All is Not Lost: Positive Sentiments On Race

From an editorial by Dawn Turner Rice, a writer for the Chicago Tribune:

When my father-in-law was a boy in 1930s Paducah, Ky., he and his friends used to go to the park, steal a swig from the "Whites Only" water fountain and take off running.

His other stories of Jim Crow-era Paducah (and Chicago) weren't nearly as cute. This is why when my husband and I moved into our small and, at the time, overwhelmingly white suburb nearly 20 years ago, my father-in-law advised us to call the police. "Let them know black folks are moving in," he said. "Just in case . . ."

We never made that call. A few days after we settled in, our neighbors came over to welcome us. They, along with their son and daughter, brought over a bottle of honey. The father is an engineer who keeps bees as a hobby.

My husband and I were young and had never lived in the "country." We called on our neighbors when we had questions about our septic field or the hard water or warmonger mosquitoes that tortured us during a few months in the summer.

Eventually our families grew closer and we exchanged keys to each other's homes. When they vacationed, we watched their property. They did the same for us.

Nearly six years after we moved in, my husband and I decided to have a child, and when I got pregnant, our neighbors were among the first people we called. When we brought our daughter home, they were among the first to come over to see her.

About 14 months after that, we were in the intensive-care unit being told that our daughter was dying. They were among the people we called to ask for prayers and among those who visited us in the hospital. They joined us in celebration weeks later when we returned home with a little girl who was on the mend.

Over the years, we've participated in each other's lives, attending backyard get-togethers, snapping pictures during their children's prom send-offs, graduation parties and their daughter's wedding. Just a couple of Saturdays ago, the four of us held court in the center of the lawn and ogled at their 8-month-old granddaughter.

Although no relationship is picture perfect, I couldn't have imagined better neighbors. I believe they would say we've been good neighbors, too.

Last week, after the Rev. Michael Pfleger controversy, I received this e-mail from a reader: "How can we make progress when people inject stuff like that into a room filled with people, who then clap and cheer? I must have been living in a dream world, because I really thought the majority of us, whatever color, wanted things to get better between us."

The majority of us do want things to get better. But where race is concerned, the majority of us indeed are living in a dream world.

We often see snippets into each other's worlds with very few opportunities for substantive and prolonged involvement. We hear sound bites, or view a few minutes of videotape or pore over bad statistics and think we know one another, or a particular group. Neither is true. We have to wake up to that.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Shipler writes in his extraordinary book on race, "A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America," we are a nation of strangers.

In a sense, that's true even for those of us who have had an opportunity for prolonged engagement. Over the years, my neighbors and I haven't had many deep conversations about race or politics.

Politically speaking, they would be described as Christian Conservatives. But I know too much about them beyond their politics to ever put them in a box for expediency.

By the same token, I don't believe they'd do that to us. That's true even though on Sunday mornings, just before the 11 o'clock hour, our cars leave our two separate driveways and head in two separate directions.

A few hours later, though, the road always leads back home.