Sure enough, the black student won by a large margin. In the months following his victory, I had a few opportunities to get to know the new president, Robert J. Foster, and it became abundantly clear that Rob was a phenomenal human being by any measure. I doubt he remembers me or our brief interactions, but I still remember how he treated me on one occasion. We were in a meeting where there were many students and many ideas shared. I don’t remember the topic, but I do remember that I raised my hand at one point and made a comment that I knew significantly moved the dialogue forward. He looked at me and nodded as I spoke, and then after the meeting he went out of his way to find me in the crowd to discuss my idea and to thank me. As he did so, he looked at me with gratitude and sincere appreciation. I truly felt that he saw me, saw my desire for goodness and my capacity to help make good things happen. He wasn’t threatened, he was a secure leader. I have never forgotten that brief interaction.
I am a fifth generation native Californian, born in Petaluma. I was then raised in a suburb of Seattle at the height of the Microsoft era. I saw the homes of Bill Gates and Paul Allen go up on Lake Washington. I attended BYU in Provo, Utah. I am entirely a product of the West, and I did not grow up seeing racism. I honestly do not remember either parent of mine ever saying anything negative about anyone because of the color of their skin at any time in my life. I do not doubt that there is racism in the West, but I did not witness any of it.
I met and married my wonderful wife while we were students at BYU. She was born in Idaho and grew up in Montana. After we both graduated, I was accepted at Duke University School of Law, and we left the West with our 1 year old baby and another baby on the way.
Durham, North Carolina was a very new experience. I had been a missionary for our Church in Chile for two years and my wife had done the same in southern Spain. I’m satisfied you can’t call people wholly naive who have spent 10% of their lives wading into the the lives of others to help them believe in God. We had seen a lot of poverty, pain, heartache, and tragedy up close and personal. But there was something different about Durham, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It took me a few weeks to figure out what was bothering me so much. Finally, the supermarket experience helped me figure it out.
I was walking down a long aisle in a Durham supermarket. I realized that my item was not on that aisle, so I continued to the end. There was a black man about my age, 25-30, coming towards me in the aisle. He also seemed to be doing the same, just walking to the end of the aisle. He wasn’t actively searching the shelves. Being a friendly person, I attempted to make eye contact with him for several seconds as we approached one another, so that I could say “hello.” He never looked at me. He didn’t look away, he didn’t look down, he just looked right past me. There was no pride on his face, no smirk, no evidence that he was trying to ignore me or diminish me. As he walked past, my overwhelming impression was that he was merely assuming that I would ignore him. I was dumbfounded.
As I came to the end of the aisle and turned to the left, I immediately walked past a white man of about 30 pushing his shopping cart. He nodded at me and smiled at me like I was in his club. It wasn’t a friendly smile, it was a confidential smile, if that makes sense. The immediate contradiction between the two interactions was horrifying to me and I almost yelled at him, “I am not in your club! WE--YOU and I--do not have a club!”
Again and again during our three years in Durham, my wife and I were saddened by how surprised black people were at merely being treated decently. We did not go out of our way to do so, did not make any special effort, and did not treat the white people we encountered any differently. The reactions of the black people would typically follow a predictable arc: surprise, delight, distrust, and then normalcy. At first they were surprised at being addressed as an equal, then they were delighted by it, then they wondered what it was we wanted from them, but finally they realized we were just being ourselves and settled into a normal, healthy interaction. The above arc describes our interactions with normal, black, North Carolina residents with whom we interacted in the community.
My black peers at the law school were not immediately surprised to be treated well, and are some of the finest individuals I have ever met. People like Chris Richardson, Venroy July, and Jonathan Calmore, to name a few. But even they knew what it was like to be marginalized. I have heard many of these honest, accomplished, and talented individuals share stories of having to put their head down and just take undeserved abuse from authority figures, merely for being black. Their stories infuriate me. If someone had treated me as they had been treated, I know that I would not have been able to humbly take it, that I would have fought back.
One day during law school, I overheard a black, female law student’s conversation with a friend. This particular woman had always impressed me. She was kind, competent, and extremely intelligent. She was talking about racism and I heard her say, “I almost prefer those who are openly racist with me, because then at least I know where I stand.” I knew that she and I had interacted frequently during our time at law school, and that she could never say that I had been openly racist to her. Did that mean that she trusted me less? Did that mean that she suspected I was secretly racist, and that I thought less of her? I admit that initially I was worried about me and how she saw me. But then I began to try and imagine the experiences she must have gone through that she would say such a thing. My heart ached for her and so many who must feel similarly.
These experiences provide a backdrop for my thoughts on the NFL kneeling issue. It is painful to see so many good friends and family members so vehemently disagree about this. What if I told you that everyone (almost) is right? Too many are talking past each other, and it is because too many are speaking a different dialect, and don’t even know it.
One such dialect is the military dialect. In the military, the flag is revered to a degree most regular citizens cannot even comprehend. To those in the military, our flag is a symbol of the sacrifices and risks every service man and service woman makes for our country. Those sacrifices are extreme and over time those sacrifices begin to coalesce around the symbol of the flag and the national anthem. This is by design. Military involvement is dangerous work, and symbols and mantras and ideals are used to help assuage the emotional toll.
Even more importantly, to our wonderful service men and women the flag comes to represent not just their own living sacrifices, but the sacrifices of all those who came before them. Specifically, those heroic men and women who have given their lives for our country. This heightened reverence for the flag is not limited to those who have served, but emanates from them throughout their immediate and extended families. Over time, a veteran’s respect for the flag becomes readily apparent to those around him or her, causing a similar increase in respect and reverence in an outward-extending rippling effect. My two grandfathers served in the military, and one graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. Do I betray them and their military service if I support those who kneel during the national anthem?
This heightened respect for the flag within our country just is, and everyone involved in this discussion needs to accept its very relevant place in the dialogue about kneeling during the national anthem. For the many Americans who don’t understand the strong emotional reaction many have against the kneelers, this greater understanding about what the flag and the national anthem mean to so many among us should help explain.
To illustrate this cultural difference, allow me to explain a unique feature of latin american culture. There are not “Yo Momma” jokes in latin america. There is no such thing as a funny “Yo Momma” joke there. Here in America, we understand that “Yo Momma” jokes are not referencing your mother, or any mother in particular, but rather a nebulous, nowhere, “neutral” mother. One can argue that “Yo Momma” jokes are in bad taste, but few in America would say they are extremely insulting, or that they qualify as “fighting words.”
Not so in latin america.
While I was a missionary in Chile, I worked with a missionary from Argentina who was about the most cheerful and hilarious fellow I’ve ever known. In our apartment, there were three of us from America and the one Argentinian. The four of us became great friends during our time serving together. During one period of rest, the topic of “Yo Momma” jokes came up. My Argentinian friend couldn’t believe that we joked about our own mothers in such a way, he found it extremely offensive.
We explained that we weren’t talking about our mothers, or anyone else’s mother for that matter. We broke down the jokes for him and their cultural context. After awhile, he began to understand. We decided to take it a step further and explained that we wanted to engage in a social experiment where we made “Yo Momma” jokes to him in Spanish to see if he could be conditioned not to have such a strong reaction. He agreed.
The result was fascinating. After we had explained the cultural context, but before we were making the jokes directly to him, he was able to crack a smile at a few of the jokes and see some of the humor in the most innocent of Yo Momma jokes. Once we began saying them directly to him; however, his response was visceral. So strong was his cultural opposition to denigrating one’s mother, he could not help but get riled up at the quite innocuous jokes we related. He knew we loved him, he knew we had never seen or met his mother, he knew it was just an experiment, and he knew that we were not serious. Nevertheless, we could see him physically struggle with the confluence of emotional waves peaking within him.
It was eye opening.
Like the flag and national anthem, the president of the United States of America is also a symbol of our nation. However, that symbol is not static. There is a new face every four to eight years. Many people will honor and revere the office and the individual one year, only to decry and demean the office and the new individual immediately after the next election. Most Americans would say that the office of the President of the United States is one of our nation’s greatest symbols, and that denunciations of any currently sitting president is a reviling of the man and not the country or office he represents. One of the great traits of our republic is that we are free to oppose the president while maintaining our patriotism. More specifically, we are free to oppose the president without going to jail or to the guillotine. This is one of the greatest of American innovations. Opposition to a King had always been treason, but here in America, as well as in the rest of America’s democratic progeny, opposition to the executive does not necessarily mean one is unpatriotic.
I submit that those who kneel during the anthem, and their supporters, are applying the same logic of opposing the president to the flag and national anthem. They are opposing what they see as unjust components of of the American experience, without opposing all the good, or diminishing those who have sacrificed their lives to protect our country. And, since many of them do not have the heightened cultural reverence of the flag and national anthem that comes with military service, they are confused as to why their protest against the national anthem engenders so much more hatred than any everyday American’s rant about the president. We as Americans have peacefully coexisted with our fellow Americans with opposing presidential preferences for centuries. The are our friends, co-workers, and family members. Another hallmark of Americanism is that we can agree to disagree about the president agreeably. "Then why not the flag and national anthem?" some wonder.
For many Americans, the flag does not primarily represent their own sacrifices in the military, or the military lives lost protecting our soil. For many Americans, the flag represents the whole melting pot of our country, all of its history and opportunity, of which the military is one important part, but not the only part. And unfortunately, many Americans have been repeatedly pushed to the bottom of that melting pot and been scalded. Just as a large pot can produce many bowls of delicious soup and still have caked on muck at the bottom, many of us floating in the middle or at the top of the American melting pot do not fully understand what it has felt like to be at the bottom. This is especially true in the western United States.
I have a close family member who lives in a mid-sized, western city that has a military base among its population. He did not serve in the military, but he is vehemently opposed to the kneelers. A discussion with him was very revealing. Among his comments were the following, “most of the black people in this town are soldiers from the local army base. They are among the best men and women I have ever met. I have never heard any of them complain about racism here, and never once heard anyone else ever speak ill of them or any other black person.”
There is a lot going on in his statement, so allow me to unpack it, (1) his own experience with black Americans has been entirely positive; (2) his own experience with white treatment of black Americans has been entirely positive; and most importantly (3) his own impression of black Americans is entirely positive! He is not racist, and he is deeply and genuinely offended at any suggestion that he is. He is not racist and he does not see racism.
He is like I was before I went to North Carolina. He and I grew up in largely a post-racist society. When I went to Durham, I was thrust into a late-racist society. I am sensitive to the fact that I painting an entire region with a broad brush. However, all I can do is speak to my own experience, and I am applying what I believe is my own objective analysis to how racist a particular region is. My measurement is:
In general, how surprised is the local black population to be treated with basic human dignity by a newly encountered white person?
Having lived in Seattle, Provo, Rhode Island, Houston, and Durham for significant periods of time, I believe I am qualified to share my personal experiences and opinion on the regional differences of this particular indicator. Houston is significantly better than Durham, Rhode Island even better than Houston, and Seattle and Provo are even better still.
Why is this important? It is important because my family member does not react to racism in the same way he doesn’t react to “Yo Momma” jokes. However, blacks around the country, and especially in certain regions, live with racism on a daily basis in a way that many whites across the country have no context for. The Yo Momma jokes are ripping them apart. Had I never lived in North Carolina, I would never have believed it. It was only after having many black friends share personal stories with me where they feared for their lives for no other reason than driving while black, that I began to understand the severity of the racism they deal with. While these instances are more common in the South, they are found everywhere in our nation.
The result of these cultural distinctions is that we are talking past each other. We need to start listening to one another, and start saying different things:
I am so sorry that you lost your son in the service, I understand that the national anthem means something to you that it couldn’t possibly mean to me based on my life experience. Please, please believe me when I say that for me, supporting the kneelers does not mean I dishonor your son!
or
I am so, so sorry that you have been treated horribly for merely being black. That is unacceptable and unfair and I can see how your American experience has not been the same as mine and why you might feel there is a need for change, and a need to protest the national anthem. I understand that your doing so is not intended to reject our fallen soldiers.
There are some who oppose the kneelers who are actually racist. But it is my experience, and my profound belief, that the vast majority of Americans who oppose the kneelers have more cultural experience and background with the flag/military culture than they do with the racism/mistreatment culture. They aren’t racist themselves and they just don’t have significant or meaningful interactions with the reality of racism. For them, kneeling during the anthem is like Yo Momma jokes for my Argentinian friend. It is too emotionally difficult.
There may be some who support the kneelers who wish to see America brought down. But it is my experience, and my profound belief, that the vast majority of Americans who support the kneelers earnestly believe that it is possible to support better treatment for black Americans without in any way dishonoring the military, our veterans, or our fallen heroes. For these Americans, those who oppose kneelers seem to be ignoring the damaging treatment of black Americans, and it hurts them emotionally just like Yo Momma jokes hurt my Argentinian friend.
Too many of us are reacting emotionally based on our own cultural experiences. My hope is that both sides might try harder to feel what the other feels, and that both sides may not give in so easily to the “either/or” trap. America is built on our founders’ ability to avoid the either/or trap. It didn’t have to be either states’ rights or federal rights. It could be both. The simple truth is that some things are better handled by the states, and others by the federal government. People may disagree about which things, but people who are honest with themselves have to admit that depending on the issue, we all bang the drum for states rights for some things, and then bang the drum for federal rights on others. I do not betray my grandfathers by supporting the kneelers, but rather honor their service. Is it possible to betray our veterans by pursuing the very ideals they fought and died to protect?
America is here because we repeatedly figure out ways not to get stuck in “either/or”. It is okay for many of us to feel emotionally troubled by kneeling during the national anthem, and still be very supportive of justice for black Americans. No amount of logic is going to make the emotional turmoil go away, it is ingrained in us. It is also okay for many of us to support those who kneel during the anthem, and still feel proud to be an American and honor our service men and women as well as those who have given our lives for our country. No amount of anger over kneeling during the anthem is going to make our emotional turmoil over racism go away.
We can honor our military AND demand justice and equality for all because we are American, and that’s what we do. We get things done.
Democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, electricity, telephone, flight, computers, internet, and on and on. We get things done.
America, we’ve got this.
