One afternoon I was eating cookies with my children, Eric and Yurie. I asked them if they had ever heard the term "oreo" to refer derisively to someone who is black but acts white. Eric took apart his cookie, put it together backwards, and said, "This is what I'm like--white on the outside and black on the inside."
Something inside me jumped. If it's possible to praise God and worry at the same time, I was doing it. I praised God for Eric's growth, his insight, and his inner assimilation, at last, after three long, hard years in an all-black, inner-city school and neighborhood. My own still-unhealed racism caused me to worry: "Will he adjust to white, middle-class society when the time comes...?"
Many parents worry about how the lifestyle choices they have made will affect their children. Two of the most frequently asked questions I hear from people who want to know more about the community and our life are: "What about being in the inner city--is it safe for your children?" and "What have you done about schools?"
When we first came to Sojourners three years ago, my husband, Jim, and I enrolled Eric and Yurie in our neighborhood public school. As part of a Christian community which is attempting to live with and for the poor, we did not even think of seeking the privilege of transferring them to a more integrated or middle-class school. We wanted to be part of our neighborhood and to bear the same burdens of the school system as our neighbors did.
We fervently hoped the children would develop friendships. We trusted that God would keep them safe physically and emotionally. Over our years here that has been a constant inner prayer, and my own faith has deepened as I have experienced God's love for them again and again and have seen their growing trust of their world, free from my own particular fears and prejudices.
The struggle to adapt to black culture, however, has not always been easy for them. Yurie, our Korean-Japanese daughter, makes friends readily. As a first grader she was a novelty to the others. Her speech and mannerisms changed quite quickly to match those of her friends. Her only real complaint seemed to be that the children kept teasing her about being "Chinese," and they had trouble learning to say her name right. In second grade Yurie was skipped to third, and finishing the fourth grade last June she was 8 years old and still near the top of her class. In some ways she hasn't had a chance to grow slowly enough.
Getting good grades has been too easy for her. I worry about her language and grammar. It's difficult as a white, educated parent, still middle-class, to let go of what I think is right and proper in speech. My own hardness of heart and inability to accept the ways of my neighbors are apparent every time I find myself correcting the way she talks.
In Eric there is a certain rigidity, a resistance to change similar to that in myself, and a shyness or emotional reserve that makes him seem aloof. For the first two years he was withdrawn, and even by the third year he had no close friends. At times he came racing in from school in tears with someone chasing after him. Bigger boys would pick on him; a friend of yesterday would turn against him today. Eric hated recess and lunch. He rarely openly complained, but until this year had frequent outbursts of anger and tears at home.
Both children have often been treated as special--even prodigies--by their teachers and peers. Sometimes I wondered whether occasions like award ceremonies, with Eric and Yurie winning four first-place trophies between them for academic contests, didn't harm the other children's self-images. We are not seeking competition or "success" for either child; what we want is for them to be truly loving, open, and giving, able to recognize the worth of every person.
Until well into the last school year we kept pushing aside the problems. We wanted to maintain our commitment, as the other parents with school-age children in the community have done, to keeping our children in the neighborhood school.
If more than four school-age children were a part of Sojourners, we might create our own school for them and the children of our neighbors, as we have done with our daycare center for preschool children. We've talked of this from time to time in the community. We've also discussed taking a more vital role in the public school itself through the PTA or Parents Advisory Council or as classroom volunteers. But with our many other ministries there is not much time for this.
I did volunteer work in the school library last year, partly to give Eric and Yurie the sense that they weren't in this thing alone. One of the hardest things I've had to discover about myself is how willing I have been for my children to be on the front lines of racial reconciliation day after day while I am less willing to put my body where my theology is.
Last spring we made the agonizing decision to transfer the children to a more integrated public school in a middle-class neighborhood several miles west of here. Over many months we had talked with other members of the community, the parents of our other children, and some of the community's pastors. We finally had to see that our commitment to this neighborhood and our neighbors did not rest on Eric and Yurie being in this school.
The day Jim and I visited the new school for the first time, we felt we were walking into a private school. The contrast to the noise and crowdedness and fighting I was used to in the other school was great. The students were having an assembly to celebrate "Architecture Day" after a year's special program called "Architecture in the Schools." Each class had a project and one group had built a plastic geodesic dome on the playground. "It was good for learning history, physics, and metrics," the principal told us, and the children got to know their neighborhood and city through the study of buildings.
Eric and Yurie also spent a day at the school. Instead of two non-black children out of more than 800, they were among blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics, representing over 30 nationalities. As we went around to the classrooms, I saw that all the students seemed eager to learn, and the teachers didn't have to yell to get their attention. I was especially struck by the spirit of mutual respect and cooperation among the children and by their self-confidence: Their world was good to them.
"This is what I want for my children," I thought, and wondered aloud why it had taken us three years to come to that school and make the decision.
As soon as I was away from the captivating sense of order and middle-class privilege and specialness, however, the strongest emotion I felt was anger--anger that the children on this side of town have to put up with the poverty of their lives and what is one of the least integrated school systems in this country. What chance do these children ever have of getting out of the ghetto, despite the dedicated teachers who battle year after year with the work of merely teaching them to read and write? No architecture or geodesic domes for them.
I fussed and fumed inwardly. Why do most of the people who work for the federal government send their children to private schools, or live in Maryland or Virginia, so as not to face or know what things are really like for the poor in this country? Why did we want to be more like them? Why did we want "something better" for Eric and Yurie?
My anger gradually turned to sorrow and compassion for the children and adults of our neighborhood. The contrast between two public schools opened my eyes and heart. In an instant the experience at the other school awakened in me a new understanding of what it means to be really poor: poor in possessions, poor in knowledge, poor in options for the future, poor in spirit. I felt that I had been walking around with closed eyes and heart for three years. I'd grown accustomed to a self-defensive posture which blocked my ability to see the poverty as clearly or feel the injustice as sharply as I did at first.
Coming back home after visiting the middle-class school helped me to feel and understand at a deeper level what it might mean for me and my family to live with the poor, to be poor, without the power of our intellect, knowledge, and experience, without the privilege of assuring our future. It's one thing to give up some of our material goods and comfort, and to live a simpler lifestyle by sharing our economic resources as a community. It would be another to continue the struggle for survival with the same sense of total powerlessness the poor have. I yearned for that powerlessness and identification with the poor that Jesus Christ had and that can only come to us now by the grace of God.
I am not yet brave or trusting enough of God to throw in our lot entirely with the poor and let our children be poor. I regret that access to privilege and the ability to get the most out of the system will get passed on to their generation. But I also know that I must travel that road to poverty first. I can only pray that when Eric and Yurie reach maturity God will use all their past experiences and sensitivities to lead them on a similar path.
In the meantime, they will venture out this month on public transportation to fifth and sixth grades, to learn a different culture--new to them and beautiful, too, in its diversity and promise of new growth for their spirits. As for me, I have felt the call to become more deeply involved in the life of the poor around me, and I too must respond in new ways.
Cathy Stentzel was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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