A Little White German Girl

Is colorblindness in regards to race and ethnic differences impossible or a myth, as many Progressive Liberals or “deep cultural-politico thinkers”, both white and black, tell us?  Isn’t it just a naive leftover from the Civil Rights Movement under Dr. Martin Luther King, which did not examine the so-called phenomenon that it is impossible for human beings not to see color and/or ethnic-cultural differences? Scores of Americans influenced by the DEI, the multiculturalists, and other neo-segregationist agendas taught conspicuously in our schools for decades, as well as the left-of-center corporate media, almost scoff at the notion of Colorblindness.

Of course, we see people's color or outward appearance, which sometimes leads us to make awful and dangerous judgments of people who look and sound different.  But there exists a terrible, if not egregious, error on the part of many within the Progressive Liberal intelligentsia who want us to accept their socio-cultural-catechetic on race via their questionable polemic against what people like me believe, when or if, we employ the idea of not seeing the color of an individual.

It is the simple, but critical difference between “awareness vs obsession.” Of course, even as a semi-washed little black boy growing up in the 1950s, I was aware that one of my uncles was married to a native Japanese Hawaiian woman (i.e., Aunt Dorothy). They somehow got together after World War II, where several of my dad's brothers served in the Navy as Seabees in the Pacific Theater.  Hell, I even thought Aunt Dorothy talked funny. She could not say “Mary,” my mom’s name. She would call my mom “Mauwee.” As a little kid, that was a source of great amusement.

 But so-what! She was one of my favorite Aunts, and all of my twelve siblings loved Uncle Basil and Aunt Dorothy, despite her not looking or sounding like a Negro.

Oh, wait a minute!  Maybe I shouldn’t use that term “Negro” anymore since we all became African/Afro-Americans in the late 1960s! Although I have never been to Africa, I have always seen myself as a plain-old, semi-ethnocentric,” run-of-the-mill, but blue-blooded American.  I know that description is a little over the top. But you get my drift.  If not, take a long trip off a short pier!

Once more, there is an enormous if not critical difference between being “aware” of one's race, juxtaposed to making it an obsession, as many DEI, Critical Race Theorists, and various multicultural catechumenates seem to do.  But just because I seek to minimize differences with my allegiance to a colorblind society, it is not the same as pretending differences don’t exist. To assume that race, sex, sexuality, and once again “skin color” mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to think that it means everything will be fatal, which gets me to my spouse.

My wife grew up and played as a little girl in the late forties and fifties in the war-torn rubble of Germany following World War II.  Her family was impoverished and hardly prosperous. If any of you can remember the phrase “people are starving in Europe,” in which the nuns and priests in my grade school often raised and sent relief to places like Germany. You know what I speak of.  It was just awful for the average German citizen following the war.
But my wife, “that little German wife girl”, now pushing 80, and her family persevered.  In our marriage and the time that God still grants us together, the least important thing that we ever talk about or are even aware of is that she is white and I am black.  It is not how it works daily in our interactions with each other and, more importantly, with the outside world. As I wrote over thirty years ago in America Magazine, I am probably what was once known as an integrationist. Although the term has been hopelessly distorted, if not mocked by race-entrepreneurs, implicit-race bias experts, and other supposedly deep thinkers on issues related to race relationships, proselytized via DEI, CRT, and “real black people” that control the distorted narrative. A narrative that is guaranteed to keep us at each other's throats as Americans, all in the name of “cultural awareness”.   What I see is racism, neo-segregation, factionalism, or tribal balkanization under new management.  

It is at times disheartening. But I think my wife, that little German white Girl whose upbringing and life experience were categorically different from my own, has taught me that who we are as a “person”, as human beings, is all that matters.  In his book The Cost of Discipleship, the late German Theologian and Martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that as human beings, we will always be more similar than different.  Take care and God Bless.

Pat, a little Negro boy!