Skin Deep

Usually, we learn our life lessons the hard way. We might stumble and fall along the
way, but that's how we learn not to make that particular mistake again. But we can also learn what not to do by watching the people around us, as well as other ways, such as through reading books. Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, I learned a vivid lesson that hasn’t left my mind all these years later.

My last two years of undergraduate work at Northeastern, I had a good friend named James, who happened to be black. I met him when he was working at the front desk in our residence hall. We quickly became close friends, the kind that go everywhere together and talk about anything, but we were only friends. This was in the mid-80's but in Tahlequah there was enough attitude about interracial relationships that we took a lot of flak about it. People didn't care whether we were a couple or not; we heard negative things from black girls and white guys. Some of them were people we knew and some weren't. James and I didn't worry too much about it. We never felt threatened. But we spent a lot of time wondering why everyone was so upset about our friendship. In our view, we were all the same, the human condition was universal, and skin color was just a scientific crap shoot. We prided ourselves on not only being able to maintain a male/female relationship, but also in rising above people's petty ideas about race. Our friendship flourished for years into adulthood, until time and distance sent us our separate ways.

But my experience begins just after those first two years there. James went on to Edmond to finish his bachelor's and master's degrees, and I stayed at Northeastern to do my graduate work. In one class called Southern Women Writers, we read a novel each week by a different author. One week I was sitting in my room, scraping my way through the Maya Angelou classic I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. It was the autobiography of Angelou's youth in Arkansas, raised in poverty and violence in the early 20th century. I don't remember much about the novel, but I do remember a shocking revelation it gave me about color. Angelou and her brother Bailey had a running argument. If I remember right, Maya maintained that there was a difference between black and white, that they could not be the same thing, biologically or otherwise. Bailey's argument was that people were just people. There was no difference. I readily agreed with that mentally. But Angelou didn't end without a punch. She told of a time when a black man had gone missing in the area. Several community members went in search of him, and Bailey was with them. After a few days, they found him---dead of course. And Bailey got the scare of his life. He returned home and told Maya that the black man's body had swelled and turned white. He had no idea that such a thing was possible; neither did I, for that matter.

I looked down at the arm holding the book, and my skin had never looked so white. It was shockingly, sickeningly white to me for a moment. I realized in that instant that there were things I knew, things I had experienced, that James never would, because of the color of our skin. He, too, had experienced things I could not know or feel. In a way, we had been right: we were all the same...but we were the same in that everyone was different. No one could know exactly what it meant to be another person, to live in their skin and feel what they felt.   Rarely have I had such a moment of blinding clarity regarding my own small ideas and narrow views. 

I wish that lesson were always as vivid to me as it was that day.  And, too, I wish I could convey the same experience to any number of prejudiced people I’ve known.  We only learn from our own revelations, though.  Keeping this one close to the surface will, I hope, always be a priority, to remind myself:  We are all alike, because we are all different.