Hey LH, how about we let that crap go for now. Or we'll be perpetuating it. Here's a morsel I drafted this AM on another front that I needed a place to stash, and I'd love to know your thoughts about it. It just kinda "popped out." :~) (Think of it as the meat course to go with the small potatoes we been stuffing ourseffs with.)
~S~
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Multicultural Competence Scope and Sequence
It's interesting, nowadays, watching the TV programs that used to reassure me that we rural folk are neither alone, nor terminally different, nor dangerous. Watching them now that I know we are knowable. (Watching them as "we," not "they.")
Nowadays my interest is pulled equally by movies and programs showcasing other cultures. As a member of the Bishop's Commission on Racism, I've been unpacking an old toolkit and putting some old anti-racism and anti-classism tools back to work. This involves, in part, reviewing educational materials that blend flawed, old-fashioned "diversity training" with new angles on theology and soul-changing.
It's a rocky ground to work. It occurs to me that it's not unlike the rocky ground in this hardscrabble, mountainous farming community where my newer roots have been digging deep. There's no topsoil here, but there is the kind of persistence this raised-poor girl understands and, most days, I can keep up with that rock-hard effort pretty well.
Sometimes I think about my friends in the southern end of the Diocese and the diversity that, from "up here," I have the luxury to envy. Of late I have found myself wondering: Which of my friends could or would spend a day up here in MY back yard? Does the desire to be known, respected, and loved cut both ways? Do the roads I travel, south, ever call any of them to follow me back home, north?
Would they see the traces of the underground railroad, here, as I do, or traces of the people from whom the escaping enslaved were hidden?
Would they see my hardscrabble friends as the good souls welcoming them, or would they see only the reserved souls the stereotype says won't trust a stranger of any color or culture? Would they believe me when I tell them, as we head out of the last city they can recognize as "urban," that the question up here is not whether one is a stranger.
The question is actually whether the newcomer has a lick of sense, will accept a few veiled lessons offered so respectfully that it's easy to miss them, will help pull the next yay-hoo out of the icy ditch come late-October winter or, as more usually is the case based on long experience, be the one the rest of us are pulling out of that ditch?
But I believe I have found, if not the ideal curriculum for European-Americans who long for an end to a variety of discomforting feelings about African Americans they'd really like to know, the curriculum for southern friends in case they want to return the discomfort and know US.
The curriculum would have to start with "Postcards from Nebraska," whose host serves as a bit of a bridge to see and say the heart of his neighbors. It would have to end with "Hee Haw"-- that much-maligned, much-mocked lesson in tongue-in-cheek anatomy that is so rich with the details of how we rural folks are misunderstood... how we are kept apart from the society that profits from our labor and resourcefulness. (This is what diversity training knows as "internalized oppression.")
There is NO WAY even my best Harrisburg friends could start with Hee Haw! No way I could stand to sit with them, watch it with them, and teach from it-- no matter how much they assured me they were ready for it!
I know this as surely as I know I can still only barely sit productively around a table with these southern "yayhoos" (my dear friends who I sincerely adore), as they grapple with how to include-- respectfully-- my people in their processes.
No, they are not even at the beginning of doing that work. Until they can tell me about Postcards from Nebraska, oh I'll be at those tables, but a tad quiet.
It's not our way, up here, to insist that people step into discomfort. It just wouldn't be neighborly, and in addition St. Francis reminds us that the Gospel insists that we seek to understand in place of seeking to be understood.