every family has its maverick, the one who runs counter to
the herd, and I played that role in mind. I was the
one who left home and stayed away.
My journey. It was from an all black world to an all white
world in the South. But it's similar to the journey that a lot of
people take, say, the transplants to Florida who
come from New York or Chicago or Atlanta and think
this place is a little strange or the immigrants
they've got. One foot in the US and the other in South
America are the Caribbean, where friends and family
live and still were like a beautiful garden
with so many variations of this one human story.
But if only it was that easy, it's those differences
that end up spoiling. I'm
Kitty Oliver, and this is crossing cultures,
changing lives where we look a race and
ethnic issues from an unusual perspective in ways
you probably have not thought about them before. You
see, I'm a writer and an aural historian, and I've spent a
lot of years interviewing people about their race
relations, experiences and their ethnicity
and the ways that they have changed in the ways that society
has changed as well. And one of the things that always comes
up, for instance, is that there's no such thing as race.
We're all a part of the human race, but we
certainly have enough evidence that people don't often remember
that if you just see a pole or a
news report about some incident that has
occurred because of the color of someone's skin or
their cultural dress or their accent. And we're
reminded of just how deeply ingrained these
issues of prejudice are and how much we have to end up working to get
past them. People talk about the need to tear down
walls, but maybe there's more of a need to build bridges, and there
are people who are doing it in their own special way. We're gonna meet
some of them in this program, people who are confronting
differences in their everyday lives and they are going to
talk to us about change and how change occurs.
We've all changed in some way, haven't read. I'll bet
it's going to stir up a lot of memories. It will certainly provoke
dialogue, So come on this journey with me, we'll
go into the homes and lives of people who are confronting differences
in everyday way. And we're gonna go
behind, closed and locked doors and take a peek
inside to see how people are
crossing culture and changing lives. Come on.
Yeah, every journey has a
beginning. The family. That's where we learn about ourselves
and about others and how we should look at the world. But what if Mom and
Dad and Children look different from each other? What happens
when color is a family matter?
Yeah, most people, most people think she's our real
mom like, Yeah, I don't know, because we're kind
of light seeing it or not really dark I've ever seen. It
is like like an issue I've never
really seen. It is an issue. Well, maybe, except for that time at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Well, that's because we were Kentucky, Mom. We went to the original
Kentucky Fried Chicken coming years ago in the back woods of
Kentucky. And actually, that's the first time I really kind of felt
scared. Their father was black and their
mother's family is Hispanic,
although they said that she looked a lot like me.
She was shorter, she was built similar. She
had the similar colored hair. So much so that when I took
Colin, he was eight months old to meet Connor to pick to see
Connor for the first time. He ran across the room and yelled Mommy and gave me a big
hug. I was, um, going through the
classes to foster Parent and
I had gone to a picnic where they had Children who were available for
adoption, and they said that I
had seen avoid that I liked. And they told me No, I could not adopt him
because he was because I was white
and I explained to them his birth mother was white and his
father was black, which made me the same as she was. But they told me
that society did not recognize bi racial Children by results. I don't
consider black, and therefore the family had to people, Oddly enough, when
they were smaller, I found that a lot of the looks. I was very surprised
because a lot of the looks came from black
adults rather than white adults. I was kind of I thought it would be the other
way around. Scholars and theorists have spent a lot of time looking at this
issue in the larger complexities of human relations. When it comes
to dealing with differences, it is
concern. For some people, the concern might be
generated from the notion that the three
black child let's assume it's a child who's black, gets adopted
by a white family. The idea that that child would
not have access to their roots, their
ancestry, understanding their culture and suddenly
traditions. It's risky, obviously, because you're giving
up your comfort for something as that is sometimes unknown. And there's
nothing more devastating than rejection. Galen Griegos
observed her Southern born grandfather's prejudice and her mother stand
against it. Eventually, she and her husband would bring Japanese exchange
students into their home and turned to foster care. My husband and I had
this wonderful experience with the exchange
students and we knew we wanted to have Children. Of
course I have two older Children, Josh want Kylie and I
remarried and my husband, David, and I wanted to have
Children. We didn't need to go to another country. We became foster
parents and we took all the classes
and the adoption specialist we were finished said
I have two little girls that I think would be very well
placed in your home. They're both Haitian
and Irish. Beautiful combination, beautiful bi
racial Children And, uh, Carrie, Ann and
Kelsey, their entire biological family
on the maternal side, are all Irish,
European, American, Caucasian, Irish. I grew up in New
England. I grew up in Massachusetts is very homogenous society.
A lot of white people in the England, in my little town where I grew up was only a
town of about 10,000. Was very,
you know, everyone looked like me, but my mother made a photo album
for me. I think maybe when I turned 30 there's a picture of
Ah Young, maybe kind of 78 10 year old African
American girl standing next to me. And I'm about two years old,
and I asked her in the picture, What? Who is this? You know,
I don't know Who is this? Who is this person in the picture, you know, And she said, Oh,
there was opportunity in the sixties. They had
a You could foster child
from the inner city and bring them out to the suburbs of
Boston was where I grew up. My mother did that one summer.
We had that experience that I was too young to really remember all that. But
you know, it's stuck somewhere down the line that that stuck in my
mind that that was OK, and that was acceptable. There's not a large African American
population in New England. It's just not there, it's not there.
And, uh, you know, I really didn't come into
that world until I moved to Florida in
1987. I was 20 years old. If we take a look at
the history of the United States, we have a very fascinating movement along a
continuum that the experts actually call
dominance or techniques of dominance. And so
when two groups meet, there's usually a kind of a four
C contact. That is this contact, which is simply physical contact within
a particle geographic air that normally leads to
competition. And psychologists tell us that competition
always leads to conflict. But then came this beautiful
development off pluralism when all of the
group started to come in and they were not demanded to give up their
ways. And then we're now is a society forced into
tolerance. That is, we can co exist, but
tolerance is very limited. Tolerance
says. I will tolerate you. I'll put up with you beyond
Pluralism says I will deliberately go out of my way
to interact with you who are different for May because by so
doing, I enrich my own culture, my own values, my only of
life. I was taken by that philosophy and I was I
was won over by this
vision of this man. I feel as though he really,
really practiced what he preached, you know, because I was
studying the Bible. I was studying the gospel
when it came down to it. They said the greatest influence in his life was
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and that's where I was
at. And that's you know what it came to for me. So
the vision now the question you asked for my life is
toe make a part of that dream come true, you know, to
make that make that really, I think that the challenges will be
from within the girls other than without, you know,
their self esteem and how they see themselves on helping them to
accept themselves the way they are. You know, I've
said to me. You know, I tried it. I
explain it to him like this. Some people are vanilla, some
people are chocolate and some people have banal and shop
mixed together. And it's better than both. One alone
said I love it Now is a lot
family. How
you as a mom and as a dad,
You know, some of the little things that have been You wouldn't even think
about doing hair every day. We have a whole ritual around
doing hair and hair gets done every single day.
And I spent a lot of time, you know, making sure that their
hairs their well groomed And that's ah,
you know, that was something new to learn and that he's doing great on
that two way also are fostering
our son Peter, and hopefully very soon,
they the courts have said we can adopt him,
so it will be very interesting in our unique
family to see we don't know how all this is gonna work out.
We don't know. You know how it will shape them and their thoughts and their
attitudes in their lives. And
so we'll see. It's a wonderful journey, and we're enjoying it
very much.
The journey continues to often in creative
ways. Johnny Leibowitz uses the canvas and
Potter's wheel. When I'm at the canvas, I can just
feel the bristles move against the canvas, and it
just it feels so good. It's like a dialogue with the divine
source. I'm not quite sure where the paintbrush might go.
I'm not right sure how the Clay's gonna fold,
But it to me it's a dialogue with the divine source that
guides me on what happens next. It's a story that unfolds,
and about a year and 1/2 ago I had a dream.
And rather than just show painting and sculptures, the dream
guided me to do something that would
give people who come into that environment
a gift that they can leave with. So I
utilized my background in Kabbalah,
which is mystical Judaism and the mysticism in general,
and I created four environments, four
rooms through which people will walk. Exhibit itself
is entitled be the Miracle, but a capitalistic journey to
the south. Kabbalah is not just Jewish, it speaks of
universal truths and
moving through this environment. I
decided that I wanted to reach out not only to Jewish people
and not only toe white people, and not only to American people. But
I wanted to reach out to people off all backgrounds, faiths,
cultures, nationalities. And so when the
first room has to do with the world of action. And when you walk
in your seat tones large tongues on the floor,
each tongue has a different language engraved on it there, 21
different languages. And that in
itself was a wonderful project because I called someone from Nova
Southeastern University to help me in the translations,
and as a result, she got so many other
people involved in the project that were excited. They were excited
to look up that one verse
guard my tongue from speaking evil, my lips from
deceit in there, each one in their own language and then
send them into me. And it was I
engraved symbols
that I didn't I never was aware of Chinese, Japanese,
Korean and to me as I
was doing it, it felt like I was touching the people
of each language source and saying,
You know, if we could speak positive, the world would be a better
place. The next room is a room where you'll have.
It's like small sculptures that are
indicative of embraces. And so it's like a village
of hugs and that deals with being open and loving
to that which is different. You know what's easy to love
someone that that's like you. But how about someone that it's
so different from you without judging? So where
does this come from In terms of your awareness of
differences? Because, obviously,
I think some of us are born with a big D on
our far heads, and it stands for not only divine, but it
stands for different. And I
felt like many people, probably most people, because we're
all individuals. I don't think anyone is a carbon copy of another,
but I feel very different. I felt that I had a different
vision when I was growing up by you
know, where people may have been reciting
pros. I was singing songs where people may have
seen, you know,
books. I was written language. I was seeing
pictures. I'm a woman and I'm a rabbi
so automatically that separated me from very traditional people
within Judaism. I was a
young girl and I was an artist that separated me
from people, you know, a certain segment
of the community in which I grew up, so it's not looking for our
commonalities. That's easy. It's really
being able to go beyond that and look
and understand our differences and be able to
choose the language, the right words
so that each one of us can speak with a true
understanding of the other. I think we need to understand each other in order to
reach peace, and then we'll stop terrorizing each other because terrorists
come from fear. And when we understand we
stop being afraid now it's important to feel safe with each other
and that we're not gonna hurt each other in the installation. Be the
miracle, she says. She looks at ways we are pulled off
balance, scratched and Thorne, and yet we remain
standing in the fire. Either we are consumed
or we ride.
Yvonne Oldham and Paul Adams came through the fire of the
early desegregation days in the 19 sixties in Delray
Beach. Their paths have not crossed again until now
as they share memories and search for a bridge across
racial line.
And I remember at the end of the day, I asked if she wanted to share my locker,
which she did. They had instructed me
that they were not gonna put me in a P e class. And
those of you know me. I'm very athletic. And
that kind of devastated me. And I did tolerated for one semester.
But like I said, I think that adults feel things
that just didn't take place. I don't remember
Paula by name, but I do remember the
young lady who escorted me around. I remember it
because it had been a huge, huge
event for Yvonne for Delray
Beach for high school. Certainly I was just part of it.
I remember it because I'm embarrassed
to think that it didn't mean more to me than it did
that, that I was nothing more than a tour guide in my mind. It should have been much
more special to me. It waas, but
I think back then, seems like 1000 years ago we were
socially unconscious. I'm really intrigued with
talking to people of this generation, you know, of our
generation, because we lived through so many changes
and I think like he was saying follow, sometimes not even being
aware of it or aware of the impact of it.
I'm just wondering, you know, when you look back on it now, can you believe how much we've gone through?
I sure can. But the one thing that you know, the older you get,
you realize that you didn't do something really good.
But I've thought about it. It's what you have
inside that matters. And I think you, Paul, all of
us hand it, whatever it is to be
able to do that for her to raise her hand and
say, Well, I'll escort her I have no idea what it
is for me. I would like to find out in this lifetime
because I have found myself in situations that
indicates to me that there's some I'm is white is a day is long
looking. My main aim was
my granddaughter called me Whitey
my hair because of my maiden name whenever. But I
have always been extremely at ease and
comfortable with
black people there, say it that
way were led to
believe that what white people did was the right thing. They
always they didn't write in their book.
They didn't cook class. They made all A's
yes, that that's what we were brainwashed
because we had to do everything
better. Well, shop. So when I
went over there, that's the life long lesson I turned. And I've been
spending my life to get African Americans understand
what they have is again. And I remember some tails. We could tell
tales a group of white girls would. We were sitting
around outside in a speech class, and they were
always curious for the not black Fels, tan
or peeled. And
ironically, no, we have been outside in the sun and my
nose. Well, I
thought I was going around showing the girl That's a C C C. So
you know, these are little things. Wear tails. And then,
of course, when you know I was able to take a shower in the locker room,
you know, way.
Why is it so difficult for white people to
talk about this? Or do you feel like it's not something you're
supposed to talk? But I can say race still matters.
It still matters in 2007 and what I'm hoping
to, you know, that that's why it's so great being able to talk
with you is that the more we talk about it, not
trying to solve it or not just talking about it in
terms of our experience, because your experience, it's
probably different from your husband's experience and people
was difference. Like my husband, he's not a
racist. I don't mean to imply that all but some friends of
mine Maybe you just haven't who wouldn't go to the concert
with They were sitting here. They might be just
shocked. You know, we have made games, but
my pain lose back to the fact that
our kids, when I say I kids, African American kids
seem like they've taken a step back. We're not
achieving the high standards that we want them to write, that
they accepted mediocrity. And
when we fought, the fight was for
excellence, right, for better education. And that's not what
we, you know, have. And in turn, white people see
that and say, Well, what can you expect? Yeah,
not my Yeah, yeah,
I see it as a
competition. You know, I'm getting a job that,
you know, I could have had, you know, because this black
person now you're gonna have that, you know? Yeah, competition. That there's a
lot to be said for that, right? Because if you look at people as being inferior,
being lower than that justifies your prejudices. But if you look
at him as being more equal than their competitive with you,
and then that's another problem altogether, too. So and
I think we're very complex with human beings. This is what I say
because it isn't just about race. I mean, it's about
differences, whatever it is and how we deal with
differences in how we come to terms with what our own,
Um, sense of other people is
what our sense of ourselves be. And yet people
do change back. Yes, I mean, look at where we came from when we were in
high school
way,
so I'll ask the question again. Then you figure your Mavericks, in
a way, I'll let other people decide.
But I wasn't afraid. I just want to make sure I didn't
feel fear. I did not feel you.
Even though I did had something, I am main calls. There were
those words I could hear occasionally. It wasn't
blamed, but it was subtle, but I just let it,
you know, I didn't respond or react to,
so that was it.
and you to be or you You
remember. I don't see myself that way, but I know
that many of my acquaintance
that for various reasons I don't It's not an
issue for discussion. It just isn't talked about. But I know
that you little straight a little strange. Okay, with
that, I couldn't. I was at the
University of Florida living in that dormitory for
the 1st 2 years where I had to learn about people who were different. I
remember this young lady sharing trying to show me
how Teoh shave my legs. You have. You
know, I had no here on my life. And if you had here on,
you would consider beautiful. You know that you
trained your
way.
Girl, girl girl. It was It was
considered exactly
way
today. No, I mean because the boy loved it.
I'm so glad you stopped by. Join me again for another
episode of crossing cultures. Changing lives will meet some
new people who are embarking on this
wonderful journey of learning to live with differences across
racial and ethnic lines. So until I
see you again, you keep sharing your stories too.
Hi.