ROAD TRIP!!: Introduction part 2--by YGandB

I don’t remember this first lunch tete a tete that Shannon describes.

My first vivid memory of Shannon is of her blowing into the College Government office one night when I was holding office hours and catching up on homework. She plopped down on the office couch and asked me, “Do you think your college experience is more segregated than your high school experience?” Oh boy. An analysis of El Mio Cid for Prof. Gascon-Vera would have to wait. But I enjoyed having these discussions with Shannon. I told her once that she is one of six white people in the world who gets it. Race, that is. She’s not a celebrated expert, but she approaches the conversations with a rare combination of humor, sensitivity, a willingness to engage and a fearlessness about putting her own thoughts and beliefs on the line. She does not hesitate to tell me when she thinks I’m mistaken and she can admit when I present a different perspective that she might need to consider. Our conversations cover the intersection of poverty, culture, privilege, self-hate and Shakespearian hubris. We don’t apologize for saying things like, “Well you know how your people are…” because we are making jokes or because the point requires a broad brush before being narrowed down to specifics. In short, we are honest, if not always right. And that honesty has created a safe space for dialogue that could not occur on a Presidential commission, in a report or in symposiums. Though we are good friends, the sources of our racial knowledge and drive for social justice spring from different founts. Shannon and I both went to high school in the suburbs of large cities and we have both lived in majority white neighborhoods for most of our lives. But as she is white and I am black, we came to racial recognition in different ways.

I learned that I was black and that that fact set me apart from others who were not when I was six and injuries my mother sustained in a car accident led us to move from New Jersey to Kentucky. There, my black friends made it known to me that there were certain things that separated blacks from whites: the way we spoke, the way we dressed, the way we interacted with our parents and the fact that we did not go around barefoot outdoors. My black girlfriends and I would spend hours playing hand-clapping games. Some, like “Rockin’ Robin” were common to most little girls. Others, I am sure friends from my Catholic private school boasting only 5 black students did not play…“I like coffee, I like tea. I like a colored boy and he likes me. Get out of here white boy, you don’t shine. I’ll get my colored boy to kick your behind. A boom boom.” That was a fun one. It didn’t occur to me until Shannon and I were on the trip what the lyrics of that ditty were. And I still don’t know why a group of little girls in the mid-1980’s were using the term “colored.”

We may have used colored because our grandmothers did. At least my grandmother did. She was what is called in highly-charged intra-racial parlance “high yellow.” She was as light as any white person and had long straight hair to match. She had been a teacher, as had been all of the women on my mother’s side of the family, at least as far back as my great-grandmother. Although my grandmother prized her civil rights, she was never, ever to be called “black.” Or even “Negro.” “Colored” suited her just fine, thank you and that was that. I did not even know what a “Negro” was. When I was about eight, I asked my mother what a “negro” was after listening to a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech on television during Black History Month. She was horrified. But as a teacher of English, Speech and Drama, instead of just coming out and saying, “You are,” and moving along with it, she instead pointed me toward a wealth of literature by and about Negroes through the ages. I read from Frederick Douglass to the Harlem Renaissance to the writings of the movement and beyond. That was when I started to understand black Americans as a people distinct from others. The distinctness rose not from our hair, or speech patterns, but from a shared history that had created a culture of which I was very proud. It wasn’t a pride that sought superiority; I didn’t actually want a colored boy to kick a white boy’s behind on my account. I can remember having crushes on white boys, black boys and one really cute Iranian boy who belonged to what might have been the only Iranian family in our Kentucky town. Rather, because I felt more firmly rooted in my own history and culture, I could have a healthy appreciation for those who were not like me without feeling diminished or threatened by difference.

Despite my racial awakening, I still went to an almost all-white school, and like most kids, a lot of my friends were my classmates. One of my grandmother’s friends, a black woman in her eighties who lived on our street used to shake her head in wonderment when my white girlfriends would come over for sleepovers or dinner and say, “Lawd have mercy, time sho’ brings about a change.”

In the fall of 2003, Shannon and I decided to finally set out to explore that time in which segregation and inequality was the de jure rule, mandated by law and openly supported by the nation’s leaders. We went specifically in search of the places where a clash of perspectives on the innate value of all humanity had produced moments of violence, compassion, desperation and faith. People asked us what we expected to learn, but we weren’t focused on learning new bits of history. We both trace our moral awakenings to the moments when we first began to learn about the people who strove to turn the tide of history by daring to demand full equality. Therefore, it wasn’t a history field trip; for us, it was a pilgrimage. It was our own private Hajj.