2018 IN RETROSPECT: THREE REFLECTIONS

As this year hurtles toward its demise, we see value in reflecting while we contemplate the coming of 2019. Here, therefore, are our individual reflections on 2018.

 

Rob’s thoughts:

As many who know me understand, owing to having been a 
speech teacher, I often think in threes. Therefore, three  reflections on 2018:

•   Managing a career switch.  As I related in this space on June 22, 2018, I’m turning my professional focus from
  
  law practice to writing. I have fiction and nonfiction projects underway, I’m in a writing group, and my novelist daughter (www.BiancaSloane.com) serves as my coach and mentor. I believe I’m making progress, but the enormity of the task sometimes overwhelms me. More than once I’ve asked if this falls into the category of “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Still, tackling the challenge energizes me and I remind myself I shouldn’t belittle what I have accomplished.

•   The spiritual journey continues.  As I also wrote here this year (September 6), I’ve found a spiritual home
  in progressive Christianity as practiced in some Unitarian Universalist  churches and in the United Church of Christ. My life partner and I visited several wonderful churches this year during our travels, broadening our horizons and encouraging study about the faith I’ve adopted. Reflecting on those experiences with her, and looking toward additional spiritual exploration, I see this dimension of my life growing in importance.

•   Confidence in American institutions.  Many progressive
  
  friends lament the state of our politics, given our divisions Donald Trump's presidency.  In 2018, Democrats reclaimed the House of Representatives and the country reclaimed the House of Representatives and the country began seeing the fruits of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s work. Both renewed my confidence ridding the nation of this cancer, whether through impeachment or merely voting him out in 2020, will become one of our finest hours.

   

Woodson’s reflections:   

In reflecting on 2018, I catalog my thoughts under “Family”, “Faith” and “Future.”

Family: Hope and I have always dreamed of our adult children becoming our best friends.

While that dream remains a work in progress, we believe we have achieved that. During 2018, we celebrated an art exhibit in New York by one child, a graduation from divinity school in Princeton, New Jersey by another, and I spent a “Walker Men’s Weekend” in Mississippi with two sons and two grandsons. These encounters provided safe spaces for sharing past pains and future hopes. We understand our children much better and they better understand us.

Faith: I remain grateful for our church, Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas, where men and women of diverse racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds worship, walk, and work

together as one. This is my third year leading the church’s Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Diversity Circle. The Circle creates a safe place where people of diverse backgrounds, from within Mosaic and the larger community, can discuss race, religion, ethnicity, and culture. Through this Circle, I have become friends with people I wouldn’t have met under any other circumstance.

Future: President Trump’s assaults on our democratic institutions have increased my awareness of the importance

of these institutions and reminded me we should not take take them for granted.  The American press has encouraged me, as it has performed admirably in exercising its responsibility for protecting our democratic institutions and values. While I still believe our country is both a country of men and of laws, I recognize other countries, to a greater or lesser extent, are too. But our democratic form of government provides for the greatest flexibility in correcting misdirection of both men and laws, something I believe the recent mid-term elections demonstrate.

I look to the future enthusiastically!

Henry writes:

The kindness of the universe let me fully live again this year. A cloud of sadness prevailed at times in years just past, though I don’t wish to remember how many. Yes, there was faith, hope, prayer, and thankfulness. But, when your spouse, love, lover, friend, and companion faces life threatening illness, life itself changes. Though joys remain, shadows loom, creeping into every crevice of time not filled.

We talked, of course, of happy times and good fortune, past and present, but the future

hung like a dark cloud invading our space, inhibiting the relaxed breath of life. We continued doing familiar things, but endless trips to medical facilities, hours of surgery, significant, repeated recovery times, and procedures sealed us in a suffocating, living envelope intent on crushing our spirits. The thought of losing Pat was a venture into hopelessness, as those twins, belief and unbelief, occupied me.

It was a time we appreciated small things, enjoying the once

insignificant occurrences. The love of family and friends overwhelmed and helped rush us through our deepest descent into the most spirit crushing moments. This year brought all we hoped for, prayed for, all we struggled to envision. Now, on the other side of that dark, impenetrable cloud, we are blessed, thankful, and renewed. My joy is unlimited.   

          

LOVE IN BLACK AND WHITE: INTERRACIAL ROMANCE 2018

White Men/Black Women; Black Men/White Women -- What’s the World Coming To? 

Does anybody still care if blacks and whites become lovers or spouses?  Fifty-one years after the Supreme Court voided laws against interracial marriage, are interracial romances even a curiosity?  We explore the questions through three sets of eyes.

Rob Writes

“His color means little,” she said. “It’s how considerate he is, his thoughtfulness, the way he makes love to me, that matters.” A white woman friend gave me that response recently when I asked her about her relationship with a black man. She and her partner aren’t married, but they’ve lived together five years and behave toward each other and the world as a married couple.  

One in six new marriages in America involve people from different races. Between 1980 and 2017, the percentage of blacks marrying someone from a different race rose from five to 18 percent. Opposition among whites to a family member marrying someone black dropped from 31 percent in 2000 to ten percent today. Television commercials for car insurance, food, banks, and other products and services now feature black/white couples.

My friend and her partner, therefore, reflect a trend, but their union doesn’t win uniform acceptance. “Two couples stared at us recently,” she told me, “like we were exotic creatures at the zoo. One couple was white, the other black, past middle age. Maybe that’s the dividing line. I can’t say we’ve gotten that response from younger people.”  Pew research, for example, shows people over 50 are twice as likely to see interracial marriage as a “bad thing” as people under 30.  

Scholarly research and polling reveal much about interracial coupling in America:

•  People living in cities intermarry more than those residing in rural areas. 

•  Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to see interracial marriage as a “bad thing.”
•  Qualitative studies show many white Americans still regard dating and marrying someone black as “strange” or “weird.”

•  In one 2017 survey, 20 percent of black respondents said mixed marriages are “bad for society.” 

• Twice as many black men marry white women as black women marry white men. 

• Divorce rates for interracial marriages are about ten percent higher than for same race couples, but up to 44% lower for black woman/white man couples.

One virtually unexplored frontier remains: POLITICS.  The nation has minimal experience with interracial relationships among the political elite. Only a few high ranking elected officials are involved in mixed marriages – New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio and his black wife, Chirlane McCray, and Utah Congresswoman Mia Love and her white husband, Jason Love, come to mind. Michigan Republican senatorial nominee John James’s wife, Elizabeth, is white. 

                           

 

This may change. California Senator Kamala Harris, a black woman whose husband, Douglas Emhoff, is white, looks like she’s running for President.  If she runs and makes head way, presumably some people will take note of her interracial marriage. Senator Harris, therefore, could challenge the conclusion Janet Langhart, a black woman, reached when she became involved with then Maine Senator William Cohen. Langhart told Cohen she wouldn’t marry him while he remained in elective office because she feared voters would punish him. Langhart and Cohen married, but only after Cohen announced his departure from the Senate. He served as Defense Secretary during Bill Clinton’s second term.

I find the research and the attitudes reported interesting, but relationships are really about love and dedication to another person.  As someone involved in an interracial relationship, I’d like to know what difference it makes to anyone with whom I share my affections. But, then, I don’t understand many things about the world. 

Woodson Chimes In

“Miss Walker! Miss Walker! Miss Walker!  There’s a white woman outside!” my first grade classmate (and cousin)

shouted upon seeing a white woman approach our school in Holly Springs, Arkansas in 1956.  Though the teacher, my mother, responded, “She’s just a woman,” Jerry, like me, believed whites were different from “coloreds” (the way of referring to African-Americans then) and they shouldn’t mix. That’s just the way it was.

By my 1967 enrollment at historically black Arkansas AM&N College, things had changed. We “coloreds” started calling ourselves “black” and demanded treatment equal to whites. That included the right to marry interracially.  Along with my more militant brothers and sisters, I felt we’d been oppressed by whites and, therefore, couldn’t marry one.  My radicalization committed me to “Black Nationalism,” Pan Africanism” and other racial group formulations evidencing solidarity with people of color worldwide.  I viewed marrying a white person as betraying the movement. 

                                            

                           

My later reintroduction to the Christian religion of my birth caused me to reexamine that principle. Christianity told me “there is neither Jew nor Greek, black nor white; old thing

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s are passed away; all things are made new.” Martin Luther King, Jr. admonished me to judge men and women by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Other religions – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the great religions of Africa -- each taught the oneness of all humanity.  My five years of law school and law practice in multi-ethnic Minnesota helped convince me I should cling less to tribal beliefs and recognize that of the 2.7 billion inhabitants of this planet, the choice of who one loves is nobody’s business but their own.

Henry Says

If romantic relationships uniquely define our lives, logic

suggests our quest for them is personal and third parties should have little say in individual choices. Prejudice, political considerations, social balancing, and ignorance may interfere with one’s romantic choices, but that just reveals how far humans must travel in route to existence on a higher plane where respect and understanding abound.  Until we get there, we live lives filled with small and petty concerns.