I grew up with a fundamental idea that all people are equal. At least, that’s what we would say out loud, and I know that we believed ourselves. It’s easy to believe this when there’s no need to shine any light on it, when there’s nothing at stake; and my identity and way of life were comfortable enough that there was never any other challenge to our ideals. My upbringing in a loving family and a small community reassured me that I was safe and taken care of, and there was no reason to assume anywhere else should be any different. I suppose, in some sense, it’s right to imagine that all places and contexts should be just as livable as any other, though in retrospect I know I knew that I lived somewhere that didn’t have the challenges of, say, an inner-city urban area. Living outside of a small town that was already outside of somewhere else and literally on the road to nowhere has its cloistered, provincial advantages—as long as you don’t have to face a broader, more interesting reality.
A logging town in western Oregon isn’t known for its racial diversity, especially as Native Americans had been forced to retreat and only years later would be recognized because they ran the casino and resort on the way to the coast. This is a lot clearer to me now, though still pretty cloudy. I know my little league team made a trek each summer to that little reservation ball field, and I never fully appreciated what that was all about or even paid attention, really. In our town, the county seat with the county courthouse and what was purportedly the oak tree used for public hangings—I was never sure if that was true or not—there were whispers that old traditions of the KKK traced back to the early history of the area. Our high school mascot and claim that we were “Home of the Dragons” could have corroborated this story. Or it could have been coincidence, but the fact that it was believable probably tells us enough.
As a kid, I watched The Cosby Show as my entry into and perspective on African American culture. Writing that, admitting this, seems ridiculous now, but I know I’m not alone in this. We liked to see the Huxtable family in that lovely brownstone and eclectic upper-middle class neighborhood. I recognize that the show was a landmark and a beginning for other possibilities in television and culture. But it’s not so simple now. NBC painted that show with its rainbow insignia and gave families like me a sense that we saw black people as equally human, as long as they were doctors and lawyers and witty and relatable, limited to a limited, specific set of terms. We setup any other standard of family of any race to be less than the Huxtable/Cosby standard, one that’s nearly impossible outside of a sound stage. It’s all the more ironic to see the demise of Bill Cosby and the revelation that this was all manufactured to make us feel good about ourselves.
I learned about my own implicit bias and racism slowly, in pieces. And I’m still working on this. I see bumper stickers that say “No one is born a bigot,” but from what I can tell it might be the opposite. We have some survival firmware built in that makes us identify with sameness and become wary of differences; and then we segregate ourselves into communities where we look, believe, and act similarly. The good news is that we can and do learn extraordinarily complicated things. If we can learn quantum mechanics we should at least be able to identify our internal biases and then really act on the equality for all humans in the ways we proclaim.
But that’s a hard path, especially if you don’t even realize you should be on it. This has been my own struggle, seeing my own inadequacies and biases. I’ve had to have others help me see that path and push me along. I’ve also been grateful that people have been patient with me. And there’s no shortage of privilege to live an existence where I could stumble along and spend 40 years or so working this out without any real repercussions on a personal level. It’s affected my communities, my teaching, and my personal relationships without my even being aware, though.
“I’ve never thought of you as ‘black,’” I remember telling my friend in college. I’d thought it was an enlightened statement, so it took me all these years to interpret the meaning of her gaze back at me, some combination of helplessness and incredulousness. She said nothing in response. Now I realize that I was lying to myself and doing a disservice to her. Of course I can see the color of her skin; and of course I can recognize my own interpretation of that. I’d just thought that being “colorblind” was correct. It took me a long time to understand that differences in physical makeup and cultural background are a part of who we are, and to deny them is to deny someone’s existence. 1
Fortunately, in college I also got to see professors who were black, step into urban communities (albeit in really limited ways), work among students from more backgrounds and communities than I’d ever imagined, and generally see the world more broadly. But it wasn’t until graduate school several years later that my professor in multicultural education had me read about “white privilege.” This was mind bending, and at first I remember railing against the notion until I could no longer stand on firm ground. It had never occurred to me that my identity and sense of how people looked at me without feeling threatened were a stupid byproduct of my whiteness; and I recognized my own nervousness around blackness, or around people speaking a different language or posturing differently or anything else. I’d read and learn more about things I’d take for granted about language and culture, that these weren’t deficits that simply had to be filled, but differences that make us who we are. This collective study flipped me around and gave me a new lens, but at that point it was most pronounced and enacted on an academic level. (That, too, is a privilege, to be able to learn something for the sake of learning it and stow it away for later in case it might be important.)
Since then, I’ve done more reading, but the real education I’ve received is through personal contact with teachers, researchers, and artists. I remember first being introduced to Bryan Brown, who taught me about baseball, and specifically how a physics understanding as I knew it privileged a specific use of language that diminished other expertise that could be equally correct, but not interpreted as such when there’s one cultural norm in a science classroom. Gloria Ladson-Billings further showed me how I’d been thinking about science from my own experience and places (e.g., labs) and hadn’t considered the places and language of my students and what could be relevant to them, as humans and as learners. My friend Malcolm told me a profound story about how he learned to swim, forced to head to swamps instead of the pools his white friends could frequent easily; and how his swimming was motivated by the need to stay clear of alligators in those places. And so many from the art community, especially poets such as Marilyn Nelson and Jacqueline Trimble. And so, so many more. But these are all an accumulation of ideas that didn’t really get utilized until I was mentored.
John, a good friend and frequent accomplice in adventures and some life-changing projects, is as Midwest, Wonder bread white as one can be. No joke, my role in our expeditions is to make sure he’s lathered in zinc oxide to protect his thin northern European hide from the solar rays that otherwise would obliterate him. But for whatever reason—and I have to attribute this simply to his core value and gumption, though maybe his vision for education above all else—John has an explicit mission towards creating equal learning opportunities for all students and all scholars in our science education communities. He goes out of his way to work and socialize with people of color, but he’ll point out to me that this isn’t because this is some kind of duty, but because his own selfish sense is that he can learn more from those in communities outside of what would be his default social circles. I benefit because of his example and because of direct connections I get via working with him. When I think of my most valued communities and connections, I realize that so many of them are connected to him as well.
One of the most significant of those connections is with our friend, Brian, also known in Atlanta as “Dr. Science.” Brian is first and foremost a dear friend to me and, in recent years, to my whole family. I delight in sharing a beer (or two) with Brian, talking about music, relating our sensibilities and challenges of fatherhood, and generally checking in.
Friendships that I’ve stumbled upon in my adulthood with people like John and Brian have been accompanied with guidance and mentoring in forms that surprise me. They sneak up in ways and forms that even hindsight doesn’t illuminate. When I visited Brian’s home in Georgia, he not only took me to barbecue and his daughter’s favorite doughnut shop, but also on a good hike up the backside and to the top of Stone Mountain. We made that hike and talked geology upon the giant mound of granite poised just outside of the Atlanta area. It’s a stunning place in so many ways.
On the front, sheer face of this granite monolith is a sculpted relief honoring the confederacy rebellion, a backdrop for laser light shows and a celebration of, euphemistically, southern culture. Brian narrated this tradition to me, including his own experience as a father, descended from slaves, experiencing this all alongside his children. From the other side of the mountain within the massive state park, Brian points out the collection of flags we pass at the trail’s starting point: a U.S. flag only slightly higher than the evolution of different Georgia state flags, including a confederate flag and variations thereof. We were among some hundred people who had probably passed by all of this red, white, and blue in all of its forms that day, taking for granted that tradition and historical stakes in the ground. This is what culture is, I suppose: the background you no longer see once it’s become so engrained and become a part of who you are. I wonder if the special sin of confederate flags is what they explicitly display or what their acquiesced acceptance means. It’s a tossup.
The other places I’ve walked with Brian are backcountry, multi-day backpacking treks. Along with John and my daughter, Anna, there were a couple treks in the Grand Tetons. Last year he looped with my family in the Uinta Mountains. Brian’s seen storms, hail and snow, as well as that thunderstorm that forced us to cower under boulders leading up to the exposed, rocky ridge. There have also been dazzling climbs over passes, a few moose, a couple of bears, and that particular rainbow that followed after the epic hail at our campsite by the lake. He’s always eager to come along, and I’m always happy to have him. I suspect he brings the bears and rainbows as well as his good conversation. But the most enigmatic presence Brian brings to the backcountry might be his physical self.
Brian had to point it out to me how other hikers, almost unanimously, do a double-take when they pass him on the trail. In the high country in the west, you’re more likely to see a moose than a black man, in spite of what the catalog photos for REI and the packaging of our dehydrated dinners might display. Brian’s presence is more notable than a bear to so many passers by, though I don’t think they even realize how they’re reacting. There are double takes and pauses. What’s a black man doing in the mountains? they seem to be thinking, even if they themselves don’t realize the cognitive hitch they’re tripping on. They’re less rattled by a confederate monument etched in the stone upon a mountain where the KKK rallied than they are by a single man walking with friends in the woods.
This is when I personally start to recognize the white privilege I live and benefit from, in stark contrast to my friend. We’re not in a back alley; we’re not confronted with a traffic stop; we’re not trying to get help from the justice system or even a store clerk. It’s none of these situations where the stakes are high. But it’s unmistakable and, clearly, if it exists in these places two miles above sea level where everyone carries all their possessions for survival on their backs, it’s everywhere else, multiplied by factors of ten. Next to Brian, no one questions my belonging in this space where we’re all intruding. No one feels unease with my whiteness in their presence.
Here’s the rub, though: I could condemn this except for the fact that I’ve also inherited a default kind of response to others who are not like me. I would do the same double takes and make the same unmerited judgements. I’ve been taught to love all people, but I haven’t learned it. And when I’m challenged I know my biases surface.
This is a delicate point and a hard one to write out, but I have to admit not only my own implicit bias but an inherent racism that I carry with me. I wasn’t taught this, but I also never unlearned it. I have to admit that and confront how I’ve been assembled in biological and cultural ways that make me so; and I have to take responsibility for learning how abolish this. I’m writing this out so that I can stare at it rather than push it aside.
There’s hope, though. In spite of the work I still have to do, for myself and people like me, colleagues and students, I know we can. There are the baby steps and the big steps in spite of the mountain yet to climb. A few introductions, a few more reorientations to who I am and who others are, our sameness in our differences, these all help me move forward. More than anything, I have a faith that the learning can take place, and for me it’s been through that same combination that I’ve learned so many other big concepts and practices: collections of new ideas, assembly of new models, and the guidance of others to show me the way.
- It gives me some hope to see that my own kids are far more aware of this than I was at their age. For example, in the past few years, they’ve educated both of us, their wise parents, about gender identity issues that they’re way more understanding of than my generation. At a dinner table, we have lessons about pronouns as though the couple of forty-somethings are pre-schoolers, learning some of the very most basic components of how to identify people. As progressive as we think we are, sometimes it still takes some perspective of youth to point out that we’re interpreting the world the way we presume it should be, rather than how it actually is. I’m grateful that my daughters can show me this, patiently; and I, in return, show them how to load a dishwasher correctly, as if that would make us even. ↩
