I just want to be with a normal white girl.

I couldn’t see so well back then.

Back in 1990, when I was around 13 years old, my oldest brother was dating a woman of Spanish descent from Puerto Rico, and my middle brother was dating a woman of Afro-Caribbean descent. Both of them were, in my opinion, very beautiful. As a teenage boy, I spent a great deal of my time thinking about pretty girls and beautiful women. I definitely thought a time or two about my older brothers’ girlfriends (and my own apparent inability to attract any females at all).

Back then we didn’t have the internet with its endless supply of absolutely anything sexual. We had the people we knew in real life, our imagination, TV, movies, and magazines like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition (or our Dad’s stashed copies of Playboy).

In 1990, Roshumba Williams was the first ever Black model to grace the pages of the Swimsuit Edition. I remember puzzling over her pictures at the time. What stood out to me then was how out of place she looked. Her short curly hair. Her dark skin. The Africa-inspired motifs chosen by the magazine’s art directors.

I didn’t like it. And even though I thought my brothers’ girlfriends were beautiful, Ms. Williams’ inclusion in S.I. also made me think about them and the changes I was witnessing in the world. I remember saying to my Dad, “I like Miriam and Liz [my brothers’ girlfriends], but I think I just want to be with a normal white girl.”

And my Dad responded with something that I wish I could go back and ask him about, because I may very well remember it incorrectly. In my memory, he said, “Well, that’s what every guy wants, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”

I don’t remember if we kept talking after that. It’s been almost 35 years since that conversation, and that one sentence is the only thing I can remember him saying in response to my statement. At the time, I took it to mean that of course every guy wanted to date White women, but not everyone would get to end up with one. Like, somehow my brothers had fallen short.

I have felt ashamed of that conversation for most of my life.

I felt ashamed of my own racist thoughts, and ashamed by my dad’s support of those thoughts. And also by what I took to be his racist judgment on my brothers and their chosen partners.

It’s possible that I misinterpreted or have misremembered what he said. Maybe he meant that our culture had conditioned us to believe that White is “normal” and that White women set the standard for desirability, but my brothers had found out that love and attraction don’t always fit within the confines of the dominant narrative.

It’s possible, but that’s not how I remember it. I mean, Dad and Mom always taught us that racism was wrong, that all people should be treated equally. Dad preached openly about inclusion in church and our parents had close non-White friends as early as college in the 1960s, when virtually no White people in Iowa associated with other races if they could help it. But my dad and I were also both products of our culture, our time and place. Sometimes the most well-intentioned people can have the biggest blind spots.

“Intelligent rap”

A little over ten years later, I had come a long way in my understanding of racism. I was married to a Filipino-American woman. I had taken classes in college and in seminary about resistance movements. My student pastor field placement was in a predominantly African-American church, and I loved it. We didn’t have this term back then, but if we did, I would have been one of those White people who thought of myself as “woke”.

During the summer, I worked for this youth vocational discernment program put on by the seminary that was very intentional about creating a community of diverse students and staff. I remember one guy on staff was a musician and rapper. During one of our conversations, he asked me if I ever listened to rap music.

“Yeah, I said. I’ve liked rap music since I was a kid. But these days I’m more choosy. I’m more into intelligent rap.”

“What do you mean by intelligent rap?” I’m sure what he would have liked to say was, “What the fuck do you mean by that shit?” But he was calm and diplomatic. It wasn’t his first time dealing with an ignorant White person.

“Well,” I said, “I used to listen to all kinds of rap, like Dre and Snoop and Biggy and Tupac, but I just got tired of all that popular gangsta rap stuff. I want something deeper, more intellectual. I try to listen to more intelligent rap these days.”

“Huh. Okay.”

He wasn’t the only Black person in the room when this conversation was taking place, and my guess is it was overheard and maybe even talked about by others. I’m sure it wasn’t the only ignorant racist thing I said in the months we spent together.

I remember one moment of outright hostility later that summer from an older Black staff person when I let him and another Black colleague know it was time to go to a meeting. “I know what time it is, young man. I do not need a White person to remind me how to be on time.” To which I was flabbergasted. I thought I was being courteous.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I didn’t know then that most rappers (my summer coworker included) had created all kinds of different songs they would have liked to release in the 90s just to be told by producers that the only thing record labels wanted was gangsta rap with messages about drugs, violence, crime, and misogyny. They told them, “We can’t sell that other stuff, so if you want to make records, it has to be this.” Back then, there wasn’t anything like Spotify on which any artist could post any kind of song and see what audiences actually wanted. Before such platforms existed, record companies had huge sway over cultural messaging. They profited off of perpetuating racist tropes.

Even though I had, by that point in my life, heard the phrase “colored people’s time”, I had never really put any thought into its origins. I didn’t understand in that incident how what I meant to be a helpful reminder was received as aggression. Here I was, a much younger White person, presuming I had the authority to tell two of my Black colleagues what time it was, as if it was my job to correct, improve or even control their work ethic.

Dehumanizing immigrants

One more story from when I was in seminary. One year between semesters I took a J-term class on border issues in which we toured different areas of Nogales, Sonora/New Mexico on both sides of the Mexican/U.S. border.

We stayed in a mission run by Franciscan nuns and spent a night as guests in the homes of families in Mexico. We toured a maquiladora factory, a refugee center for people recently deported from the U.S., a church that took in immigrants, and a border patrol station.

I remember how the border patrol agents refused refer to people as people. They were simply called “bodies”. As in, “We have two bodies approaching the wall,” or “Sensors picked up three bodies crossing the river last night.”

The dehumanizing tactics disgusted me. “You mean people?” I asked. They ignored me.

One day on that trip we want to a community arts center in downtown Nogales, Sonora. The director of the center was showing us different art projects that his students had created. He also told us (if I understood him/remember correctly) how Mexico was supposed to have a law against propaganda and advertising in public places like plazas, but it was often ignored by politicians and businesses. One of the projects that he and his students took on was the removal of propaganda and advertisements and replacing them with community murals. They tore the posters down and put up beautiful paintings.

Something about this kind of creative, resistant act struck me as deeply human and utterly admirable. And it was like a switch flipped in my brain. I realized I had been seeing everyone around me as “those poor people just trying to get to a place where they can enjoy the same standard of living as me.” But after that moment, I found myself appreciating them as brave, imaginative, meaning-makers from whom I could learn so much. I had been dismissing and dehumanizing them without even realizing it.

Every uncomfortable confrontation is like getting a new pair of glasses.

In the years since I was that naive thirteen year old boy, I have had SO MANY instances in which my limited understanding of the world has made me feel stupid, ignorant, confused, ashamed, and guilty. And sometimes when I’m in the midst of a learning experience, I feel defensive, frustrated that I’m being misunderstood, or angry about someone lumping me into a group of other “bad” people.

It’s uncomfortable—even painful sometimes—to be called out, challenged, and forced to adapt to a perspective that is new to me. But once I finally get that important lesson that some—often frustrated person—is forced to teach me, I have learned to value it for what it really is, a clearer understanding of this world and how I/we might live together in it.

I have heard my wife tell the story multiple times about when she received her first pair of glasses. She put them on and was shocked at the details she could see around her. “I had no idea people could see individual leaves on trees!”

If we don’t know about our blind spots, we have no real idea what we’re missing in the world. And we might be resistant to people giving us a pair of corrective lenses. “I’m fine. I don’t need those.”

And even when we’ve been given the glasses and seen what a difference they can make, we don’t always remember to—or want to— wear them. I think back to how my dad had several pairs of reading glasses. He was always taking them off and leaving them places, like in the car or on his desk, or the table next to his reading chair.

I must admit that I’m kind of like that when it comes to my cultural understanding. I get used to thinking I’m doing just fine without any help, that I’ve overcome most of my internalized racism, my unconscious bias, and all my other blind spots.¹ And then my wife or my daughter or a colleague will realize I’m not seeing something and hand me a pair of metaphorical glasses. I might even wave them off at first. But eventually, when I jam them back onto my head, I get a clearer picture of what they’re trying to show me. I feel all those uncomfortable, excruciating feelings until, once again, I eventually come back to gratitude.

On gratitude

I have to be careful here when I talk about gratitude, because I know that the process of me learning these important lessons usually comes at a cost to others. I have said and done things that cause my friends and loved ones real pain, anger, or in the very least a significant amount of eye-rolling. And even though I am profoundly grateful for the lessons I’ve learned, I have also been taught not to be the person who says, “Well, I for one am glad we had this experience. I feel so much better now that I understand these things. Thank you!” In other words, “Isn’t it great for me that you had to suffer through this annoying or even traumatic experience in order for me to get to a most basic understanding of human decency?”

People of color—and pretty much every single person who isn’t a cis-gender heterosexual man—get really fucking tired of having to deal with the ignorance of White people, especially White men. What feels so overwhelmingly obvious to them somehow takes us an eternity to learn. So when one of them cares enough to take the time and energy and risk to their own well-being in order to engage with me and point out one of my blunders, blind spots, or other bad behavior, then what they deserve from me is gratitude. I don’t always get there in that first moment, but through the years, through all the various forms of instruction, however it came, I have learned enough by now that when someone hands me a new pair of glasses, the appropriate response from me should be, “I’m sorry, and thank you for this.”

1. We haven’t even really touched on my sexism, classism, ageism, or ableism, just to name a few.