The Isolation Journals - Day 63

Prompt:  Everyone has a place that they call home. This place has undoubtedly shaped your worldview, for better or for worse. In your mind, go back to when you were a child. Now identify someone—maybe you know them, maybe you don’t—who, if you’d grown up with them, would have changed your worldview. Write a letter to them welcoming them to your “home.”

---

Taking some liberties today.  This is not a letter so much as a musing on what might have been, and what could be?

I grew up in a very white town.  A sea of pale faces, many of them affluent.  You could count on one hand the black and brown faces in my 6th grade yearbook.  Though I was one of those pale faces, I always felt different, other, for growing up in a single-parent household back when divorce was still so rare and apparently traumatic that I was forced into a counseling group with the handful of other "divorce kids."  

I didn't understand until much later just how much privilege I still benefited from, both inside and outside the context of that small, homogenous town.  Just because I happened to be born white in America.  The transfer of intergenerational wealth.  Cultural capital.  An unambiguously white sounding name.  It didn't occur to me until much later to wonder how that handful of students of color felt, how 'other' they may have felt or been made to feel growing up surrounded by whiteness.

I love the friends I grew up with, but I wish I had the experience of more diverse childhood friendships.  Kid friendships are so easily forged but run so deep.  They can start as simply as, you like Barbies, cool me too, okay we are sisters now.  But a kid friendship gives you access not just to that kid, but to an entire other family and way of existing.  

At a friend's house, it's a whole new world.  What kind of snacks does your mom buy?  Does she let you have soda or video games?  What does your laundry detergent smell like?  What books does your family read?  What movies and tv shows do they watch?  How does your mom yell at you when you're in trouble?  What's your dad like?  What is it like to have siblings?

All those little human details that you don't get with an adult friendship, which, in my experience at least, is difficult to push beyond the 'preferred acquaintance' stage.  All those little human details that make it impossible to ever think of an entire group of people as a faceless, monolithic Other.  That make it impossible to give credence to stereotypes and prejudice.  That make it impossible to hate.  

If only we could all have cross-cultural and cross-racial childhood friendships, at that time in your life when it's okay to ask questions out of genuine curiosity.  When you aren't worried about saying the wrong thing, or showing how ignorant you are.  If only it could be the default to discover how much we have in common and celebrate what makes us unique.

But if you can't go back in time and learn the easy way, when your kid brain sucks up new information like a sponge, you can still invite people into your "home."  Right now, when we're still largely cut off from in-person interaction, we can invite words and voices and perspectives into our homes.  Here are some books that I've read this year that have broadened and deepened my understanding of what it means to be Black in America:

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Caucasia by Danzy Senna

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehesi Coates

Becoming by Michelle Obama