Meeting David Wilson

My ancestors were not especially affluent, mostly hard working farmers, blacksmiths, boat builders, millers and such. I have researched most of the ones who settled in Kentucky in the eighteen hundreds and have found that a few of them did own slaves. I wonder how I would react if one of the descendants of those slaves came to me today looking for answers that I don’t have. David Wilson, a North Carolina restaurant owner, got a call from his black namesake, David Wilson, and the dialog that ensued is one of both optimism and pain. I hope a lot of you got the opportunity to watch the documentary this young black filmmaker made while on a journey of discovery to find his ancestors and himself. It was on MSNBC on Friday night and I assume they will rerun it at some point.

After the film, there was a “conversation” that included some amazingly articulate and insightful people, others who seemed a bit dismayed to have been selected to discuss the uncomfortable issue of race in the US today. A lot of short film clips were also run, and I was particularly impressed by “the doll test”, a repeat of a study done in 1954, where black children in a day care center were shown two baby dolls, identical except one was black, one white. They were asked which was the nice doll, the pretty doll, the bad doll, the ugly doll. It seems our efforts to boost the self esteem of black children in the last 50 years has done little to make them feel comfortable in their own skin. The majority of the children picked the black doll as the bad and ugly one, the white one as the pretty and nice doll. I was flabbergasted that at such an early age these beautiful children perceive themselves to be inferior because of their skin tone. I don’t know the answer here. I thought on some level we were raising the first almost color blind generation, but I guess no matter how far we have come, we still have a long way to go. On a personal note I also thought about our still male dominated society and wondered what would happen if little girls were shown a boy and girl doll and asked the same question.

As a child and young adult I studied the Bible extensively, as it was one of the few sources of complex literature available to me. Many things puzzled me, but one that always stood out was the admonition that “the sins of the fathers would be visited upon the children, even to the third and forth generation”. It is a recurrent theme in the Old Testament and the innate unfairness of it always made me angry. It conjured up the image of a vengeful jealous God punishing innocence. Not until I was older did I understand that we all come with a script already written for us by all that came before. I now realize that the sins of the fathers, and the mothers too, are visited upon us to the end of time. I am thankful that some among us have rebelled against the script as written. The David Wilson story speaks to both black and white and all the shades between who are doing their part to make needed changes in our society. For the most part we have changed the laws that supported racism, but our society is far from equal. The only way we can make it so is to ask the hard questions and not retreat into platitudes when we get the hard answers.

Along with the sins of my fathers I inherited the blessings of my parents, their work ethic, their stubbornness and determination, and a lesson not many of my peers were taught, tolerance of racial and cultural differences. My father often told the story of my brother returning from Navy boot camp in 1956 with three friends in tow, one black, one Jewish, and one Catholic. I’m not at all sure what those men thought when they met our oh so white and oh so Southern Baptist family, but my Dad was proud of his son that day. It was only with a bit of discomfort that all of us sat down around the table and shared a meal. I was very young, but the incident stands out distinctively in my mind, the men in fresh starched white uniforms, the strange Yankee accents, the awkwardness of strangers in a strange land.

My grandmother and I sat in the porch swing a decade later while I told her about my experiences at college. With her third grade education and a lifetime of hardscrabble existence, she could not imagine the world in which I was privileged to live. Her first comment to me as I gushed on about books and friends and professors was “I sure hope you don’t have to sit next to any niggers at that school.” I was seventeen and self-righteous as only the very young can be. I jumped at her in anger and informed her that one of the biggest darkest black men I had ever met sat right beside me in English class. Horrified, she asked me if he smelled bad. I don’t remember what I said to that as I was “gob smacked” to use the British expression learned from the young Nigerian boy who actually did sit beside me. When I calmed down I finally realized that if my father could grow up with those attitudes and yet teach me tolerance, there was hope for the world. I still believe it is true and I taught it to my children. Now I repeat it to anyone who “has an ear to hear”. Happy Sunday all.