WEST BRATTLEBORO — My wife's Aunt Mary had her 90th birthday not long ago, and we went to Connecticut for the celebration. Aunt Mary is still as quick and spry as anyone could be, except not so mobile anymore. She greeted me like a member of her family. It was a warm and kind gathering.
That side of the family has a lot of church people among them, and it was a beautiful occasion, with singing and a wonderful poem from a pastor who was just about as old as the matriarch whose years we honored.
A celebration of 90 years must be realistic. My favorite line from the pastor's poem was when he said not to surround the dead with flowers they can't see and urged us to give them to people when they are still alive. There were so many flowers there, and Aunt Mary saw them all.
I had a long talk with one of my wife's uncles, a man who served in the military for a couple of decades, training soldiers in places like Iraq. He works now with people who have special needs and learning disabilities, as I have done for three decades. We had a lot to talk about.
The evening was a moment of grace for me in times that can seem dark, with all the polarization going around and the madness in Washington, D.C.
But what was most interesting about it, for me, was that I was the only white person there.
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On the ride home, my wife and I talked about the words we all use to talk about race and ethnicity. During our conversation, I posed the question, “Should we shed labels because they simplify too much, or should we try just to come up with more accurate descriptions?”
Within my lifetime, the word used to identify someone with darker skin and slave heritage has shifted from “negro” to “black” to “African-American” to “person of color.” It can be a little confusing to try to get language right these days.
After we spent time in Sicily, where half my blood is from, I told my wife that I was going to be “Anglo-Sicilian” from now on. It's just a joke between us, but I like the sound, and it is accurate enough.
We didn't reach a conclusion, but we agreed that any sort of label reduces the reality of someone's background and experience in a way that may be partly accurate but is also, on the whole, false.
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Race is both a social construction and a lived reality, in ways that have changed over the years and will change in coming years as well.
In the United States, almost one of five births in the past few years was an interracial child. Cross-currents of race and identity may someday seem as distant to us as cave drawings.
At the same time, the lived experience of people from different backgrounds who have brown skin makes the dream of having a post-racial society seem distant. I can't shed the basic privilege of my skin and gender, and I will never know what it is like to live within brown skin in this nation.
I thought of how often my wife or one of my black friends is the only person of color in the room in this town and how rarely I experience the reverse. Even when I find myself at a dance club down in Hartford that is entirely black, I know it's just for a visit.
People of color must live in white society in the United States. Sometimes the subtle, implicit bias and structural racism that marks our world can seem worse to my friends than the overt racism that threatens them.
As we were coming back into Brattleboro from Aunt Mary's party, we were tired and quiet. I was thinking about the “Black Lives Don't Matter” poster that showed up in downtown Brattleboro this summer, the anti-Semitic chalking that was found on our sidewalks, and most of all how Vermont's sole black state representative, Kiah Morris, decided not to stand for re-election for her Bennington seat because of racial harassment.
It seems like such a terrible thing to have happened in such a progressive state.
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One thing we can do is talk about race in authentic and sometimes uncomfortable ways, with good will in our hearts. Maybe we can try to find more occasions to spend time with one another across the different boundaries and labels that divide us.
In an interview with Spike Lee in an online publication oriented to black American readers, Lee was saying that the black community should be open to white allies, which is somewhat a theme in his new movie. In the comments, I came across a statement that stayed with me: “Allyship is a 24/7 job, and there's a lot of white people trying to pull part-time shifts.”
A lot of folks on the strand disagreed with Spike Lee about allies and questioned the motives of any white person claiming to be on the side of racial progress in this country. It was uncomfortable to read some of these comments, but I could see where they were coming from.
Not long after we were married, we had gone to Detroit to visit Lester, one of my father's oldest living friends, a man who had been a mentor to me when I was young.
Lester and Lorraine had married when it was still illegal for a black man to marry a white woman in some states, and he got his break at Newsweek by selling the magazine pictures of the 1967 riots in Detroit. He wound up having a long and noteworthy career in journalism.
During our visit, we shared some of the conversations about race that were surfacing in Brattleboro. Lester told us a story about two men he had known who worked on the line at one of the automobile plants back in the 1960s.
One of them was black, and one was white; they lived on opposite sides of town, but they worked closely together on the line, and they got along. One day, the black man called his colleague to say that he wasn't going to make work that day - his boiler had broken, and he didn't have the money to fix it right then.
It wasn't that much money, and the white guy said he could run it over and give him a lift to the plant, in exchange for having his co-worker cook him a meal sometime. Soon, the two families began sharing meals.
The way Lester told it, it wasn't such a big deal - they weren't talking about race or about all the troubles going on in the nation at that time. They were just sharing food.
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I have been reflecting recently about my upbringing. My dad was fierce about the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and as a young man I was graced by black male role models.
We've come a long way since then. Barack Obama took the inaugural oath, but not before my dad died, which has always been a sadness for me. But a black man finally became president, and I know the day that happened would have been a good one for my father.
In some ways, I'm glad my father died before our current era, though I miss his advice sometimes. I think he would be dispirited by our current times.
But history is long, and I am unwilling to be dispirited.
I am not ignoring the reality of racial tensions that are at a boiling point in our country. We are also in a historical moment of challenging the labels that confine us.
It's us to up now. I don't have a proposal, but Vermont is an incubator for new ideas - how else could such a small state produce two strong, progressive, and viable presidential candidates in the span of 20 years?
Let's keep in mind that race is the deepest fault line in our nation's hope for “a more perfect union,” and that it is an entirely invented concept.
Let's talk to one another. Let's break bread together.