Just another word

On my mother's side, my Dutch-American ancestors have been here since before the Civil War. My people were among the very first immigrants from the Netherlands to put down roots on the western shore of Lake Michigan. I have a picture of a couple dozen elderly Hollanders gathered in some lakeshore park in 1898 for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Dutch people in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. My great-great grandfather is among them.

My father's side left the island of Terschelling for America in 1868, once the Civil War was over. Terschelling is a beautiful place--I've been there a few times, sat alone at the harbor and wondered what my life would have been like had C. C. and Neeltje Schaap had stayed, if I'd been born and reared on that kidney-bean Frisian island with all those spacious beaches.

My grandmother could recite the Heidelberg Catechism in Dutch because that's the way she had to learn it in her turn of the century Dutch Reformed congregation. Ironically, she didn't understand Dutch. She was, after all, third-generation American.

A man I know who knows and loves local history, told me about a unkept cemetery just outside of Hull, Iowa. No one gets laid to rest there anymore. For the most part, the community whose people are buried there is gone. "There's a black guy buried in that graveyard," he told me once upon a time. I'd have to look really hard to find the grave of another African-American anywhere in the county, I'm sure.

In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump would have had to raise the numbers of among his base by five percent in order to offset changes occurring in the demographic profile of the red states he'd won in 2016--just to offset the significant changes in the American populace. The times--like skin tones--are a'changing.

In 2008, I walked across the room during the Iowa Caucuses to join those caucus-goers who supported Barack Obama. I'd been moved by the speech he gave at the Democratic Convention a few years earlier, really moved. He seemed thoughtful, a good man. I'd never liked the Clintons much, so Hillary was out; and this bald man thought John Edwards loved his hair far too much. Besides, I thought Obama had a chance to heal the nation--our first Black president.

I'm guessing that election was the first time I heard people repeat what that little girl up top of the page has emblazoned on her sweatshirt. I thought the idea was cute, and nice, and obviously true--sweet.

And now it's happening again with the VP, Kamala Harris. Some town in India went plain crazy when Biden/Harris won. What's more, Ms. Harris's father was African. She went to Howard University, a traditionally black college in Washington D. C.

Native people I know are thrilled to see Deb Haaland as the new nominee for Secretary of the Interior. Here she is.





She doesn't look at all like me, but she looks a heckuva lot like them.

I understand what that girl has written on her sweat shirt, but the line doesn't thrill me like it does her or her mother or parents or so many people of color.

Why not? Because for my whole life I've been blessed with white privilege. Because for my whole life the only people I saw in significant places in national politics looked pretty much like the gent I see in a mirror every morning. White privilege is something I've borne without knowing it or owning it. But it's always been there.

In 1967 I was a first-year college student. That was the year that anti-miscegenation laws were finally totally repealed in the United States--it was no longer against the law to marry someone from another race. My parents used to say that mixed-race marriages were so sad because the children--"mulattos"--were born to suffer not being accepted in either white or black communities.

Today, people for whom my parents felt so much pathos include an ex-President and our own VP.

I wish I didn't have to say it, but the vast preponderance of human beings who marched on the Capitol a few weeks ago looked very much like the person I see every morning in the bathroom mirror.

White privilege is what I have, and what those who do have don't want to lose.

In a nation where all men and women are created equal, white privilege is a synonym, just another word, for racism.