(This) White Man’s Burden

My daughter holding her newborn brother's hand. To be clear, this is not what I'm doing but why I do it.

I still maintain hope that, one day, we can accomplish Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. A caveat: this would not negate our ability to see color, merely integrate the notion that in our differences we are still all of the same worth, something our culture is still too broken at this point to do. This has been my hope since I first heard those words as a child. But now, I understand that Martin was speaking about the character of white people.

***

My mom took me to task once for wanting the world to be fair. We were driving, the two of us, in the middle of nowhere across the high desert on the way to my aunt and uncle’s place in the mountains. It may or may not have been the trip when she let me drive the car, illegally, to get some practice behind the wheel.

I thought, at the time, she was critiquing a complaint I was in the middle of making about something I should have been allowed to do as the 14-year-old master and commander of my own destiny. That misunderstanding later evolved into another as I reinterpreted her words to mean the unfairness I called out would never change. That unfair is just the way things are immutably.

I think I see it now. What my mother was trying to get me to understand is that merely diagnosing something as unfair is never enough. If we aren’t working to make those diagnoses cures, well, we’re merely part of the unfairness. And some of that work must be identifying how we’ve been part of that unfairness from the start.

Otherwise, we cannot uphold the vow to first do no harm.