My mother is almost 90 and going through a lot of physical problems. She's almost blind, she uses a walker, she's got respiratory issues and lost her husband of 60+ years in January of 2018. A few weeks after he died, she fell and broke her neck. She's never really had time to mourn because, since then, life has beaten her black and blue.
I have a good friend at work who is a black woman a little younger than I am. We worked together for many years and after that we stayed in touch because she always has a women's shoes calendar in her office.
No, really. Women's shoes.
It's a wall calendar that features about 15 photos of haute couture shoes every month with a description of who designed them and other details. We go through them and discuss which are cute, which are hideous and which are simply works of art. She has taught me a lot about shoes, fashion and why shoes matter so much to women.
About a year ago, her sister had a severe stroke. We now discuss that as well as my mom. Helping a family member go through things like that can give you a deep, intimate connection with someone else doing the same. It's beautiful. I love our friendship.
What if, as some of our political leaders demand, I had an oppressor-oppressed relationship with her? What if our friendship had to be prefaced by apologies to her for slavery, Jim Crow and all the rest? What if she took the attitude that I don' t know what it's like to be black? Who knows, maybe she feels that way deep inside. If she does, she doesn't mention it. We talk shoes and family.
Personally, if I'd had to start our relationship with an apology, I'd deeply resent her. Shoes? Ha! We wouldn't talk shoes. At best, I'd avoid her completely for fear of offending her. At worst, I'd catalog every mistake she made to add it to a list of faults that show racial inferiority.
Screw that. I want to talk shoes and family. I love her as a friend. We have a lot in common despite very different backgrounds. Why do I want to focus on skin color? It has no value and gives us no basis for affection.
This isn't a mystery. It's not like the politicians who scream about race don't realize that they are building walls between us, walls that prevent heart-to-heart conversations and deep friendships. They know exactly what they're doing.
We don't have to play along. We can talk about our interests and passions and hobbies and families. We can strip the racialists of their power by being human.
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| She's a devout Baptist so we share faith as well. And kids. And cooking. |
2 comments:
Politicians know their rhetoric is building walls between us. It is intentional.
Peace, self responsibility, and the absence of blame would destroy everything progressives are trying to do.
Read the first line, and instantly flashed to probably the most hateful song I've ever heard.
"What it's like." Everlast.
That one that spends the entire song fixated on the designated victim, and making dang you know that they "only" got the bad reactions, and you're evil if you disagree with what you did.
I don't remember when it came out, I just remember the first time I heard it I knew I was being manipulated, cynically, and with malice aforethought-- with all of the personal responsibility stripped away from the designated victim, and depending on how much poetics you're willing to allow, they're attacked by their internal guilt made external for rejection or a caricature of the worst of the reactions.
Possibly because I could remember a few years earlier, when my mom spent about half an hour standing there talking to a guy panhandling by the liquor store.
He spun one hell of a story, held to it, she interacted with him just like anybody else, and at the end gave him a twenty-- and after we pulled away, she said something like "Don't ever do that. He is probably going to go buy himself a bottle to poison himself. I did it, because he told one hell of a story, and we didn't have anything else I could give him."
I know he was there for a few years, and then was gone, and I never saw him again. So she was probably right.
I know it made it so that I try to always have "beggar bags" in the car-- stuff that someone who is really in need of help will like, and want, and that will TOTALLY PISS OFF someone who is lying for advantage. When I get stuff organized, I even have two types-- for ladies and for gentlemen, with suitable stinkpretties for each. Because it's silly, yeah, but the idea of Smelling nice is just so important when you're dirty and feel like crud.....
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