Stories about our own histories and experience of life have tremendous power to confront the racial hatreds and lies so common in contemporary media.
I AM WHITE!
Well, most of me is. It’s about this annoying little dab of Iroquois blood in me courtesy of my great-great grandmother. Ol’ Henri LaRochambeau (name changed to protect the guilty) apparently had little taste for those anemic French ladies up yonder on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River in late 18th century Quebec? Noooo, he just had to have one of those way-hot Iroquois babes. So he married one… my great-great-grandma. And if the family legend be believed, unless it’s a bunch of ‘legend’, more than one at the same time. Yeah, Henri was by reputation into a bit of unrecognized polygamy. That’s why some Iroquois warriors eventually showed up to kill him…
But before the unscriptural fool succumbed to an aggregation of spears and arrows, he spawned my maternal family’s bloodline, himself heir to a land grant provided by Louis XIV to a minor nobleman for services rendered. My own mother bore the same surname. Direct lineage…
But that little dab of Iroquois blood matters not to the racial attack forces. For I must bear the stigma of that off-white skin color afforded by our Creator to all of us Caucasians. Such a guilty lot are we, all of whom were no doubt born of European wealth, privileged, and so white. Read on, for not all of the LaRochambeau line fared so well…
STORIES OF ‘WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE’? HERE’S MORE OF MY OWN…
Now how about some truth, if that matters in this age of racial gaslighting and systemic false witness? Every time I am confronted with objectors to ‘white-male-privilege’, I merely inquire of them, “Tell me, when did you live in someone else’s garage??”
Now let me tell you about the garage. It was the winter of 1951, and a freshly-divorced woman with a son about to turn five years of age received the mercies of a Christian family who had a somewhat furnished garage. One bare light bulb hung by its own electric cord from a ceiling over a workbench homemade of common construction lumber. There was an old ‘Ben Franklin’ potbelly coal stove that managed to keep the garage and its occupants warm, and the boy had his little pail to help Mommy carry ashes outside. A small, single-unit hot-plate served to heat the Cream of Wheat, the oatmeal, or the cereal du jour in the mornings, and the mother sometimes suspended bread over it until toasted. Mother and son kept minimal milk and other items on hand from the neighborhood grocery just outside, their refrigerator until the boy was about age ten. Only then did they graduate to single-room apartments with a Murphy bed. And they had a car when the boy entered eighth-grade.
The mother slept on a surplus military bunk bed, she on the lower, the little boy on the top bunk. One night, the boy awakened to witness his mother chasing something in the garage with a broom, a small scurrying creature with a long tail.
They ate supper and spent evenings in the crowded house where the boy remained in the care of the Christian woman during the day, while the mother worked as an assistant bookkeeper for scant compensation. But that was post-WW II and the early days of the Korean conflict, not an optimal time for a divorce with a child on $15.00 per week.
After that experience, the mother and the small son moved from apartment to apartment, always living in neighborhoods of mixed race. The boy noted later in life that he was the only child of a single parent family in any neighborhood, and that others including the blacks and Hispanics lived in houses while he and his mother eventually graduated into half-doubles with a shared bathroom. His first girlfriend was a Mexican immigrant, his friends her three brothers.
If the reader has not noticed by now this white boy’s utter antagonism toward the purveyors of ‘white-skin-syndrome’, I will spring it on you now in Kamala Harris manner: “That little boy was me!!” But how might that be? For I am white…
TOWARD RE-EDUCATION
A library website blurb advertising Robin DiAngelo’s latest high-dollar pack of lies informs us that “Racism will not be interrupted by a hug or a smile. Dismantling white supremacy requires white people to commit to a lifetime of education and accountability.”
So why don’t we give her sort some re-education that these sin-loving wretches so desperately need?
I began my work life in the labor ranks. I eventually got into long-haul trucking, went through three degree programs and part of a fourth, had to go back into trucking, was eventually enabled to return to two theological seminaries and ordained into the Lutheran ministry. I did it the same way ‘persons of color’ can and have done it, striving for excellence, overcoming the negatives of life, taking advantage of commonly available loans and scholarships, and paid them all back. I did it by doing what I had to do while looking for opportunities to further myself and what I ought to do before the God Who redeemed me.
Please note that I did not do it by bearing a false witness against my neighbors, peddling demonstrably malicious propaganda, gaslighting blacks into believing that they are of substandard intellect and ability and are not able to do the same because of the skin color of my fellow whites, whom the wealthy DeAngelos and Ibram Kendis of this world don’t mind smearing with money-making false witness against their neighbors.
SO AS TO TELL OUR OWN STORIES
We who wage war against these distortions of reality do not need to be similarly confrontational. And we certainly ought not to return false witness for false witness. Not that we are above such in matters of social conflict, but that it is not a very smart tactic. Then how do we engage the evil with the good?
First, we must tell our own stories as I have above, and that not only about our successes, but alsoabout our endurances and our failures along the journey. We who grew up among the poor Whites beside the Latins and the Blacks seem to be absent from the typical enumeration of the disadvantaged. The truth is that we struggled with the others to rise above their circumstances and have every right and obligation to declare our stories from the housetops, and in the media. The Dr. Ben Carsons of this life are right there with us as we reinforce our commonalities, telling and re-telling our stories of simply doing what we found to do along our individual journeys. In this we find each other.
Second, take careful note of what I said above, that the lower white working class is never, ever, included in categories of the disadvantaged merely due to the color of our skin. We must expose these willful omissions on the part of the race-baiters, namely the poor, lower working class in which we have our roots, and from which we garnered much of life’s wisdom. We might do well to ask why Hispanics and Asians also play such a minor role in the contentions, as much racial hatred and violence is perpetrated against them. In short, look for the omissions and supply them with stories of our own realities.
CONFRONTING THE MADNESS
To perpetuate this race-card-orgy madness is madness itself. The opposition fails to take note that classists and racists of whatever skin color who must support their contentions against others with falsehood insure their own eventual demise . For lies have this annoying tendency to come back to bite those who tell them. And the Hebrew-Christian ethic of the love of God and of neighbor condemns the bearing of false witness against another. So tell your stories, freely, and in truth,
Father David+