When I was 25, working as a news announcer for one of Boston’s major radio and television stations, a woman who’d recently graduated from college joined our ranks. She worked in the newsroom, as did I. She was African-American. We became sweethearts for a few years. Somewhere along the way she said to me that I was just about the least prejudiced white person she’d ever met.
There’s a long and lovely story of how this woman helped to alter the trajectory of my life in ways that has contributed singularly to the rewarding existence I enjoy today. I will write that story if I live long enough.
Included in it will be my relationships with people of color. Those relationships include not meeting a person of color until after high school; watching Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech live on TV as the sole white person, boy of 19, in the company of at least a dozen black cleaning ladies on an Army base; and the fact that my father was a bigot.
And while these experiences contributed to whatever absence of prejudice my friend felt, they weren’t the primary reason for it. That came, and comes, from something deeper: how I feel the universe works, and the purpose of life it serves. Something I’ve felt since birth it seems.
I find it impossible to make sense of anything related to values and why things are the way they are without my own story of the big picture. That picture, for me, includes reincarnation.
Which is why I find race to be just a necessary experience that comprises a given incarnation. It’s one of the ways the soul grows its conscious oneness with all of existence, the spiritual adventure we’re all on, so far as I can tell. That to reach oneness can take many lifetimes suggests just how much we have to learn. How much we have to embrace as part of us. And how incremental that can be, given distractions like beliefs, habits, preferences and the like.
Race, gender, or any other worldly identity is not who we are. Oprah is no more black or a woman than I am. She just happens to be both in this lifetime, and I’m neither.
At the same time, I’m aware that the particular incarnations we draw to ourselves bring with them unique challenges that can be all but incomprehensible to those who don’t share those challenges. I’m not sure I have much of a handle on what it means to be a white man, much less a person of another color, gender, et cetera. What I am acquainted with is the harm of feeling that whoever we are is superior, or inferior, to somebody else.
As I say, I think the basics of this understanding were hardwired into my being before I was born. But I was still in the process of realizing it at the time of my friend’s comment. Sure, I knew I assessed life differently than many others. I’d never met a person I didn’t like, for instance. Not fundamentally. But I was still early on in my metaphysical sense that all of existence is a manifestation of God. All differences are an illusion. All value judgments are self-created.
Among the gifts of my long-ago sweetheart was the opportunity to appreciate more deeply who I was.
What an invaluable form of friendship.
A beautiful and wise story, Steve! Thank you!!
The world would be a much different place if we all would only practice this. Thanks Steve!