I honestly don’t know my ultimate purpose in writing this blog, but I feel in my soul it needs to be written.
I was blessed to grow up in a diverse part of Atlanta, finding myself playing with neighborhood kids of all ages and colors. And even though my upbringing kept me from extreme segregation, I recently remembered the first time I experienced white-dominant culture. I was in 3rd grade, and one of my best friends was over to play. I finished braiding her hair and she had just begun to braid mine when she burst into tears.
“I wish I had your hair,” she sobbed.
“Why? Your hair holds these braids better. Mine just falls out.”
“Who cares? Your hair is silky and mine is rough. I’ll never get to have white girl hair.”
I fell silent. I mean I guess she was right. I couldn’t comprehend why it mattered to her, but she wouldn’t ever have white girl’s hair. Because she wasn’t white. She‘s black.
I didn’t remember this story until I was sitting in an African home while sweet Juliette braided my white-girl hair into cornrows intricately matching her own darker, coarser ones. And while I see that as a naive 9-year-old I admittedly appreciated that my friend liked my hair, I sadly didn’t begin to grasp the weight of each of her tears until college and beyond. And in retrospect I realize how these experiences have left me stinging with a hundred different finger pricks, each a reminder, a symptom of the greater illness behind it all.
Looking back,
I remember listening to a female activist speak on Black Lives Matter as a roomful of mainly white people snickered defensively around me.
I remember people of all ages and color telling stories of horrendous present-day prejudice in a seminar on church racial reconciliation.
I remember an African village woman imploring us to pray her unborn baby would have white skin.
I remember being stopped at a security checkpoint between villages to have a guard recount how white people forcibly took his family’s land.
I remember walking into a local one-stop shop to see multiple different brands of skin bleaching lotion.
I am a white woman. So my life experience has not been to feel or be told that I’m less than because of skin color. And I realize, therefore, that naturally this may not seem give me a large platform on which to stand when it comes to this issue. But when I’ve witnessed how universal racial favoritism has become, to be completely dwarfed by the severity and permeation of it all, it hurts me too much not to say something. It’s not just an archaic issue, an American issue, or a first-world issue.
I’ve written and rewritten this blog, trying to find the right ending. Because I feel myself ultimately wanting reconciliation to have scrolling end credits scored by John Williams, a director calling “cut!” on set, as a crew with colors as diverse as a skin-toned crayon box goes out for dinner together after a scene well done.
But—sitting back and processing—how can one end a short blog on that which has essentially become man’s greatest struggle? Especially as—a post-processing rant—slavery wasn’t considered inhumane until recently, relative to the greater context of mankind. Even broader than that, the act of putting down one’s brother in order to succeed, the reverence of colonization no matter the cost for the colonized, has been a characteristic of humanity for centuries now.
So. Back to ground zero. I don’t know how to end this blog. Because I don’t know how to fight to end a struggle without inadvertently invalidating the amount of struggle that has already taken place before me. Especially when my skin matches that which has been seen as the dominant one. I don’t know how to respect this firehose-like issue, while also trying to suppress the yearning to fix a large hole with something as measly as a superhero-themed bandaid, only to get consumed by the flood anyway. And then to try and find God in it all…
