The Wrong Side of the Fence

For those of you who have claimed that racism doesn’t live in Canada, here is my story:

“This land used to belong to John Ware. They called him “N***** John”…but the times being what they are, we can’t use that word any more”. Those were the exact words that came out of my father’s mouth as he proudly parked his truck at the edge of the coulee of his newly purchased ranch in Southern Alberta. These jarring words were among the first spoken by my father to my future husband, Duane Forde. Yes, that Duane Forde — 12-year CFL veteran, national television commentator, owner of two university degrees, son of a high school principal…and a black man.

Crickets…

Awkward silence…

As soon as I was alone with Duane I actually told him he should run fast and far away from my family. Let it be known, I warned my father countless times before meeting Duane that he could not use that word, that it was a hate word. He responded with “Why? People call me ‘Scotch’ all the time because of my Scottish descent, stereotyping me as being cheap”.

Yup..

….because that’s somehow comparable to decades of oppression and inequity that began with slavery and hasn’t ended since.

The truth is, this word, and many other racial slurs surrounded me throughout my upbringing — but my white privilege swaddled me in ignorance. My life, cloaked in white privilege, protected me from putting a name to the hateful and ignorant atmosphere that enveloped me while I was growing up in southern Alberta. In the 70’s in my small town, my friends and I would go to the local five and dime store and buy ‘liquorice babies’…or ‘n***** babies’, as most of us ignorantly called them. In the “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” counting games of our childhood, it was neither a “tiger” nor a “piggy” that was being caught by the toe…

Nope. There’s that ugly word again.

I was told I could not date black men when I went away to college. A family member “informed” me that babies born of interracial relationships would have diseases. My father’s best friend called me “selfish” for wanting to date Duane. As he put it, “whites should be with whites and blacks should be with blacks.” I can’t tell you the amount of racist ribbing my father took in my hometown from his friends and co-workers, over the fact that his youngest daughter was marrying a “black guy”. This did not help my father’s already tainted attitude towards my husband of choice. This…is just a snapshot of the culture of racism in which I was submerged while growing up.

I would love to say that my human heart figured out racism overnight after I ventured out on my own. Sadly, it did not. It was and continues to be a process of educating myself not just by reading and asking questions, but also by being immersed in cities that have seen their fair share of oppression. I witnessed firsthand the racism and oppression that surrounded and continues to surround indigenous people when I worked in Regina, Saskatchewan for nine years. I’m also well aware of the racial intolerance that exists here in Toronto, a city that prides itself on being a melting pot of ethnicities.

And then there’s the racism my family has had to endure. The day after I returned to work following my honeymoon with Duane, my co-anchors on the CFTO news desk flashed a picture of my wedding on the screen to congratulate me. The next day, I was ushered into my news director’s office…where I was informed that the station had received death threats directed at Duane and me. Death threats. People — 21st Century Canadian people — actually wanted to kill me because I married a black man. Imagine that for a minute.

One day in eighth grade, my son was riding the school bus home when a couple of white kids in the seat in front of him were listening and singing along to rap music on an iPod. Every time the N word came up, they would point tauntingly at my son. We, as concerned parents, addressed this issue with the school’s administrators, who expressed how “unfortunate” it was and assured us that they would deal with it. Their version of “dealing with it” didn’t require the kids to acknowledge any wrongdoing, let alone apologize. Their version of dealing with it didn’t involve a detention, let alone a suspension. Their version of “dealing with it” didn’t include any loss of bus privileges whatsoever…at least not for the offending parties. My son, on the other hand — the victim in this case — was moved to a different bus that picked him up and dropped him off farther from our house.

Shortly after that, my son was walking, alone, to meet friends at the park in our upper middle class neighbourhood. As he walked past a particular house, a group of white teenagers, clearly older than him, sitting on the front porch started to hurl racist insults his way. He didn’t know them and they didn’t know him. It was a scary moment for him regardless of his age, especially given that it occurred shortly after the horrific events down south in Charlottesville, Virginia, where U.S. President Donald Trump made it socially acceptable (for “very fine people”) to be racist again.

That was the first time that “The Talk” happened with my son. It wasn’t the last. When I was growing up, “The Talk” referred to the awkward discussion that parents had with their adolescent children about the birds and the bees. I’ve learned that, for adolescents of colour, “The Talk” often has another, much different meaning, referring to a conversation in which parents prepare their offspring to navigate a world in which their physical appearance will lead some people in positions of authority to treat them as disrespectful until proven polite, stupid until proven intelligent, lazy until proven industrious, and of course, guilty until proven innocent. “The Talk” also happened with the mothers of my son’s white friends. It was important to have them and their kids understand that, despite our children having virtually everything else in common — their values, their interests, the places they frequent — their white sons would often get the benefit of the doubt when my black son wouldn’t and, as a result, their friendship came with a degree of responsibility to “protect” him.

This white privilege into which I was born is just a real daunting thing. A white blue-eyed, blonde-haired woman, raised by a racist, now married to a black man and raising black children. The angles at which this crazy world comes at me right now have my head spinning. At times I feel tremendous guilt. Sometimes I feel sad. Mostly, however, I feel empowered to facilitate change.

Listen, I certainly can’t pretend to know what black people go through, I will never know. But I am a mother of black children and I will continue to educate myself about systemic and blatant racism that continues to follow black people. I will continue to use my voice to try to help other people who want to change.

I’m not proud of my past and it’s not easy to talk about my father like this. He was a man I loved and a person who gave me lots of other wonderful characteristics that allowed me to live my life in vibrant colour.

Before my dad’s death he did come around. He had my son’s picture up in his hospital room and he also introduced my husband to his friends. As for my dad’s best friend, the one who said I was selfish for dating a black man, he met Duane at my dad’s funeral and took me aside and told me Duane was welcome in his house any day. It’s funny how much easier it is for people to accept each other’s differences when they actually take the time to get to know each other instead of making judgments based on assumptions. It’s baby steps but we need those small victories to move forward.

I guess I’m exposing my past and my present simply to show that, in the words of Nelson Mandela,

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

So, I may have grown up on the wrong side of the fence — but I chose the other side. I chose love.