For centuries this country repeated that we are brute beasts; that the human heart-beat stops at the gates of the black world; that we are walking compost hideously proffering the promise of tender cane and silky cotton, and they branded us with red-hot irons and we slept in our shit and we were sold in public squares and a yard of English cloth and salted Irish meat were cheaper than us and this country was quiet, calm, saying that the spirit of God was in his acts.
̶ Aimé Cesairé. (1913-2008, Francophone Afro-Caribbean(Martinique) author and politician)
As you know, I am a psychotherapist who works with couples most of the time. I am primarily a “family of origin” therapist. This means that, in totally simplistic terms, I hold the position that none of us fall far from the tree. We are born into a family system and this system has a script that it follows as it engages with the world. In my thinking, it is imperative that we become conscious of this script and make decisions about it. In my family of origin, setting the family table for dinner was an art form. This involved the right linen, the appropriate dishes (bone china for festive events and pottery for regular meals), flowers if possible, the right cutlery in the right places, napkins and some thought to the theme of the occasion. I liked this script and have chosen to follow it. I note and enjoy that both my children hold onto pieces of this script.
There are many other delightful scripts that I have inherited and follow with enthusiasm and gratitude. One of them is voting!
At the same time, I was born into a racist family, complete with xenophobia and abundant prejudices. It was a family with a white supremacist script. Of course, I want to qualify this. My folks were good and kind and deeply Christian. This was true until the arrival of certain other people. Let me introduce you to some of these others, and my journey to become conscious so that I could make my own decisions. Maybe this will resonate with you and cause you to rethink some of your decisions concerning your own script.
I was born at the very beginning of World War II. At that time in Canada we did not like German people and we came not to like Japanese people. “Krauts” and “Japs” were the terms in my childhood home. When I entered kindergarten, such an ironic term, I was taught to step on cracks on my way to and from school to break a German’s back. Good girl that I was, I did so and reported daily to my parents the number of Germans I had killed. I was a committed and proud little killer!
Later, in high school, to my chagrin, I was not up to speed in French language classes, but for some reason had a gift for the German language. They say God has a wicked sense of humour! I decided to study German but to hate the teacher who was a German. I grew to appreciate the language and its poets. I was not yet emerging from a racist position but it was a start.
In the passionate global response to the killing of George Floyd , I am finding meaning that helps me understand more deeply my struggle with my own racism. I am learning that white supremacy/racism, xenophobia and prejudice are not interchangeable words. I have always thought that one of my life tasks was dismantling the prejudice of my family of origin script. I am now seeing that it is much more than that.
Xenophobia is an unwelcoming and fearful attitude toward strangers, foreigners and anything unknown. It is the opposite of hospitality. My family welcomed many to our table but there were many who were unwelcome. The poor were welcome but Germans, Jews, Roman Catholics and Blacks were not. Usually xenophobia is an aspect of white supremacy/racism.
Prejudice is the biased contempt one feels toward others that one has not gotten to know. It is a matter of the heart. Though I sat in my German class and learned the language, I would not open my heart toward my German teacher. I hated him, and it is more than ironic that his name was Herr Schatz (“Mr Sweetheart”). This is prejudice, and it, too, is often a component of racism. Currently on CNN there is a very warm-hearted bromance between Chris Cuomo, a white Italian-American broadcaster, and Don Lemon, a Black broadcaster from Louisiana. They model how prejudice is broken by opening one’s heart to the different other.
Reflecting on these concepts, I can see how I took on the work of dismantling my German prejudice and xenophobia. I kept up my studies of the German language so that it became my second language in academia. Eventually this led me to pursue theological studies in Heidelberg. In those days it meant taking a ship to Germany, a two-week voyage. Naturally I chose a German ship to strengthen my German fluency. On board I fell in love with Jorg, a German student on his way home. I felt I was making progress in my attempt to rid myself of this prejudice. However, after a week of speaking only German I knew that I did not have the skill to study another language in German. I would be studying Hebrew in Heidelberg and the instruction would be in German. I made a u-turn, got off the boat in the UK and made my way to Scotland where I studied the Greek New Testament in English! In Scotland, my roommate was from Germany and we became fast friends. I did keep Jorg, though, for quite a while longer. I now see that I had been busy in my life ridding myself of at least one prejudice.
The commitment to learning Hebrew had been part of my attempt to understand Jewish culture. While my family was quite antisemitic, their expression of Christianity was deeply rooted in the stories of what then we called the Old Testament and would now call the Jewish Scripture. I loved these stories and they continue to inspire and instruct my life. My family with Puritan roots observed the sabbath on Sunday. I deeply appreciate their observance of the sabbath and incorporate this ancient Jewish spiritual practice into my current life. Within my Christian practice I honour that Jesus was Jewish and often, in my liberal theology, think of Jesus primarily as rabbi.
Quite incidentally and hopefully not deliberately, I also learned that having boyfriends that were forbidden by my family was a way to break down prejudice. I seemed to have a talent for this, and my next boyfriend was Jewish. In this case, his parents were as unwelcoming of me as mine would have been of him, had I ever told them. I was indeed a work in progress.
I n the next few years I found myself as a pastor to two or three reservations on the Prairies. I was tasked with opening my heart to Indigenous peoples. Fortunately, I was terrible at bringing them to Jesus (as they had their own beliefs) but they taught me beautiful crafting, and I learned to appreciate their art work and to try my hand at beading and moccasin making. Slowly, I learned just a little about how hard their life was in a white world. I was completely naïve about the deeper issues. I am only now waking up. Just recently I picked up my daughter from a meeting with several chiefs of the First Nations of our country. I waited in the hall and some of the members of the task force found me waiting there. When they discovered I was the mother of Mary, they welcomed me with such warmth. They told me that they regarded my daughter as one of them. I was so immensely touched and proud. Perhaps generation by generation we are doing better.
Next I was assigned as a student pastor to a mission in downtown Montreal. Here I made my first Black friend. My job was to get to know the kids in the neighbourhood and she was one of them. She was just a bit younger and she embraced me. The other kids listened to her, and she said I was to be trusted. Maybe I helped her too just by being white and being with her on the street. The police often harassed Black kids out on the street, and in response they did mischievous things to express their anger. They tipped over post boxes and rang fire alarms. I was often with them, and my new friend, their leader, protected me. It was exhilarating for me to be so accepted by them.
Later I asked her to my home in WASP London, Ontario for Thanksgiving and she came. My parents treated her somewhat kindly but it was forced and she knew it. She left early and our friendship dissolved. It is very very hard to break family scripts. Clearly I still had work to do in uncovering and understanding my racism.
My battle to accept Roman Catholics ran very deep in my heart. When WW II ended, I was five and my brother came home from overseas with a girlfriend who was Roman Catholic. When she came to visit in our home and I could see that she was not welcome. I found her enchanting and exotic and it was a struggle for me to accept that she was “other” and had to go. How could this be?
London, Ontario was the territory of the Loyal Orange Association, an anticatholic secret society. It was popular and our first Prime Minister was a member as was our thirteenth Prime Minister. We all knew the story of the Black Donnelly’s whose homestead in the 1880’s was in a town, Lucan just outside of London. They were Irish Catholic immigrants that had not fought for the English or the Protestants in Ireland. They were murdered by vigilantes for the anti Roman Catholic sentiment. It is a gruesome story that was imprinted in our brains.
It was a struggle for me to open to Catholicism. As a psychotherapist with a theological background I longed for a discipline of spiritual practice which is so akin to psychotherapy itself. The Roman Catholics had kept this tradition alive within their practice with monasteries and convents and retreat centres world-wide. Protestants had held such practice in deep suspicion. We had an enormous collection of hymns and we sang our spirituality. Protestants protest and are not given to the interior life. Eventually I found myself pursuing the spirituality of the great Christian mystics and for the most part they were Roman Catholics. I tend to jump in and I did, in this case as well, and began with a two week silent retreat with a group of nuns still in full habit in a retreat centre in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Gradually my prejudice was eased and has continued to develop to this day.
As I grew and learned, my racism was eroding but there were times I reverted to script. They remain deep moments of shame. As a student in Chicago in the mid-sixties I was pregnant and needed an obstetrician. My colleagues told me about a great doctor who saw students on campus. I made an appointment and when he came to call the other patients into his office, I saw that he was Black. My family’s racist script hit me full force and I fled the office never to return. There are absolutely no excuses. By this time, as an adult in full command of my faculties, I was a racist. Full disclosure! Though I now had many Black friends, was part-time staff at a multi-racial church and worked for Jesse Jackson, I fled the office of a qualified Black obstetrician. All I can do is confess, forgive myself and know that early scripts can be triggered throughout life at moments when least expected.
Finally, I was beginning to understand that white supremacy/racism is a societal script. It is not a feeling (prejudice) or an unwelcome attitude toward the unknown (xenophobia) . It is the development and maintenance of a system for the benefit of white people only. It is what Amié Cesairé grasped so brilliantly in the last century. Black people continue to be treated as walking compost that gives rise to the literal and figurative sugar cane and cotton of white people. This is a thoroughly invasive political and economic system. I, as a white person, have this script tattooed upon my life by both my family and my society. I need to acknowledge this, continue to uncover all the ways it makes me act as less than human and do better. It is the task of a lifetime.
Currently I am finding the old familiar hair washing command ̶ wash/rinse/repeat ̶ to be helpful in understanding my responses to racism. For example, at the personal level, I want to defend my action in the obstetrician’s office. I want to wash it with the context of my situation at that moment. When I walked into the office, I had been unaware that the doctor was Black. Next, I want to rinse it by telling you that my last child had died, and that I had specific ideas about the kind of powerful doctor I needed. Then I have to realize that washed and rinsed, without shame and confession, I am totally likely to repeat. Without the difficult and demanding work of addressing my racism, I will keep washing, rinsing and repeating.
At the societal level, I want to continue washing by telling you that racism is a problem in America, but rarely a problem in Canada. In the bestselling book The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power,Canadian writer Desmond Cole demolishes any such thought. A former Toronto Star reporter, Cole looked at the year 2017 in Canada month by month, reporting on news stories in which Black and Indigenous people and the BLM movement have been fighting a losing battle with police and school boards, Pride, the federal immigration authorities and other communities all across this land. This is information most Canadians do not want to know. Wash it out. Or at best rinse, explaining why it is so and why it is not racism. And, as Cole makes clear, in every next month of 2017, it was and would continue to be repeated. He left his job with The Toronto Star, Canada’s most liberal newspaper, who could not tolerate his activist voice. Yes, racism/white supremacy lives in Canada. We must acknowledge this; we are complicit if we deny it is so.
British Columbia is having a provincial election. Recently, the party leaders had their debate. The buzz after the debate was that both the main party leaders had been racist in their comments when responding to questions about race. Our current premier shared a story about playing on sports teams as a kid with kids of colour and that, as a result, he did not see colour. His simplistic answer was immediately identified as racist and challenged. To his credit our Premier immediately apologized. The new leader of the Green Party, a woman, said clearly that Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour experience racism on a daily basis. We all have to truly get this before we can move forward.
What to do? Become conscious of your own script from your family of origin and how it has both personal and societal implications. Be able to define what white supremacy/racism is. Confess, if this is in order. Take steps to change. Stop washing and rinsing and repeating the situation. Open your hearts to the other. Be courageous if an activist opportunity comes your way, or initiate one yourself. I think it is about being engaged without making excuses that we don’t have the time or money, or that we’re too old to make meaningful changes.
I walked with a friend from Toronto over Thanksgiving, and she shared that she has spent the summer engaging with many books on racism. That is her way of responding. My eighteen-year-old granddaughter is reading James Baldwin. Two other friends just told me what they are doing in Philadelphia, a swing state in the upcoming election. They gave me permission to share their telling of this. I am humbled by their courage.
“I think last evening was the 17th Tuesday we stood in silent vigil on the church steps at my sister’s nearby church. Our sign, We Stand Against Racism, has evoked so much positive response from traffic on the busy street - waves, horns, applause, thumbs up, shouts of thanks. We stand for an hour. One week a member of their peace and justice committee counted positive feedback from 127 cars. Of course, not everyone likes us. A guy known in the Glenside neighborhood has taken to joining us on the public pavement in front of us. His sign, I Hate Virtue Signaling White People, causes confusion unless cars are stopped at the light with time to figure our conflicting messages. Last week a courageous Black gentleman parked and walked to confront our harasser, who gave him a taste of the charming rhetoric he’s flung at us. Someone standing with us became frightened and called the police. The sign bearer protested about his first amendment rights. All ended peacefully. We did not have to implement plan B: duck into the church.”
We must all find a way to confront our script of white supremacy. Changing a systemic script is profoundly difficult but our voices matter.