Here is Edward Grinnan’s Editor’s Note to the February 2016 issue of Guideposts. If you’d like to subscribe, click here.
February is Black History Month, so it is only fitting that we feature an African-American woman who has recently made history—the indomitable Misty Copeland, who last year became the first black ballerina named as a principal dancer for American Ballet Theatre.
Her triumph did not come without obstacles, including race. We Americans have been having a conversation about race for 240 years.
From the Civil War to the civil-rights movement, from Selma to Ferguson, we have struggled to understand ourselves as a multiracial society. The conversation has been heated lately as society has grown more diverse.
My awakening to racism came when I was about five, accompanying my parents on a business trip to the historic Chamberlin hotel in Old Point Comfort, Virginia. While they were attending a function I was put in the care of a black babysitter who, when she took me downstairs to the restaurant for dinner, wasn’t allowed inside. She showed the waiter what I was to have off the menu, then retreated to a discreet corner of the lobby where she could keep an eye on me. I’ll never forget sitting alone in that huge, fancy dining room not understanding why my babysitter was kept out. Up north I never saw this. I was so upset.
I stayed awake so I could ask my mom about it. “All human beings are equal in God’s eyes,” she said, “and things are changing in this country.” Yet even Mom couldn’t have imagined that an Irish Catholic like herself would be elected president in a couple of years, let alone an African-American 48 years after that.
Things have changed—a lot—but not always for everyone and not always enough. We still struggle. Yet human beings are far more alike than they are different. A mother in the Kalahari weeps for a sick child the same way a mother weeps in Finland. A Chinese father’s pride in his son is no different than an Italian father’s pride in his. Underneath the cosmetic differences our hearts are the same. It is culture more than race that divides us, and cultures can be understood and differences celebrated. There is really only one race, the one we all belong to equally.
So let’s keep talking. It’s gotten us this far, which is a long way from that dining room in Old Point Comfort.
