We had a fine Thanksgiving weekend, thanks for asking. Thursday was just family, but our Saturday tradition brings a houseful of friends to conversate, play music and feast. Bone and boil down the turkey carcass to make a vat of gumbo, make salads, breads and holiday punch, and haul out guitars and banjos for a modern version of the old-time play party, joined by an accordion and horn and pot-luck delicacies.
My mother was a German war bride whom my dad brought to the US after World War II. My wife’s paternal grandparents were Lithuanian immigrants who came through Ellis Island and met in Chicago. One of our guests is descended from Russian Jews who fled pogroms in Mother Russia to New Jersey over a century ago; she and her Irish American husband were back-to-the-landers who emigrated to the Ozarks in the 1970s.
The Cherokee mother of another pal went to Indian school way back when; he ended up as a lawyer. One guest grew up in an area of Louisiana settled by Italian farmers. I don’t know everyone else’s ethnic heritage, but last names are German, Anglo-Saxon, possibly French. Among invited guests who couldn’t make it were a Mexican American, enrolled members of the Osage Nation, and a Polish American.
Few of our friends actually earn their living as musicians; our day jobs included working in public schools or nursing, as contractor/handyman, US Forest Service firefighter, geologist, and small businessman. Half are retired, though active.
Almost exclusively, all these people would be perceived as “white Americans.” The Jewish lady told about going to the beach in her New Jersey childhood. Along the way, many African Americans parked on a roadside to walk down to a waterside area designated for blacks. Even as a little girl, she felt sorry for their separate treatment.
I never heard the term “white privilege” until a couple of years ago, but I instinctively understood its benefits. My parents tried to buy a home in the early 1960s – it was repossessed. The last car they owned would have been about 1958. We always wore hand-me-downs, many of which my mom sewed after work. I enrolled in teacher-training college at age 31, thinking maybe I might advise some kids to avoid some of the troubles I’d seen.
I remember in my student-teaching semester at an almost all black junior high school, telling my charges, “There are only two ways you get power in America – money or education. And if y’all ain’t got money, you better get an education!”
Education served me well. Although many decry the low wages teachers earn, my wife and I built a comfortable lifestyle over our lifetime together and eventually bought this place in Grandview, Arkansas.
Our friends live in places with similarly romantic names – Hogscald Holler, Pension Mountain, Little Red River, Holiday Island – or Ozarks towns like Eureka Springs, Branson and Cassville.
Except for some neighbors, we don’t know many people who actually grew up in the Ozarks. Some came as children or young adults, others retired locally after living in various other places, or escaping hurricanes from the Gulf states. Some grow vegetables or raise chickens, many just have house pets. I am not familiar with all their life stories, but I know how “white privilege” helped them.
Under different circumstances, my life would have taken a different, more difficult trajectory. I am fortunate to have good genes, to have been raised in a home that valued music, art, language, games, travel – all ways we educate ourselves. Being white, tall, male, culturally aware and educated – these attributes opened doors that I would have had to push much harder had I been black, short, female, or ignorant. Material poverty and spiritual poverty are not mutually exclusive.
Cajun Chef Paul Prudhomme maintained that a gumbo has wonderful amalgamated flavors, but each bite reveals the taste of individual ingredients. Likewise, our society should honor the tang and spice of diverse people –otherwise we just have a bland broth.