June 5, 2020 by Lola Cain
My heart is too full for words, yet words must be said, so I will begin that process and see if the words needed find their way to the page.
When I was a child, we sang a chorus frequently in Sunday School that was instructive in informing my view of the world.
“Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
All are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
And the Bible, in unison with that chorus, taught me that Jesus died for ALL humans:
John 3:16-17 NIV
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into to the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
In addition, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance regularly in school, ending with “...one nation, Under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for ALL.”
I was born in 1945 and that was the view of America I was raised in. I want to preface what I have to say with that as the foundation, but I want you to go on a journey with me exploring my limited learning about racism in America.
I was raised with the notion that all people were created equal and that we could be anything we wanted to be if we only put our mind to doing whatever we aspired to do or be. It wasn’t until I was close to adulthood that I started hearing stories that told me otherwise.
As a child I accepted people at face value, and my judgment of them was on whether they were “nice” or not. In that regard, not much has changed for me. I do not have a racist bone in my body. I had no influence that would cause me to develop a negative perspective of any ethnic group. The people I was around didn’t gravitate to groups based on ethnicity – and pretty much everyone I knew was white or brown.
As a 3rd grader, one of my best friends was a Japanese girl. I don’t remember ever even thinking about it. She was just my friend. I only state the reality now to make a point. When I was a young teenager, our youth group used to go to the migrant camp in Wilder, Idaho, on Sundays to sing songs and visit with the workers who wanted to come out and visit with us. It was fun! That opportunity certainly broadened my horizons, and as I learned Spanish, gave me a chance to practice it. But the people were not “less than.” In fact, I was fascinated by their culture and by our differences that culture influenced.
When I was a representative to Youth Legislature my Senior year of High School, I met my first black student. Seriously! And I was totally fascinated by him. He was bright, articulate, engaging. There was no difference between he and I but his beautiful browner-than-mine skin, and that was a positive, not a negative.
Our high school had a few Japanese kids, but most of us were various shades of white. I say that to acknowledge I was not brought up in an ethnically diverse society. All that changed when I went to college in Kirkland, Washington the Fall of 1963, to what is now Northwest University. Talk about diversity. It was beautiful. We had students from all over the world. Everyone was accepted for who they were. I never heard one word suggesting anyone felt otherwise.
After my Sophomore year of college I went on a 2-month-long mission trip with a number of other college students from multiple schools to Mexico. There was only one other student from my school. She and I boarded the Greyhound Bus in Seattle and rode all the way to Mexico City. On our way, we stopped in Los Angeles at the height of the Watts Riots. I didn’t know that was what was going on until afterward. What I did know is that we pulled into a Greyhound Bus Depot somewhere in Los Angeles, and I desperately needed to go to the bathroom. I was the only one who got off the bus. I thought that was strange. As I stepped off the bus, I saw that the entire bus station was surrounded by black women with their arms linked, barring entrance. I walked up to one lady and said, “I really need to go to the bathroom, please.” Then I stood and waited for a response. Another lady not far away, said rather gruffly, “Let her through.” Two ladies unlinked arms. I said, “Thank you,” went in to the bathroom, came back out and said, “I’m back.” They unlinked arms and let me out again. After I got back on the bus, some people expressed that they didn’t think I’d come back – and even suggested they thought I’d be killed. I didn’t get it. They weren’t my enemies. Why would they hurt me?
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started hearing more about injustice. I was shocked and appalled. Of course I knew that things had not always been as they were in my growing up years. I knew about slavery – but not much. The only story told in our family was of my great grandmother who had a little slave girl her age as her companion, and, even though it was against the law at the time, my ancestor taught this girl to read. I was sooooo proud of my great grandmother Anna for doing that! (Still am!)
And, of course, we learned in school about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and that he freed the slaves. I thought slavery was horrible, and was glad the slaves were freed. That was the right thing to do. I was sorry it was something that tainted our nation’s history, but was glad it ended.
When the Civil Rights Movement began and I started hearing about the inequities between blacks and whites – things like separate entrance doors, separate bathrooms, separate drinking fountains, protocols for where people could sit – and that it was even illegal to marry someone of a different color, I was also appalled. I wanted to apologize to everyone and assure them I didn’t feel that way; but I lived in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, and it didn’t directly affect me. It was different where I lived – or so I thought.
We lived in Montesano, Washington during the years we raised our family. We had only one black man that I ever recall seeing, and he was a sweet, highly regarded older man I rarely saw. We had a few Korean kids who had been adopted by families in our community, but honestly, we weren’t a very ethnically diverse area. Two of the adopted Korean girls were among the best friends of my girls, and I was shocked one day when our eldest daughter came home and reported that while she and her friend were sledding on Third Street a younger boy (about 9 years old) had yelled at our friend and called her a “Chinese Nigger.” I wanted to go find his parents and have a face-to-face “chat.” My daughter said our friend asked her not to interfere – to just let it be. I honored her request, but I was both horrified and steamed.
One of my dearest friends married a black man – who then became my friend too, and I love him and cherish our friendship. Because he was raised in Ghana, and not raised in the negative racial climate of the United States, he doesn’t have the same ingrained cautions, and therefore, didn’t have walls preventing me from becoming his friend. But, I was alerted to the fact that because she is white and he is black, there were places they could not go together. I was incredulous that was still true.
In 1989-1990 I went back to school to finish getting the credits I needed to earn my Bachelor’s degree, and I spent my senior year of College at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. TESC was diverse in many more ways than just ethnic diversity. That year provided an incredible education for me.
In +-1999 I started supporting a young man in Kampala, Uganda, first getting him through Secondary school, and later through University. In that process, emotionally he became my “son.” I call him my adopted son but there is no paperwork to that effect. He is not legally my son, but in every sense, I view him as a son. He and his family are very precious to me.
In 2000 when we moved to Olympia I attended a church that was blessed to have as a member one of the nicest men I know. He happened to be black. That was not what defined him, however. I dearly love him as a person. He’s quality. First class! I even wrote a Christmas play for the church that features Santa telling the Christmas story and had him be the Santa. It was wonderful! I was absolutely horrified to learn that he had a cross burned on his lawn. I could not fathom that there were people who lived in this area who had a “color” ax to grind.
During my time at that church, Hurricane Katrina happened, and I was the liaison for helping a Cambodian family who resettled here after everything they owned was destroyed by the hurricane. They, too, became “family” and I adore them.
I attend a church now that has a lot more racial diversity than any I have ever attended previously. I love it. And I treasure my friends of all ethnic backgrounds.
I wanted to get through the timeline portion before stepping back to talk a little more about my time at TESC. My course of study that I took that year included a trimester of a course that explored the Harlem Renaissance. I fell in love with the writings of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. I grieved that I had never been introduced to them before. We studied the art, literature, music, history, and all of the facets of the Harlem Renaissance.
It was in that class that I learned how slavery started. Black people kidnapped other black people of different tribes and sold them to Dutch traders, who sold them as slaves. I hadn’t known that. I had supposed it was white people who had enslaved them, but it wasn’t. That was even more shocking to me to learn that they were captured and enslaved by other black people. Man’s inhumanity to man has no bounds!
And I learned that when black people were first brought to be sold on the auction block, that the buyers were told they were basically animals – not capable of being anything but stock to be bought and sold. Incapable of anything more. That was a HUGE shock! But, if they believed that, then it made at least a little sense how the white folk could treat them as they did in the beginning. Still, it was intolerable.
Leap years forward, after slavery was ended, but the color line was still very much intact. Rosa Parks sat down on a bus and didn’t go to the back because her feet were tired. What an uproar. She became a rallying cry, just as George Floyd has today. (I seriously wish the rallying cry was Breonna Taylor, because what was done to her was even more deplorable as it was without any cause.) But the point is, there is still a racial chasm for some that needs to be exposed and dealt with.
Dr. Martin Luther King said it best when he said that he had a dream...that one day his children would be judged, not be the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Just a few days ago, a friend of my granddaughters in Puyallup stood alone on a street corner with a sign that said, “Am I next?” No one should have to feel that way. It didn’t take long for others to join him and support him.
We need law enforcement. There are plenty of bad criminals out there, and they aren’t all of one ethnic background. The bad apples need to be caught and incarcerated. But just because someone is a person of color, they shouldn’t immediately be assumed to be a suspect.
And, not all policemen overreact and treat others with unjust force. In law enforcement’s defense, racial bias is improving, but it has to get even better than it is right now. In 2018 police fatally shot 38 unarmed blacks and 32 unarmed whites. In 2019 those numbers decreased to 9 unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites. [That information is according to a Washington Post database.] We won’t be satisfied until those numbers are at zero.
(One disconnect is that we hear a lot about it when a black person is killed, but never when the person is white/ Asian/ Hispanic, etc. I am not condoning what we do see happening, but the outrage should be equal.)
In 2019 police officers fatally shot a total of 1,004 people, with most of those being armed or dangerous. Of those killed, 235 were African-American. That accounts for about one-fourth of the deaths, a percentage that has remained the same since 2015.
On the other hand, there were 7,407 total black homicide victims in 2019, as reported by Heather Mac Donald on WSJ.com, so the number of black people killed by police was much lower in comparison than death caused by other people. Again, that is not intended to minimize the injustice of other unnecessary deaths; it is just provided as information. I think it helps provide perspective that we have a larger problem in the United States than just law enforcement.
Still, when unnecessary force hurts people, and is particularly terrifying for people of color my family and/or I know – it hurts me. Like my granddaughter’s friend who decided to go stand alone on a street corner in Puyallup and hold a sign that says, “Am I next?” That thought should not be on a young person’s radar.
It is absolutely awful that Antifa and others who just want to disrupt and cause destruction have usurped the voices of those who are involved in peaceful protest – a right we have in our country that I defend. The total lawlessness of the looting, rioting, burning, robbing, killing criminal element is reprehensible and must also be stopped. Macy’s and hundreds of other stores and shops had nothing to do with the unnecessary death of George Floyd or any of the other unarmed people who have been killed. The looters had no reason to break in and steal everything with no one lifting a finger to stop them. Shame on them – and shame on the leaders of the cities who allowed it to happen. We have to have appropriate law enforcement or we will go back to being the “old West” where each person took the law into his own hands.
We are better than this. We have the right to speak up, and we should. We need to advocate for better policies, and we should. We need to point out injustice where it exists, and we should. But we should also support and applaud all of our members of law enforcement who are putting their lives at risk every day to make our lives safer. Most of them are truly good people who are there to serve and defend.
My personal exposure to discrimination was actually reverse discrimination. When our eldest daughter was at the University of Washington in the 1990’s, during her senior year she lived in an Intentional Community House, in the South Seattle area, and one day when I went to visit her I needed something from the store, so stopped in her neighborhood and went in to the grocery store. I was the only white person in the store, and the glares I got were very telling. They didn’t want me there. That was very instructive in understanding what I had heard about how many black people feel in various circumstances.
I experienced that same thing in the Southwest just a few years ago. We were exploring an area, looking at the cliff dwellings, and stopped to buy a few groceries. That feeling that no one wants you there is an awful feeling.
So – my exposure and experience is limited, but in some ways I am grateful for that. I don’t enter relationship opportunities with a chip on my shoulder. Like Dr. King, I believe people should be judged by the content of their character – and I have had the joy of meeting some real fun characters!
I understand that BLACK LIVES MATTER, but I prefer the mantra ALL LIVES MATTER. I think the former divides and the latter is inclusive. We don't need more divisions. I want us to be better, do better, and keep improving. Our lives depend on it!
