Years ago, just out of college, I taught high school art in a small suburb not far from Ferguson, Mo. Our little community was so poor and violent that we were looked down on by all the neighbors, including Ferguson. Even though I rode my bike the 3 miles from my home — a diverse, comfortable neighborhood near Washington University — I may as well have landed on another continent.
One of only a few light-skinned folks on campus, I had to learn a new language and how to let things go, including everything I had been taught in college education classes. I did not so much teach art as make a place where art could happen. Supplying the materials and ideas, my students explored their own creativity. We played Isaac Hayes on the record player and pulled the shades down on the industrial-sized windows through which one could, in the distance, see the Mississippi River snaking by the Arch. Most days the room was a mellow, safe place to be creative.
I learned many important things about culture there, mostly by listening to my students. A favorite line of honky jokes usually involved a white guy wearing tight-on-the-bootie, cream-colored Levi’s jeans and walking around in the winter without a coat. Interrupting, I would remind them of my whiteness, whereby they would look at me incredulously and reply, “Colbeck, you ain’t white — you pink.” In a strange way, I felt honored.
In another conversation, I heard girls repeating the warnings their mothers had drilled into them to stay away from white men, because they will hurt you. “They will rape you and beat you up.” “Wait,” I said. “Those are the same warnings I heard about black men from my mother. You grew up hearing that too?” Were there other things I had grown up believing about race that just were not true?
Then there was the discussion about paternity. Some kids were convinced that two children sharing the same mother but different fathers were full siblings, but sharing the same father and different mothers made you stepsiblings. Aid to Families with Dependent Children restrictions had made it better financially for fathers to leave the household than to stay. Men had been stripped of their value as providers.
Wondering why people stayed in these dirty, unsafe neighborhoods with giant potholes and no streetlights, I learned about St. Louis policies called racial covenants, illegally enforced to keep black families in the poor neighborhoods, where they lived without services, playgrounds, parks or pools. Blacks were systematically denied the right to buy a nice home in the suburbs with a low-interest GI loan.
After three years in the district I would become part of this community, yet I would never be able to shake my whiteness. I would always be “the other.”
What is it about us as a species that we are so fearful of the other? How is it that one tribe can so easily defeat another and take its freedom? How can we be living in a prosperous country, built on slave labor, yet still, after four centuries, we cannot admit our illegal gains and put it right? Perhaps it goes back well beyond modern self-awareness.
For millennia, nomadic horsemen roamed the steppes with their sheep. As climate shifted, stronger, more violent tribes pushed other tribes off their grazing grounds. Those tribes that were forced out of the steppes were pushed into the “civilized” agrarian cultures along the Rhone, the Danube and the Mediterranean Sea, where they destroyed cities and rebuilt them to their own style. If members of an unknown tribe appeared on the horizon, they were mostly likely not coming to celebrate with you, but to destroy you and your family, and then celebrate.
We do come by our fear and distrust of “the other” naturally. Some 200,000 years of migrating and keeping watch on other tribes is a long time. Since this behavior no longer serves us a species, will we be able to unlearn ancient behaviors? If we do not, we are all doomed.
Modern challenges call for creative community solutions. Tribalism is dead. The other guy on the horizon may be the one who has just figured out how to save you.
Micki Colbeck, of Strafford, is an artist and a conservation biologist. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.