I live in Dallas, Texas, and I’ve never felt more pride in my city than I have this past summer. I live in an urban neighborhood less than three miles from downtown Dallas. On July 7, I sat on the couch with my husband and heard the helicopters circling downtown Dallas, when five police officers were killed and seven more were injured at a Black Lives Matter protest.
Just hours before that frightening, gut-wrenching night, I began writing a piece about race. I’m white, my husband is black, and we have three beautiful biracial children. It went something like this: I read articles and analyses about police treatment of black people, and watch shocking video footage, and cry, and get angry. And then I read the outpouring from friends, acquaintances, pundits, and politicians on social media until I feel numb. My thoughts can’t help but wander back to the earth-shattering reality that this could happen in my world, to someone in my family. So I walk away from the screen I was reading, and think about dinner, or laundry, or something mundane.
With a little distance from the onslaught of opinions and analyses about these events, I had a moment of clarity. The thing that strikes me most about these incidents is that perhaps, at root, they occur because of the fear of OTHER. It’s human nature to fear the unknown. Maybe we’re all just a little bit afraid of people who don’t look like us or don’t have experiences similar to ours.
And I reflect on how my husband and I happened to meet, and the choices we’ve made for the family we created together. We met in college, at a small school with a residential college system. Every student that matriculates at this university lives on campus their first year and is placed, at random, into a residential college. The residential colleges are the center of student social life. You eat, sleep, study, and party at your college. Most people live on campus three of their four years in college. My closest circle of friends looked like a Benetton ad. My freshman roommate was Jewish. I learned about Ramadan by watching friends fast for a month. And when I started dating a guy who lived down the hall who happened to be black, no one batted an eye.
The more years pass and the more I see and hear about other people’s college experiences, the more I realize how remarkable this was. I can’t speak for the entire student body, but I know every one of the large circle of friends I made is a better, more educated, and more open-minded person, for that experience. And without entirely realizing it, I can see that I’m trying to recreate this experience for my children, inasmuch as I can.
It takes effort. Studies show our children are attending ever more segregated schools, despite decades of policies designed to counter this. And many of us are living in ever more segregated neighborhoods. While many of Dallas’ magnet public schools are relatively integrated, Dallas’ neighborhood public schools tend to mirror the more homogeneous neighborhoods where they’re located. The inner-ring suburbs of Dallas have become more diverse, but I hear accounts of “white flight” to more far-flung outer suburbs.
We chose to live in an urban neighborhood for many reasons – proximity to our downtown jobs, a thriving arts district, great restaurants. But chief among the factors we considered was the relatively diverse population. We send our children to a neighborhood private school because it offers small class sizes and it has a relatively diverse student body. I feel pretty strongly about this. And I believe I would feel strongly about this whether my children were white, brown, or purple.
I know many decision points come into play when people make choices about where to live and where to send their children to school. There must be a thousand different ways to encourage your children to interact with people who are different from them. Church, sports teams, extracurricular activities, volunteer opportunities. I don’t mean to proselytize. What’s right for us may not be right for anyone else. But I have to think if you interact in a meaningful way with people who are different from you on a regular basis, you become a more empathetic, open-minded, and compassionate person. And maybe you question the snap judgments you might find yourself starting to make about someone else.
Dallas has experienced its fair share of racial tension and strife. But my city came together this summer, despite political, religious, and cultural differences. I’m thankful I live in a city that’s diverse. And I’m thankful for a neighborhood that embraces this diversity and a school that celebrates it. I have to think we’re all better for this.
About the author: Joanna McFarland Owusu is a freelance writer and researcher based in Dallas, Texas. A federal government analyst in a former life, Joanna now spends her days wrangling two little boys and a toddler daughter.
