Opinion

Let’s talk

| Letter to the editor from Penny Hilton |

If I was in charge of New Gloucester, or one of those “influencers” online, I would say to our town, “Okay, everybody, breathe… now remember a little humility. Pay a little less attention to your certainty, and a little more to each other. You can’t impose understanding, but you can nurture it – and it goes two ways.”

What prompts this, of course, is the upset sparked by the Charter Commission’s discussion of how to present as an introduction to the Charter what happened between the indigenous people and the folks who wanted to make this land, “given” to them by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, into their new home.

I was surprised that there was such a forceful reaction to the idea of updating the story to show our understanding, now, that the native people experienced the settlers’ attempts to make a place for themselves by force as an invasion, and they did as we would do: fought back. I was also surprised at how difficult it was to discuss. Some of us got a little flustered, and our language reflected both our anxiety and our roots. What was later called “a racial slur” was used by someone who was actually arguing for the history to be updated.

Was it a “racial slur?” It could be seen that way, for sure. But it clearly was not intended that way. If you find that hard to believe, you don’t fully appreciate how the process of consciously reorienting beliefs and language to a new understanding stumbles over unconscious culture.
There is a reason and context for our lagging grasp of how deeply and thoroughly racism is entrenched in our thinking, even when we mean to be, and think we are, totally unbiased.

Many of us older whites grew up with the myth of our racial supremacy baked into every sphere of our experience, with absolutely no personal experience to make us question it, or to even think about it at all. Here in the North, outside the cities, non-white races were virtually nonexistent in our daily lives. I have frequently asked white friends, “When was the first time you saw a black person?” For me, it was when I was around six and spent some time in Children’s Hospital in Boston. There was the black nurse who would braid my hair and color with me, and the black custodian who came in the night when I woke up in a puddle of blood and called for help. As a teen, I saw more “Negroes” when I would go into Boston or Harvard Square, but never had occasion for a real conversation.

Race was never thought of or talked about in my life until that wonderful March on Washington. I listened for hours to the live radio broadcasts. I heard Martin Luther King, Jr., and I heard the crowd. I was thrilled. I was awed. Something HUGE was happening, and I was an idealistic 15-year-old.

From then on, I heard and read whatever the media covered about all that happened for years afterward, but it never touched my life directly.

I went to Bates College for three semesters, where two “Negro” women were the only non-white students, and of course, they were exceptional.

A few years later, married, my husband and I set off on a cross-country trip in our VW camper with our two German shepherds. My Canadian-born father had spent some time in North Carolina wooing my mother (who was born in Maine but moved south with her family in her teens). The only thing about race he ever said to me was before that trip, when, obviously struggling to find the right words, he warned us soberly that the dogs might be a problem in the South because “Negroes” smelled different. And what did I know? My take on this, years after, is that if the dogs reacted with aggression to blacks, and if that reaction was triggered by smell, it was most likely because of a rational fear from years of white people siccing attack dogs on them. Maybe my dad knew that… or maybe he thought there was a natural difference in smells. He was from St. John, New Brunswick – what did he know?

So we kept to north-ish on that trip, and no interactions with any black people stand out in my memory. I DO remember the white “cowboys” in Arizona who whooped and yelled things and gunned their big trucks around our hippie van. And the “Indians” at a Taco Bell who had to wait till the ever-replenished line of white people were served before they could order.

Back East again, my husband and I both went to work at a psychiatric hospital in Jamaica Plain, outside Boston. I only remember one non-white patient in the two-plus years I worked there, but there was a mix of other races and ethnicities among the staff. We eventually named our second daughter after a tiny, wrinkled, chain-smoking, elfin-smiled, endlessly compassionate AND no-nonsense ex-nun RN from Colombia. We found a mixed-race couple who worked there – Irish wife married to a dark man from Argentina – funny and colorful. We happily worked with and bought sweet-potato pies from Doris, a black aide, and were glad when a young black man named Joe, with muscles, and a gold star embedded in his front tooth, was available when there was trouble on a locked ward.

I had nothing against Joe.

But I said something horrible to him I have never forgotten.

We were arguing passionately about something serious. We were both fully invested in our own sides. From somewhere totally unfamiliar to me came a huge anger, and I myself could not believe it as the word came out of my mouth – I called him “boy.”

Unlike the commission member who fumbled for his words, I meant to be disrespectful. I meant to negate Joe and his infuriating ideas. Without espousing any racists beliefs or goals, I acted like a racist. Which means, inadvertently, way in contrast to my conscious intentions, at least a little bit, I was one. And I was ashamed.

That was, of course, years and many lessons learned ago. When New Gloucester United Against Racism organized a Zoom workshop on racism earlier this fall, I first thought I would not go because I did not need to. Then I thought, “Well, I don’t know what I don’t know.” And I am glad I changed my mind. There was stuff I didn’t know, but the best part was that it was a totally safe space to be just who I was, just where I was in my thinking and questions. Nothing too dumb – or impolite – to ask, and a chance to talk with other NG attendees in breakout sessions. I understand two more Zoom workshops are planned, and I think it would be great if everyone attended. Let’s talk freely and frankly, with warm intentions and patience. I think we will all feel better.

In realistically and intentionally reframing our world with fairness and respect, we are doing something enormous, so difficult that it has taken generations for ordinary white Americans to see it is necessary and now, maybe, possible. Of course we will make mistakes. But we will work out a fairer and healthier way to engage with inequity, inherited fear, and inherited guilt over time, together. Many of us will need compassionate correction, some of us will need forgiveness.

All of us will need humility.

Penny Hilton

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this opinion piece are solely those of the author. Publication does not reflect endorsement by the NGXchange or its volunteers. NGX welcomes diverse viewpoints and invites your submissions. Learn more here.