Petroglyphs
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I Am White. I Am Male.24 September 2023 There has been a lot of discussion about who is allowed to discuss prejudice issues or cultural appropriation or .... It appears that some people feel that you have to be of a certain background to be allowed to discuss these things. I am deeply saddened by behavior I am witnessing in our community. Instead of starting with the belief that people are endeavoring to be good people, they are attacked for the slightest perceived misstep. And then they appear to be thrown into a box rigidly defining them thereafter. Apparently, by similarity to the statements made to some of the people I am seeing attacked, I likewise cannot understand prejudice. Apparently, I am not qualified to be part of a conversation about prejudice. I am white. I am male. And apparently that says it all. That seems to me to be the very definition of prejudice. I am white. I am male. That says so little about me. Why should anyone listen to me? Why might I have anything of value to say about prejudice? Following are a smattering of details about my life. Maybe they qualify me in some way to have something useful to say on the topic of prejudice. Or maybe I qualify to be part of the conversations on prejudice simply because I care and would love it if no one was treated differently based on race or gender or any grouping made of people. I was raised in a home by my parents, two originally National Institutes of Health researchers, people whose colleagues came from various backgrounds of race, ethnicity, country, religion and more. Mom is Catholic, though that didn't happen until college when she converted from the Episcopal religion of her family heritage. One of her grandfathers was Bishop of the Diocese of Fon du Lac of the Episcopal Church. And one of her great grandfathers was an Episcopal missionary in Florida when there were only some coastal towns of European descendants in that region of North America. What could I learn from her? Because of her gender she is part of the largest group of people in history and in the present to have to deal with discrimination. So during her second career, when she walked into the office of the Director of the CIA in her pretty dress carrying a stack of papers, it was not shocking to her that she was told by a male in the outer office to just put the stack over "there". What was probably out of place for the people working in that outer office of the Director was her response, "I am here to brief the Director." She was, after all, the Assistant National Intelligence Officer for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons Proliferation, Technical adviser to the Secret Service and FBI regarding security against chemical and biological terrorism of the White House, Pentagon, Capital Building, Camp David and other key government sites during and after Desert Shield and Desert Storm, member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Military; J-5 - International Negotiations, and Co-chair of the Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Subcommittee of the U.S. Government Counter-Terrorism Committee. All in a pretty dress. Oh, and she modeled a little and broke her arm early on in the university circus when she was younger. Maybe she got her belief in equality in part from her mother. Her mother's father taught his daughter about finance and investment, and drew up the legal papers so his daughter could buy and sell property in a time women were not yet allowed to do so on their own. Dad is Jewish. So however white he was, was not always enough. Did it affect his not getting accepted to Cornell University Medical College after graduating from Cornell University? I can't really say. His father changed the family name when he was first starting his accounting business. He was not getting many clients with his more Jewish name. Things got better when his last name was not as Jewish. Who knows what factors really affected things, but it was a valid question. Our family went to Rome courtesy the Vatican. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences had a meeting of about 20 cancer researchers from around the world. Dad, Branch Chief of the Immunology Branch of the National Cancer Institute of the NIH was invited. Attendees and a few families that had accompanied them had a private audience with Pope Paul VI. So Catholic mom got to meet a Pope because of Jewish dad. My dad's parents took in a boy, Jack, who was rescued from a concentration camp. The Nazis had killed his parents. A colonel who was part of the troops liberating the camp took Jack under his wing and brought him to the U.S. in the hopes of getting him into a family. He settled in with our family. Now Dad is not my biological father. He adopted me. Mom's first husband was not ready for a family at that time. Mom made him an offer when she left him. He could have no responsibility for supporting us, if he released all claims to me and supported my adoption should she remarry. I was too young for any of that. I just grew up with mom and dad. But is my Jewish heritage less pertinent if I don't have the same genes? And along these lines, my mom and her siblings were adopted by her parents. How does that affect the pertinence of her heritage? One of my first friends (6 or 7 years old) is Black, but never thought anything about it, just like people with whom my parents worked. Turns out my friend lived in one of the first communities in Maryland where Blacks owned their land, but I learned that over decades later. He was just a kid I met playing in the woods and each others homes. As a kid I was encouraged by my parents to watch movies like 'Conrack' and 'In the Heat of the Night', and pointed to the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice when I had a book report assigned. It appears that they wanted me to learn about the injustices people face based on being different. And I remember going to a movie on the Holocaust as a family. Part of being raised in this family was learning about the history of the peoples from our heritage. In particular, we learned not just about the semi-recent horrors of the Holocaust, but the earlier pogroms and centuries of racist injustices suffered by my Jewish ancestors. What do I get from the friends I have had, who are of varied ethnicity and nationalities? What do I get from having the girlfriends I have had - Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, mixed race (since apparently we have to put people into boxes)? Or from my first wife - Hispanic, born in Costa Rica, and moved to U.S. with her mother and Venezuelan stepfather who worked for WHO? And what do I get from my five Black roommates in college and some discussions of experiences with prejudice? Do I qualify to be part of race conversations based on my experiences, my family tree, or my genetics? What if mom's first husband was Black? Then would I qualify? What if my mom's adoptive parents were Black? Do I get to partake due to my Jewish ancestry or does being adopted disqualify me? How does being a white male define me? There are three things we can get from pieces in my life story.
My point here is that the only way to know who I am is to get to know who I am. I want things to be better for all people. I want to be part of making things better for all people. I want to participate in dialog exploring what the problems are and how we might mitigate and eliminate them. I want to be part of the world community. You cannot chose what you're born with, but you can chose what to do with what you are born. I am white. I am male. But it really does not matter that I am. I qualify to be part of the conversation, because I care about the world of which I am a part. I want to part of its healing and its solutions. I need to be part of working on those with everyone else. |