It took guts to write 'White Girl?' - and it took guts to respond

by Terry Tazioli
Seattle Times Scene editor

The choice to run Lonnae O'Neal Parker's original piece was not a choice at all. There was no question in my mind. It was too good not to run.

I just wasn't sure how you, the people who read us, would respond.

I wasn't even sure, as I read the story for the first time, how I was responding, except to say I kept holding my breath and shaking my head in wonder. I'd never seen anything quite like this story on race in print, not in any newspaper I knew of, including my own. Nobody that upfront, that much of a stomach puncher who would let her name and picture be used. Kind of a Take That piece.

"My cousin calls herself white and I see a side of me just passing away. Swallowed up by the larger, more powerful fish in the mainstream. And I wonder if that will be the future for my family, some who look like Kim - others who look like me but have married white, or no doubt will. And I wonder, ultimately, if that will be the future for black people. Passing themselves right out of existence. Swearing it was an accident." - excerpt from "White Girl?" by Lonnae O'Neal Parker

She confronted me, and I don't like to be confronted. She talked bluntly about race and pointed her finger. I cringe, sometimes, from bluntness and often from finger pointing. And I really didn't want to be on the receiving end of some of things she talked about.

Took guts, I thought.

So when we ran O'Neal Parker's piece and you all started writing, I thought the same thing - took guts. I couldn't believe how many of you were willing to put it out there, and put your names on the things you'd written and let your pictures run in the newspaper.

Then came the follow-up stories from O'Neal Parker and her cousin Kim McClaren. And then came the guys from "Nightline."

And you know what? In all of this, nobody ever really asked me my reaction to the story, or to the response, to the follow-ups, or to the national attention. Or more to the point, nobody ever asked me about race.

I'm glad they didn't. It's just so easy not to go deep, to not look at my prejudices, to not have to talk about them. It's easier being the editor, the referee in all this, to not participate.

I have been well-schooled in talking across race. Been to lots of diversity workshops. Spent a week in Florida at one profoundly emotional training session. Belong to a clutch of folks who first met specifically to talk about race, and who still meet. I have had the fortune of working for years with people who aren't like me. Who don't look like me, who weren't raised the way I was, who didn't grow up in a community like mine. And if you knew me, you'd realize how much I'm not like them, in at least one pretty fundamental way. I'm gay, and I'm sure that's been an adjustment for some of them.

But I still don't know about race. We all have prejudices - we've just learned how to hide them - even from ourselves. It's like what O'Neal Parker said: Stop taking shortcuts or we're never going to get along.

I don't want to be that way, so here's what I ask myself, over and over again: Do I really like people who are different from me, whose skin is a different color? Do I have to? Should race even be on my radar as a measure of anything? Do I harbor deep-seated distrust? Am I afraid of the people I sit near and live next door to? Am I good enough?

I don't know that I am - or even what that means. I think I may never know.

What affects my life the most are the experiences I have every day. The experiences I choose to have, and the ones I'm thrust into by the people I work with, the people I live with and the situations I put myself smack in the middle of. That's how I grow, and that's how I get in touch with the race thing and what may or may not be stewing inside of me.

A friend of mine, in concluding an essay he wrote recently on prejudice, described how he'd fought for years to overcome a particular bias of his. He still hasn't completely overcome that bias, he'll tell you.

I know he talks a good line, and I know that he knows that. I also know how hard he's worked on the prejudice and how deeply that effort has affected him. But somewhere in his heart, the prejudice still lives.

It diminishes him, he wrote.

As my own prejudices diminish me.

Terry Tazioli's e-mail address is ttazioli@seattletimes.com.

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