Belonging: A Culture of Place (10 page)

In the hills of my grown-up life I have an opportunity to live beyond the narrow prejudicial ways I was taught to see poor white folk. I have to work at appreciating the trailers dotting the hillsides that look to me like giant tin cans. Seeing beyond the surface, looking at the care neighbors bring as they work to turning these structures into homes, I feel empathy and solidarity. Writing about the meaning of community in
The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace,
M.Scottt Peck shares that true community is always “realistic.” To be real in community differences must be acknowledged and embraced. Peck explains: “Because a community includes members with many different points of view and the freedom to express them, it comes to appreciate the whole of a situation… An important aspect of the realism of community deserves mention: humility. While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the ‘soft’ individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each other’s gifts, and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness others share their brokenness, and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection. Be fully aware of human variety, and you will recognize the interdependency of humanity.” These insights come to those of us who truly embrace community, seeking to live in fellowship with the world around us. Sadly, accepting human variety means that we must also find a way to positively connect with folks who express prejudicial feeling even hatred. Committed to building community we are called by a covenant of love to extend fellowship even when we confront rejection. We are not called to make peace with abuse but we are called to be peacemakers.

Of course we cannot truly be peacemakers if we have not found peace within. For many folk, who are disenfranchised and indigent in the Kentucky hills peace comes form that sense of belonging on this particular place on earth, our hills and mountains. This peace must be protected when we live in a culture that is daily warring against us. Just as mountain removal destroys and decimates sacred ground our souls are assaulted by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The colonization of our Kentucky earth is as vicious as is the assault on what tourist minded advertisers evoke with their slogan Kentucky’s “unbridled spirit.” When we work to protect our community as well as the earth which is our witness, the ground on which we stand we create the conditions for harmony, fellowship, peace. Those of us who left Kentucky ground to plant the seeds of our being elsewhere return to the bluegrass state because we realized, as we made lives elsewhere, that this was the landscape, the earth, that most nourished and nourishes our spirit.

The insistence that the best and brightest of the Kentucky hillbilly — country folk need to move elsewhere to become fully self-realized comes with no insistence that this elite group should return to their homeplace. Consequently a major human resource is taken away from this state. Symbolically, this is not unlike mountaintop removal. Making the decision to move back to Kentucky, I was stunned when many city-based friends and acquaintances expressed concern that I was headed to the backwoods, to a place where I could not be truly myself, truly alive. It surprised me that so many of the negative stereotypes about life in Kentucky are as fixed in our national geographic imagination as they were when I first left the state years ago.

Living in New York City and feeling as though I did not belong, I begin an inward search for place. More than thirty years have gone by since me leaving Kentucky. Hence my inward search did not begin with my home state. This seeking led to a psychic archaeological dig where I plundered the depths of my being to see when and where did I feel a sense of belonging, when and where did I feel at home in the universe. That searching led me home to Kentucky. But I could not just be anyplace in my home state. I chose a small progressive town where the me of me could live freely. In the essay, “Local Matters,” Scott Russell Sanders explains the importance of finding a place of belonging: “It is rare for any of us, by deliberate choice, to sit still and weave ourselves into a place, so that we know the wildflowers and rocks and politicians, so that we recognize faces wherever we turn, so that we feel a bond with everything in sight. The challenge, these days, is to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere, actually to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell not simply in a career or a bank account but in a community… Once you commit yourself to a place, you begin to share responsibility for what happens there.” Even though I wanted to belong in the many places I lived away from Kentucky, I never committed. There was always the possibility that I would be moving on, starting over.

Returning to Kentucky, making my life in a small town, I knew that this was the end of my journey in search of home. Sanders shares in the essay “Settling Down” that it took him “half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. And he means the land, weather, seasons, plants, animals. Boldly he declares, “I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one. I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place.” Connecting homeplace to spiritual peace, he reminds us that “in belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world.” Eloquently these words express my feelings about being here, about my house on the hill and the acres around it that I know will be forever green, recovered from hilltop removal, no sub-divisions.

I am called to use my resources not only to recover and protect damaged green space but to engage in a process of hilltop healing. Although I come from a long line of Kentucky country folk, farming women and men, I am having to learn my stewardship. I do not have the longed for green thumb but with a little (more than a little) help from my community, I am doing the work of self-healing, of earth healing, of reveling in this piecing together of my world in such a way that I can be whole and holy.

7
Again — Segregation Must End

No doubt every writer of essays has one or two that give them pause, make them think again and again, wondering where did that come from. It is usually impossible to explain to folks who are not writers that ideas, words, the whole essay itself may come from a place of mystery, emerging from the deep deep unconscious surfacing, so that even the writer is awed by what appears. Writing then is revelation. It calls up and stirs up. It illuminates. Among my essays one that really shook me up and moved me is the essay “representations of whiteness in the black imagination.” In this essay I wanted to talk about the psychological traumas racism causes. In particular I wanted to write about how black folk living in the midst of racial apartheid come to fear whiteness, come to see it as something terrible. When civil rights struggle first brought national attention to the issue of racial integration, individual racist white folks would often share their “intimate” knowledge of black folks by telling the public that the “colored people like to keep to themselves.” Yet no one ever raised the issue of trauma, that maybe black folks stayed together and wanted to stay away from white folks because of the suffering white folks caused us to feel through unrelenting exploitation and oppression.

The monstrous way in which white racists inflicted and continue to inflict pain and suffering on black people will never be fully recorded or acknowledged. Contemporary, big, beautiful, expensive coffee table books which bring stylish images of brutal lynchings into our homes, making it appear as though these past atrocities are just that, something over and done with, deny that these horrific images documenting the vicious hateful attacks on helpless black bodies by powerful white bodies carry with them a legacy of trauma that has not passed, that has not gone away. Our nation is capable of acknowledging that Jews who were nowhere near the German holocaust, whose relatives, friends, and acquaintances were murdered and slaughtered, suffer post traumatic stress disorder, fear of the “german” other, fear of bonding outside one’s group, and at time the crippling fear that it will happen again are victimized by remembered trauma. But it has only been in very recent years that there has been a willingness on the part of a very minority of thinkers in the psychological community and beyond, to acknowledge that black people who witness grievous racist exploitation and oppression are traumatized. And even when incidents are over that the victims experience post traumatic stress.

Fear of being victimized by racist abuse has long kept black folks confined in segregated neighborhoods and social relations despite legalized anti-discrimination laws and accepted racial integration. Growing up in racial segregation I felt “safe” in our all black neighborhoods. White people were represented as a danger, especially white males. Every black girl in our segregated neighborhoods knew that we had to be careful not to have any interaction with white males for they were most likely seeking to violate us in some way. While sexual violation was the dreaded form of white male racist assault, it was also clear that white folks, often acting on a whim, humiliated and shamed black folks, whether through aggressive verbal abuse (calling us by ugly racist epithets) or blatant physical assault. In the days of legal racial segregation, no black person could defend themselves against the violence of a white person without suffering severe reprisals. Consequently, black children living in racial apartheid were systematically socialized to fear white folks and to stay away from them.

Even though we lived in segregated neighborhoods, there were a few black folks in our town who lived near white folks. Our mother’s mother Sarah Oldham lived in a white neighborhood. To visit her house we had to walk through neighborhoods occupied by racist white folks who taunted and jeered at us. Needless to say as children walking through these neighborhoods was frightening and stressful. Even if we passed the homes of white folks sitting on the porch who were friendly, we had been socialized to see their friendliness as a lure, setting a trap wherein we would be caught, where we would be helpless and hurt. Taught to be critically vigilant in relation to white people we were not taught to see all white people as “bad.” We were taught that there were good and kind white people, but that they were rare. Meeting the adversity caused by white supremacist aggression early in life helped many of us have posttraumatic growth. Were this not the case, individual black people would never have acquired the skill to live harmoniously among white people. Still many black people suffer posttraumatic stress disorder as a consequence of sustained racist exploitation and oppression. More than not that pain is usually ignored in our culture.

There is no psychological practice that specifically focuses on recovery from racist victimization. Indeed, our society has moved in the opposite direction. Many people in our nation, especially white people, believe that racism has ended. Consequently, when black people attempt to give voice to the pain of racist victimization we are likely to be accused of playing the “race” card. And there are few if any public spaces where black folks can express fear of whiteness, be it engendered by rational or irrational states of mind. However, white fear of blackness gains a constant hearing. And psychological research indicates that a great majority of white Americans respond negatively to images of blackness. In Jonathan Haidt’s book,
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom,
he calls attention to this implicit prejudice: “Researchers have found that Americans of all ages, classes, and political affiliations react with a flash of negativity to black faces or to other images and words associated with African-American culture.” White Americans who see themselves as not prejudiced usually shared these same perceptions. The history of racial apartheid from slavery’s end to the present day has focused on the issue of integration particularly social integration, housing and interpersonal familial relations. Today in our culture the workforce is racially integrated, people of color, (especially black folk) and white folk work alongside one another, may even share lunch but rarely does this racial integration carry over into life beyond the job. Mostly white and black in our nation live segregated.

Studies of race and real estate show housing to be an arena where racial discrimination continues to be the norm. In
Words That Wound
law professors Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence discuss the reality that racism shapes “suburban geography” stating that “while residential segregation decreases for most racial and ethnic groups with additional education, income, and occupational status, this does not hold true for African-Americans.” In his work on race and the issue of housing, political scientist Andrew Hacker calls attention to the fact that even liberal and progressive white folks are concerned when it seems as though more black homeowners are moving into what they perceive to be “their” neighborhoods. In his book,
Two Nations,
he emphasizes that one black family may find acceptance in a predominately white neighborhood but more than one is seen as threatening. Of course most white homeowners insist that the issue is not racial prejudice but rather economics; they are concerned that their property will not rise in value. Given the system of white supremacy the blacker the neighborhood the more likely it is that the property therein will be deemed less valuable by property appraisers, who are usually white.

Nowadays, in real estate circles, sellers and buyers alike, talk about racial economic zoning in housing. Since on the average white families make more money than people of color/black people, some neighborhoods will automatically be all white because of high prices. Certainly, in the small pre-dominantly white Kentucky town of Berea where I reside there has been no history of racial segregation in housing. Instead the town’s founder John Fee and its citizens were committed to the project of ending racism, of ending segregated housing. During the early days of the towns development in the late nineteen hundreds, citizens had to sign a covenant reinforcing this commitment, one that publicly declared their willingness to live next to a white or black neighbor. When I first moved to Berea I, like other black folks before me wanted to see the “black neighborhoods.” I was astounded when I was repeatedly told that Berea really did not have black neighborhoods, that because of its history of anti-discrimination in housing individual black people live wherever they desire. This is one of the aspects of Berea that continues to make the town a swell place to live.