I've been following the "controversy" over Attorney General Eric Holder's Black History Month speech haphazardly in the mainstream media for the past few days and yesterday I caught a piece on NPR where All Things Considered featured a "debate" between a much out-classed (in very sense of the word) Joe Klein and Professor Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University.  Klein was shouting like he was auditioning for a the McLaughlin Group.  Such a squeaky shout.  Of course the schedulers choreographed this match-up to a predictable formula: a White putative liberal arguing, no, we're not a nation of  cowards, and a Black liberal scholar arguing that yes, we are.  But it got me thinking nonetheless: and while I can't speak for the rest of the nation, on my own behalf I have to plead guilty, with extenuating circumstances.  To do this, I need to be a bit biographical: bear with me or yawn and turn to the next blog, as you wish.

I'm 67 years old (for a month or two yet).  I grew up in a Swedish enclave in Minneapolis-itself a Swedish enclave.  I never saw garlic until I went to college, and when I encountered it the first time, I thought it was a water chestnut-crunchy like, you know?  I met my first Black person in eighth grade: my home-room teacher, Mr. Bates.  He was the first Black teacher in my junior high, and this was his first year there.  There were zero Black students in the school.  My grandparents and parents had taught me to be respectful, and they were careful to say Negro, which was the polite thing back in those days.  Mr. Bates intrigued me.  I think I liked him...but home-room lasted only 20 minutes, so I can't say that I got to know him well-no eighth grader gets to know teachers really well, do they?

I moved on to High School, leaving the public schools to go to the same private school my father had attended.   Yup, it served the Swedish community-if someone wasn't a Johnson or a Peterson, one could bet he/she was a Larson or Anderson...occasionally something more exotic like a Nystrom or a Kjellberg.  Zero black students in the school.  We played the occasional pre-season basketball game with a couple of the city high schools, so my first encounter with Black kids was on the basketball court.  I enjoyed and didn't enjoy the experience.  The playing was fun: the losing by fairly significant margins was not.  And we were good-in our own league.

On to College, where my horizons significantly broadened.  After all, that was where I learned about garlic.  It was also where I had my first Black classmate:  Not an African-American, but an International Student sent to my school by missionaries.  His name was Washington Odongo, and yes, he was from the (Belgian) Congo.  I can't imagine what it must have been like for him.  I know he kept pretty much to himself-not because any of us were hostile to him, we were too polite for that, but perhaps because we treated him like a curiosity. 

My college was in Chicago-on the North Side.  I perhaps visited the South Side a half dozen times-to go to the Museum of Science and Industry, to take my GRE exams at Illinois Institute of Technology-things like that.  But this was the early sixties, and there was racial unrest.  The Loop belonged to everyone-not much else did.  But every Sunday I visited the South Side.  There was a black owned radio station, and from early morning to late evening it broadcast live from one black church to the next black church.  I encountered gospel singing and marveled.  Had I had the guts, I would have gone to First Church of Deliverance, rather than worship from afar.   

On to graduate school in Cleveland.  Cleveland was as racially segregated as Chicago, with the exception of Shaker Heights which was making a concerted effort to stay integrated, rather than let redlining and block-busting turn the suburb over.  My school was on the border between the Black ghetto to the north and the Italian Ghetto to the south.  In graduate school I made my first tentative friendships with blacks: fellow students and residents in the graduate dormitory.  I began to realize how little I knew and how much I missed what I didn't know.  My awakenings were sometimes rude.  A Black woman studying in the law school guffawed, when I called Darius Milhaud's La Creation du Monde  "jazzy".  How could I be wrong?  I read it right off the record jacket.  I knew it didn't sound anything like the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which I had encountered in the first Cinerama movie.  It didn't sound anything like Miles Davis or Bessie Smith, either...but I hadn't encountered them-yet.

My politics completed the flip-flop that began in College.  I became a Democrat, to the mild unhappiness of my parents.  I voted for Carl Stokes, who became the first Black mayor of Cleveland in 1967, but this was through the motions stuff-well meaning, the "right thing to do" along with marching for nuclear disarmament, ending Viet Nam, and in support of Civil Rights.  The number of blacks I actually knew could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with a couple of extra fingers left over.

But there were some things changing-some I have not thought about for years.  The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in which I sang under the baton of Robert Shaw, was thoroughly integrated.  I can remember hanging out around the pool when we went to Puerto Rico in 1963, and, several years later when a bunch of us, Black and White, went on a boat ride on the Lorraine River, listening to Handel's Water Music or singing "In these delightful pleasant groves" together.  Thank you, Robert Shaw-for integrating a chorus both in terms of class and race.  I sang with Mel, the postman on one side of me, and a coroner who taught in the medical school on the other.  I was awakening to how much I needed diversity, and how sheltered and insular my life had been.

On to work in a small college in New England-in a town which had few if any Black citizens in it.  This was 1972.  To the best of my memory there were two Blacks employed by the school-one a faculty member and one an electrician.  Both are still there now-as am I.  I count them both friends now...but it took a long time.  Here's where my cowardice struck, and the point of this reminiscence comes here.  I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing, of being clumsy, of making a joke which might be taken wrongly, that I said little or nothing more than commonplace pleasantries.  And in some ways, I think they felt the same way.  Better to smile and keep it cool and pleasant than take the risk of an argument-even though I loved to argue with my white peers.

As I've gotten older, I hope I've gotten wiser.  Our campus is far more multi-toned now than it once was.  I'm comfortable enough to talk seriously with my Black colleagues, and to crack a joke with them or at their expense-knowing that I'll get the slap-down I deserve if I blunder badly, but that all will be forgiven.  I have more black students now-there were hardly any twenty years ago.  And I'm brave enough to extend friendship to them.  I was rewarded with a surprise tin of cupcakes on my 65th birthday..organized by two delightful young black women.  
My sixty-sixth year marked another small step.  For the first time ever I slept over at the home of a Black friend, and for the first time ever I had a Black friend guest overnight in my house.  Am I  a little braver now-I guess I am.  I'm still afraid of saying the wrong thing...but then I'm also afraid of saying the wrong thing to Whites I don't know very well.   

So I guess I'm concluding that I'm leery of the idea of a collective national dialogue.  Not that I think that's a bad idea or an unnecessary thing.  But in the sixties I was there and did that.  What we need-what I need is more courage to engage in individual dialogues, not so much for the sake of settling anything, but for the wonders and surprises and sheer pleasure of discovery that these can bring.  

If anyone wants to invite me over for dinner, I'll contribute lingonberries, sylta, and orange-fennel ryebread.  Not pickled pig's feet, though.  My Aunt Hannah and Grandpa Hans loved those, but they in their mercy didn't make me eat them.