Moving Past Assumptions to Understanding
By Chelsea Conaboy
As I circled the beat, I would notice an '80s-style dining room set standing as a sentinel in the window. Some days, a rattan couch or a velvet recliner guarded the door. I knew the Uhuru Movement had a reputation for militancy, but I wasn't sure exactly what the used couches, ceramic trinkets and dog-eared paperbacks that filled the Uhuru Furniture and Collectibles store on Central Avenue had to do with black economic empowerment.
A man who worked there told me Kitty could explain it.
On a Saturday afternoon I pulled my car up to the curb outside the store. Kitty would be working today. As I sat in my car, I felt my chest tighten with anxiety. I pulled my notebook out of my bag, stuck a pen in my hair and stepped from my car into the heat of the afternoon. Kitty could tell me about how the store built economic development along the color line of St. Petersburg. She could explain it. But first I had to ask.
Woven through my nerves were thoughts of how this woman I hadn't met yet would perceive me. I am a white girl from New England. And I wanted to know about the struggles of black people from St. Petersburg. I wondered how I could make her trust me enough tell me her story. Especially when I barely trusted myself.
I didn't know if I could do it. Could I show her the polished side of me, the one that has been planed smooth with an education on how to analyze the world around me, and glossed to a shiny finish with the willingness of an open mind?
Or would I somehow make a blunder, a simple misstep that would strip my educated polish bare to expose the wood beneath, ingrained with something awful? Would she see the twisted knots of something inherited that I couldn't deny, something that looked like racism?
I knew it was there, disguised by my best efforts. And try as I did to keep it from ever showing, it had before. I was nervous it would again.
* * *
It was my sophomore year in college. I had just started writing for the student newspaper. It was only the eighth article I had ever written, but it was an important one–the University of New Hampshire's 10th annual celebration of Martin Luther King Day.
Rev. Eugene Rivers III was the speaker. He was a dynamic man-the founder of the Uhuru Project in Dorchester, Mass., and co-chair of the Ten Point Coalition, which provides resources for Christian churches that serve African-American people in the Boston area.
After the ceremony, Rivers held a question-and-answer session in one of the lounges of the student union building. I interviewed him there.
As he answered my question with some disregard, speaking past me to address the rest of the room, I noticed a man sitting nearby. He wore a tweed jacket and large oval glasses. Someone mentioned that some students at the gathering were there to write a paper for a class. The man in the jacket said something. It's foggy now. I forget his words exactly. But, I will never forget what I said to him.
"Are you a student in the class?" I asked him.
His eyebrows raised in surprise, and I realized my mistake. The man looked more like a diplomat than an undergraduate student. He carried his broad shoulders square and tall. His bald head and round face gleamed with a dignity that was obvious but hard to name.
"No," he said. "I'm a professor." His tone was curt, but not dismissive.
I walked slowly home to my dorm room that night, crying. I couldn't stop thinking about what I said to him. It could have been an honest mistake. He could have been a non-traditional student. But why, I wondered, had such a simple slip made me feel so ashamed?
This man was black. I realized I had never had a black professor before. His brown skin had made him a shade too dark to fit the paradigm of a professor in my mind. It would be almost four years before I would learn his name. But the realization that Professor Justus Ogembo brought me to that night shook me.
I was open-minded. Growing up in suburban Rhode Island, I hadn't seen much diversity, but I had tried to make myself understand it. I hadn't been taught to appreciate differences, but I had learned to do so on my own. At least that's what I thought.
When I was a child, my parents were very principled. They taught us about respecting other people, like our teachers, who were white, and our older family members. They were all white, too. The lesson didn't cross color lines.
When my brother was in high school, he dated a girl named Dana who was a track star. She had an electric smile and was headed for Harvard. Dana was also black. My mom didn't approve. She and my brother must have fought almost daily about the relationship. They would yell at each other at the dinner table. He would run to his room, slamming the door behind him. She would cry. The fighting didn't stop until he broke up with Dana.
There were other things, too. My parents would gripe about how unfair affirmative action was as my siblings were applying for college. Their philosophy was always that people must take responsibility for their own actions. You have just got to learn to "pull yourself up by the boot straps," Dad would say, ignoring the way society has spent decades kicking people who are not white and privileged down each time they have tried to do so.
I had fooled myself to think that I had escaped that attitude. I had done my best to expand my world beyond the ground my parents first laid out for me. I studied African-American literature, wrote about diversity issues on campus, enrolled in the International Affairs dual major programs and searched for opportunities to travel abroad.
But on the night I met Professor Ogembo, I went to bed feeling as though I hadn't changed what was at the core. My parents and I were carved from the same tree, with all the same knots and imperfections. I realized that we are rooted in the same system, one that perpetuates stereotypes and keeps society stagnant.
Every so often I would see Professor Ogembo on campus and wonder whether he remembered when we met. At the time, I was too afraid to ask. It could have been that the moment was small and insignificant to him, and he forgot it as soon as it passed. It could have been that way.
Or he could remember it as one more time when someone threw inequity in his face, made his education, his stature and his wisdom invisible beyond the color of his skin. This time, it was all my doing, even if I was the only one who heard it happen.
* * *
My hand steadied for a second against the metal handle to the front door of the Uhuru Furniture and Collectibles store. Then it kept shaking. I was nervous. How much of me would Kitty see through?
I breathed a jagged, shallow breath and stepped inside. The smell of used furniture, like a warm attic, met me at the door. My eyes adjusted to the light of the long, narrow room lined with rows of couches and rimmed with bookshelves and TV stands. I focused on the desk at the back of the store.
The woman behind the counter looked up from her work there and said hello. Her face was pale and topped with blond waves. The muscles around my lungs relaxed and my shoulders dropped.
Thank God, my body seemed to say, she's white.
I felt an instant of relief. Then I noticed it and felt the same shame I had four years earlier at the Martin Luther King event.
Somehow the fact that she was white protected me from the damage that I was afraid my own assumptions would do. She would understand if I said something wrong. Maybe I felt assured by the assumption in turn that the slips I might make wouldn't offend her. But my sigh of relief proved to me I hadn't moved very far from where I was four years ago. I hadn't progressed. I was still scared of myself and the damage I could do.
* * *
Last week I decided I needed to talk to Professor Ogembo. I needed to know if he remembered. Maybe I wanted some sort of absolution. But it was more than that. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know when other people had made assumptions about him and what he thought of them, whether he thought such assumptions were racist. As a professor at the University of New Hampshire, a liberal school in a conservative state that is overwhelmingly white, he must have advised people like me, I thought. People who had grown up within the system and wanted out.
This morning I finally found a number for the professor that didn't have an operator's voice at the other end. The sound of his voice instead made me nervous. I tried to explain why I was calling.
"I met you at a Martin Luther King event a few years ago," I said. "We just met briefly; you probably won't remember it. But maybe you will."
I fumbled my words and started over.
When I finally got the story out, Professor Ogembo didn't remember that night. He was not as concerned about it as I was.
"That's something extremely trivial," he told me.
He said he had been asked the same question before. Just recently he picked up a student who was walking in the rain and dropped him at the library. The student asked Professor Ogembo what his major was. The professor said asking a question like that can never be a mistake.
"Human knowledge comes through trial and error," he said.
We see something and we think we know what it is. Then we test it, he said. We learn that our assumptions are wrong and we change them.
The first night I met Professor Ogembo, I spoke with an assumption that I didn't know I had-that professors at UNH aren't black. Once I voiced my assumption out loud, I could hear how wrong it was.
When I entered the Uhuru Furniture and Collectibles store, I walked in with the assumption that a black woman wouldn't want to talk to me about the struggles she faced if she were to see the perceptions that hid at my core. When I felt my body relax and recognized there was no need for the tenseness I felt to begin with, I sensed how I was wrong to be affected in such a way.
Once I found the courage to ask him what he thought, Professor Ogembo showed me I didn't have to be so ashamed. He showed me that the assumptions I hold are not inherently dangerous, as long as I am willing to see what is in my heart and to test it.
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