Speaking Freely

Don't believe what all the scientists are saying nowadays. This world of ours was hotter in the 1980's. Especially that one time, when I was nine, and had to stand in line all day at Six Flags over Texas.

But misery is not what sears one summertime amusement park line into my memory, like the hot asphalt scorching my little purple flip flops. Everything else about that white hot day, though viewed through the squint of my mind's eye, was completely ordinary to me as an Okie, temporarily living in Texas. To roast in one ride line or another was a rite of passage for modern western prairie youth: a price willingly paid for the wind-whipped centrifugal, animatronic, splash-landing reprieve to come.

No, it was the sound of Spanish, being spoken nearby, that made that line, that day, stay. I could hear the two women in front of me, unassumingly, flipping sounds around like they were supposed to sound like that. A conversation, likely about mundane family gossip, hypnotized me. Probably plans for where to eat between leaving the park and heading to the hotel, danced in my ears. Impossible music. It made no sense to me, but I could tell it made sense to someone. I longed to understand them. They were enchantresses, putting me under a spell with their casual incantations.

Surprise surprise: I was a precocious and talkative kid. Sometimes, after dropping some lengthy, bookworm-fueled chatter on a glazey-eyed grown-up, they'd smile at me stiffly and ask if I had an "OFF" button.

It was a question which elicited about as much comprehension as I enjoyed that day, listening to eleventy million hours of a Spanish at Six Flags. So many words.Those were words, right? All of them? Hearing another language sounded liberating.  Like the freedom to leap out of my small world of conversations with well-known adults and their weary attention spans. Speaking outside of the comprehension of some, yet still within the understanding others. But who? Who else talked this way? Who else understood? Could I understand it too, someday?

Can I tell you another story? Just kidding, it's my blog. No "OFF" button here, just "PUBLISH."

Ahem, Once Upon a Time, two days later, back home in Big Spring, Texas, language left me out again. Some kids from my church and I were bumping along a country road in a van, on our way to another vernal tradition of my youth: VBS. (Vacation Bible School. One week of memorizing verses, gluing popsicle sticks, drinking apple juice, and singing about that "Arky Arky." Y'all know. Don't front.)

Our church offered rides to and from VBS, in the form of a van that came to each kid's house, picking us up every morning and dropping us off in the afternoons. That day, that van ride, like the Six Flags line, was no novelty.

Had it not been for my first encounter with " the N-word," my only memory from the whole week would most likely have been the devastating victory I delivered in a contest to look up Bible verses faster than everyone else. To be fair, none of those other kids stood a chance. They could all best me at any physical game, but, like I said before, words were my domain. I was merciless, destroying kids as old as twelve who didn't even seem to know which testament they were in. An inspirational poster, mounted on a large piece of cardboard and shrink-wrapped in cellophane, was my trophy. I was certain it meant great things for my future.

Such a glorious defeat of mine enemies could have outshone the week if it weren't for a freckle-faced boy, on the ride to VBS, introducing me to the language of his people.

It began, as I imagine it often must, with the exchange of jokes. Just kids, young enough to actually heartily laugh at knock-knock jokes, but old enough to want to sound like the adults we have heard nearby. A boisterous lad with a wavy reddish shag asked everyone what he was certain would be a humorous question. His blue eyes flashed as he cheekily made an analogy between the night sky and the color of ....what? What was that word? Everyone in the van laughed. I looked around, confused. Left out. Next, another camper had a similar joke to tell. And another one. Their meanings were all alike, and elusive, though the new vocabulary differed. What were they all laughing about? Of course a better question would have been, "Who were they all laughing about?"

Their sounds made sense to someone, but who? Could I understand it? I came home, attempting to replicate the words I had just heard, hoping my parents could translate them. This was my language. I should understand it. It made everyone laugh. Ever the talkative word nerd, it unsettled me to lose out on the meaning of something. As soon as my parents heard me approximating a word salad of racial slurs, they stopped me, horrified, saying those were ugly and terrible things to say. I was never to repeat them because they disrespected people of other races.

The end, right? Except that was only the beginning.

Because this is America. 

Each pair, or van-ful, of us might only understand each other, but an individual can feel more connected to a "foreign" language than her own, here. It is the strength of a pluralistic society: one where there's no official anything: language, religion, ethnicity. It means our kids grow up with a wide array of meaning with which to communicate, seek understanding, and shape new meaning.

For all its frustrating complications, this country holds, sometimes hostage, the potential for just about anything. 

Back Where I Come From

This park is one of my favorite places in the city where I currently am.

Once a small zoo, it is now a shady site for sitting, playing, and enjoying a stroll, all under the watchful gaze of giant lions, frozen forever in a silent roar. Throwbacks to a different time, they guard this same spot.

Today, between a morning, spent teaching out of town, and afternoon meet-up with my family, I sat on one of the black iron benches, reading. A young man rolled up to me in his wheelchair, engaging, smiling, asking if I would like a map to his city. I began to reach for my pocket, assuming the map he offered was for sale. He smiled and said the map was free, but he would like for me to enter a little information about myself on the top sheet of a stack, mounted on the clipboard he extended to me.

With the attached pen, I wrote the requested information about our visit to Oaxaca, Mexico. Four of us, here for x amount of days. And then there was that blank, the one that asks where we came from.

Well, that's easy, isn't it? Sure. There's nothing inherently difficult about writing "United States." There's not even anything ideologically difficult about writing "United States," because I have always thought of my country as an anything goes, free to be me, live and let live sort of notion of a nation, sort of.

It's about as patriotic as I get, thinking of the wide range of true things about the United States that make it decidedly, dividedly, united. No particular way, that's the rule. We all have to live together, grumble about each other, help each other, and do our best to ignore each other. Go to that homespun holiday dinner, avoid politics, pass the turkey, and let live, right?

Yet, I felt a pang of shame, stating on that sheet of paper, where I come from: a direct result of paying attention to what is happening there now. Who is saying what, about whom, all the outrage, praise, and deafening silence it garners. Even though I am thousands of miles from home, I feel close to events already starkly in the sharp focus of a 20/20 vantage point of the future- one I hope will be "a different time," but, I know better.

Growing up in the United States, I thought a lot about racism. It almost fascinated me as a child, the history of slavery, segregation, the struggle for civil rights, and systematic oppression. The clearly terrible bad guys in white hoods, the clearly noble good guys stirring the masses with soaring rhetoric about a better future, one which should have happened already.

It was at once unbelievable, and unnoticeable to me, how atrocity and inspiration formed the story of the United States: the place I come from.

All the places and times I have been, in that mostly lovable, earnest mess, they all have something in common. Although I was told the black and white good and bad of U.S. history was thought to have happened in "a different time," it still happened all around me, frequently.

A neighbor shouting a racial slur at her annoying dog, insisting it wasn't racist, because she used it for everybody.
My sweet great grandmother closing our front door in the face of my mother's employer, a black man she did not know and certainly would not be inviting indoors.
The scowling elders who once smiled at me kindly. As a cute little blonde girl, I was adored by them. As a young woman, holding hands with a man I had loved for years, I was a troublesome example of the changing times.
The store employees who followed that boyfriend whenever he shopped out of their sight.
The word that was scrawled across my dorm room door when he and I first fell in love.
Horrible remarks jokingly made to me about my co-workers in high school, because we sat together at lunch.
A bus ride to school, during which a classmate retold his dad's favorite jokes, and I came home with so many questions. What did those words mean? Who was he talking about?

So, why take to the blog to telescope back into time and look at just a few instances in which the privilege of being white meant I got to witness, first hand, the unvarnished view of some who shared my skin color? Why bother writing about how casually they committed the same category of crimes as the bad guys in the those black and white photos in history books?

Because sometimes I fancy that the things I write here might be read by people younger than myself, people whose early memories coincide with news stories about human beings whose lives should have mattered more, if only they had been the right color. I want to say something to them, to you, that was never said to the younger me. It is a hard and solid truth that was denied, though it roared, not so silently, at the corners of my existence. Racism in the United States is not the stuff of history books. It rarely wears a white hood, and it never admits that its story never ended.

That "different time"? Is now. Unless those who know are believed, unless those who come from it can call it what it is, it is tomorrow too.

From Knee to Shining Sea

Ah, the beautiful coast of Oregon, USA!
Sparkling waves of one of the seas to shining seas.

Purple mountains majestically falling over each other, tumbling to the sand, trying to be the first and last to be shrouded in lingering mist.

The nesting bald eagles have been around more and more.

key-YAW!

The famous American melting pot of all the races, ethnicities, and ....wait.

Humanwise, the stunning Oregon Coast actually has a rather monocultured landscape: for the west coast, there is a surprisingly homogeneous collection of mostly white people.

This is not an accident. White people came here during a period of time in U.S. history when most other people were wrestling with matters of race, back east. The easy fix to racial tension, as most white deciders coming northwest saw it, was to prevent racial diversity in the first place.

The Ku Klux Klan got pretty big in these parts, which surprises most people who think the KKK is mainly a Southern thing The klan and their fans' dreams of a white utopia led to something called "sunset towns," which outlawed walking around outside at night, while black. I live in a town that was once a sunset town.

One man's utopia can easily be another man's dystopia. Especially if the first guy is in the KKK.

But that's the past, right? Now is not then, we are not them. Now Oregon is a hippie wonderland, plus Obama, so racism must be just like Nazis, a thing we only see in scratchy black and white footage.

Except.

Woops.

And.

Because.

Which reminds me of.

It's almost like we are doomed to repeat some sort of history. How could that have been avoided? Didn't someone once say something about that? Oh well, history is old, right?

Who cares?

Exactly.

Who cares?

She cares. And her concern is taking a form that really could teach and create possibilities for something new for the future, which requires being unflinching and unrelenting when describing what is happening around us now, and in our recent past.

Here's what LaNicia Williams did (and this is just lately!)

She came to a place where she gets to live with the wearying daily reality of standing out, and kindly leads its most innocent little residents through their ignorance.

She's looking out for local kids, particularly kids of color.

In short, she teaches the wider community how to be inclusive, not only with her, but for everyone living here who has a different "label." She knows good intentions do not mean that there aren't still some who tragically don't appreciate what it's like to be not-white, young, living in Nehalem, OR and see this sprayed at a place that's supposed to be a safe haven for our youth in our community.  

I am so grateful to her for speaking out and not letting up. Thanks to that, there is now a big $1000 reward and the community of Nehalem is talking about something we obviously need to discuss: race, diversity and inclusion in the USA.

Because,if we are serious about being the best mixed collection of people whose great great grandparents probably came from other places, we're going to have to be able discuss things sometimes. Not just discuss, but listen.

The art of listening to each other could go a long way toward avoiding situation where people who have, recently, been trotted out to perform patriotic gestures, feel no other recourse but to refuse.

It's also what will help the average U.S. citizen not have to think about what it's like to be all kinds of things they aren't. Each of us doesn't have to consider all the things if we are listening to people who walk through this life and world differently than we do.

When black people tell white people that racism, the systemic oppression of a race of people, is a real and unacceptable problem, it's possible for white people to believe them before literal writing on walls.

If all of this only made you want to read more, stay tuned, because LaNicia isn't only single-handedly leading this county's most important overdue conversation. She also participated in the little project that never quits, The Food of the Future, by teaching local kids to make soul food.

For hours, she directed, explained,and invited participation; a paragon of ability, humor, and wisdom. A video presentation of her work that evening is in the works .

As she guides our neighbors through these times of racial revelation, I imagine her employing the skills I saw at work in my kitchen when she was here. I know she is treating her students' weak moments as opportunities to know and teach them better and also learn from them.


LaNicia is currently working with other like minds at Oregon Coast Love Coalition. Check it out and read more, in LaNicia's words, here.

Quite a legacy, LaNicia! And that fried chicken haunted my dreams for weeks afterward.

photo credit:Broken Banjo Photography

Written by Rebekah Laszlo and LaNicia Williams