Interracial couples have lesson for nation.
Thirty-six years ago in Brooklyn, N.Y., I was captured by life and love. I was a willing participant, and did a little capturing myself. To our mutual surprise, Roberta and I and her five children decided to form a new kind of family.
This black woman from Belize taught me more about love, faith and guts than anyone I had ever met, and continues to as my wife. I was an avid student of love, faith and guts at the time, having joined Sun Myung Moon’s church in 1975. Our marriage in 1981 was like a graduation from there.
When I joined her family, our kids were ages 6 to 15. Imagine, if you can, their generosity and openess in welcoming a 26-year-old white Australian, who thought he knew everything, as “Dad.”
Now, three decades, one more son, 16 grandchildren and one great grandchild later, we have climbed to the same mountaintop that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of, and are living in the promised land. Is that arrogant to say? Perhaps, but what I mean is that as we grow spiritually, our perception changes until we become one with life and fear disappears.
Back on Earth, though, fear is alive and well and embroidered into our culture — nowhere more so than in race relations. After 15 years in Florida, my 6-foot-4 black grandson has been stopped while driving 28 times; I’ve been stopped four times. If my son and I go shopping, store clerks might follow him but not me. We are offered different products at banks. We’ve had “the talk” with our kids and grandkids about proper behavior if stopped by police, and the fact that I’m exempt from this danger is revealing. Our son in New York works for transit and drives an Audi. He’s been stopped more than 30 times.
Over the years, we have built communication and empathy, like most families. Real relationships between the races can be a minefield, and rather than risk an explosion, the default setting for many white Americans is polite avoidance. I was told when I first arrived in New York, “Don’t make eye contact with black people on the subway.”
We’ve all heard “No justice, no peace”; perhaps it’s time to consider also “no communication, no justice” and “no honesty, no communication.”
This new healing language can be invented best by those who have already stumbled into most of the minefield and survived: interracial couples and families.
In 1999, while walking down Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn, someone jumped on my back and tried to pull me to the ground. Two black teens were trying to mug me. I couldn’t get over the dissonance and wanted more than anything to take these two home to their mama.
A passerby intervened and walked me up the block. Roberta later shared she’d had the same experience when she lived in Red Hook projects in Brooklyn, and she did take the two perps back to their mom.
Curiously, I wasn’t intimidated. I felt related to them. Hmmm. My grandson once said, “Grandpa, you’re not white — you’re light-skinned with good hair.”
What are the unspoken assumptions, centuries old, that structure our thoughts about each other? The stuff everybody knows is true? The stuff political correctness has forbidden us to examine?
It’s time to take a look, and interracial families are the ones to do it.