Diversity at Work

PERSONAL ESSAYS AND COVERING RACE

By Aly Colón Butch Ward's letter to his daughter shows the value of journalists writing personal essays. Such reflective writing helps internalize and understand the nuances, complexity and emotional elements surrounding racial issues. As journalists, we often approach coverage of race from an intellectual, sociological or demographic vantage point. We keep our distance. We avoid the subjective. That approach offers one means for understanding race.  The personal essay, pioneered at Poynter by Chip Scanlan, was adopted by seminars about race and untold stories as a tool for understanding differences better. The personal essay enables journalists to drill deeper. Understand those they write about better. Write more comprehensively. And begin the act of reporting and writing in a place we often ignore: ourselves. If we don't understand where we're coming from, how can we understand where our subjects are? Interested in diversity? Check out our diversity seminars. Sign up to receive Journalism with a Difference by e-mail: * Click here (sent Tuesdays)

Earlier this fall, I participated for the first time in a Poynter seminar entitled "Writing About Race." My teaching role in the seminar was a small one; for most of the week, I sat at a table with 17 journalists and talked, debated, laughed and cried about issues that, quite literally, go to the heart of who we are. They gave me reasons and courage to confront questions that I often find it easier to avoid; I know that many of them also confronted some of their own difficult questions.

At week's end, all of us wrote personal essays and shared them with the group. For an entire morning, we listened to stories about family secrets, anger, heartbreak, injustice, reconciliation and hope.

This is my essay. It is a letter to my daughter, Caitlin. She told me she thought I should publish it because someone might benefit from reading it.

September 23, 2005

Dear Caitlin,

I think we need to talk.

Actually, I think I need to talk, because this week I've realized that for all that we have shared during our 19 years together -- the hundreds of afternoons on the soccer field, the nights on the computer doing research papers, the hours of telephone conversations since you went away to college -- we haven't talked very much about what we don't share.

We haven't talked much about race, Cait. Your race. My race. You've become so much of my life that I almost never think about the fact that we're different. But we are -- and I need to talk with you about what difference that makes.

It's been 20 years now, but I still remember the meetings with case workers from Catholic Social Services, and their questions about why your Mom and I wanted to adopt a baby from Korea. And I remember saying that we simply wanted to adopt a child, that we were not worried about creating an interracial family, and that I even wanted to believe that families like ours might help other people get over their hang-ups about racial differences.

Today I realize that my answer overlooked someone important, Cait. It overlooked you.

I wanted to adopt a child; I wasn't worried about our differences; I hoped other people could change.

But what about you? What do you want, Caitlin? What do you need?

Talk with me.

* * *

You were too young to remember the lady in the Italian Bakery.

You and I were on one of our mid-week excursions to South Philadelphia, to wander though the vegetable stalls, buy some fresh pasta and share a bag of cheese fries. One of the guys in The Philadelphia Inquirer composing room had told me about a bakery on Federal Street that sold great Italian bread. And so, we made that our last stop. You were old enough to walk, about 18 months old, but I was carrying you as we walked into the empty store and took that first, cholesterol-packed, deep breath.

With no customers inside, nothing obscured our view of the éclairs and pastries and piles of Italian cookies displayed under the glass counters. But only a moment passed before a woman emerged from a back room to greet us. She was older, her gray hair pulled tightly back into a bun, and just tall enough to preside over her store from behind those glass counters.

While I don't remember her greeting, I do recall that she walked right up to us and her eyes went directly to you.

Then to me.

Then to you again.

And back to me.

"She looks like her mother," she said.

"She looks like her father, too," I smiled, and before the woman had a chance to ask what I meant, I added: "She's adopted."

"Oh, that's wonderful," the woman said -- probably in an attempt to repair any possible damage to our budding business relationship. You didn't seem troubled by the exchange, Cait, especially when the woman disappeared behind the glass display case and returned with a chocolate cookie. You wore it home.

Photo by Bill Cramer/Courtesy of Butch Ward

For years, I have told that story and people usually laugh in the way we do about the embarrassing little moments of life. Maybe that's how it should be. Today, though, it is a story that reminds me that you and I are different, Cait, and that people notice. They notice and they make assumptions. And they act upon those assumptions in all kind of ways -- some good, some benign, some hurtful.

In the part of southwest Baltimore where I grew up, Cait, white people lived south of Frederick Avenue and black people lived north of it, just as they had since your grandmother was a little girl. Some black children crossed Frederick Avenue and came into our neighborhood to attend the public elementary school; and after a shopping center opened, running south from Frederick Avenue into our neighborhood, blacks and whites shopped side by side in the Murphy's Five and Dime, stood in the same check-out lines at the A&P, and ate at the same lunch counter in the White Coffee Pot. At my first job, while I was in high school, I sold clothes -- double-breasted suits, pastel-colored shirts and wide, patterned ties -- to black men and white men at Dudley's Father & Son.

All of the interaction, however, did little to change the essence of black-white relationships; it certainly did not change many people's assumptions about each other. And after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on that Thursday night in 1968, we watched the black smoke rise for three days in the skies north of Frederick Avenue.

Thinking back, Cait, I can remember pretty vividly how I felt during the years when newspaper headlines and TV images evolved from freedom marches in the South to the thousands gathered on a Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial to the raised black fists of two athletes standing defiantly on an Olympic stage. I was in high school during the mid-1960s, Cait, and I remember feeling that the fight for equal rights was a righteous one, that all people should have the same rights and privileges that I had. I got goose bumps listening to Dr. King as his voice soared and dipped and soared again, and, at least figuratively, I believed I was walking arm-in-arm with Black America.

But as the months and years passed, I remember feeling increasingly confused and disappointed as the black voices grew more militant. Not only were they attacking those whites who were denying them the vote, denying them jobs, denying them access to entire neighborhoods, I heard their anger turn on all white people, including me.

How could blacks be angry with me?

Early one morning, I walked up to Frederick Avenue to catch the Number 8 bus that goes downtown. Standing outside a neighborhood tavern, across the street from another endless row of Baltimore brick row houses, I saw an older black man walking toward me. He was limping a little, head down, maybe mumbling to himself. When I saw that his path was likely to bump me, I edged a bit to my right and offered a quick, "How're you doing?"

He spit his reply. It landed at my feet.

As the man passed, never breaking stride, I shrunk. The stares of all of those brick row houses across the street, all of those houses north of Frederick Avenue, were fixed on me as I waited on the bus stop. They were angry with me.

* * *

This week, Cait, I think I remembered something that time and my insecurities had obscured: There is a difference between empathy and shared experience.

As much as I love you, I can never share your experience of being Asian. And as much as you love me, you will never share my experience of being white.

Before this week, I realize, that reality scared me. It dissuaded me from talking with you about our differences, because I saw it as something that separates us -- and I don't want anything to come between us.

At times this week, I thought the fact that I will never share the experience of being Black or Asian or Latino or Native stood like a great canyon between me and the people of color in my life. And I began to worry that maybe the canyon could exist one day between you and me, too.

Today, I'm not worried so much anymore.

Today, I've stopped running from the differences I cannot change.

Today, I want to embrace them. I want to learn as much as I can about your experience of being Asian -- not in order to share it, because I simply cannot do that -- but to better understand it, in the hope that I might better understand you.

You, the daughter I love so much.

I know there are those who will continue to see my inability to share their experience as a reason to distrust me, to keep me at a distance, to remain angry with me. So be it. I will try not to feed their anger.

But I have so much I want to know about you, Cait.

I want to hear about what it's been like to grow up Asian in a white culture, with white parents and a white brother, going to a largely white school, playing on white sports teams, worshipping in a white church, pledging a white sorority.

I want to hear about the moments when your Korean heritage makes you feel proud; about the times when your difference makes you feel special.

I want to hear whether you ever feel compelled to deny an important part of yourself.

I want to hear how you are, Caitlin Kim; who you are, Kim Young Ok.

I cannot share your experience, Caitlin, but I can try to understand it and to empathize. We cannot walk the same journey, but the more I understand you, the closer I can walk alongside you, arm-in-arm, trying to be the father you need me to be.

Talk to me, daughter. I love you very much.

Dad