You Just Ignorant As Shit: An American Story

This is your fair warning that this blog post may not be to your liking. Leave now if you are likely to be offended by my wrestling with questions about equality.

Man. Remember when this used to just be posts about my worst dating experiences? 

Like that time I hit on a gay guy? 

Or that time an anesthesiologist started crying on our first (only) date? 

Or when that one dude asked me out for dinner and then just sat there -- foodless -- watching me eat?

Those were the good ole' days, eh?

I've never been a terribly balanced individual. A few decades ago, someone told me water was good for me, so I drank 3 gallons of it one day. When I was around 19, my mother told me you should only eat when your stomach growls, so I took her at her word, lost so much weight my roommates didn't recognize me, and developed an eating disorder. When I was 21, someone told me running is good for you, so I ran 3 hours in an afternoon.

I've been like this pretty much as far back as I can remember. 

It wasn't until I turned 24 that a psychiatrist finally diagnosed me with "OCD tendencies -- we don't like to say that patients are OCD anymore, because that's labeling, you understand, but here's some medicine. Hopefully this will help you stop counting things so much."

(My folks believed more in prayer, the laying on of hands, and anointing things with oil than in doctors and medicine. They are die-hard Conservatives. That may be important later.)

I often worry that the people who have known me the best and the longest are just shaking their heads at me and wondering when my next "phase" will occur and whether they can put up with me for long enough to get through this one. After all, I don't still drink gallons of water a day or run for hours at a time.

That was all Prologue.

Here's what I'm trying to say:

I'm confused by American Christianity. I've been confused for a long time, but I thought that as I aged, things would make more sense. Instead, they've just gotten cloudier and cloudier.

I am confused because I have shifted and the world in my immediate orbit has not.

I grew up in South Carolina surrounded by Confederate flags, listening to blatantly racist sermons in church on Sundays. It did not occur to me that any of this was wrong. How could it? My parents were fundamentalist Christians who took me to Pro-Life rallies and Billy Graham crusades. I was in a closed feedback loop.

Then I went to teach in Hazelwood and all hell broke loose. I realized I was going to lose my job if I didn't start educating myself about Black folks. That's the God's honest truth. 

The summer that Michael Brown was shot, I'd been in Hazelwood for 5 years already. I was still asking co-workers asinine questions like, "Is it true black people don't get bitten by mosquitoes? My friend's boyfriend is black and he says that's why he never gets bitten. Is that a real thing?"

Then everyone else in the Teacher's Lounge would chime in with equally absurd questions until one of the black teachers said, "Ya'll bein' racist."

Very soberly, I said, "I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to be racist."

When things like this happened, the typical reply was along the lines of a deep sigh and then, "Nah, you ain't racist T, you just ignorant as shit." Which I considered a really kind and generous thing to say, even at the time. 

But then Michael Brown was shot, and overnight everything changed: 43 HSD teachers quit in one week. When students chose their own seats in my classroom, there was an invisible line down the middle of the room now: black on one side, white on the other. No one knew what to do, how to act, and me least of all.

It's said that when things aren't working, you have to change something -- it doesn't even matter what. Just change anything at all, because it's never going to get better if you keep just doing the same damn thing.

As I said, I don't do anything halfway so I decided to CHANGE ALL OF THE THINGS!!!!!!!!!!

I started a GoFundMe to raise supplies and founded a drumline in Hazlewood. I moved out of volunteering with Beyond Schools and started volunteering with recently paroled men in North STL. I started reading every book I could get my hands on written by people of color. These books didn't even all make sense to me, but I just kept reading. And gradually, I changed and something inside of me began to shift.

An administrator in my book club said recently that there's no point in talk, talk, talking to people we know who are racist. They are going to be who they are going to be. Leave 'em be.

But I don't think that's true. I have to believe in the basic goodness of people -- despite growing up learning that we are all desperately wicked and depraved. I have to believe that if I could grow and change and learn, other people can too. It's the reason we are teachers. We believe in the human capacity for growth. I owe my own to many teachers who helped me along the way.

I didn't start out nobly. I took the job in HSD because I needed work. I started becoming involved with social justice initiatives to save my ass. But along the way, the men's stories became real, the beat of the drums started uniting the students, and the black authors started making sense.

I recognize that my personality tends toward extremes, and that maybe my zealous nature can make what I think or say or do off-putting to some. But one of the administrators in my North County book club said recently, "When you see the light on civil rights issues, IT'S LIKE YOU'VE MET JESUS!!!!"

And others immediately chimed in: "YES!!!!! It's like meeting Jesus!!! That's exactly what it's like!! You need everyone to know!"

That is as true a thing as I can say, on a deep and fundamental level.

We have this misguided conception in America that you are EITHER racist and evil OR non-racist and good. That's a fallacy though. Racism is predicated on two things: ignorance and power. It's not wrong to be "ignorant as shit." You can be a very good person and be ignorant as shit. 

But we are in charge of where we allow that ignorance to lead us. Are we safe in our ignorance because we have the luxury of saying, "This doesn't directly apply to me and my family?" (power). Or are we willing to take the much more labor-intensive road of loving and educating ourselves about the people who can't do anything for us, whose lives don't even *need* to intersect with our own?

I have to believe that Jesus would do the latter. Regardless of convenience. Regardless of prior bad experiences with people "like that." Regardless.