I often think about the time my mother told me to “stay away from the blacks.”
You’re probably imagining all kinds of things about her now, but they’d be wrong. This was a woman who grew up French-Canadian Catholic in rural Maine, which wasn’t popular. She was always on the side of the little guy. In 1939 she married a Chinese man, and endured all the hardships of an interracial marriage in the 40s and 50s. She used to tell the story of how they’d send a family friend to try to rent an apartment for them, only to have him be told “We don’t rent to Italians.” Boy did those landlords ever dodge a bullet! What my parents had to go through back then just to live quietly, minding their own business … it’s almost unimaginable now.
How did this woman, all women, end up telling her seven year-old son to “stay away from the blacks”?
Well, it was 1968, and Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated a few weeks earlier.
Things were peaceful but tense in the northern city I grew up in. I remember walking down the street with my mother on a fine spring evening and spotting a handbill stapled to a telephone pole. I stopped to read it: it called on blacks to rise up the way they had in DC, and Baltimore, and Chicago. You can see some of the DC aftermath in the picture above.
My mother read the handbill too. She looked me in the eyes, and said, “Stay away from the blacks.”
One of the reasons I keep coming back to that memory is that it was a powerful lesson to me on how it’s not just what you say; it’s how you say it. She said those words with reluctance, pain and shame that made a huge impression even my seven year-old self.
“Stay away from the blacks,” she said. “They’re angry because Martin Luther King was killed.”
Because of the way she said that I didn’t come away with the impression that black people were dangerous, but rather that angry people are dangerous, and that the death of Dr. King, who at my age I was barely aware of, was a terrible catastrophe for everyone. Had she said those same words with the smug self-righteousness of a racist, I’d have come away with a totally different lesson.
As parents we try to say and do the right things, but we fall short sometimes because none of us are perfect. It’s the struggle to do better that matters; that’s what keeps us heading in the right direction even when we misstep. That I learned from my mother, and it’s a lesson I’ve tried to pass on to my own kids.