White Like Me, Part 2

“This will be the sanctuary.”

The man from the church pointed gleefully into the huge concrete expanse, spreading his arms wide to indicate the mass of their new church. People from all over the country followed this short, balding man in a windbreaker around in the damp auto garage, where holes in the asbestos ceiling tiles exposed the rafters twenty feet above us. We had converged at this location in Tacoma, Washington to board a tour bus with equal numbers of Whites and Others, or non-whites. Together, we would spend three days on the move, exploring topics of social injustice and reconciliation from sites all over the Pacific Northwest.

The trip coordinator ran busily behind us in the former garage, making appearances and studying her papers. I am not sure why we were meeting in this location first of all places, but the members of the little congregation were taking our presence very seriously. Several of them jostled behind us carrying food and unfurling white tablecloths. I worried that we would be eating in one of these moldering concrete expanses. Looking around the old auto garage, I sighed heavily, knowing what kinds of hazards lurk in a place like this: physically, emotionally, and financially. Our guide pointed to a dark corner stained by incoming rain. “That is where we would like build the espresso booth, but we are not sure yet what coffee company to feature. We are still talking about it.” I smiled at his bravado.

Our guide, a deacon of sorts, explained how the Tacoma city population is divided by a single street. Their church is on the wrong side of the “red line,” which is a real estate term that describes an unspoken demarcation signaling the end of the White side of town.

“New people won’t come here,” he explained. “And we lost several church members when we chose to purchase this building, because a lot of people complained that it was too far. But it’s only eight blocks difference from our last location.” He shook his head. “We thought that if we had a coffee drive-thru right here, that maybe we could get them to come again…,” his voice drifted uncertainly.

I remembered Pastor’s story about our own church being built against the red line in Portland, Oregon. We still have trouble bringing people through the doors, but nothing like this. Trying to gain a little perspective, I reflected on the time that I had lived in the Puget Sound area several years earlier. Perhaps it’s the military presence in this area that makes the people so rigid, but I remembered starving in plain sight just a few miles north in Bremerton, Washington with little comfort. Thank God I moved.

The short man took us into an adjacent room covered in new sheetrock and tasteful taupe ala Home Depot. Fold out tables were draped in white cloths topped with little candles. Real silverware tinkled in the background, and the members of the church placed the paper plates next to the ceramic mugs. I appreciated the artful display of Stash teas, and poured myself a cup so I could hold it in front of my mouth. I hoped the cup would signal to the people in the room that I was busy, that my cup would act like a great white totem deflecting the social evil of small talk. It didn’t work. Pastor brushed past me and said, “I overheard Tina talking…and I think this could be good for you. I don’t know yet, but there is team willing to include you.” I nodded my head, and ducked out of the polite conversation between him and another black woman in which he had included me. I noted with curiosity how surprised I had felt at their natural interaction with me, and with even more shock that I had not known what to say. The first thought that crossed my mind was to ask “So, what’s it like being black?” Of course I knew enough from my experiences with other black people that she would take this as an insult, so I mumbled something and left. Cursing myself for forgetting the woman’s name, I escaped through a side door.

Outside, it was too cold to be on the sidewalk, but calmer. I saw the street in front of me, and imagined stepping off the curb to follow the white lines to the “right” side of town.

Instead I called my Dad on my cell to tell him I might not make it. Onto the bus, I clarified, complaining that I couldn’t deal with the cocktail chit-chat. Plus, my partner had gone missing. I told him that I was worried that something may have happened to her, knowing that he would be impatient with my concern over someone I barely knew.

“Seeing as they’re telling you that you need some partner for this trip, well why don’t you put your hand in your pocket? And when they ask, ‘Where’s your partner?’ you take out your little pinky and say, ‘Why here I am!” If I had an invisible buddy Jesus, he reasoned, then why couldn’t I introduce them to all my make-believe friends?

Of course I laughed, even though I knew he was ignoring what I had just said. My parents were believers, but had been critically injured by the church. My interest in organized attendance was baffling to them, however they accepted this behavior as another one of my eccentricities. Regardless of the situation, my parents offered unconditional support. With that in mind, Dad dispensed with more helpful advice: “Fuck ‘em. You don’t need to go on this trip. Look, it all comes down to one thing. You look at what’s inside a person, not what’s outside. It’s real simple.”

But, how could it be that simple? I thought of all the complicating factors that shape a person’s experience and their perceptions of the world. I thought how I would never really be able to see that clearly inside anyone without having shared a similar experience. I have never been enslaved. I’ve never been categorically beaten down and limited in my opportunities because of the color of my skin.

With this reasoning, I asked my Dad how he could find any middle ground in his own life to understand how a person of color would feel. Could he understand how one would be able to get over generations of being told that he was worthless? And how many lifetimes would it take to see change?

“It’s not your problem if people want to feel sorry for themselves and make excuses. Slavery is in the past. You got to just live your life and not let people tell you who you are. And you got to make yourself happy for a change and stop worrying about all of this. And that’s the end of it.”

Part of me wanted to agree with my dad, to please him, and make life simpler. But I had another Father to please. The Christ inside of me would not let me forget that God did not promise me happiness. He promised me freedom and joy, which comes from accepting the truth: that slavery provided a source of profound inspiration to the men in our history who authored our laws and created our American institutions. These institutions shaped the type of opportunities available to each generation that in turn defined the hopes that parents then passed onto their children. I love my dad, but I knew somehow that giving up this opportunity to press into that truth just to pursue happiness was a counterfeit reward. I did not know how this whole trip may turn out, but I was willing to obey Jesus in faith that “all things work towards the greater glory of God for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” Yet I was not sure just exactly who “called” me onto this trip. Pastor had asked me to join, and I knew he can be kind of excitable. But while praying, I had sensed an urgency to participate in the trip. Well, how was I going to explain that to people? I pushed away my doubt and focused instead on trying to help my dad understand where I was coming from. Maybe I could still receive his blessing.

I tried again to tap into his own experiences, asking this time how he felt about having been approached by a black man looking for work on his construction crew, back when he and Grandpa were supervisors. I remembered that both men used to lash their men with their words. Between cigarettes, they would spit into the ground when some jive talking lazy XXXXXX tried to get a job swinging a hammer or shooting a nail gun. In those days, I had never met a black man for longer than those few seconds between the verbal debriefing and running off the site. I’m older now and we don’t talk about that stuff, not even amongst ourselves. It’s in the past and buried or unburied and Dad wanted to leave it there. So despite my prompting, my Dad had nothing more to say. We spent the next five minutes trying to say goodbye, and he hung up the phone. I went back inside and scanned the room for Pastor under the guise of locating my tea cup.
Pastor and Dad are from the same generation, but their stories parallel more than they intersect.

For example, my dad had told me, in one rare moment, how he and his friends used to pile into a cheap Chevy Citation and speed down the highway with an open bottle of apricot brandy and a case of Budweiser on the weekends. As a young man, his father’s advice to him if the cops were chasing him was: drive faster! Once, when a cop finally flagged them to the side, he had told Dad to slow down and then wrote him a mere warning while his buddy chucked an empty can into the ditch.

On the other hand, Pastor had once told me of a car trip of his own as a young man. He had needed to drive a vehicle home for an out of town friend. A few hours into the trip, the several cars moving ahead of him came to a stop at a police barricade. Without warning, the cop rushed past the front vehicles to Pastor’s side. He shoved a double barrel shotgun through the open window at his temple, screaming contradictions while Pastor scrambled to obey. When Pastor’s name did not match the vehicle registration, the cop refused to believe his statement. He was yanked outside where the officer slammed his face onto the hood while he was cuffed, leaving the other drivers to watch, unmolested. His father, the Reverend from a prominent church in the Bronx, put his duties on hold, traveled south and bailed him out of jail. No charges were filed.

Our host called us to dinner. Now, in addition to my token tea cup, I had an entire plate full of food to busy myself with. But like an idiot, I broke pattern and set my cup down to pick up the tail end of a half spoken conversation two people over. Oblivious to the true intention of the conversation, but sparked by a stray comment, I expounded about some academic point relating race to identity formation. I soon discovered my mistake when the people at the table began studying their hands. In response to this observation, I abandoned my sentence with “so,” and pushed my fork around my plate as a distraction, not sure if I really had anything valuable to contribute to this group other than taking the role of White racist (which I was not about to accept). I was working too hard to distance myself from that label, but for a second I wondered if it might fit?

While play-eating, I listened to an Italian man at the end of the table carefully explain to the larger group exactly what qualifies a person as Italian. He pointed at James seated across the table as an illustration, and declared him a fine Italian specimen. James nodded his head solemnly and accepted this honor as an exercise of his Hawaiian hospitality. In this instance, Hawaiian and Italian tradition had intersected.
The people laughed at this as I cleared my dishes from the table. And I wondered quietly if Pastor and Dad could ever experience the same casual moment.