Reconciliation Blues

Daydreaming is a disease with me. I swear if I had all day, I'd probably spend a good 12 hours staring off into space. But my boss just gave me this book to look over today, and I cracked the cover tonight after way too many episodes of American Dreams re-runs. Once they started evincing tears from me (I do NOT think that is a proper use of that word, but it felt right, and I'm writing all of this from feeling, I'm afraid), I figured it was time to shut off the tube and get my nose in a book. My nose has been way too paper-free the past year.

So, apparently I can't even read without daydreaming, and I ended up starting to talk at my wall to an attentive (and invisible) audience. For some reason, God has put these words on my heart for my school, Moody Bible Institute for a few reasons. I'm sure I'll mention them here... I honestly don't know what I'm going to say, so I make no promises. We're winging this.

Okay it goes kind of like this. I'm standing on the stage in Torrey-Gray, and one of those blinding lights is shining right in my face, showing off the fact that I forgot to powder my nose, and that my hands are visibly shaking. They always shake when I'm supposed to be talking on stage. The only faces that I can see in the crowd are the faces I fear most. My mind somehow always picks them out. They're the influential ones - the ones with the "political" pull on campus to make things happen, to make them NOT happen, and to make me feel like an outsider. Case in point - my last semester. BUT, these people need to hear this too, and sometimes, when you care about something enough, honesty works alright.

*ahem* A couple coughs to steady my voice. It's always unsteady when I'm... yeah, you get the picture.

So, there are two reasons why I don't think I should even be talking about this at all. A) because I don't know any of you. Well, not many of you. And B, because I'm very obviously white. Even I question my own ability to address the race issue at all. But I think we need to have white students talking about these things... caring about these things. I've only been here one semester, but I've watched the dynamics, and frankly, I'm jilted and really concerned.

I'm a missionary kid, and I've spent a lot of my time not in America. When I cross the border into Mexico - my home country, for all intents and purposes - or when the always-cross border guard at the airport's international checkpoint gives me my happy little stamp on my increasingly floppy passport, (wow, that was wordy, but we're lettin' it flow... apparently my flow is pretty precocious.) my cultural sensitivity is impeccable. All my sensors are on. My ear is to the ground; I'm picking up key phrases; I'm reveling in the culture and the complete other-ness of everyone I encounter.

I never do that here. America, to me, was always kind of like "base" in a game of tag... life at its most perfect, and to a fault too. America is supposed to be the boring place where all the happy, rich white people live, with nice houses and big backyards and Nintendo Wiis. America is the land of Super Targets and all-you-can-eat buffets and Stepford neighborhoods. That is, until the economy crashed and I moved to the city, this city.

I came expecting to need some extra "tough-ness". I was so not prepared for the hordes of homeless, for the ghettos, for another world within my safe one. On top of that, my experience of African-American culture was shamefully threadbare. My experience of black people was that one family in our church - awesome, wonderful people, who dressed and acted just like all the rest of us, except the mom could sing like nobody's business - her solos at church were always my favorite, beginning a lifelong obsession with all things soul, jazz, gospel - and the kids' names were different. Other than that, they fit right in. No second thoughts about skin color.

I got to college, Arizona State, and still... nothing. I mean, yeah, there was the rapper on the corner of Mill Avenue selling his CDs every night, and for free he would let you try on his massive headphones and take a listen. Sure, there was that time around 12 or 1 that this one section of our Memorial Union would fill up with a bunch of cocky football jocks and all these beautiful girls that looked just like Rihanna, hairstyle and everything. And yeah, they did all just "happen" to be African-American. For a few minutes, as I walked past the Chick-fil-A, I would feel a vague sense of separation - this unsettling sensation that maybe, if I asked to sit at one of those tables, I might not be their idea of a great addition. Still, my only attitude was admiration. I knew that one of my best friends could break it down like a "black girl", and that it was beyond socially acceptable to tell your token African-American friend that you "really wish you were born black too."

Setting aside the fact that I really have always, always wished that I was born black - for the voice, you know (it's so hard to sing good blues, jazz, anything with my vocal limitations - my dreams of being Ella Fitzgerald have all but died), I was not prepared for Chicago. I picked urban studies as a major because it sounded "cool".

I think it's worth mentioning here that I met two amazing girls overseas the summer before - both of whom just happened to be Moody students. One was white, the other black, and they got along incredibly well. The black girl - we'll call her Amanda. Amanda, while always mild-mannered, was fun, very engaged, and was always teaching us to dance bhangra or laughing her adorable little laugh. I met a very different Amanda when I eventually ended up on the same campus with her. Silent and timid, the always modest and retiring girl had a completely different general attitude than I remembered. And then there was that table, in the student dining room, where a good percentage of the African-Americans chose, day after day, to sit. On the far side of the room, isolated from any of the major tables or groups, it hardly seemed, to a visitor's eye, any kind of a good social choice. And yet, such are the facts.

How strange indeed it is that one of the main factors that separates us as followers of Christ - and no, I don't like words like "evangelical", much as people try to convince me that it's not inherently a "white fundamentalist Christian word" - is the color of our skin. Right? I mean come on now, what's the big deal after all?

Centuries of bigoted prejudice is the big deal. Yeah, that's all in the past, way back in the stone age... like, the '60s. But this is real. I would wager that we're more segregated now then we were then. You know why? Cause now we're comfortable. Things work out well for us, when we're hanging out with the kids who look like us and wear the same stuff, who share the same life experiences, and it's just nicer to date some guy that fits our parents' socially acceptable criteria.

Right? Think about it, just for a second. How many of your "standards" for a boyfriend or girlfriend are really God's? How much of it is cultural? Could any of it even possibly be prejudiced?

Maybe it would help to look at things less from a "that's-racist-and-this-isn't" standpoint, but from a cultural perspective. Society has a lot to change, granted, to make this country a better place for every ethnicity. We do have pretty much the best gig going on though - actually, assimilation, as terrible as it seems to us Gen XYers, is a pretty good thing. It keeps things like the impending silent takeover of Islam in postmodern Europe from happening. BUT, as small as things like the color of our skin might seem, they've kept us apart for a long time. And because of that, different cultures have developed in America, adding richness and depth to the overall atmosphere or mixing bowl but breeding distrust and subconscious segregation nonetheless.

African-Americans have a multi-faceted, full-fledged, awesome culture goin' on now. While we're over here enjoying our white privilege - yes, it exists, ask anyone who knows anything - they've been making music and recipes and traditions and holidays and dreams over here.

I feel like it's only fair that we stick our ears to the ground, and get ourselves some of the cultural sensitivity that is so celebrated in our worldwide missionaries. It is a sad thing indeed if we can outreach to the whole world and not our own people.

Guilty as charged, friends.