Hark! Your life is speaking

How to listen?

So, you don't know any “brown” people and your stereotypes are keeping you from striking up more than the most superficial of conversations?

Well, amazingly enough, brown people can read and write, too. I bet you didn't know that public school even taught that.

Ok, nasty sarcasm aside. But here is where it tends to come from.

I grew up in a tiny backwater lost to civilization secessionist place in CA where there was one kid, who was half Blackfoot, in my school. His mom came to our class one time to talk about weaving with pine needles, and I thought she was an anthropologist. This is because this town never let brown folks in, and I never left. Migrant field workers came through from time to time, but they didn't come into town, and their shenanigans, if they were foolish enough to have them did not make the conversations that a child could overhear. There is a reservation for the local Native American tribe, but I didn't know that until I was an adult and lived somewhere else. From my history classes, I got that we not only killed all the buffalo, we killed all the Indians with them. From extrapolation, I believed we had shipped all the Africans home when we ended slavery.

As I hope many of you are aware, geography combined with the people who live in those patches of memorization, are very poorly taught in American schools – public and private.

So you can imagine it was something of a shock, at 11, to move to Port Hueneme/Oxnard, CA and learn that some of those dark skinned people did not need to ease up on their beach time. My favorite embarrassing story of my ignorance was being a huge Tina Turner fan, but being unaware that she was black until they cast Angela Bassett to play her in that movie. (Hey, some of us like music but don't need to sleep with the musician in order to do so.) My least favorite story is how in 7th grade (middle school for me), I was so horrifyingly ignorant of race issues, but still seemed to possess stereotypes I have no idea where I got, since it wasn't like I had any people reinforce them against and I presumably made them based on what I learned in school and the subtext of adult conversations. My grandpa had to come pick me up from school for a long time because a group of girls were sick of my cracker ways and going to kick my ass. I didn't even know what cracker was. Can I just say – it's still hard to see myself as a Ritz cracker, a buttery, crispy delicious snack that will probably give you cancer.

There are more stories, lots of stories. And I could tell you them, but what I really want is for you to sit down and find your own. Because you have them. Listen to yourself first, before you try to listen to someone else. I spent 10 years doing diversity and anti-racism training with white adults in Oregon. I can tell you true – YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW YOUR OWN STORIES. How can you hear anyone else's stories around race and class if you don't even know your own?

Start at home. Start when you were little. What was dinner like? What did the adults talk about? What were they talking about when they covered your ears (the dumbest thing ever)? What did they never talk about? What TV did you watch as a kid? Go back now and watch it again. So it's fresh for you when you do try to listen. If you have done any of the work confronting your stereotypes, you will probably start to see some of the subtle instructions you received unconsciously.

Start outside. (I'm gonna tell you that if you don't have someone to process this with, don't just say it out loud. That is how you get called a cracker in middle school.) WONER, WONDER, WONDER. Wonder why that person got pulled over. Wonder why you never see white people pulled over. Wonder why some people wander across the street any old time and place and look you in the eye while they do it. Wonder why that makes you so uncomfortable, not why it makes you so angry. Wonder what the difference between anger and discomfort and shame and guilt and an itchy nose.

And Ponder. Ponder what it is like for you to not be a surgeon because you couldn't pass that chemistry class. Ponder what it would have been if you could have been an astronaut, except for the whole application process and joining the military and and and. Ponder whatever dreams you gave up because they didn't seem doable, the process, the negativity, the derision, the need for a paycheck came too high and you gave up and here you are in human resources. (Hey, I love lots of HR people, and many are great, and none of them were aiming there.) Imagine all that mountainous difficulty – and apply it to getting a job at McDonalds. You now have just the tiniest taste of being a young black man but no idea of the baggage he is carrying around due to things he can't possible change.

Do this for a couple of years. In the meantime, don't tell people you are learning to understand the brown skinned people – because you are not. You are beginning to understand yourself.