OUR INHERITANCE
In January of 2017, after a discussion about racial tension in America, and coinciding with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s holiday, I asked my juniors (ages 16-17) to answer the following essay prompt: What is your racial identity? How has it impacted your experience so far, as an American, or as a person living in American society?
I did this for several reasons.
(1) I want all of my students to feel pride in their identities as Americans, or as immigrants living in America (all of whom I hope will attain citizenship someday).
(2) I want everyone to think about what we have inherited as Americans—the good and the bad. I believe ours is one of civilization's great nations, not only for what it has achieved, but perhaps more importantly for what it has overcome. But significant challenges remain.
(3) I want them to understand that the problem of racial tension is inherited, is global as well as American, and exists outside politics. Whatever we may think of the current president or members of Congress or any of the things they've said or done, we must recognize that none of us live in a bubble untouched by the ongoing tension between traditionally wealthy and powerful groups of Americans, and traditionally impoverished and exploited groups of Americans. And, we ought to be able to engage in the kind of political debate where racial stereotyping informs neither side; for example, it isn't inherently racist to desire immigration reform, if that reform does not target immigrants based on the color of their skin.
(4) Finally, a personal narrative offers a nice change from our usual breakneck pace analyzing rhetoric and writing argumentative pieces—and more importantly offers an opportunity to begin thinking about the college personal statement.
The following is my own response to this same prompt, followed by my own thoughts about how we as Americans can overcome an inheritance beset with racism, nativism, and misogyny. Finally, I offer some extended thinking about the challenges of this assignment.
MY RESPONSE TO THE PROMPT
Texas. Source: Wikipedia.
When I was five I attended kindergarten in Krum, Texas. One day Mom and Dad, Granny, and I piled in the car to visit her family an hour away in Bowie. I still remember the sign on the outskirts of Bowie: the sun will not set on a colored face in this town.
Bowie, you see, was a "sundown town."
St. Louis Dispatch, December 12, 1906.
Granny's family was a pretty typical poor white Southern family. They emigrated to Texas from the Ozarks, and before that, no one knows. They were Scots-Irish with roots probably stretching back to Appalachia or backcountry Carolina. It's likelier than not one of my ancestors fought in the Confederate Army. It's likelier than not one of my ancestors was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
But Granny wasn't.
I'm not a Southerner; I grew up a mountain west boy. I was born and raised in Colorado, apart from a few elementary school years in Texas. I spent my undergraduate years at the University of Montana in Missoula.
So I guess the best description of me is: white Westerner.
The flag of the great state of Colorado. Source: Wikipedia.
Governor Stanford, c. 1870. Source: Wikipedia.
Leroy, my Dad's father, built a life as a apple farmer in Western Colorado. He grew up in a middle class Iowa family with documented roots stretching back to Moses Stanford, a Massachusetts Minuteman in the American War of Independence against the British crown. Through him I'm also closely related to California Governor Leland Stanford, a railroad robber-baron made rich from the hard labor of Chinese immigrants, and incidentally too drunk to drive the golden spike that completed the nation's first transcontinental rail line at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869.
I figure I'd be permanently retired by the pool brushing my fake hair if it wasn't for a certain university in Palo Alto where all my money is.
All the years I knew him, Grandad was an apple farmer and a trumpet player with a fondness for improvisational jazz. One of his life's highlights was meeting his favorite president, Jimmy Carter, while fly fishing down in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
One thing I never understood about Grandad was his virulent antisemitism. We couldn't watch television without some comment about how so-and-so's face "looks like a map of Jerusalem."
Whenever he said these things, we challenged him.
Maybe sometimes he was just pushing our buttons for his own entertainment, but the truth is that he held a sincere belief about the insidious nature and nefarious agenda of "The Jews." From someone in his past, he inherited this. My Dad rejected it.
On the other side of the family, Grandma, my Mom's mother, also grew up in an American family with roots stretching back centuries: Irish Northerners, who boasted inventor Robert Fulton as an ancestor.
Grandpa, my Mom's father, was full German, but born in America after his parents immigrated through Ellis Island and settled in Nebraska a little over a century ago. The family surname was Vonderlage (VON-der-lah-gee). Although I'm not a redhead like my Mom's sisters and several of my cousins, I inherited my copper beard from the Vonderlages of northern Germany. It's possible some of them were Dutch—the name sounds kind of Dutch to me. It turns out I even look Dutch. In Amsterdam folks would start talking to me in that strange consonant language that almost sounds Orcish.
I would interrupt, "No, no, sorry, I'm American."
Amsterdam, August 2010. J. Stanford.
Without taking one of those DNA swabs, what I know about my grandparents is what I know about where I come from. I suppose it's pretty typical for a white American: some parts of me have been American for generations, and other parts came through Ellis just over a century ago.
Me and Grandpa back from fishing, early 1970s.
I was my grandparents' first grandchild, and it's possible that being a boy added a little shine to their joy. Grandpa took me fishing in the mountains and took me to football games at the University of Colorado in Boulder, just the two of us. And, many years later, when I finished my master's degree and became a teacher, it was the only time I ever saw him cry, and they were tears of joy.
On the whole he never said much. He would not discuss his U.S. Navy service in the Pacific Theater of World War II, I believe, because he refused to burden his beloved family with all he'd witnessed. I experienced only the briefest flash of his true feelings about the war, one day when we happened to be watching the news. A Nisei (first generation Japanese-American) woman whose family our government interned during the war finally earned her degree from a California university.
"Japs," Grandpa muttered.
"Grandpa, what if the government had interned your family because they were German?"
No response.
Another time, when I was younger, I remember sitting in that same den with Grandma and Grandpa when his sister and her husband stopped by for some reason or other, and during the course of the conversation, Grandpa's sister started complaining about her new boss, a "n****r."
My grandparents' facial expressions betrayed their abject mortification, I hope not only because I was sitting there saucer-eyed. Grandma quickly changed the subject, because this is what Nebraskans are supposed to do when uncomfortable topics surface.
Beaver Creek, Colorado, September 2012. J. Stanford.
You know what, though? Lucky me, being born into such a family. All four of my grandparents were good and patriotic Americans. Their hard work and military service helped build this country. Each of them taught me about love and commitment and loyalty: they spent time with me one on one, they dragged me out of my room away from my books and crayons and showed me Colorado. They gave me amazing parents. And they accepted me—a sensitive boy with a smart mouth. And they left me with gorgeous memories.
None of their children or grandchildren suffered any abuse. Four of their five children and eight of their nine grandchildren finished college. Several of us earned advanced degrees. Everyone is middle class, or upper middle class. If you'll kindly discount my love of wine there is no drug problem anywhere in the family as far as I'm aware.
What are my other privileges?
I'm male. I'm big. I have never needed to carry mace or learn self-defense. I can't begin to guess all the ways life would be more difficult if I was a woman or if I was transgendered.
I'm white. I can walk through the mall without security following at a distance. I can drive anywhere without fear of law enforcement. Well, almost anywhere. I'm not straight, and when my partner and I were pulled over in the middle of the night with California plates in Moses Lake, Washington, I felt genuine fear. Hatred burned in that police officer's eyes, and although he elected not to ticket us for driving 39 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, I glimpsed, for a moment, some watered-down version of what it must be like to be pulled over as a nonwhite motorist and fear for your life should you say the wrong thing or make the wrong move.
I'm American. What wealth and opportunity I've enjoyed in this country! Yes, in 2018 we face serious problems. As of this writing, we the voting citizens of this country still enjoy the power to effect significant change. But there is so much more we can do, besides vote.
Writing about my racial identity and my background has helped me see that our unwillingness to accept our various privileges, and our unwillingness to shine a bright light on the casual racist attitudes we inherited from good people, is the reason racism continues to thrive, almost unseen, like cockroaches under the floor.
Source: Amazon.
In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt argues that evil depends not on the actions of a few extremists, but on the casual acceptance of the majority. Adolf Eichmann, in her view, was not a monster; he was not extraordinary; in fact he was average and ordinary, like most men. To her, that was the true monstrosity, if such an everyday guy could be directed to commit such atrocities, and see nothing wrong with it, and feel no impulse to resist.
Are average Americans capable of such acts?
A call to save the white race in August 2017. They selected Charlottesville because the town decided to take down its Confederate Civil War monuments, drawing the ire of racists everywhere. Source: Stormfront.
Almost every day, the current president unapologetically tweets or says something racist, nativist, or misogynistic, and millions of Americans express outrage. Although this behavior emboldens white supremacists to march openly and commit acts of violence, as they did last year in Charlottesville, they have always been around, and will probably continue to lurk among us for many generations. Because of Arendt I'm convinced they are not really the problem.
The problem is that many Americans seem more worried about how they sound than what they mean. Racism, nativism, and misogyny continue to be accepted if it isn't too openly offensive.
It isn't objectively wrong to argue that immigration policy needs reforming and the border needs securing—unless the only immigrants you care about are brown ones. What about "illegals" from Eastern Europe?
#BlackLivesMatter continues to be mischaracterized to mean Only Black Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter More, instead of Black Lives Matter Too. To deny African Americans any legitimate grievance about injustice in America is every bit as ignorant and racist as any of the president's tweets. We should not be arguing IF there is injustice, we should be arguing how best to improve the objectivity of our institutions.
Yes, we have made progress. Bowie, Texas, is no longer a sundown town. But don't kid yourself: the concept of a sundown town is not a Southern phenomenon. It is an American phenomenon. Hawthorne, California, in Los Angeles county was a sundown town. Racial covenants used to dominate Seattle. We are only one human lifetime removed from that America.
Today in Seattle, a socialist Indian-American sits on the city council. A black African immigrant has been elected mayor of Helena, Montana. There is much about which to feel hopeful.
But we can all do more.
TELL YOUR STORY
All Americans matter. All stories matter. No one anywhere, living in any time, has ever been the same as you. You are unique. Take pride in your identity.
Most people, like my grandparents, are good, hardworking people who inherited attitudes and values from previous generations, and though they may have known in their hearts that some of those attitudes were wrong, it was their children who were ultimately able to reject this part of our national inheritance.
What have you learned from your experience in America?
Grandma Vonderlage and her three daughters in Grand Lake, Colorado, in July of 2006. My mother is the middle daughter, in the photograph, and in life.
TOUGHEN UP
It seems to me we all could use thicker skin.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "No one can take away your right to choose your own attitude."
Source: YouTube
No one is a saint. It's not about feeling guilty for reacting emotionally to the vicissitudes of everyday life, it's about keeping Frankl's words in the back of your mind.
Talk to strangers. Smile. Look for common ground. When you need to challenge someone, see if you can be firm without being emotional, condescending, or patronizing.
When someone says something offensive, it's usually a by-product of fear and insecurity, not the mark of the beast. On social media especially, many of us (including me) tend to react emotionally. It's like a contest: Who can hit back with the most savage response?
I admire unemotional responses. They carry greater impact.
"That's not okay."
"In my experience..."
"With respect, I disagree."
Toughen up. You might get challenged. Who knows, you might learn something!
Once, when I met a group of lesbian college students about a university study we were all participating in, I found myself describing the appearance of a woman I know. It went something like this:
"She's beautiful in a traditional way, you know, like a magazine model," I said.
One of the women said, not unkindly, "Not everyone thinks that's beautiful."
Whoops. Right. "Of course," I said.
They wanted to tell me more about how I was wrong to say it.
I let them. It didn't hurt me to let them be heard. It didn't hurt me to reconsider: What is beauty?
Beautiful? You decide. J. Stanford.
About a year later, during my first year teaching in a majority black middle school, I made a galactically stupid, careless mistake. Near the end of the school year, it was someone's bright idea to have ALL the kids in the hallways cleaning out their lockers at the same time. A predictable pandemonium ensued. One excitable kid—a kid I didn't know—ran wild, up and down and back and forth, poking other kids and yelling and although he wasn't causing any real harm, I stopped him and I said, "Quit acting like an ape."
He knew exactly what to do. He ran straight to the principal.
That afternoon, the boy's angry father tore into me for about two hours. It felt like two days. I wanted to protest and apologize and defend myself. "I know why it was wrong. I am your ally, I swear! If you only KNEW me!"
Instead I sat and took my lumps. It was painful. How could I say such a thing, with my upbringing, my education, my values? I can only think racism is so woven into the fabric of our nation and our media and our entire world society, so immersed in the assumptions and ways of thinking of generations past, that it can manifest in any of us at any time.
We make mistakes. Sometimes there is no excuse, no defense, and we have to be tough enough to admit it.
Swedish clothing giant HM stepped in it big time this month. Source: AP.
ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR PRIVILEGES
Do you ever have the feeling sometimes that people seem to be competing to see who is the most tragic victim with the Most Hardest Life?
Bad things happen to all of us. I watched my husband of 14 years die of melanoma at age 39.
Here's the thing. The moment I start believing no one has suffered more than me, no one has it worse than me, I am not only ridiculous and clueless, I'm dangerous.
One of the defining characteristics of sociopaths and bullies is that they wallow in their own victimhood and use it to justify any awful thing they say or do. Neo-Nazis imagine the white race (what does that even mean?) is dying and suffering dilution and the world is coming to an end and that's why they justify their views with idiotic pouty slogans like, "We have a right to exist," as if the government has ever told straight white men who they can and cannot marry, what they can and cannot say, what they can and cannot buy, where they can and cannot live, what god they can and cannot worship.
When tragedy strikes you, there's no way to heal, no way to live a happy life, if you walk through life as a victim. The best way to let go is to acknowledge and appreciate all the ways you're lucky. I enjoy more privileges than the vast majority of the world's human beings. Pretending otherwise is silly and pointless.
A memorial to the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre, in Denver. J. Stanford.
Just as bad as perceived victimhood is accepting guilt for crimes you didn't commit.
Why feel defensive or guilty about the crimes of people in the past who look like me? It's not my fault. I didn't choose my birth mother. I didn't participate in the Civil War-era genocidal cleansing of Colorado's Native Americans.
No one in my Colorado high school ever taught me about the Sand Creek Massacre. It's no exaggeration to say I graduated from Greeley Central High School with absolutely no awareness that there had ever been any native people living in Colorado. As far as I knew it was just a bountiful, beautiful empty land put there by God for white settlers to find.
Almost as bad as murdering an entire people: attempting to erase them from our collective memory.
That's not my fault. But as a teacher and a writer I can do better. I can teach all of America's history, not just the part about Abraham Lincoln. I can teach the triumphs of our ancestors and the crimes of our ancestors. We remember the Sand Creek Massacre not because we hate America but because we need to understand how human beings will always be capable of such things. Indeed, such things continue to happen. Every day, somewhere in the world.
We remember the crimes of American history for the sake of objectivity. No nation is completely good or completely evil. No person is, either. Some people strive to become better, not by denying their own shortcomings, but by recognizing them and working to eliminate them. So it is with nations.
TREAT OTHERS AS INDIVIDUALS
It is part of our biological imperative, deep in the lizard part of our brains, to eat when hungry, to sleep when tired, and to make quick judgments when danger approaches. If I am walking down the street by myself and I see a group of human beings approaching me, I will automatically evaluate the situation. Do I perceive a threat?
If I'm in an unfamiliar place, I'll become even more observant.
Palm Springs, California. J. Stanford.
As a gay man I have always been more vigilant than most, always aware of my surroundings, because even in the relative safety of Palm Springs, California, men have attacked other men just for holding hands.
The problem is that we're not always walking down the street. This necessary biological imperative interferes with our ability to see others as individuals. If I am sitting in a university classroom, I should not be peering around the room thinking, "Lesbian. Black activist. Hippie. Conservative Republican. Foreigner."
In the past I've challenged students, "Give me ONE THING you can tell FOR SURE about another human being based on appearance alone."
"If they're in a wheelchair, they can't walk."
Not necessarily. My fully ambulatory high school friend Marc decided to wheel himself around for an entire week in order to see what it's really like to be physically challenged.
"You can tell what race they are."
No, you can't. An African American friend of mine has skin the color of coffee with a generous helping of cream. Curious people will ask him if he's Cuban? Puerto Rican? Filipino? Brazilian? Tan?
Are darker puppies inferior to lighter ones? Source: Pinterest.
I look white. So what? I might be part Native American. Or, I might be Dutch. Or South African. Or Irish. Or Icelandic. I might not even speak English. You can't tell just by looking at me. And even if it's 99% likely that I'm a white American based on appearance alone, so what? You can't see my education level. You can't see my occupation. You can't see my past. You can't see my talents. You can't see my sexual orientation. (Unless I'm flouncing.)
We rely too much on our eyes, and on our biological imperative to make snap judgments. Casual banal racism—the most pernicious, enduring kind of racism—is simply an overreliance on unfair judgments. It's lazy.
A more disciplined mind will see an individual rather than seeing the member of some group. A more disciplined mind will remember that the amount of melanin in the individual's skin reveals nothing about character or conduct.
EMULATE DR. KING
Just the other day, a white woman I know asked angrily, "Why do we even celebrate King's birthday, anyway?"
She's not a bad person. She just doesn't get it.
We celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday not because he fought injustice, but because of how he fought injustice: not as a victim, not with negative emotion, but with the power of love, the strength of conviction, and the most powerful weapon any human being can wield: the raw power of language to influence and inspire. He used his talents to bring people together and to resist nonviolently—an American idea. Yes, Dr. King learned from Gandhi, but Gandhi learned from abolitionist Henry David Thoreau's seminal book On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, written in response to the tragic, unjust Mexican-American War of 1848.
We celebrate Dr. King not because he fought injustice against African Americans, but because he stood against ALL injustice against EVERYONE.
We celebrate Dr. King because it is possible to effect change without violence, without hatred.
How lucky we are, that the words and actions of Dr. King are also part of our beautiful, terrible, wonderful, complex inheritance as Americans.
What will we do with it?
The immortal Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arguably the greatest American writer, the greatest American leader. Source: Scholastic.com.
CHALLENGES WITH THIS WRITING PROMPT
The following is what I shared with students in addition to the prompt.
Potential problems with this assignment:
You’re adopted, or there is some other reason why you don’t have a clear idea of your genetics. There is nothing wrong with that! Many Americans aren’t sure from where they “come.” Even many Americans who DO know from where they “come” do not consider race an important aspect of their identities (see #3 below). So, your narrative will be about your experience as someone adopted. How do you perceive yourself? How do others perceive you?
Your family will not approve of you writing about your experience for some reason. That’s okay. There are some directions we can go, including (1) only I will read it; or (2) your family can become a part of the process so that they feel more comfortable. We will find an alternative (see below) if we have to.
There are other aspects of your identity you find more compelling than race or ethnicity. That’s okay too. YOU get to decide what’s important about your identity. I would appreciate if some part of the essay does address the racial part of the prompt, even if it’s a passage explaining why race is NOT an important part of your identity.
You feel that telling your story honestly will put you in some kind of jeopardy. Example: your immigration status. Again: I am the only one who has to know who is the author of the piece. It can be anonymous. I will protect you.
ALTERNATIVE PROMPTS: If something about this assignment offends you, or you have some other problem with it, see me and we will find a way to tailor it to your needs.