We walked through the park side by side. The gravel crunched beneath our feet and spreading live oaks speckled us with comfortable shade. We had walked this path many times, our laughter pealing over everything and nothing, our arms linked and feet falling in unison—the way teenage girls do.
This time, the warmth of sun eluded me. No laughter rang out and our arms hung by our sides. My heart was heavy.
My friend had just confronted me over something I’d said earlier that hurt her deeply. My words had been thoughtless, but what really hurt was the evident racism behind my words.
I was horrified. I’m not racist, I protested earnestly.
But I am white and she is black.
That alone was enough to silence me and make me listen. I stopped protesting and I told her I was deeply sorry. I had been thoughtless because I simply didn’t know.
Years have passed and today I’m only more aware of all I don’t know.
I have seen, but I have not known what to say.
If I speak up, I may offend.
What if my care appears ignorant or patronizing?
I choose silence over the risk of being misunderstood.
I haven’t known how to express my sorrow and my care because I do not know what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes.
But there is one thing I do know—what our black brothers and sisters have suffered over the years and what they still suffer is wrong.
Nothing I say is going to make it better, but I am convinced that silence is also wrong.
Little by little, it is dawning on me that no one needs me to say all the right things. What I have to say, in fact, is unimportant in the end.
I sat on an airplane beside the loveliest woman flying from Washington DC to New Orleans. She was far more genteel than I will ever be.
We struck up conversation and I began to have an inkling of the fascinating life she had lived; growing up in a large family in the south, longing to attend Howard University in the midst of the Civil Rights movement (but having to settle for university in Mississippi), and now living her dream teaching at Howard.
“Tell me more?” I asked hopefully. I love stories. Hers should be a movie.
The flight was not long enough. When we parted, she hugged me warmly with tears in her eyes and I didn’t want to let go.
I did not need to say the right things. I just needed to say, “Tell me more.”
And for a moment, I got to walk in her shoes.
I sat on bleachers at soccer practice.
Correction: I almost never sat. I mostly tried to keep my little ones from falling as they ran the length of the bleachers. Back and forth. For an hour.
I was disheveled and hot and scattered after a long day of mothering and teaching school.
On the bleachers, another woman sat serenely, wrapped in a beautiful head scarf. She did not speak to the other soccer moms. Did she speak English? I plucked up the courage to introduce myself.
She and her husband are from Iraq, she told me, and their families fled to the United States when Saddam Hussein terrorized her people.
“Tell me more?” I asked.
She told me her husband’s father is a general who is fighting ISIS bravely. He FaceTimes with her children (his grandchildren) daily. He longs to see them grow up, but he is needed where he is.
She pulled up photos on her phone and showed me her beautiful family—her mother and sisters, pictures of the family all gathered at the mountain home her father-in-law built (with 12 bedrooms because he wants his many children and grandchildren to visit often).
Her voice held a distant longing that made me ache with homesickness with her.
For a moment, I stood in her shoes.
This simple phrase, “Tell me more,” has proven to be a far better way to show I care than all the opinions or help I could offer.
In my marriage, in mothering, in friendship. There is so much I don’t know, but I want to know.
I will be misunderstood and I will make mistakes. But I can say “I’m sorry,” and I can keep learning.
If I truly want to know what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes, to feel what they feel, to hear the longing in their voice, I must listen.
Some of the books that have shaped me this year and brought more empathy and love (usually listening through my headphones as I cook and clean):
I know why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Unashamed by Lecrae
