Listening

Earlier this week, I was sitting at a kitchen table in the North Mississippi Hill Country, sipping coffee and talking to someone who, on the one hand, was much like me: He was white, of my generation, married, had gone to the same sort of schools I had, and was baptized in the same sort of church I had been. 

But we absolutely voted for different people in the last Presidential election and have very different views on most social issues. If they saw the bumper stickers on his Ford Super Duty truck, some people would consider me a traitor to them by even talking with him. 

While we sat there, drinking good coffee and eating mediocre grocery store cookies, we talked of many things: People we had known who were now gone, lessons we learned from our ancestors, how the children in our lives were growing, and how proud we were of them. We also talked about politics, race, economics, and religion. Neither of us hid who we were, and neither of us got angry. When I had to leave to go to my next meeting, we both commented on how much we had enjoyed the conversation, and I have a standing invitation to come back and drink more coffee the next time I’m in town. 

* * *

How do people change? How do bad ideas die, and good ideas grow in their place?

In 2018, after nearly 30 years away, I returned home to Mississippi, the land of my childhood, of my father, and of his father before him. We lived with my grandmother before her death, and 5-year-old me ate breakfast in the kitchen my grandfather had built. I climbed in the same trees my ancestors had played in, and like them, I was raised in the same culture of white supremacy. 

The little country church in which I was baptized as a child, where we sang that Jesus loved all the children regardless of the color of their skin, where I learned about the love of God and the healing power of a potluck meal, had, two years before my birth, decided to leave its denomination rather than admit People of Color to membership. Or heck, for that matter, allow them to attend. 

In the late 1980s, my high school had separate yet equal prom kings and queens and homecoming courts, and we students voted on which Black person and which white person was most likely to succeed or that we thought most beautiful. 

A white farmer I knew had sent his daughter to Ole Miss, and she came home from school with a Black boyfriend. She was ten years older than me, and I remember that we were all excited she was coming home, and then we all hushed it up when the farmer disowned her, and she moved away. I never saw her again until after her father died decades later. 

So white supremacy is not some novel idea I am learning about after my book club read Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was “borned to it,” as Huck Finn liked to say about his sinful nature. It was the water in which I was raised and, to all appearances, the natural order of things. 

We did not think of ourselves as white supremacists. No, by all accounts, we believed we were good white people. We were not permitted to say the N-word. We had Black friends and co-workers. I went to a fully integrated high school. 

In retrospect, we made the mistake many white people make when we confused racism with antipathy and believed our proximity and relationships absolved us of guilt. In reality, racism is not about feelings or relationships – it is about structure and power. But it would take a lifetime for me to learn that.

And what changed me was listening. Like I was listening at the kitchen table earlier this week. 

* * * 

We seem to have lost the capacity to listen. I’m not trying to sound nostalgic there as if I am mourning for an idealized past where everything was rainbows and kittens. Rather, it is harder to listen to other people now than it once was – largely because we have so many alternatives. Our hyper-connected world has made it easier and easier for us to find like-minded people, but also easier to shut out those who differ from us. 

And because we do not listen to each other, we don’t truly know each other, and thus it is easier than ever for people in power to divide us. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Bill Moyers wrote about when Lyndon Johnson explained the tactic to him in the 1960s: 

“We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. ‘I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,’ he said. ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.’ ”

Years of listening have taught me one critical thing: We are not nearly as divided as we think we are. Or, more accurately, we are not as divided as those who profit from our separation want us to believe we are.

NB: I have talked about this work I do before, and I tend to get two reactions: 

The first is outrage because they believe I am discounting real injustices and injuries. I am not. There is a world of difference between saying that I agree with the ideology of a Klansman (which I don’t) and saying that a Klansman and I share some (but not all) of the same hopes and dreams and that if we made a list of our base motivations for how we move in the world, there would be an overwhelming amount of overlap. Rather than treating him like a strawman I can dehumanize, I am forcing myself to recognize he is a human with motivations, agency, and choice, who is also acted upon by outside forces, as am I. 

The second is something like, “Teach me how to do this!” There are good people out there doing this sort of work – I used to be one of them – and it’s not hard to find if you really want to learn, but I feel somewhat pulled to write a bit about this over the coming weeks. So, stay tuned.