“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
PDF file of the whole collection
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Transformations, 19–27
I shudder to think what my life would have been like had I not gone through the experiences described below.
Learning to Listen
One Friday afternoon in February of 1981, a student came to my office to ask for an extension on an assignment due the following Monday because that morning she had been taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped—she had overdosed on prescription drugs to try to kill herself. I gave her a one-class period extension, but had no idea what to say, except for “Come back, if you’d like.”
That Sunday morning in church I asked a doctor friend what to say to someone who has just told you that they have tried to kill themselves.
He replied, “Listen.”
I stared at him with a blank face. I had no idea what he was talking about.
When the student came back, I listened, partly because my friend had told me to and partly because I didn’t know what to say. During the next few years, I listened to more students and to others whom I knew. After four or five years, droves of students were coming to see me in my office and to sit with me at lunch in the college’s cafeteria.
During those years, I learned three things:
• Other people have feelings.
• Those feelings matter to them.
• Listening to people is a way of loving them.
This story is the one I have told more often than any other, because it describes the most transformative experience of my life. It is the background for the next story, “A Conversion.”
A Conversion
It happened on the first Sunday afternoon in August of 1985. For several summers I had ridden my bicycle two or three times each summer to the south beach at Highland Park, about seven miles from our home in Deerfield, Illinois. I parked my bicycle at the bicycle rack, then strolled to the boulders at the south end of the beach. There I sat watching the waves splash against the boulders.
I formed a photographic image of a particular splash and said to myself, “God knows the precise location of all the water molecules in this splash.” Then I said, “God knows the location of all the water molecules in the immediate vicinity of this splash, and not only that, in the surrounding area as well, and in . . .”
Here I stopped. I could not take it in. It was all I could do to sit for a few more minutes in dumbfounded awe before getting up and returning to my bicycle. (As I was recounting this experience to a class once, one of the students exclaimed “Stop!” and put her head down onto her folded arms on her desk. I stopped.)
On this Sunday afternoon in August, Ron and Alison, two Trinity College students, were sitting on the beach. I sat with them for a bit. We tossed pebbles into a Styrofoam cup that stood on the sand between us. One of them that Alison had tossed hit my leg. We joked about the headline in the student newspaper—Student Hits Professor with Rock.
I got up and headed toward my boulders. There were waves, as usual, but it was not the splashes that captured my attention that day. It was my life as a philosopher.
I had been trained in American analytic philosophy, which prizes clarity, logic, and precision. It also prizes the fact that it deals with real philosophy—”hard” issues such as the mind-body problem, free will and determinism, language and reality. It considered “soft” matters, such as the meaning of life and the nature of love, beneath its purview. Only nonphilosophers or European philosophers dealt with these latter unphilosophical subjects.
For the past several years I had been reading the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, novels that probe the inner terrain of the human psyche. I had read and reread Blaise Pascal’s Pensées and did the same for Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions, the chapter in which he analyzes his resistance to God’s “austere mercy.” I had soaked in Soren Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.
I could not resist the power these books possessed. I could not help engaging in the searching inspections of my heart these books described so well. At the same time, I could not help but think that doing so was not true philosophy. A genuine philosopher, I believed, would leave these matters to others. I prided myself on doing true philosophy with its impersonal clarity and precision.
My pride broke as I sat watching the waves. “I will not regard these matters with disdain. I will not feel less of a philosopher because I think about them,” I thought. And when I do think about them, I will do so with clarity and precision. (That day I became an “analytic existentialist.”)
I sat for another quarter of an hour, then walked back to my bicycle, waving to Alison and Ron as I passed them.
You cannot sit on those boulders anymore. There is a Stay Off sign at them, which the lifeguards enforce. I know, because I sat on the boulders once after the sign appeared. And just as I did I was yelled at by a lifeguard up at the beach, who used a bullhorn to communicate his demand to leave. I left and have never returned.
Becoming a Kitchen Person
I am embarrassed to admit that when Linda and I married, in 1965, she did all the cooking, cleaning, dishwashing, making the bed, and laundry, while I took out the trash once a week.
My only defense is that cultural norms seeped into both of us so deeply that neither of us even thought to raise the question of how we would split household duties. Actually, it wasn’t quite so lopsided, as I cut the grass and did car things. Still, it was widely disproportionate.
About ten years later, Linda asked me whether I could do a supper once a week, start to finish. How could I say no? I chose Saturdays.
I must have been acting like an ignorant househusband at first, because one Saturday when Linda was in the living room and I was fumbling in the kitchen, I yelled to her, “Hey, Linda. How do you do such and such?” It probably was about some little thing, such as how much salt you put into something.
She yelled back, “Do it the way I did it.”
I was a bit miffed, because I didn’t get an answer to my question. So I yelled back, “How did you do it?”
She yelled, “I figured it out for myself.”
She nailed me.
That’s when I became a kitchen person.
But it didn’t stop there. In a patriarchal culture, it is husbands who drive the car and wives who sit in the passenger seat. That’s what we did for at least a couple of decades after we married. When we started sharing driving, though, it became a little annoying to ask who would drive each time we were going someplace together. So we decided I would drive on the way to wherever we were going and that she would drive on the way back.
At some point, I started doing the dishes Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. And later still, I did the laundry once a week and more cooking.
Although both of us had absorbed the norms of the patriarchal culture we had grown up in, we slowly shed those norms and by the early to mid 1980s regarded ourselves as convinced feminists.
Teaching PHIL 105 Race and Justice
I, a White college professor, had taught philosophy at Christian colleges for forty-five years before arriving at Wheaton College in 2013. Two years later, Wheaton, an evangelical Christian college in Illinois, changed its core requirements so that a single course could count for more than one category of required classes. “Ah!” I said to myself. “I will teach a course called Race and Justice for which students get credit both for the philosophy requirement and for the diversity in the United States requirement.”
Nothing, however, in what I had previously taught dealt directly with racial issues. Nor had I read anything about race, except for several slave narratives. I had, though, visited Black churches from time to time. And for some time I had regarded racial issues as important. So I was ripe for learning a good deal more about race.
I got the philosophy department’s approval and the faculty curriculum committee’s approval, then spent more than a year reading numerous books and articles on the subject. I read about the nature of race, the ethical underpinnings of racial equity, and “Whiteness.” I also watched a six-part television series on the history of African Americans, read more autobiographies and Frederick Douglass’s famous Fourth of July speech, given in 1852.
I never thought that the extensive reading I did for the course, plus actually teaching it a number of times, would change me. But it did, in numerous ways—ways that changed my conception of what it is like to be a person of color in the United States and ways involving my own self-conception.
1. I became much more aware of the overt ways in which many Black Americans had been discriminated against, including having fewer opportunities to buy houses in White neighborhoods, receiving disproportionately longer prison sentences, and being stopped by police officers more often.
2. I learned that the history of people of color in the U.S. had been ignored or distorted in history textbooks.
3. I came to realize that I had thoughtlessly assimilated a sense of White normality, which, I learned, is part of the concept of Whiteness.
4. I learned from Black and Brown authors that this sense of normality came through to them as a sense of White superiority.
5. The sense of White normality, I found, had a deeper dimension: it was central to my self-conception.
6. It also occurred to me that if I had thoughtlessly assimilated White normality and superiority, then by the same sociological and psychological process of socialization in which the ethos of a culture seeps into its young, other White people had as well, at least those who had been in predominantly White surroundings.
7. I read about institutional racism, but wondered at first what it meant for institutions to be racist above and beyond the racism of individuals. I figured out that institutional racism consists of injurious practices and policies that individuals in institutions act in accordance with.
8. I learned, too, that the federal government, plus state and local governments, had explicitly adopted racially injurious policies and practices in the early to mid twentieth century.
9. I learned that just because federal, state, and local governments later had passed laws to make racially injurious practices illegal did not mean that these practices would disappear.
10. Among implicit individual practices, I learned, are racial “microaggressions”—“the brief and everyday slights, insults, indignities and denigrating messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned White people who are unaware of the hidden messages being communicated,” to use the words of Columbia University psychologist Derald Wing Sue.
Altogether, these ten items made me realize that people of color had had very different life experiences from mine, so much so that it was as though we were living in two different Americas.
I was no longer the same person I had been several years earlier.
The six-part television series was titled, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, narrated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African American Studies at Harvard University. Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July speech is titled, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” The full speech is at http://masshumanities.org/files/programs/douglass/speech_complete.pdf.
The book that exhaustively describes racially injurious governmental laws and policies with regard to segregation is The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).
The article that describes racial microaggressions is “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” by Donald Wing Sue in Psychology Today (October 5, 2010). Available online.
This story is excerpted from pages 1–8 of my The Uneasy Conscience of a White Christian: Making Racial Equity a Priority (Wipf & Stock, 2021).
© 2024 by Cliff Williams