Fixing what’s broken.

When I was in elementary school, my parents built a house in a neighborhood a few streets over from Walton Way. It was a newish neighborhood, and my father loved the challenge of working with a builder to craft a home for his family.

It was a great house. A really gaudy navy blue that, to this day, makes little sense to me, but it was a child’s playground. I had a nice room with a built-in desk (which blew my mind) and a closet big enough for me to recreate whole episodes of “Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood” because, yes, I was that kid. The backyard had a creek that ran through it, which I, of course, transformed into a raging river that divided a rival kingdom from another some such thing.

For most of my time in this house, I went to Lake Forest Elementary School.

Lake Forest was a stone’s throw from The Hill, an older neighborhood in Augusta that featured a lot of what we in the South call “old money.” My family was solidly middle class, but we weren’t necessarily equipped to live in this part of town. 

These are beautiful homes of varying architectural makeup populated by, more often than not, with white folks who definitely had a little extra money in their pocket. Lake Forest’s classrooms, though, weren’t filled with white students from this prestigious neighborhood. Those children were scattered across the city, sitting in classrooms at private schools five miles over here and eight miles over there.

I didn’t live on The Hill, but for one year I was one of those students. Went to a private school. Hated it. Didn’t really make a lot of friends. Didn’t like the structure. I’m not here to judge it, since it may work for some folks, and that’s fine, but it wasn’t for me or my family.

And it cost too much money for me to be unhappy, so I started second grade at Lake Forest. I loved it. My teachers were compassionate, committed and kind. My classmates were wonderful, warm and generous.

The difference between these two schools, of course, is that I was in a distinct minority. Our class sizes were always too large because, you know, underfunded public school in the 1980s. In each of my classes, I was probably one out of four or five white students. Hell, in my third grade class we had four white children, and three of us lived in the same damn neighborhood. The rest of my classes were overwhelmingly black.

I’m not telling you this because I believe we need to embrace some bullshit memes around “not seeing color” or anything like that. Or that I have a unique perspective into the blight of people of color because I spent three years of my early educational experience in a predominantly black classroom.

No, I tell you that to tell you this.

In fourth grade, my family moved a few neighborhoods over. See, the house that I loved and that my father had built had one gigantic flaw - it sat at the base of a broad slope and any time it rained, water poured down the hillside and rushed like a mighty river through our crawl space. As you might imagine, this wasn’t a terribly enviable position to be in as a property owner, and even more so given that father was undergoing a significant career transition (something I’m more and more sympathetic to given my own circumstances).

It made practical and fiscal sense to move, so we bought a new house in a new neighborhood and headed over to the little piece of land my parents still call home to this day. It’s a great house. It has a pool. It has a garden that my mother nurtures and tends to every morning. It has numerous quirks and headaches that plague my father to this day.

And it meant I had a new school. A whiter one.

Forest Hills was a fine school. It had some teachers who worked hard, and others not so much. It had some students I liked very much, and others not so much. It’s always difficult to head over to a new school. Your social structure is uprooted, bonds of friendship broken, and it is hard for a child of any age to have to deal with that. It felt to me, however, that there wasn’t the same sense of togetherness or kindness in many of the students that I had enjoyed at Lake Forest. I had my first experience with cliques. I got bullied for the first time. I heard kids my age use curse words. I saw students be openly disrespectful to teachers.

Many of those kids, but not all, engaging in this behavior were white. Now, don’t misunderstand me, I got to know plenty of great people during this experience, many of them friends to this day. And let’s be clear, much of this behavior is the nature of getting older. Youngsters start pushing their boundaries, testing authority and exploring with things that grown-ups do so they can look “cool” in front of their peers. Likewise, fourth grade to eighth grade was kind of rough on me at times, so I’m also likely viewing some of those experiences selfishly and through an absolutely jaded prism.

I’m not telling you this because I believe we need to understand that kids can be kids, and this is all part of growing up. Or that this is some morality tale where I climb my way up that proverbial high horse to tell you that white kids are worse than other kids.

No, I tell you that to tell you this.

After just starting at the school, my family was at some party or neighborhood gathering or other social function. I’m playing with other kids, my parents are mingling about while sipping on cheap beer. I remember being asked by one of the grown-ups how I liked my new school, and I’m sure I replied it’s fine or something like that. 

He smiled and said, “well, I know it’s good to be at a place where more kids look like you” before walking off.

People say no one is born racist. They show pictures of small children of varying races playing ball or holding hands, slap on a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. and stick it on social media as if they’ve made some grand point. It’s a nice gesture, and I’m not suggesting there’s no truth to the messages behind those images. Surely there is.

But everyone is born into a society that tilts in a direction that inherently works against people of color. Everyone is born into a society that features a disproportionate rate of incarcerated black men. Everyone is born into a society where people of color lack access to health care. Everyone is born into a society where the pathway to higher education for blacks is narrower than for whites.

Everyone is born into a society where a belief that being around people who “look like you” is more comfortable than not.

Think otherwise? Then ask yourself how a bunch of heavily armed white protesters can shove police, threaten state legislators and block traffic with nary an incident, while a black business owner simply trying to get law enforcement to make sure looters stay away from her store can be arrested.

Think otherwise? Then ask why minorities who “whiten” their resumes stand a better chance of getting a job?

Think otherwise? Ask the families of George Lloyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbrey and the countless other black families that have lost loved ones to excessive police force.

This isn’t to say progress isn’t being made, but that’s not the point. Achieving progress is an ongoing effort, and we clearly have to keep pushing because, well, look around. There’s no mountaintop to reach here, just a steady, concerted effort to keep climbing while ensuring people who don’t look like me have the same, unfettered access to climb with me.

Listen, it is not the job of people of color to handhold white people during this time, explaining to us how we can be better and how we can serve and how we can change things. And it is not the job of people of color to listen to some white people “bothsides” this difficult, sad time of our history, hearing from us all the “good” things we’ve personally done in the past.

If we want to see society change for the better, if we want to break the back of racism and persecution and distrust and fear and brutality, it has to start with people who look like me. And Lord knows I don’t have all the answers - far from it - but I do have plenty of questions for not just you, but for me.

Have you taken your black colleagues out to lunch or to grab a drink, inquiring about their families, listening to their stories and understanding their personal histories?

Have you listened to the lyrics from black musicians, moving beyond the beat you find so hypnotizing to get a sense of the anger, pain and experiences that drive this artistic expression?

Have you intentionally sought out a black-owned business and bought goods or services from them?

Have you given to organizations and causes that widen the pathway to education, support black entrepreneurship and advocate for black causes?

Have you absorbed the heartbreak and fear and frustration and anger from black activists, pushing aside the rising heat that flushes your face and fighting off the natural desire to respond with “well, I’m not racist!’ and, instead, simply listen so you can truly understand what is going on and figure out how to be better?

If I start asking those questions, perhaps I start finding the answers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my third grade class lately. 

When you’re seven years old, you don’t really comprehend “staying in touch” because you’re focused on the next shiny thing dropped in front of you. We played today, had fun and what’s next? I moved to a new school and on to new friends. It’s life. It happens.

But I keep seeing their faces. And I keep hearing their names.

Damien. Jameson. Jovonne. Karl. Delbert. Denise.

And so many more.

I don’t know where they are now. I don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m embarrassed to say that, for some of them, I can’t even remember their last names.

But I know this - their life experience has been very different than mine. They have undoubtedly  experienced hardships and fears and challenges that I will never be privy to simply because of the color of their skin and a society that for too long has viewed them through a discriminatory lens.

They were good kids. They were great friends. And they didn’t have to be. I didn’t share their experiences. I didn’t understand their backgrounds. But, even though we were just children, they welcomed me as a friend, loved me, laughed with me, played with me and cared for me. And I have no doubt that, at some point in my life, I have either been complicit or silent in a way that has done a profound disservice to that love and generosity, and that has really broken me in a way that’s hard to put into words.

I can’t control what other people do. I can’t police what other people think. All I know is that I feel like there are a lot of people who are broken to varying degrees by what is going on and what they’ve experienced. I cannot pretend to understand this brokenness, but I can be mindful of it and use that knowledge to take better control of what I do, what I say and how I act.

Though I am sorry, this isn’t a time for people like me to merely apologize. It’s not about us. 

It’s about fixing what’s broken. Let’s do that.