***Warning, I use a controversial and offensive word. My intent isn't to offend, just to dis-empower the word.***
Very few people I know have watched the entire “I Have a Dream” speech. Most of us through history classes or other places have heard his echoing words. I am not a black man. I am mostly a white man, although not completely. I grew up in a middle class white home in rural Wyoming. This town only had two black people in the entire town. One was a professor at the local college; the other was his daughter, who had a white mother. The town I grew up in was right on the edge of the Wind River Indian Reservation. I knew more Shoshone and Northern Arapahoe people than I did black people when I was a child. Part of my heritage includes Cherokee Indian. I still remember my Great Grandmother’s face as she knitted a blanket for my newly born baby brother. It’s one of my earliest and fondest memories. The racial dynamic of my early childhood was primarily white with a few Native Americans and some Hispanics. I don’t remember witnessing any racial tensions or inequalities as a child.
I do remember being told a joke by an older boy. This joke was a stereotypical racial joke about a parrot making remarks about black people and watermelons. Had the joke use the term black person instead of n***er I might have understood it and would have rejected it. I didn’t know what a n***er was. I honestly thought a n***er was a type of tree because I had heard Brazil nuts being referred to as n***er toes. I just knew they were part of the mixed nuts my mother would put out at Christmas. I remember repeating this joke to my father. He didn’t get angry with me, nor did he laugh at it. He stopped what he was doing, and took me aside. He asked me why I thought it was funny. I explained that I thought a parrot would talking about a tree eating a watermelon was funny. To my 8- or 9-year old mind, it was a silly joke.
My Father explained to me what a n***er is and I felt very sad that I had told him the joke. We talked about how I would feel if someone made jokes about Indians that way. I thought back to my Great Grandmother and how I would feel if someone made a joke like that about her. That moment became the foundation of my racial beliefs. Today, I had my two daughters watch the entire “I Have a Dream” speech. It occurred to me half way through that they might not understand what a “Negro” is, so I stopped the video to ask them. Neither my 6 year old nor my 10 year old knew what Negro meant. We talked about segregation and how the struggle isn’t over. How it isn’t just their struggle. Freedom and equality is everyone’s struggle. As a white man, I do not know what it is like to grow up as a black man in the south, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a responsibility to protect his freedom, his rights or his opportunities.
If you haven’t watched the entire “I have a dream speech”, take 18 minutes out of your day and watch it. Or even better, take 25 minutes and watch it with your children and talk with them about it.
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
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