The Long Haul

Disclaimer: This is a messy, streams of consciousness post that meanders all over the place. It just came out like this and I have left it here for now. Consider yourselves warned. 

Let’s get Harriet on the twenty! I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind in the year two thousand & seventeen would be opposed to this. That’s how far I’ve come. I know that people, like Donald Trump, are against it. Did you know that he suggested she might be more comfortable on the two dollar bill? Actually he implied that he would be more comfortable with her on the two. It might just be that he really admires Andrew Jackson, but still. When’s the last time you saw a two dollar bill? My granddaddy, Woodrow Wilson Carter, used to hand them out & I tried to hang onto them for life, but I don’t think I could locate one in my house if I tried. The golden dollar which was finally graced by Sacagawea is beautiful to look at, but who ever gets a glance at her? I’ll tell you who, kids whose grandparents like to delight small children with coins, which is a good start but you get my drift. Did you know that they ceased production of it in 2008 due to lack of popularity? The two dollar bill. I think we’ll pass on that. 

I honestly can’t wrap my head around people being skittish or reticent, in 2017, about putting a brave black woman, one of our nation’s most unlikely heroes, on a piece of paper money than any of us barely even uses anymore. It literally makes no sense to me. It’s the kind of thing that I would think the minute you hear it you would think to yourself, Oh my gosh, what a great idea. Why haven’t we done this sooner? And I’m from possibly the most racist town in Alabama, bless its heart. I hope I’m wrong about that. There is a lot of competition, or there was when I lived there, up until 1990. But I’ve been gone from Alabama 20 years, and I know it has gotten better. I just don’t know how much better. 

In Seattle, I still get asked where I am from about every five days. And I still have a very I’m not from here kind of feeling even though I love everything about Seattle except her weather. And please don’t go talking to me about how great the summers are. I like them, but I also like swimming in warm outdoor pools & wearing flip flops until November. Call me crazy, but I like spring & fall, too. Nine months of winter feels a tiny bit too long, and gray is not even in my top five favorite colors. I miss vitamin D & humidity, until I forget & go home in August. What I am saying is that I still feel like a foreigner here most days. Like I’m in town for a visit from some exotic place most people who live here have never been. And I have no plans to leave even though I will never be able to convince the people I love the most to visit often or move here & open up a Johnny’s BBQ. But I love it here. I really do. I own Seahawks gear & was once mistaken for a Huskies fan.

But back to Harriet & all the stuff that is still wrong with our country. Back to Making America Greater which I am all for, on account of how Jesus-y & humanistic that is. I’m also optimistic, in general,  so hope springs eternal.

I’m from Alabama. Cullman, Alabama. A place I love with all my heart. I’m the kind of person who has proudly uttered, more than once, American by birth, Southern by the grace of God. I feel gratitude for my birthplace & where I grew up. I love the South. I love it so much that I love to see it capitalized, because it feels worthy of a big letter at the front. A Harper Lee sized indulgence that I participate in regularly. It’s my home. My sweet home. Like the song. The song people love. All over the world. Sweet Home Alabama. Like the movie with Reese Witherspoon that I got in an argument/near fight over when a male attorney from my Seattle Presbyterian church suggested it was unrealistic for a girl who had made it in New York City to leave all that for a Southern man. I smugly let him know he had no clue what he was talking about & obviously hadn’t met a lot of Southern men, because that movie made me seriously wonder if I should move back home. I didn't, but I did sign up for Match.com to date a guy in an Auburn hat. Desperate times as they say. Turns out he was Aubie back in the day, turned Mariner Moose, & that he just wasn't that into me. It was probably for the best. #rolltide 

Cullman County is where Borat was filmed. Remember the hilarious scene in the woods where Borat talks to guys on a hunting trip & compares them to characters from Sex and the City? That's my neck of the woods. Cullman County. It’s an upside down triangle-shaped county in Tornado Alley about an hour north of Birmingham on I-65. It's a city of 15,000 where a lot of people stop to get gas, eat at Cracker Barrel, or go visit their grandparents. I went to Cullman High School where my beloved-by-all history teacher, Mrs. Tiffin, told us personal accounts of the KKK burning crosses in her front yard. And I went to East Elementary where I couldn’t go out on the playground one day in first grade, because the KKK was protesting the admittance of three Black children who had just been sent to an orphanage in our all-white town because their daddy killed their momma, a fact I just learned a few years ago from my second grade teacher who had been furious about it. I still wanna be like her when I grow up. Cullman County. A place that was rumored to have an awful sign at its entrance years, years before I was born, letting Black people know they were not welcome there after dark. Where, in my lifetime, Black employees of a moving company from Birmingham wouldn’t take the furniture past the exit on the highway. Where I was booed at, by Black athletes, during the state track meet in Selma, Alabama, because my black & gold jersey simply said Cullman on it. Where, at my ten-year high school reunion, in the year 2000, I overheard a college-educated classmate & premier athlete say that a Black guy wasn’t smart enough to play quarterback at the University of Alabama. Where, though my blood started boiling upon hearing it, I said absolutely nothing. 

My hometown is a place I felt nervous to admit being from once I finally started having conversations with actual Black people. When I finally eked it out to a fellow staffer at a University of Alabama cheerleading camp to a Black Alabama cheerleader, the first words out of his mouth were do I need to check your pillowcases for eye holes? He was teasing me so I laughed & pretended to be offended, but I still couldn't blame him for asking. It was a relief to go to college & optometry school in Birmingham, because then I could just tell Black people I was from there, a very white lie. So I’m from Cullman, in north central Alabama, where I’d venture to bet there are still a few people who aren’t in favor of replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the twenty. 

But why in the world not? What are they scared of? I know it’s wrong to call people they, but I feel like I’m talking about my people, Southern white people, so maybe it’s ok. What's up with them? I forget. I think maybe I knew at one time. I’ve been a racist for more of my life than not, without even knowing it. And I just assume I still am, in countless ways I can’t see yet. I’m sure I have more room to grow than I could even imagine. I want to be better, to be different, to grow & transform until the day I die. As a Christian, I think that’s kind of the point. Isn’t it? To be transformed more & more into the likeness of Christ. And, at the risk of stating the obvious, Jesus wasn’t a racist. I want to be so much more Jesus-y than I am - five, ten, twenty years down the road. But when people don’t look, smell, talk, dress, eat, or act like me, I make a thousand snap judgments that I am mostly not even aware of. I try not to do that, judge people by looks & stereotypes & my miniscule personal experience with pretty much every other race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic group than my own, but the fact that I have to remember to try not to means that I do it all the time. 

But I don’t want all of that personal baggage & where I am on the road to not being a racist to keep me from doing everything I know is right, right now. And I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be right & good & godly to put Harriet on the twenty. If we go with the America is a Christian nation argument (I prefer to say a nation of religious freedom), or if you are one of those people who think America should be a Christian nation because you are evangelical & were taught like me that the goal in life is to bring everyone in the world to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, on account of him being the Way, the Truth, the Life & all, then our journey as a nation should be a Christian journey which by definition is one of repentance & redemption. I apologize to all of my teachers for that last run on sentence. It's not your fault. I'm just too lazy, busy, & tired to blog with correct grammar, sentence structure, & punctuation. Thank you for your service. Somehow I scored a world-class education in a tiny town in Alabama. Teachers are world changers, & they do not get paid enough. 

This might be a good time to tell you I have a Masters of Spiritual Nuture degree from an evangelical Christian seminary. If we are trying to be a Christian nation, it should, by definition, be a journey of sanctification where we leave the old/the sinful/the unredeemed & put on the new clothes of Christ, which means love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, & self-control. Because against these there is no law - at least that’s what the Bible says. Or we can go with love your neighbor as yourself if you like your morality more succinct or straight from the mouth of Jesus. Love God & love people was Jesus’ bottom line. And I know, believe me I know, that we can argue about what that looks like for years, but, if you’re a Christian, we can at least agree about what we are going for. We are supposed to be Christ-bearers. Or little Christs. That’s what Christian means. When someone told me that, for the first time, at First Baptist Church, it blew me away, because it seemed impossible, especially at age sixteen.  

I know this next part sounds all seminary, but please bear with me. I am getting to the age where I love what I love & I don’t care quite as much about what other people think (even though I still care a lot). Anyway, a phrase that has been rolling around in my head, for at least ten years now, is on earth as it is in heaven. Somewhere along the way, I was introduced to the lofty idea of the kingdom of God, which sounded spiritual & vague. The idea was that Jesus ushered in God's kingdom of love, joy, peace, etc. (see above), but that it is an already & not yet kind of thing. Jesus kicked it off when he came down here to show us how to live & love, then He handed off the baton with a promise to be with us in our souls. Before leaving, he prayed a prayer that I learned in church & prayed in high school before track & gymnastics meets. It haunts me to this day. In a good way. Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Now here is the kicker, at least for me. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Blah. Blah. Blah. Just kidding. The rest is good, but this sentence is the one that won’t let me go. What does it mean for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven? 

Heaven. My best definition of heaven, based on my own flawed-I-know theology is where things are as they should be. No more tears & all. God is Love. God’s in Heaven. Heaven is where love is & where all that is not love is not. No one in heaven will be a racist. No one. God’s Kingdom will have come, which I can’t really wrap my head around, & that is as mysterious & maddening as it is comforting to me. It’s believable & unbelievable at the same time. When my kids ask about heaven, I feel so inadequate to explain the sheer seeming impossibility of it. And they are only four & six years old. But I’m a believer. I really am. I can’t quite shake it, nor do I want to. Feel free to roll your eyes at this next part, but what comes to mind is a Helen Keller quote I heard as a teenager. Helen said I believe in immortality because I have immortal longings. I read a biography of her in third grade, & I’ve been drawn to her ever since. And I love good ol’ CS Lewis who said if we have longings this world cannot satisfy then perhaps it’s because we are made for another world. So anyway. . .on earth as it is in heaven. Easy peasy, right? Maybe not, but it seems pretty straightforward to me when it comes to some things - like racism. And, for the record, I tend to overthink just about everything.

Another verse that comes to mind is one that was thrown at me during my own personal nightmare that I won’t drag you into right now. Someone reminded me that, in the bible, God promises to redeem the years the locusts have eaten. Kind of weird, gross, a little hard to relate to, but hopeful & poetic at the same time. It sounds like a very good thing. So it seems like common sense to me that maybe we are each supposed to do our part to redeem the years the locusts have eaten in our own country which brings me around to slavery & confederate monuments. 

People, Jesus is not proud of these monuments. Or the confederacy. Not at all. Just this week, Trump said he loves the dreamers & that he loves everybody. I hope that’s true. But I know Jesus loves everybody. I think all of us who believe Jesus was more than a human agree on that. If not, I can’t help you. Not right now. And Jesus is waiting, very patiently it seems, for us to take those monuments down. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I realize that each man bronzed on a horse is someone’s great great great grandfather (not sure how many greats are required) & that he was made in the image of God just like you & me. And he probably had some stellar qualities & maybe even did some heroic things in his life, because we are all a mixed bag & very few people are pure evil. But fighting for the South in the Civil War was not one of them. He may have thought he was fighting for something good. He may have thought he was fighting for his & his family’s survival. And maybe he was. But he was also fighting for something bad, something evil actually, for slavery to continue. Maybe he was fully convinced in his own mind that his cause was just, but it was not. Period. There is no other way to see the Civil War. He may have loved his wife & his children & his soldiers, but fighting for slavery to continue was wrong. Maybe he even asked for & deserves forgiveness, but he does not deserve a monument in a public place to honor his service or sacrifice during the Civil War.

One of my favorite things about country songs & certain Southerners is the ability to distill a truth down to a few simple words, because sometimes things really are that simple. As some astute tweeters/total strangers have pointed out to me, Germany doesn’t have any Hitler statues. We don’t need any statues honoring the confederacy or anyone who fought for it in the Civil War. Is slavery as bad as genocide? I’m gonna have to say yes. It’s a free country, so you are free to disagree, but I’m calling same same. Or at the very least evil evil. Surely we can all agree on that.  

So, there shouldn’t be a single monument standing in a public place that honors a confederate soldier. Why doesn’t that sit well with people? The easy answer is that people are racist. But I don't buy that. Sure, there are overt racists that are all for monuments, but it has to be more nuanced than that. Charles Barkley doesn’t really care if they come down, but I think his point is that there are much bigger fish to fry if we are serious about helping Black people. It seems way down on his list when it comes to the equality & safety of Black people. Condoleeza thinks they should stand. I’m not sure why. Is she resigned to it? Is she focused on bigger problems? I’m guessing she is, too, but that makes my ears perk up, because, obviously, she is Black & I am not. I wrongly assumed that every Black person in Alabama, if given the opportunity to vote, would vote to have them removed from public places. And I have assumed that they would vote to rename every Robert E. Lee school while they were at it. I would vote for that. I think I would also vote for it if I were Black & still living in Alabama, but I’m not, so I don’t know for sure. Put the statues in a museum if you want to, but only if it provides context. Tell the stories of when the monuments were erected. Tell the plain truth about the Civil War. We have Holocaust museums & memorials for a reason. We all know that history tends to repeat itself. We need stark reminders of what not to do. We know the capacity for evil in the human heart. We know the capacity for evil by good church-going Christian people trying to do the right thing. We need reminders, of course. But we don’t need monuments in public places that seem to call evil good. Hate what is evil. Cling to what is good. That’s the bible again. Abolishing slavery is good. Put up a monument to that in its place. Or don’t. Just get rid of what we now know is not good. Why isn’t that crystal clear to people? What’s the cost? What is there to lose? If I'm wrong, let's hear it. Enlighten me. What is the godliest move?

Before Charlottesville, it never occurred to me that the monuments I’ve seen in places like Charleston & Savannah might offend someone. It never occurred to me that a Black person might look at a monument & see it as a celebration of or the defense of slavery or a slave owner. It literally never crossed my mind. It never occurred to me as I toured former plantations that the very existence of a restored plantation turned tourist destination would be offensive to a black person. When I went with my family to the Dixie Stampede as a teenager, it didn’t cross my mind that a black person might not enjoy it or feel comfortable there. I thought it was clever that they served us a whole meal without utensils, & it seemed like good clean fun. I remember passing a flag quickly down the isle. I don’t remember if we sat on the South side or if we won. I didn’t notice the bathroom signs. There wasn’t a flicker in my soul of anything being amiss. Nothing felt wrong. I liked seeing the pretty antebellum dresses & the handsome uniformed men on horses. It was kinda like watching a Disney movie. Nothing about it seemed real. Nothing felt wrong. The Civil War seemed like one in a string of many wars in our country, that we had to study in school, that happened way before my time, with absolutely no impact on my life.

I don’t like studying history. I’ve never been able to keep the dates straight. I have a fear of games like trivial pursuit or trivia nights in bars, because I remember so few details & dates from my few history classes. I took one in college, because I had to, & I picked the easiest professor. I’ve watched historical movies, but that doesn’t help either. I feel fully engaged while I am reading or watching then I promptly forget the facts when the test is over or the movie ends. I know embarrassingly little about the Civil War & the confederacy, especially given all I’m saying about it. But maybe that makes it easier for me. What I know is that slavery is & was unconscionable. There’s no yeah but in my mind. And I think most of America feels this way. But maybe that’s the West Coast coming out in me. I like to think it’s the Christian coming out in me, but I’ve been a Christian for way longer than I’ve felt this way. 

I think about 99% of us can agree that we don’t need anything in our society that implicitly or explicitly endorses, glorifies, honors or celebrates slavery or slave owners. And I’m so sick of people, like our president, saying this is some kind of slippery slope. No, it’s not. We are a country of smart & compassionate people who mostly want to do the right thing, the loving thing, the good thing for all of our citizens. I think most of us believe if it hurts one of us, it hurts all of us. Or if you need a Christian analogy to get on board then we are all part of the body of Christ. Hurting one part of the body hurts the whole body. And, as Christians, we are to lay down our lives for each other which means we are to take down our monuments for each other. Because, call me crazy, but that’s what Jesus would do. 

My children are Chinese. I think that has tendered my heart in a way that maybe nothing else could to consider what life is like for a person of color in America. I often think of what it would be like for my children if we moved back to Alabama. And you know what I think? I think they would be treated with far less racism than if my children were black. I’ve thought about adopting a black child, & I have a cousin, that I like to call my nephew, who is black. I am also related to someone, on the other side of my family, who has made it clear that she wouldn’t want a black child in her extended family. I don’t want my little cousin/nephew to have to walk past a single statue erected to celebrate a racist war. He already has to live in a town where racism is not yet gone, where the kingdom of God is coming but is not yet fully realized in this way. Where someone might be mean to him on the playground, not because he is a kid & kids are mean, but specifically because he is black. That brings out the mama bear in me. It makes me wanna growl at the unjesusy people.  

There is a fantastic civil rights museum in Birmingham, Alabama. Maybe it needs a graveyard out back where confederate statues go to die. I think that image might've stuck in my mind if I had visited it as a child when words from a textbook didn’t quite take up residence in me. It seems like a place every fourth grader in Alabama should take a field trip to when they study Alabama history. Then they should take a second trip back in tenth grade during American history. Kids from Georgia, Mississippi, & South Carolina should be strongly encouraged to come as well.  

Because it’s only as a 45 year old adult that I feel like I am becoming aware of & care for more than a minute about racist overtones in politics & personal conversations. It is only now that I am more able to even see & have begun to care, in a real way, about systemic problems that need to be addressed. I feel very late to the game when it comes to speaking up or asking questions or reading up. And it’s hard to stay focused on or committed to, because the reality is that the problems around race in our society affect my day-to-day life so little. My quality of life will probably be pretty great whether things get better in my lifetime or not for people of color. I’m just now realizing that I need to seek out voices of minorities to teach me what their experience is like in America, because it's vastly different than mine. I’m finally paying attention to my own feelings about & reactions to racism & wondering what I can specifically do to help. I only now want to be part of the solution in more than a be nice to people in a “do no harm” kind of way. 

There was a time in my life when I hesitated to touch a black person’s skin. I was seventeen years old & a UCA cheerleading camp instructor. I was helping a high school girl climb up on a pyramid & there was hair under her arm. She didn’t smell like me & she was dripping with sweat. I probably was, too. As I helped her climb up, I felt an inkling of shame. Healthy shame that I hesitated to touch her. That same summer I went through a drive through with a black guy in my car. He was a buff cheerleader at NC State. I was worried that the Hardee’s employee, a total stranger in a podunk Georgia town, might think we were dating. Later, his hand was the first black hand I ever held, all white on the inside like mine, which came as a total surprise. I remember doing my first chair stunt with a tall black cheerleader from George Washington University. I sat in his hand & shook my pom poms. I do not remember the first white guy’s hand I sat in to do a cheerleading stunt. When I moved to Seattle, a very handsome black guy asked me out while I was sitting on the grassy shore of Lake Washington. He owned his own wine business & gave me his card. I politely declined a date & never called, partly because he was a stranger, but mostly because he was black. 

Driving across the country with my husband, I heard a sad story about black cabbage patch kids getting adopted last & with tears in my eyes realized I never would have picked a black doll either. In my thirties, I sat with one of my best friends at a Thai restaurant in Magnolia & told her that I didn’t think I could adopt a black child. It seemed like too much of a risk, that I didn’t know if I had it in me to try to insert myself in the black community. I was fearful that I’d be rejected or looked down upon. I didn’t want to feel anyone’s contempt for making a choice, as a privileged white woman, to adopt a black child. It seemed so much easier to adopt an Asian child, a Filipino child, or a South American one. 

But now, if we adopt again, I’d love to adopt from Haiti. The fear is gone. Not that that makes me not a racist. But it does mean there’s been some kind of progress over the long haul. And I think it is almost always a long haul. I have lots of education, & I am thankful for it, but it hasn’t done that much to help with my own racism save one multi-cultural issues class that was eye-opening & life-altering. But that was in graduate school, in my thirties, at a good Christian seminary, with a brilliant biracial woman professor. How many people get that? How many other people need it as much as I did? I don’t know. I’ve also been in church since birth, but it took me years to even realize that the song Jesus Loves the Little Children was talking about colors of actual people. What has helped me the most is just getting to know people. Eating, drinking, traveling, diving, studying, volunteering, & dancing with people who do not look or sound a bit like me. And listening instead of talking, which is so not my forte.

And I don't know about you, but I’m so tired of white people telling me what black people should & shouldn’t be offended by. I call it whitesplaining, which i know someone thought of way before me. In my opinion, when it comes to the confederacy, slavery, the Civil War, we should let black people decide which flags to fly, which monuments stand, which tourist attractions need to go, what reparations can be made, what would actually help, what would be healing, who should be honored, what would be empowering, how I need to change, how we need to change, & how to move forward. Because I don’t even know what on earth as it is in heaven looks like in those realms. Dixie stampede seemed pretty great to me. I have ideas & guesses but no solutions that I’m sure are the right way forward. A few things just seem like common sense. The confederate flag seemed like a no brainer as soon as I realized it was offensive to fly it. But I really didn’t know it was until someone pointed it out to me. It hadn’t occurred to me until I saw some controversy about it in the news. And even then it kinda went in one ear & out the other. Taking it down seemed like a good idea, but saying anything about it or doing anything about it didn’t even occur to me. 

I’m just in this moment thinking about how racist Old South, a fraternity tradition of Kappa Alpha, is. Is that still going on? If so, it might be a good time to stop it. They're fraternity boys. It would take less than five minutes to come up with a better costume party tradition. It seemed like a neat idea to me back in 1990 except that my freshman-at-Auburn prom date had grown a scraggly beard for it that I wasn't crazy about. It didn’t occur to me that Old South parties at Auburn were in any way tied to the fact that there was gossip going around about a girl who might bring a black guy to prom. I thought that was fine, but I didn't come to their defense. Looking back, I wish I would have. Can you see a pattern here? 

I have always loved the song Dixie, but it never occurred to me that a black person might be offended by it. Never. That seems weird now, but that was my reality. It was just a hauntingly pretty song to me. Growing up, I never associated the word Dixie with the confederacy. Alabama’s license plates boldly claimed that we were the Heart of Dixie, & I thought that had a nice ring to it with a cute heart on the tags to boot. I have always loved nicknames, so I liked that Alabama had a nickname. But if my black neighbors tell me Dixie is offensive (& they shouldn’t have to, but they do because there is so much white obliviousness to racism), then I should never sing it or put it on my car again. What is so hard about that? I’ll admit there was a dang in my soul upon realizing a song I liked was racist, it felt like someone was raining on my parade, but surely the joy of a better world far outweighs that or at least it should. Shouldn’t it?

So let’s get Harriet on the twenty & take all those monuments down. Let’s be the greatest generation. Let’s be more on earth as it is in heaven than our parents & their parents & every generation before them. Let’s listen closely for what we don’t yet know about the racism that still exists in our own hearts, in our neighborhoods, in our society, and in our systems. Let’s say not on our watch will racism flourish or will anti-racism efforts ever be thwarted or get a bad rap. Let’s never let something as basic as black lives mattering meet resistance or become controversial. 

I think the hardest part is that most of us, & I’m talking about white people here, don’t know we are racist or we don’t feel any responsibility for other people who are. Because we don’t harbor any ill will toward people of another race that we encounter in our walks of life, we think we are fine, our friends are fine, people we respect are fine, things are fine, & there really isn’t anything else that we can or need to do. But it’s just not true. We need to get Harriett on the twenty & we need to get those monuments to a better place. Maybe we could knock em’ all down at the same time like they knocked down the Berlin Wall. Or Trump could declare a week for it. I say let black people decide the when & where & how & who. Let’s listen to those who are offended & let’s make it right. Repentance means saying I was wrong, I’m sorry I hurt you, & asking how can I make it right. Let’s ask how can we make this one thing right? Let’s listen & do it, if at all possible. Then let’s go back & ask again what is the next good thing we can do? Because we are all made for on earth as it is in heaven. I think it will feel good to do. I think it will feel better than what we’ve got going on right now, for all of us, whether we know it or not. In college, I was mildy pressured to pick a life verse in order to make Jesus happy. I landed on I have come that they might have life and have it to the full. Less racism means more fullness. More life. That verse can also be interpreted as meaning life and more life, life on top of life, heaped up life. And that is exactly what we should be shooting for, for every person on the planet & every person who might not be as welcomed as we are in any of our cities, states, churches, schools, or neighborhoods. It is a colossal task. A God-sized one. And it won’t all get healed up before heaven, but in my not so humble opinion, trying is definitely the way to go. Because I think it's what Jesus would do. Do you?