Haiti and the Zoo

The Quilt – Part 3

I love this picture. We bought the t-shirt at a Baptist encampment up in the hill country from Petionville. Petionville is the wealthier part of Port au Prince. The little compound has a restaurant, a souvenir store and a small zoo. Roberta would occasionally load all her kids into one of the large trucks, along with Charlene and me and would haul us all up the hill to what they called “the zoo”.  She would feed us all in the American style restaurant after we had checked on the animals.

Our trip to the zoo was just one of many delightful memories of our time in Haiti. We visited the country for about 24 years and we spent two of those years hosting the Estes Church’s guest house for medical teams and other transient missionaries. While there, we met lots of fascinating people, including Roberta’s friend Bobbie. Bobbie was a retired education professor who wanted to improve the Haitian educational system. She and Roberta worked out a plan and Bobbie would come down every three or four months bringing along some of her former students, now teachers in Tennessee’s school system. They formed relationships with teachers and principals in some of the more promising schools and began to teach them how to better reach their students with the material they wanted them to know.

Bobbie was hit hard by Roberta’s murder. You can read her reaction and much more about Haiti in Charlene’s new book "Roberta - Joy and Courage in a Clay jar Too Soon Broken"

Black Lives Matter

My Quilt Part 2

Bev Ryan made me a quilt. It is a beautiful thing with twelve of my favorite all-time t-shirts set in a gold-flecked blue background. As I look at it, I can see that it in one way tells the story of my life. I was a t-shirt collector for several decades. When the shirts wore out, I replaced them with solid black t’s and Charlene commissioned Bev to make the quilt as a thank you for my help formatting her new book and getting all the pictures in the right places: See it here: Roberta

That leaves me with an opportunity to write a short piece about each shirt on the quilt. I already started with my blog last November called Stand in the Gap.

If I am to move left to right, top to bottom, today’s story is about my Black Lives Matter

shirt. I bought it at the Black Lives Matter booth at the Minnesota State Fair. Charlene and I spent a few minutes there talking with a courteous young man who was staffing the booth. 

The slogan grew from a series of young Black men who were shot and killed by police officers across the country. Please understand that I have a son who is a Saint Paul Police Officer and a Thin Blue Line sticker on the back window of our van. I do understand that some of the dead men left the officer with no other choice. But I also understand that some of the officers in question turned to deadly force too quickly.

Some of my friends have countered the shirt with “all lives matter” but that misses the point. It is our stereotypical fear of Black men that has left so many of them dying in the streets. It is Black men who need the community to stand up for them and I have worn the shirt with pride.

For more on the topic, see my book Growing Up White.

What If Everyone Were Green?

What if all of a sudden we were all green? No more red, brown, yellow, black and white? Just green. How would the world be different?

The news would sound different. “A green man shot and killed a green man in a St. Louis suburb last night.” “A green woman heroically rushed in to save a green child in downtown Minneapolis early this morning.” I suppose we would fairly quickly drop the designating adjective and just speak of men and women, girls and boys.

The designation of colors has become an important code in our various cultures. When you speak of a white woman or a black child or an Hispanic man, you have instantly summoned up all kinds of unconscious, preconceived notions of what that person is like. We instantly think we know much about them - what kind of food they like; perhaps their intelligence level or their education level; maybe their propensity for violence; possibly their attitude toward people who look like me.

A sociologist might call those preconceived notions “prejudice” or “stereotyping.” 

But if we all were green, we would not so easily be able to access our stereotypes about what we call “race”.  We would have to wait until we got to know someone before drawing any conclusions about their likes or dislikes or about their proneness to loving or giving.

Try this – whenever you meet someone or read about them in the news, think of them as being green and see if it doesn’t change your attitude toward them. If it does, then your attitude needed changing.

Click here to Check this blog on Stereotypes