Quietude and Old Racism



View from a one lane bridge last month driving back from Arenal. Lots of tiny one lane bridges on the backroads near the volcano.

It is eerily quiet now. Our pool crashing friends are gone. Others I know have flown back to the U.S.A. now. Driving through Tama it's a ghost town still. Big lumbering lazy iguanas slowly crossing the main calle.

My eldest daughter called yesterday morn to tell me she was back in touch with a group of kids she'd started hanging around with in middle school. Just after we're moved to Central Virginia. I was glad to hear because I'd always wondered what happened to those kids as they all drifted apart post-high school. But one of the things she said shocked me to my core.

One of the boys told her how mind blown he was to meet Jim and I. That we were literally the first white people he had met that treated him just like they did everyone else.

This is 1990 we're talking about, not 1890, and I can assure you I treated all of my kids friends the same. Central Virginia, 1990, in the shadow of Washington. D.C. Jesus wept.

Trust me, I"m not special. It was just a case of me treating the kids like visiting kids.  Thinking about race was not even a consideration. I'm just a mom. A mom of kids that routinely brought kids home. The sometimes server of soda, popcorn and once in a while pizza.

I had come to assume that racism was dead in the U.S. except in some redneck pockets in the backwoods, certainly not in the well scrubbed Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. I was disabused of this notion once Obama ran for president and I got to see people I knew well erupt in the exact same type of racist I witnessed as a small child in South Louisiana.

I'd lived long enough to see my racist KKK loving father swing around and change his tune on African Americans. I don't think I knew how much he had really and truly changed until he died and people of color flooded the visitation and funeral. Many of them told me tales of the times he'd gone out of his way to help them and their families. He was loved, much more than I could have imagined. I believed after his funeral in 1999 that we had turned a corner decisively as a nation and were post-racist now.

I am so sad to say that the majority of the racist statements I am seeing now flowing out of the mouths of my brothers and sisters in Christ. They seem completely unable to understand that the guy they came to be following is a person of color. Jesus was not lily white. They follow a book written by a dark, and nomadic Middle Eastern people. They refuse to even slightly accept that the time has come to demand our law enforcement enforce the laws of our nation without color or race.  They call dark people 'thugs' and other derogatory names. It's a disgrace.

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