The first time I laid eyes on the n-word was the summer before fifth grade. A sudden thunderstorm had chased my neighborhood friend and me inside his house. His mother requested my friend’s help in the kitchen as she fixed us a snack. I meandered around their living room. There was a bookshelf in the corner lined with series titled American Classics. The hardback spines were lettered with gold. I picked a book at random and started reading about a boy named Huck.
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Close to 30 years later, my wife and I have been having The Intentional Dinner Conversation with our children. At ages seven, four, and two, they are just barely old enough to sit still for any length of time. But in light of the protests across the country, we have been making an effort to talk to them about race.
Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids, encourages parents to inspire our children’s moral imagination by inviting them to picture themselves in scenarios involving race. In our house, we call it What Would You Do If…?
We start off along the lines of what would you do if…you could fly? But the two older children have moved quickly to poignant topics. The seven-year-old suggested, “What would you do if…the coronavirus was over tomorrow?”
All three kids wanted to see certain friends in our neighborhood. I noticed that all of these friends are white.
One evening, my wife asked, “What would you do if…you saw someone your age being mean to someone?”
The four-year-old son immediately answered, “Call the police.”
She and I talked about how, yes, you can get an adult involved. And there are also certain situations with children his own age in which he could say something like “Stop it” or “You are hurting that person’s feelings.”
Then, my wife asked a follow-up: “What would you do if…you saw someone being mean to someone because that person was Black?”
Without hesitation, the four-year-old replied, “Call the Black police.”
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I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina in a part of the city known as ITB—Inside the Beltway. That meant white, middle-to-upper class. I walked across the street to elementary school. Black and Brown kids were bused in. I remember thinking that their different neighborhoods all seemed to include the word “Heights” in the name. I could see those apartments climb toward the sky through the window of the car cruising down the Beltway.
I remember only one police officer ever visiting my neighborhood. My younger brother had “accidently” (he later promised repeatedly) dialed 9-1-1. After this explanation was given, my father and the officer exchanged smiles in the driveway. The nice policeman got back into his car, his gun gleaming from the holster at his side.
At some point in my youth, I actually read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Certain passages had been edited for language.
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During the coronavirus, I returned to Mark Twain’s novel on my Kindle. I have the original version, including the n-words.
I had a vague memory of Huck deceiving the slave trackers by claiming that his traveling companion and runaway slave Jim—who appeared to those men as a shadowy figure in a distant raft—was actually his father and had smallpox. The danger of this infectious disease was poignant to me in this time of COVID-19.
What I hadn’t recalled from my first reading was that Huck had mixed feelings about this decision to help Jim escape. Huck believed that he was robbing Miss Watson of her property, thereby breaking one of the Ten Commandments. After lying to the slave catchers—and actually receiving money from them out of their pity for his plight—Huck decides that he will only make decisions based upon what comes “handiest” to him.
“Handy” can refer to an object that is close by or situation that is a matter of convenience. As applied to Huck’s rule for morality, “handiest” reminds me of the situational ethics theory I’d studied in seminary—weighing any decision based upon a cost benefit analysis of the given situation as opposed to judging through a lens of absolute moral principles.
There’s also such thing as a handy excuse.
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The Intentional Dinner Conversation idea came from Jennifer Harvey’s book. She notes that many parents would never consider themselves to be racist. And yet, time and time again, they made decisions that placed their children in predominantly or exclusively white communities. These parents justified these decisions as “doing what was best for my kids.”
A little more than two years ago, my wife and I said those exact words as we bought a home in our current overwhelmingly-white neighborhood. How handy.
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I grew up in the Church. By high school, my religion was baseball. I made pilgrimages to fields in little towns across the state. But I didn’t have to make a long journey to find the Confederate flag. The “Stars and Bars” were plastered to the truck fenders and shone on the belt buckles of plenty of white kids in my high school. By this point in my life, I was certainly familiar with the n-word, although I recall far more instances of “wigger” which referred to one of the white students who wore baggy pants and rode the bus from one of the Heights.
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Jennifer Harvey was the featured guest on a livestream discussion in the aftermath of the Amy Cooper video. Cooper, a white woman, called the police on an African- American man who had told her to put her dog on a leash as the public park required. Dr. Harvey pointed out that it’s easy (and tempting) for a white person to say, “Well, that’s not me!” Even if ethics depend on the situation, most would agree that Amy Copper was clearly in the wrong.
My wife and I think we vote the right way. We think we read the right books. Recently, along with our like-minded neighbors, we were outraged over our Homeowners Association’s decision to enforce the little-known rule against yard signs. My family had lived here for over two years and never heard a peep about prohibitions against signs until a Black woman in our neighborhood designed and distributed Black Lives Matter signs.
A bunch of us took to social media to denounce the racist actions of our HOA. There were two separate news reports and, as of this writing, the HOA has not only issued an apology, but also backed off the original threat to confiscate signs while they review their policy.
But at the end of the day, Jennifer Harvey and a host of experts make it clear: it’s not merely what you say or the stance you take. Your children learn the most from how you live.
After George Floyd was killed, my wife and I attended protests. We knelt on the hard asphalt under a blistering sun for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the exact amount of time George Floyd suffered under that police officer’s knee to his neck. We’ve chanted “No justice, no peace!” and “Black lives matter!” We’ve heard soloists belt out “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and speakers denounce the orange man in the White House, the same man who tear-gassed protesters for a photo op in front of a church. He held the Bible upside down. What a handy metaphor. It’s easy for me to summon righteous indignation.
But in our current living situation, by the end of most days, the only people of color that my children see are the people who cut the grass of the well-manicured common areas in our neighborhood.
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Let me acknowledge that Mark Twain’s novel is problematic. Twain was certainly a product of his time and place, yet his work continues to speak to us. As an adult, I was not only struck by the relevance of the “handiest” ethic, but also found resonance with one of the last chapters titled “You Can’t Pray a Lie.”
Huck’s conscience is tortured because he’d helped an enslaved man escape. Finally, he decides to write a note to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, confessing his crime and telling her where to find Jim. Huck immediately feels a sense of relief. Finally, he thinks, his soul has been washed clean.
But then, Huck remembers all the times he shared with Jim on the river. How Jim had looked after him. How they had laughed. How they had floated down the river naked together, stripped down of all clothes. Not stripped of prejudices, but at least of pretensions.
Huck holds the letter as if his hands were a scale. He feels his eternal salvation hangs in the balance. He declares, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” And tears up the letter.
Slavery is not my context. The situational ethics for Huck—the legality of a human being as someone’s property—do not pertain to me. It’s hard to put myself in Huck’s shoes. Yet I am moved by his willingness to sacrifice his own well-being for another human being who is being treated unjustly.
What am I willing to risk and sacrifice for people of color?
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Here’s the point in the essay when I’m tempted to outline the initiatives at my overwhelmingly white church to engage an African-American congregation in genuine partnership and also study anti-racism material on our own. Here’s the point where I’m tempted to mention the social justice exchange that I hope to be a part of once it is safe to gather again on a regular basis.
I’ve written out these goals and hold the paper as if my hands were a scale.
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One of my mentors wrote to me about raising her children in a racially-divided city in the Mid-Atlantic. She and her husband tried to ensconce their young family into predominantly African-American neighborhoods without realizing that making such a choice was a mark of their white privilege. They learned many lessons the hard way.
But she shared one of their best decisions: enrolling one of her sons in the city’s all-boys’ choir. Roughly half the choir was comprised of African-American boys from underserviced neighborhoods. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, this son sang and traveled with these peers, forging friendships that have lasted and deepened into adulthood.
A friend of mine immigrated from one of the Caribbean Islands to play soccer at the university about five miles from where I grew up. I was telling him about my anti-racism programs at my church. He shrugged.
“What about getting a bunch of black and white kids together and throwing a few soccer balls between them?”
I might prefer that the sport was baseball, but we’ll try it and see.
Jennifer Harvey stresses that white parents will make mistakes. We cannot reach for the handy excuses that we are colorblind or that we live in a post-racial society. We must try to have the uncomfortable conversations with our children about race. Whether through arts or sports or religion, we must try to create communities with people of color that are genuine, which means we will embarrass ourselves by saying and doing the wrong things. In baseball lexicon, we will swing and miss. Yet, we still have to try. For this is not a game. As the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Aubery and so many more has made plain, the soul of our nation is at stake.
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I think it’s true that many white suburbanites want “what’s best” for our children, including racial diversity. My family will have The Intentional Dinner Conversation. We will engage communities of color, if they will have us. Finding activities with children of color will require additional time and energy, but it’s worth it. Even if they have to play soccer, my kids get to be around my friend, his effervescent smile and carbonated energy!
But I grew up ITB and have essentially returned to that social location. I know there is the implicit pressure to conform. The expectations of neighbors, including parents of my children’s friends. Maybe we protest a yard sign policy. But there is pressure not to get “too political.” Don’t advocate for defunding the police.
Deeper still, racism is not limited to individual actions and words. The truth of race in America is that white people have been conditioned to privilege ourselves and our children over people of color and theirs. It’s not just the activities and choices—it’s the fundamental orientation of our society. This is the definition of white supremacy. To change such inequality is going to take sacrifice from the people who benefit from the system. That is what white people mean by “too political.” Sacrifice.
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Huckleberry Finn is filled with the n-word. The ethical decisions are rooted in the context of slavery. Let us hope that, one hundred and fifty years from now, people will look back on our situation in America with bewilderment, even anger. They will not be able to imagine how people could say that All Lives Matter, just as we cannot justify Huck’s moral dilemma regarding a fugitive slave.
But across time and space, I do relate to Huck. He genuinely felt that his mortal soul was at stake. I believe I hinder my children from following the brown-skinned Lord of Love because of my unwillingness to change, which is, finally, because of my fear. White suburbia is hardly heaven on earth. Yet, I’m afraid I have to raise hell in order to be a part of its transformation. That’s not how I was raised in the Church here in the South.
But even though it cost him, Huck could not pray a lie. That gives me hope that neither will I.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman serves as poet pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, NC. His fourth book, Gently Between the Words, was published in 2019.