We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident

My Dad used to tell this story about coming home for the weekend from army training with a black friend. His mother took them out to lunch. This would have been in the mid-1950s. The server said, “He’ll have to go, we don’t serve that kind here.”

His mom stood up. “Let’s go boys, we don’t spend money with racists,” she said.

I can’t confirm or deny if this story is true — my Dad is gone and I never knew his mother — but my Dad did work for school integration in the 70s, so it seems like a thing that could be true. Years later, my mom told me that yeah, this sounded like something she would have done.

My mom also told me that our phone used to ring with hate calls during the school integration days, and that there were raised eyebrows over the black families attending our family events.

Once, I think it was in the mid-80s, my Dad told me I could crash a company party. A few days before the party, just in passing, I said, “Hey, that party. I got a date — he’s black.”

“SO?” was my Dad’s response.

I have black and brown friends who confront racism daily. I’m an invisible minority, I’m white, but being Jewish, I’m part of a group that knows a thing or two about racism; I have my own stories about this topic. That said, I have no idea what it means to be brown. And I only recently experienced what it means to be a visual minority when I traveled in Kenya and Tanzania. “Oh, yeah,” I thought, “I don’t look like everyone else here. I’m white.” That was a weird awakening.

There are many complicated things that shape how I got to be who I am, but I am grateful for being raised with an understanding that the color of your skin or the source of the blood in your veins should never be an obstacle.

Never mind, my words are nothing compared to those of Martin Luther King. I listen every year and weep for what we have not yet done. And when faced with racism, I think about what my Dad would have done — and I try my best to do it.