Maya Angelou wrote, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” This is the quote that will guide me through my search for cultural humility.
I was born white. Nobody asked me what color I wanted to be. I was just born this way: pale skin, toe-head blonde, pink fingers and toes. I was also born female. No one asked me what gender I preferred. Then, about a month after I was born, my parents even chose my religion; they had me baptized as a Catholic. These three conditions created my destiny, my opportunities, my struggles, my pains, and, for a long time, my opinions about people who were different than me.
I was raised in a white community: white neighbors, white church members, white school, white grocery stores. Both of my parents were white. All my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were white. As far as I knew, everyone in the whole world had bleached skin.
When I was nine years old, my father—an Air Force sergeant—was transferred to England to serve there for four years. So, in the middle of my third grade, my large family of nine white children flew to England to live for four years. While there, we lived off-base in the English countryside and attended English Catholic schools. I can only remember white classmates, kids who looked even paler than I did.
In California, state history is taught in fourth grade, so I missed learning about the California missions, the Spanish colonialists, and the Gold Rush. I didn’t study about how the Franciscan priests converted the native Indians to Catholicism, made them work in the missions making wine and bread, watched them contract the white man’s diseases, and buried them in the mission cemeteries.
In seventh grade, California students study United States history, so I missed that too. While kids back home were studying about the Colonial times, I was learning about Anglos and Saxons settling the British Isles, William the Conqueror’s successful takeover of England in 1066, and the tumultuous and factious rule of several royal families like the Houses of Lancaster, Tudors, and Stuarts. I became fascinated with Elizabeth I, whose reign produced William Shakespeare. To me, she was a powerful, ingenious woman who used savvy strategies to maintain her hold on power and her queenship in a male-dominated world.
If my old friends in the U.S. studied anything about slavery, I didn’t at all. I leaned that the men from aristocratic families often sailed out of England due to business, but nobody ever talked about where they went, what decisions they made, what they saw, what they were responsible for, or how their wealth was produced.
My family lived in England from early 1966 to late 1969—important years in America: civil rights. I missed hearing about all of Martin Luther King Jr.’s marches, his speeches, what he was speaking for. On the day that Robert Kennedy was killed, Sister Genevieve asked me to stand up in front on the class and tell everyone else how I felt about his assassination. I didn’t know.
I never even heard about Martin Luther King’s assassination, and no one asked for my opinion when he died. An ignorant mind doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about right and wrong or concepts of equality and freedom.
I knew little about Black people except what I learned from the mouths of my parents. My father thought they were lazy. He told stories about the Black men in his unit who were supposed to work on the plane engines. He described how they sat around smoking cigarettes while the white men brought in the parts, organized the work spaces, and fixed the broken planes. The Black men smiled as they smoked, knowing they could get away with doing nothing.
My mother used the “N” word. Whenever she talked about Black people, she called them “N****s.” I knew that it was a derogatory term by the sneer that formed on her face when she said it. The tone of her voice emphasized the first syllable in a low guttural sound, and then let up on the second syllable like the backlash of a whip. One side of her lip curled up like she had just found a cockroach in the garbage can.
While we lived in base housing—a pastoral oasis with grazing cows and forested valleys—a Black family moved in next door to us. My parents reacted with quiet, stunned faces. One day when I was outside in the front yard, one of the boys from this family walked out onto their patch of front lawn. His skin was black, as dark of my father’s shoe polish. We looked at each other silently for several long minutes.
After noting his skin, I searched for his eyes—not black. In the English sun, they shone like deep, brown pearls floating in seas of white cream, friendly, wistful, inviting, tender. I softened in response, like a morning glory opening in the early light, and a wad of shame built up in the center of my chest for all of my preconceived notions.
Yet, this was only a first impression and short-lived. Soon, our family was on our way back to the United States and away from our next-door Black neighbors.
And so, I came back, enthralled with a love of English aristocracy and royal lineage and the literature that upheld their good and righteous glory. I believed in the goodness of Henry V as he protected the English throne on the edge of France. I believed in the moral purity of Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
I never studied American history until I got to college. In high school, I studied World History in freshman year. No Black peoples or slavery interrupted my understanding of Egypt, Rome, Constantinople, or Napoleon. As a senior, I studied Civics, never learning about the constitutional amendments that finally allowed women and Blacks the right to vote freely, without literacy or taxation barriers.
In college, finally, I took American History from Colonial Days to 1877. 1877 was the end of the Reconstruction Period in the South. Did I understand the significance of ending Reconstruction? Absolutely not. Looking back, I wonder why the academic planners chose to end my history class right before Jim Crow took over the South.
So, I entered the world of adults, ready to work, vote, contribute, change, and mold my society with an incomplete understanding of the history and make-up of my country or the world. Little did I know that I would learn what discrimination meant, but from a female point of view. But, even with good intentions, I was ignorant of who my fellow Black brothers and sisters were and how they felt about themselves and me. My perspective was too white, too female, and too Catholic. My journey toward cultural humility was going to be a long one.
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