cultural autobiography

David Vinson

Rehab 654 - Multicultural Counseling

Cultural Autobiography

Section 1

I don’t think I’ve ever been liked by anyone more than by my Granddaddy David. My two brothers and I were miracles to him. He delighted in us, like a child seeing a fish jump or a first firework. It’s not so much that he thought we were especially good or talented -- though he enjoyed praising and boasting about us; our mere existence simply amazed him, excited him, in a way that I’ve never felt with anyone else. Others have loved me as much and more, I’m grateful and fortunate to say, but he had an exceptional, electric affinity for his grandchildren. And before you object that this is nothing exceptional -- just the mysterious nature of grandparenty love (and you would be right!) -- I must say that I’ve been blessed to know many of my grandparents, and only Granddaddy David seemed to have this constant sense of astonishment, near disbelief, mixed into his care for us.

I say all this because Granddaddy David, David Monroe Blackburn, is my way into this discussion, a place to start and a touchstone along the way. He died only last August; the grief is raw for Grandmother Dot and Mom and his two surviving siblings. I’m still ready to hug him and clap his broadly sloping shoulders. And he represents a lot of my family history.

Blackburn, sounds like a pretty Anglo name, right? Unless I go far afield, most of my family names seem to lead to the British Isles: Vinson (an Anglicized version of a Norman name), Smith, Hallbrooks, Leonard, Bolling, Stewart, and so forth. David Blackburn was born in 1927, the eighth of 12 children, nine of whom survived into adulthood, in Limestone County, Alabama. By the time David was born, the Blackburn’s, like the Vinson’s, had been in Alabama for several generations, by way of Tennessee, part of the southwestern American invasion-migration. 

Reading Edward Baptist’s, The Half Has Never Been Told, was a very intimate experience. Baptist starts the book in Danville, VA -- where I was born and raised -- and tells of the forced march of thousands of enslaved African-Americans along trajectories I’ve driven many times; either through the mountains or dipping south of them into Alabama and other parts of what was then the “southwest.” As Edward Baptist describes it, this slave-driving, stolen-land, cotton-boom financial system first created the American economic behemoth we know. The Blackburn’s and Vinson’s were very much a part of this; both sides seem to have moved into Creek country during this period, with and without enslaved persons.

Of course little David, growing up in a sharecropping family during the Depression, didn’t know America had gotten rich on Black bodies, Native country, and cotton bolls. He just knew he loved horses and mules, wished he had more food and fewer beatings from his dad.

Like so many Southerners, my family’s most cherished stories are often pastoral, invoking “simpler” times on the farm when people were “poor but hard working.” Granddaddy David and his siblings running down the hill to jump into the creek after a hot day in the field. Grandmother Betty always having to pull hookworms out of Dad and Aunt Julie’s feet because they never wore shoes running through the pasture. Grandmother Dot and her twin sister Margie playing paper dolls under the kitchen table. Granddaddy Richard laid up with polio, spending the summer reading and watching rabbits through the window. As Tim Wise explained in “White Like Me,” the images and narrative of poverty from the first half of the 20th century are presented as mostly White, with honor and heroic pathos, a stark contrast to the mostly Black depictions of modern poverty, presented with judgment, pity, or fear.

While the Depression was hard on all my family, I’m sure, really only my Granddaddy David grew up dirt poor. Eventually his eldest brother was able to get a job with the electric company and save up enough money to help his dad finally buy some land. David and all his siblings would grow up, survive wars, get jobs, and enter the middle-class. Hurray! ‘And’ there is White privilege all over David’s story. Not ‘but.’ 

I think one reason many White folks are so resistant to exploring the privilege in their lives and family history is because they think it has to be ‘but.’ They think acknowledging the racist systems and behavior that privileged themselves or ancestors will completely discount their lives. Yes my Paw went from rags to riches, ‘but’ look at all his White privilege. Why can’t we say, ‘and?’ Getting out of the Depression and WW2 was difficult...and, because my family was White, they had a level of opportunity and socioeconomic access that folks of color did not have. My forebears who moved southwest were tough and resourceful, and they were racist abusers of Black and Brown people. If we love our ancestors we need to take them off of these Imperial-Roman pedestals and honestly see their good and evil.

Two of the key supports for Granddaddy David were the church and education. At some point, on both the Blackburn and Vinson sides, my family got dunked, full body, into the Baptist river. I’m not sure if any of my ancestors were born again before the Baptist’s lost their racially integrated and charismatic flavor. In any case, the Southern Baptist Convention and its internal crises have figured prominently in my family. Granddaddy David and my dad both went to Southern Seminary in Louisville and sided with the “moderate” faction in the “conservative take-over” during the late 80’s-early 90’s. My older brother and sister-in-law both went to the moderate Baptist Theological Seminary here in Richmond (where my dad taught for a while). My Vinson grandparents were faithful Sunday School teachers in their conservative SBC church.

Before heading to Southern in Louisville, David struggled through depression and starts and stops and self-doubt to graduate from Howard College in Birmingham; he considered this to be his greatest personal achievement. Education has been both enjoyment and employment for my family. My dad, mom, older brother, step-mom, two granddads and a grandmom have all worked in education at some point. Our family life for the past few generations has orbited the school and church. A “successful” life has been a one of learning and service.

In their marriage David and Dorothy (Dot) assumed fairly stereotypical gender roles. David studied and worked, did most of the outdoor work, while Dorothy worked and worked some more, and did most of the indoor work. The responsibility of caring for my mother, Joan, fell largely on Grandmother Dot, although David was very involved. On my dad’s side my Grandmother Betty achieved undergraduate and graduate degrees, and briefly taught, but after my dad and aunt were born she, too, found herself mostly working at home, caring for the kids, and finding ways to lead and serve at church. She told me once that her most fulfilling work was researching and writing several entries for an encyclopedia of Alabama as well as a history of her church. My mom and dad largely followed suit, with dad working more outside the house and mom inside, although they consciously attempted to share more in the domestic chores.

Sexually our family has presented, up until recently, in a hetero-normative, conservative Christian model. Chastity, monogamy, modesty, man and woman. Over the past 20 years things have really changed. My parents and my aunt and uncle have divorced. My dad is remarried and my aunt has a wonderful same-sex relationship. Granddaddy David, though he never officially endorsed same-sex marriage, seemed more comfortable with the idea in his later years.

I’ve taken more from Granddaddy David, via my mom, than just my name. Depression and headaches. Love of the earth and naps and memorizing Scripture. Like him, I am a cisgendered southern male WASP. None of us in the family who have chronic depression have identified it as a disability, but really it often functions that way - as an impairment to full participation in major life activities. Like him I identify as a Christian and strive to live a simple faith of gratitude and love. I’m not sure if he felt sexually attracted to women exclusively, as I do, but we connected a couple times about our struggle with lust and guilt. We both identify as politically liberal, at least relative to our southern WASPy contexts. I think his sense of Whiteness, developed in the Jim Crow era, had more definition than mine does. In both cases Whiteness is defined primarily by what it isn’t, but in his case this was more often overtly reinforced.

At one point in college I decided that whiteness was bunk and that I would no longer identify myself as such. I was only vaguely aware of the privilege involved in such a thought! Based on Helms’s White identity model, I’d say I’ve spent a lot of time toggling between disintegration and immersion-emersion. Is there any positive future for a classification system designed to oppress? Maybe not, but I’ve accepted whiteness as something to work with, out in front of me as much as possible, so that it’s not pulling all my strings, so to speak.

As for gender identity and sexual orientation, I have put in less time and effort toward developing awareness. Thankfully my parents never overtly pressured me to “be a man,” and they always spoke affirmingly of same-sex relationships. I’ve never been frustrated that I have to live up to some standard of manliness or heterosexuality. I realize that this is a great privilege. Of course, I’ve internalized so much from the examples of male-ness in my family and society. Men stay composed, don’t complain, deal with problems or threats, get angry rather than scared, defer to women in domestic matters, take out the trash and mow the grass.

As a heterosexual man I’ve never faced the slightest bit of discrimination based on my sexuality or sexual orientation. The only time I’ve ever felt the sense of being ‘othered’ in this regard came during a get-to-know you weekend for a study abroad program I did in college. We all stood in the middle of the room and the facilitator called out an identity adjective -- Religious, Optimistic, Biracial, etc. -- and if you identified with the descriptor then you were supposed to walk to the side of the room. Well, one of the words was ‘Straight,’ and I’ve never liked that word, because it seems to imply that if you’re Queer then you’re crooked or broken. Anyway, I didn’t walk to the side of the room, so a few of us were left in the middle as, presumably, Gay or Queer. We got some looks, and one guy seemed to be a little worried about bunking with me after that, but that was the extent of it.

Section 2

While my hometown -- Danville, VA -- was very segregated residentially by race and class, the districts were set up so that the schools were mostly integrated, and the school system as a whole is majority minority. My formative experiences of difference were primarily in school and sports, along racial and class lines. In my childhood world you were either White or Black, poor or middle-class. My immediate neighborhood was basically all white and middle-class to upper-middle-class, nestled between West Main and the train tracks. And, wouldn’t you know, on the other side of the tracks, sat a less affluent, more Black neighborhood. My parents, church, and school teachers all promoted a charitable approach to class difference and a tolerant approach to racial, cultural, and religious differences. There was a lot of good will to go around. But no one really championed a justice approach. I didn’t know until after I left for college that James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr. had come to Danville in response to police brutality; this was not taught in school. No one explained why the neighborhoods were segregated. The schools were well integrated, yes, but by the time kids got to high school, the advanced and AP classes were 80% White and middle-class. Racial and class differences seemed to be inevitable and unfortunate, best met with charity and polite tolerance.

My first vivid memories of racial awareness come from school. I remember standing with my kindergarten or first-grade classmate, Thomas, at the water fountain. I mentioned the fact that his name was Thomas, and that Thurman Thomas was the running back for the Buffalo Bills (my buddy’s family loved the Bills). Then, I realized that he was Black, just like Thurman Thomas was Black. I can’t remember if I said that outloud or not.

Another vivid memory is a birthday party from 2nd grade, I think, maybe 1992 or 1993. My classmate and friend, Brandon, had invited me to a pizza parlour-arcade. I was the only White kid among maybe a dozen kids or so. I really enjoyed myself and played with Brandon in the ball pit, trying to do flips off the side. But all during the party, from the moment I walked in, I had a weird feeling that I didn’t know what to do with. This White-Black business was a lot bigger and heavier than I knew. I felt danger in it. My mom later said that Brandon’s parents had been especially appreciative to her for bringing me. Ten years later or so, long after I had lost touch with Brandon, he recognized my mom while working at a restaurant. Looking back, I wonder if, had the roles been reversed, would Brandon and his parents have made as big an impression on me and my family. My hunch is no. Integration has so often been asymmetric, on White terms or in White arenas.

Almost thirty years later, now, this race and culture business is still bigger than I know. As with so many other subjects, the more you know, the more you don’t know. I joined a Black church in college, spent a semester in the Dominican Republic and saw racism against Haitians, lived in Turkey for a school year and met Turks, Kurds, Armenians, and Arabs, worked at a boarding school here in Virginia with kids from all over the world, and lived in an interracial semi-monastic community for six years. I’m so grateful for these awesome intercultural experiences, but I wouldn’t say I understand or could explain them. When I have specific questions about a cultural difference, I guess I follow Granddaddy David’s lead and pick up a book, looking to history and anthropology. But what about the Big picture, the why picture? Are cultural differences more than just the accidents of history and evolution? If anything, to me, they are a call to live life in its fullness; to praise God; to explore and appreciate, engage and argue; to stand in awe of such diverse beauty; to take a stand; to get it wrong; to stay open and grateful.