay Me down to sleep. But still there is too much silent grief and I for one am grateful for days like today where those who have experienced a loss can speak it aloud and be supported in their grief. So I am posting today for all my friends and family who are grieving and I'm remembering with them today if I know of their losses. Hugs and prayers to you all.

National Coming Out Day

October 11th is National Coming Out Day. Today as part of that observance my daughter and I participated in a March for Gay Rights in Memphis. It was an historic event in this city. Never before has the GLBT community and their straight allies come together in these numbers to protest and to demand equality. And make no mistake Christian readers...it IS about equality.

Most of us in the straight Christian world have no idea what life in the GLBT community is like. We don't get what it is to be a minority, despite our incessant whining about how persecuted we are because people want to wish us "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". We don't comprehend what it is like to live in fear day after day in our places of employment. We don't contend with hatred day in and day out simply because of who we love. We don't have to consider anything other than age of consent when the issue of whether we're legally able to marry comes up. No, that's not even right...the issue of whether or not we're legally able to marry simply doesn't come up. Its just a given. So much of what we take for granted is denied our GLBT brothers and sisters.

March organizer Michael Hlidebrand told WMC news "Nobody knows you can be fired for being gay. They don't know about all of the rights we don't have that straight people have." And we don't and worse we don't care. We stick so dogmatically to the one note song that being Gay is a sin that we cannot hear the chorus of voices around us asking, "So what? Even if it is what does that have to do with denying us our HUMAN rights?"

Because I believe that marrying the person you love is a HUMAN right. I believe that the ability to live openly without fear is a HUMAN right. I believe that the ability to be who you are at your place of employment is a HUMAN right. For so long we've followed the hateful, hate-filled rhetoric of the so called "Religious Right" that we have swallowed the lie that the "Gay Agenda" is pushing for "Special Rights". It is simply not true. Our GLBT brothers and sisters want and deserve the same rights that we in the straight community take for granted as our birthright.

Today I am "Coming Out" and standing alongside my GLBT brothers and sisters and saying: Enough!

WHAT do we want?
EQUALITY!
What do we WANT?
EQUALITY!
What do WE want?
EQUALITY!

Separate is NOT equal and HATE is NOT a Family Value.

I am a straight ally and I love my GLBT brothers and sisters. Equality NOW!

Happy Blog-iversary!

One year ago today this blog was born as a place where I and my friends could ramble about issues of life and faith.

It has been a crazy year for me. In May my house was one of hundreds (thousands?) across the state of Tennessee to be damaged in the flooding. I've been kind of consumed with recovering from that ever since. When I started this blog I was still a member of a Methodist Mega-Church (MMC for short) and I was struggling with the decision of "do I stay or do I go"...the flooding brought me, unexpectedly, the answer to that question. The response of the congregation and pastoral staff at FBC Memphis to a family who were "just visitors" brought into startling contrast the way things were done at the big MMC. By Memorial Day, four weeks post flood, we had moved our membership and we have spent the last several months making our home at FBC. It was the right decision for so very many reasons. I am thankful for this community every day. It has created a safe space to BE an Unconventional Christian unlike my experience in the MMC.

I am blessed to have such an awesome group of co-authors. I gain insight each time one of them posts and I'm glad that the rest of the blogosphere gets to share that experience with me. I am hoping to add a couple of new co-authors in year two so stay tuned! Thanks for joining us this year and Happy Blog-iversary!

Let's Talk About Growing Up Bullied

This is not an easy post for me to write but I am inspired by Dan's courage over at Single Dad Laughing and I am accepting his challenge to use our voices and tell our stories. I'm hoping my co-authors here will do so as well. I know parts of the story of at least one of them and I know he has something very valuable to offer to the conversation.

I tend to minimize what happened to me as a child, I think most of us who were bullied do this in order to survive, but I have come to believe that we are doing our children a disservice by continuing to edit our stories now that we have made it through to the other side.

I was SIX when it started. I look at photographs of that little girl and I realize now that the words that were thrown at her had no bearing in reality. But when you're six and your peers are telling you that you're fat, you're going to believe them. And I did. I remember vividly being taunted and I recall at least one physical assault, the other girl grabbing me by the collar and skirttail of my brownie uniform and throwing me bodily across the playground.

I am fairly sure that was when I came home and told my mother I wanted to do weight watchers for the first time. I was SIX. I remember choking down a required weekly meal of liver and trying desperately not to throw it back up, so badly did I want to be "normal". I was SIX. Decades of yo-yo dieting and disordered eating find their origins in that year. I was SIX. Six year old should not be counting slices of bread and servings of fruit for anything other than math problems.

It ebbed and flowed, getting better some years and far worse others. I had a bit of a reprieve with a change of schools in 4th through 6th grade but in seventh grade in our small rural county all the elementary schools merged into the single middle school and my old tormentors were right there waiting for me to arrive. I remember laughing to keep from crying when my nicknames in band included such things as "Two Ton Terri with the No Ton Tits" (nothing like being both overweight AND flat chested) which mercifully was often shortened to the initials TTTwiththeNTT so at least my peers outside the bandroom didn't know what that meant. Until now.

I am done laughing. Those words hurt more than any of the boys who spoke them will ever know. Or perhaps they will. Some of them are on my friends list on facebook. If you find your way here know that even as I tell the world what you did to me, I forgive you. This is not about you. This is about speaking my truth to the world and hoping that it will prevent some other young girl from hating herself, some other young boy from deciding life is just not worth the pain.

It is hard to write this. Harder still to know that some of the worst, most hurtful things, took place at church. Yes even God's house was no escape. I will be forever grateful to Pastor James Lee who found me crying in the stairwell that day and who had the courage to share with me his own story of being a bullied child. Who told me I was beautiful and who held out the confident hope that somewhere out in my future there was a boy growing up to manhood who would see that beauty. Who told me that it did get better and who did so from a position of authority as one who had been there and survived to tell the tale.

To those of you who are in the trenches being bullied...it gets better. Life is NOT high school. Thank God! It gets better and life is worth hanging on for. Living well truly IS the best revenge.

I love my life. I love who I have become. I did find that man Jim Lee told me was out here waiting for me and he does find me beautiful. Yet even without that, I find me beautiful. I love me just the way a I am. I am a person of worth and value and I know that about myself now, despite the best efforts of the bullies in my life to convince me otherwise.

I'm no longer a huge fan of CCM but Hold Fast by Mercy Me is one of those songs that speaks to me. It reminds me of the reality that there IS HOPE. It Gets Better.

I'm inviting my readers and my co-authors to share their stories here. It is important that we speak our truth. It is critical that our children know that it DOES get better. Please. Your story may be the one that a hurting child needs to come across and identify with to gather the courage to face one more day.

If you have stumbled across this blog and you're living the hell of being bullied and are wondering if its worth it...there is help. Organizations like Cindy Lauper's True Colors Project and groups like the Trevor Project focus on GLBT youth while To Write Love On Her Arms exist to help anyone who is struggling with suicidal thoughts, addictions, cutting and so on.

You are a unique and unrepeatable miracle of God. Don't let the bullies convince you otherwise. There is life on the other side and it is worth it.

How Many Before We Say "ENOUGH! "?

This week the news has been buzzing with accounts of the completed suicides of four gay or gay perceived teens. How many more of our children have to die like this before we stand up to our own prejudices and say ENOUGH!? The suicide rate among GLBT teens has long been known to be at least four times the rate among their straight counterparts but this fact has been not only dismissed but twisted by those with a right wing agenda to illustrate their belief that being suicidal is part and parcel of being GLBT. It is not. This is one place in the GLBT world where straight allies can make such a huge difference. Be supportive. Be willing to stand up when others use hateful, hurtful words and to step in when violence is being committed against ANYONE. Be willing to confront the bigotry and ignorance and in doing so bear the burdens of our GLBT brothers and sisters as Christ would have us to do.

And another thing...stop holding up the myth that being bullied builds character. I have heard this countless times in regards to homeschooling my daughter...that by doing so I am sheltering her from having to deal with the reality of bullies. Newsflash! Bullies exist outside the walls of brick and mortar schools. The mythology that surviving bullying is somehow uniquely character building is part of what enables this nonsense to continue. It completely negates the negative impact, the long term scars, that even "survivors" bear. It totally marginalizes the experience of these kids that are telling us, with their last desperate acts, that YES WORDS CAN HURT ME!

Bullying is NEVER ok. It is never a positive thing. That it has been allowed to be spun as such makes it particularly insidious when trying to have it taken seriously as a problem. Asher Brown's parents tried in vain to get help for their son. Seth Walsh transferred into independent study to escape it but the damage had been done. Billy Lucas was actually told by his bullies to "go hang himself" and was suspended for fighting back. The hate and hurtful words actually followed him beyond the grave when a memorial page set up in his memory was bombardedwith homophobic messages. These children and others like them who are being bullied about their weight, or their looks, or their IQ, or whatever their "differences" may be are suffering. They may be suffering in silence or their pleas for help may be falling on deaf ears that believe that bullying is just a normal childhood rite of passage and "kids will be kids". We MUST listen. We must hear what is being said and what is NOT being said and we MUST teach our children better than this.

We must start with our own beliefs and biases. We must make, in the words of AA, a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and be sure that the words our children a hurling at each other are not the ones they are hearing from their parents and their religious or political leaders. We must open our mouths when those role models say something horrific and not let that stand.

We must stop this.

Our CHILDREN are DYING.

ENOUGH!

Different Books, Common Word

Today I attended an event that I am sure I will be pondering for a long time to come. My new church, First Baptist Church - Memphis, hosted a screening of the documentary Different Books, Common Word followed by a panel discussion between our pastor and a Baptist laywoman who has lived 14 years in the Middle East and two local Imams. It was powerful. 250 Muslims and Christians gathered together in one room to explore our common beliefs and to try and begin to understand our differences. So many things about this event blew my paradigm to pieces.

I find myself pondering how much of my own ignorance about Islam is a result of an American patriotism that makes exploring/studying their holy scriptures somehow seem disloyal. After all I have read, without fear, The Book of Mormon, the Jewish scriptures in my own Bible (and some of the Talmud), the writings of Confucius, even bits of The Satanic Bible (authored by Anton LaVey) so what has kept me from exploring the Qur'an for myself if not a misplaced sense of American patriotism?

For most of my adulthood "the enemy" has been defined for me as "Islamic Terrorists" just as for most of my childhood "the enemy" was defined as "the Communists" and just as I did not explore the writings of Marx and Lenin until I was an adult and they were no longer the "script" for the things I had been taught to fear so I have not explored the Qur'an to see for myself what it says. I know a lot of things I have been told are in the Qur'an. I know a lot of things I have been lead to believe about Islam and the supposed desire of all devoted Muslims to see me convert or die. I don't know, for myself, whether any of what I have been told or taught is true.

One of the statements today that struck me and prompted this line of thinking was when one of the Imams in the video remarked something to the effect of he would not disrespect Christianity by attempting to speak to what the Bible says because it is not his holy book yet Christians feel free to speak what they believe the Qur'an to say even though it is not our holy book. I'm probably butchering the quote but the concept was that we feel very free to make claims about what Islam believes and teaches when we are not students of Islam and do not study the Qur'an...a book that even Muslims often have a tough time understanding.

Another comment that was made was about the rush to judgment that occurs when a terrorist attack happens. The example used was the Oklahoma City bombings where within moments of the attack a so called expert on terrorism made the claim on national television that it had all the hallmarks of "Islamic Terrorism"...and where the perpetrator was ultimately found to be a White American veteran who had received the Bronze Star during the first gulf war. A man who, prior to the bombings, would have been rightly regarded as "an American Hero".

I am sure that there will be more I will be processing here as I view the DVD again (I purchased it and would love to screen it with my churchkids over the Christmas break) for now though I am on a mission to read the Qur'an for myself and to find out what it really says and where our Different Books offer that Common Word.