Diversity

I’ve been thinking about Katie’s diversity meeting experience. I often talk about being three disadvantaged groups in one. Though I am tri-racial, I am automatically classified as an African-American by the color of my skin. I am female, and I am left handed. You may wonder why that last one matters, but it has caused me many problems in a country where most things are designed for right-handed people to use. My grandmother did not attempt to teach me how to do things left handed. She couldn’t. She told me that when she was a child, they tied the left hand behind the child’s back to keep them from using it. They thought the devil was influencing the child. I am fortunate I was not born during that time. I would have likely been a slave (as her father was even though his father was white) and might have had my left hand cut off. I certainly would not have had any rights to own property of my own or be a person under the constitution.

I feel fortunate to have been born when I was born. Even though the bathrooms and lunch counters in the South were still segregated. It seemed strange to me when I would leave New York and go to North Carolina and be in a completely different world. I made speeches in my 95% white high school when Martin Luther King was killed. I got to walk around in solidarity with the Black Panther Party for a short while in college. Despite this background, I have led a very privileged life. I can only recall one or two incidents in my life that I can say real prejudice was involved. My second husband was Irish and German with a smidgeon of French Canadian. In his family the First Nations (Canadian Native American) blood was a deep secret and never discussed. When we started dating, I warned him to let his family know about me in advance. He seemed surprised at the notion. He was really disturbed when he found out that they had family meetings about “the problem” and that his divorced parents were speaking for the first time over this quandary. Eventually his mother and I became good friends, and I became ‘the exception.” The exception to what they generally think about Black people. This has often been the position I am cast in as the only Black person in a larger group.

I have First Nations Canadian friends that are still recovering from the psychological trauma of being taken from their families and put into residential schools for their own good by the government. They are still trying to recover their identities and traditions that have been lost. The mixed bloods are in a twilight world where they still don’t fit into the overall culture, but don’t fit into the First Nations group either. They have created their own music, dance and cultural norms to give them a sense of place.

These people like me are neither white, nor red, nor black (in my case), and we really have no “place” we fit into in this world. I believe we do have the best opportunity in time and place in the history of the western world to find our own authentic voices in this multi-cultural melting pot that has become North America.