On Frank Bruni, White Men, and Listening

Frank Bruni's recent column in the New York Times, "I'm a White Man, Hear Me Out," generated a lot of discussion and made me reflect. Bruni takes issue with the point of view that white men are disqualified from participating in discussions on race and that we often receive mixed messages, such as (he is quoting Mark Lilla): "You must understand my experience, and you can't understand my experience."

I think Bruni well captures how many white males feel about the discussion around race these days, and that most white men are apt to vote for the person or party who is not asserting or implying that they are racist.

But I also think that it is perfectly understandable, even logical, for people who have been systematically harmed by systemic racism practiced over centuries to feel both that white people  must and cannot understand them. Moving between hope and despair and feeling both things at once about the current state of race and racism in America should be a common experience.

I have had the good fortune to be in many situations--not just in Africa but in Portland, too--in which I was the only white person in a room, and I have co-facilitated or sat in many multi-racial groups that discussed race and racism. I have found that the capacity to just listen with empathy to someone's experience of racism is very powerful for both the listener and the speaker. One of the more pervasive and often subtle privileges of white masculinity is the privilege of having the floor. All sorts of possibilities open up when that dynamic shifts.

Just listening won't fix the problem, and I believe that there is a time for everyone to be heard. But for white men to just listen might be a powerful and promising beginning.

Zed Books of the UK has just published a book by Yo Ghana! President and co-founder, David Peterson del Mar: African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father, Africa in the U.S. Imagination. The book is dedicated to the late Brando Akoto, one of our organization's visionaries.

Leslie James, a historian at Queen Mary, University of London, remarks that the book: "Demonstrates how Americans projected their own gender, class, and racial psychoses into their experiences and renderings of the African continent. Peterson del Mar seeks a critical approach not to what Africa is, but to how Americans have perceived it. With this comprehensive source, we might begin to understand the difference."

Kathryn Mathers, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, states: "Through a comprehensive yet sensitive analytical reading of fiction, autobiography, and film, Peterson del Mar shows just how much Africa has and continues to shape what it means to be American." The book is summarized in a blog post on the Organization of American Historians website.

Contact us (yoghana.org@gmail.com) if you are interested in purchasing a copy for $20.00, and the profit will be donated to Yo Ghana!

"I Will Not Sit and Fold My Arms"

By the age of sixty, most academics have their courses worked out. But I taught a service-learning course for the first time this past term that was a blast.

The Portland State University students were from an Honor's College seminar class, and most of them volunteered as tutors with immigrant students at Reynolds High School under the direction of Debra Tavares. Two worked with middle school students taking an enrichment course on interviewing and research at St. Andrew Nativity School. One worked as a tutor at Africa House, part of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.

The PSU students were delightful to work with. Some were immigrants themselves, most had been born in the U.S. Some were on the shy side, others very outgoing. Some had loved high school, some had hated it, and one had dropped out.

What they all shared in common was a passion for helping others and adapting to what students needed. And the younger students loved them.

I remember that about twenty years ago, when my life partner and I contemplated adoption across racial lines, I had a sense that having a son of color would entail leaving my cocoon of privilege, that I'd start to see the world at times from my dark-skinned child's perspective.

For me--and I think for the PSU students who had grown up in comfortable circumstances--tutoring vulnerable youth is a bit like that. You start to learn what sort of trauma refugees have witnessed, what sort of difficulties and prejudices that so many youth and their parents face. Like parenting a child of color, it becomes more difficult to assume and to assert that life is always good and easy and fair.

There is a lot of discussion these days among progressive-minded Americans about how to be in solidarity with refugees and other immigrants. I think what we found is that providing some concrete assistance (help in learning English) and a willingness to sit and listen to people's stories can be very powerful. Deep listening can provide youth with permission to start thinking about and sharing their remarkable, often painful, stories. And once you've heard those stories and witnessed the courage of the people telling them--well, your perspective on life is deepened and changed.

I'll give Joel, one of our courageous young students from Reynolds who lost her parents and siblings a day after her birth, the last word on this: ""I will not sit and fold my arms."

Why I'm Posting Less Here

I plan to keep posting blogs here every few weeks, but much of my blogging has been subsumed by Yo Ghana's website or Facebook page.

My Author Interview

The Beyond Footnotes series of KPSU radio station and the PSU History Department recently interviewed me about my forthcoming book: African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father--Africa in the US Imagination. 

Click here to listen to the forty-five minute interview. The folks at Beyond Footnotes do a great job of preparing and asking questions, and there are many other interviews in the series.

The book will appear in mid-July and is dedicated to Mr. Brando Akoto, a Yo Ghana! board member who passed away late in 2015.

​For more information about the book, consult the Zed Books website.

Three Evening Scenes

• Tuesday night had already been a full day when I arrived at the Troutdale City Hall. I was there to talk a little bit about Yo Ghana!'s partnership with Reynolds High School, but mainly I was there to support two of our students. One of them was Rando, a small, ebullient Muslim girl from East Africa who has been interviewing family elders to relate their journey through civil war and refugee camps to America. Her voice started very faint, then became stronger and stronger as she shared the remarkable story, and the council members' eyes filled with respect and wonder.
  
  About two hours later I boarded a transit train and heard the voice of Diana calling to me, another one of our students, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who in the rainy night was in charge of her little brother and wheel-chair bound mother, all of them struggling to understand a new language and new skills such as how to negotiate the transit system in a wheelchair. But they seemed much more resolute than frail and not at all deterred by missing a stop.
  
  ​Then I joined an apartment full of Ghanaians full of joyful expectation. The wife and children of a leading volunteer were about to arrive, ending a separation of nearly five years. When they stepped into their new home it exploded with noise and joy. The eyes of the three young children were wide. So much to take in. Twenty years from now they'll still remember that night, and by then they'll be doing great things.
  
  ​Americans often ponder going to Africa and helping Africans. But Africa is also coming to us, and Africans' resilience, warmth, and determination are helping all of us, now and far into the future.

Making Sense of Each Other

​Kwame Anthony Appiah, the distinguished philosopher born to an English mother and a Ghanaian father, remarks in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers: "when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree; but, if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end."

His words came to Wednesday morning during the Yo Ghana! Student Showcase at St. Andrew Church's Community Center in Northeast Portland. Students of Deb Tavares (shown above) who are learning English shared their work. A boy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo related how his father survived and escaped war; a Muslim girl from East Africa spoke of how she has come to love wearing her hijab; and a student from Mexico showed a photograph of the truck his father uses for his landscape business, a job that leaves him exhausted, but "this is how we make a life."

Yo Ghana Board member Dr. Labissiere shared the delights and fears of growing up in Haiti and how coming to the U.S. brought new challenges of racial and personal identity. Yo Ghana Project Coordinator Ibrahim Ibrahim emceed, young Maddie from Fowler Middle School read some fine letters on overcoming hardship from Ghana, and a bunch of students received awards. Students and teachers from Reynolds High School, Vernon School, St. Andrew Nativity School, Fowler Middle School, George Middle School, Campfire Columbia, and Judson School--all the way from Salem!--attended.

We are often urged to exercise tolerance toward others. Appiah urges us to "make sense of each other." I hope that tolerance and understanding can lead to deeper exchanges in which we learn from and move forward together.