Words matter, but how you choose to hear them matters, too. Whether you are truly listening, honestly trying to understand what someone is saying, goes far in determining whether communication is happening.
Consider these words:
Black lives matter.
Defund the police.
Privilege.
If your kneejerk response to “black lives matter” is to say, “all lives matter,” you aren’t listening. If all lives mattered, people would not need to declare that black lives matter. But the evidence is overwhelming: despite decades of struggle and progress, racism – individual and systemic – endures.
If you believe “defund the police” means abolish all public safety, you aren’t listening. That may be the goal of the odd anarchist, but what I hear is people clamoring for a fundamental shift away from police departments as militarized forces of order and occupation, a shift to better trained, more properly equipped guardians of the peace. Many police departments, including ours, have moved in this direction, using allies, better communication and conflict resolution skills in dealing with mental illness, domestic disputes, cultural differences and other potential flashpoints.
About privilege: Many of us who are white bristle at the term. We react defensively.
Listen for a moment to my friend Kyndell Harkness, a young black woman, a former newsroom colleague I remember mostly for the unabashed joy she showed in life and work and her interactions with people.
“I love my son,” Kyndell wrote in the Star Tribune four years ago, when the little boy she had adopted was 5 years old and race was, like now, in the news. “He is not of me, but he is black like me. Born of African parents, birthed in Bemidji, a tiny thing, barely able to see.”
She named him William.
“I held him as soon as he came into the world. Perfect and beautiful. Curled up on my chest, fingers outstretched. Dreaming the dreams that sprinkled smiles on his face.”
She watched as William raced around their Minneapolis neighborhood, greeting neighbors and strangers, who all gushed over him.
“I watched him toddle, walk and run, always stretching out the space between us. … I thought how free he must feel, how open his world must be. He loved the world and the world loved him back.”
But she wondered. “When will it happen? When will the world stop loving him? He is a black boy. There is no hiding from it. His reality will change, and I am dreading that day because with it comes the death of his innocence.
“His love of the world will be buried with one racist word or act. There is no escape. It’s going to happen.”
She recalled her own youth, walking in New York City, excited and curious but observing the “clutched purses and wide berths … the looks on faces telling me my presence was not welcomed.”
From the moment she first held her son, she worried about how she would protect him. “Not his spirit; there is nothing that can save the pieces that will be taken from him. This is just about keeping him alive.”
Someday, she knew, she would have to “look that boy in the eye and explain why it isn’t safe for him to wear the hood on his hoodie sweatshirt, even though it makes him feel cozy. That he will have to be careful walking around his neighbors’ yards, even though right now they delight in his surprise visits. That sometimes it will not be safe for him to run,” the thing that has brought him such joy.
“Why? Because he will grow to be a tall, strong black man and people who don’t know him might fear him.”
William still runs and bikes around that neighborhood, Kyndell tells me. But he knows his life has changed in recent weeks. She has talked with him about the death of George Floyd and the Minneapolis police officer who pressed a knee into his neck. Last week, they went together to the spot where Floyd said, “I can’t breathe” and “Mamma!” and then died, that bed of concrete now ringed by flowers of remorse and defiance.
“William wondered what will they do with this place,” Kyndell said. What, he asked her, will become of this shrine of protest, anger and sadness.
“I told him I didn’t know.”
Young William said, “It needs to stay.”
Chuck Haga had a long career at the Grand Forks Herald and the Minneapolis Star Tribune before retiring in 2013. He can be contacted at crhaga@gmail.com.
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June 13, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Chuck Haga: What we say and hear matters - Grand Forks Herald
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