Under Our Skin: Getting Real about Race--and Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations That Divide Us
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Under Our Skin: Getting Real about Race--and Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations That Divide Us
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Overview
An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day. Now, in Under Our Skin, Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a husband and father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496413291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tyndale House Publishers |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2015 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
JD Jackson is a theater professor, aspiring stage director, and award-winning audiobook narrator. A classically trained actor, his television and film credits include roles on House, ER, and Law & Order. JD was named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of the Year for 2012 and 2013.
Read an Excerpt
Under Our Skin
Getting Real about Race â" and Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations that Divide Us
By Benjamin Watson, Ken Petersen, Dave Lindstedt
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2015 Benjamin WatsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4964-1329-1
CHAPTER 1
ANGRY
I'M ANGRY because the stories of injustice that have been passed down for generations seem to be continuing before our very eyes.
Every year, my parents took us kids to see our grandfather in Washington, DC.
I always loved going to visit Pop Pop, who was my mother's father. He lived on the eleventh floor of a high-rise apartment building near the Watergate Hotel, and we'd walk out onto his balcony to see the lights and sights of the nation's capital. To the right, we could see the Kennedy Center. Straight ahead was the Potomac River. And if we looked left, we had a clear view across the plaza of the Washington Monument. To me, even as a kid, it was breathtakingly beautiful — a solitary spire connecting earth to heaven. Every time we visited, I couldn't wait to gaze on it once again.
Pop Pop's place was filled with what I call old-people trinkets — knickknacks, figurines, little statues, and all sorts of souvenirs — that Pop Pop had picked up here and there throughout his life. For us kids, these constituted a kind of toy store: rows of interesting objects that we could take down, play with on the rug in the living room, and use to create worlds and armies and stories about the lives of make-believe people. Hours of fun. I'm not sure whether we ever realized to what extent these "toys" represented real memories of the years through which Pop Pop had actually lived.
My grandfather was born in 1920. His grandfather was born in 1860, at the beginning of the Civil War, into an America where slavery had yet to be abolished. And so, as I have sometimes thought about it, I dodged slavery by just five generations.
To some, that's a long time. Then again, it really wasn't that long ago. Pop Pop lived right in the middle of that not-such-a-long-time between slavery and me.
He grew up in Culpeper, Virginia — only seventy miles from DC, but light-years away in terms of racial attitudes. The limitations that were placed on blacks didn't set well with him, even when he was a young boy. Like many kids, he was just a bit rebellious, but a lot of white people might have called him a delinquent. One hot summer, at the age of thirteen, he decided to jump into the public swimming pool, which of course was designated as whites-only. He went ahead and swam in it anyway. Later, his father got a call from the authorities, who demanded that the family pay for the cost of draining the pool and refilling it with "pure" water.
Before my grandfather reached his midteens, he moved from Culpeper to DC. His parents didn't believe he'd live to see his twenties if they stayed in Culpeper, where, on Saturday nights, Pop Pop was able to see burning crosses in the distance — white people "having fun" on the weekend with their own brand of terrorism.
A full six decades after the abolition of slavery, Pop Pop's world still had separate toilets and drinking fountains for blacks and whites, a distinction validated by the "separate but equal" standard approved by the US Supreme Court in 1896 in its landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision. And as Pop Pop became an adult, he faced limitations in the working world as well. He often told me that I could do whatever I set my mind on doing. "But," he cautioned, "understand that because you're black, there's always a ceiling. You can go only so far up the totem pole."
He ran into that ceiling often enough in his life, I think, but he didn't seem to let it stop him. He served his country for several years in the army, and though he never was sent overseas, he put in his time as a supply officer and was honorably discharged. Later, he got a job as a pressman in the Government Printing Office, which became his main employment for much of his life until he retired in 1976. He also maintained a side job as a bartender, working at an officer's club in town and catering various events.
Pop Pop took pride in himself. He was five foot seven, slender, and always well dressed. He wore a handsome Kangol hat, which was a variation on a beret but with a wider brim. I think people back then dressed better than we do today, but Pop Pop especially cared about his appearance. That went for his apartment, too. He kept it meticulously clean — to this day, when I smell Listerine I think of the antiseptic smell of his place — and he maintained everything in neat order, with all his old-people trinkets lined up and in their places. It was as if he had a plan for his life, was living it out, and was tracking his progress on the shelves in his apartment.
He was popular. I remember him always knowing a lot of people while I was growing up. He was very social. Many people along the street would acknowledge him by name as he walked by. He had lived in Washington most of his life and had accumulated friends for a long time. People — black and white — loved him.
For all the social limitations faced by a black man in the 1940s and '50s, Pop Pop had made a good life for himself. If there was a ceiling for a black person, so be it; Pop Pop seemed intent on making sure his life filled as much of the space under that ceiling as it possibly could.
Pop Pop had several passions. One was golf. He loved playing the game. Some of the little statues he kept at home were of golfers positioned in various stages of their swing. He also had golf balls lying around his place. As a kid, I thought about taking one of his Champion golf balls, going out onto the balcony, and throwing it as far as I could toward the Washington Monument. Later in life, Pop Pop gave me a set of golf clubs, hoping perhaps that I'd become a golfer like him. But it never took. I pursued this other thing instead — football.
Pop Pop's second passion was Cadillacs. Black people weren't supposed to be able to afford one, and that may have been the source of his passion. He owned a forest-green Caddy and was extremely proud of it. He had a lead foot and always drove fast — because he could in that thing. He would take us to Safeway, and it was so much fun to sit in the back seat of the Caddy (without seatbelts) and slide back and forth while he drove fast and took hard turns. Dangerous, maybe, but loads of fun. And we all survived, with glee, what was otherwise just a simple trip to the grocery store.
Finally, Pop Pop had one other passion: dental floss.
When he turned fifty, Pop Pop got braces. It certainly wasn't pleasant for him, coming so late in his life, but after the braces were taken off, he developed a new appreciation for good teeth. Part of his daily tooth-care obsession involved the near-constant use of dental floss. He was always flossing.
Sometimes he actually fell asleep with floss still in his mouth. When he'd nod off like that, sometimes there would be a single string of floss hanging out over his lip and down to his chin.
When my sister, Jessica, and I saw him asleep like this, we'd giggle. Sometimes, we'd quietly walk up to him and get really close to his face, and one of us would carefully put a finger close to his mouth to touch the hanging strand of floss. It would move, and we'd stop, trying not to laugh and hoping it wouldn't wake him up. It wouldn't, and we'd get bolder, actually taking the hanging strand of floss between our fingers and starting to pull it. We always thought that maybe sometime we could slowly pull the whole strand of floss out of his mouth without waking him up. But we never went that far, always chickening out at the last minute.
Even today when I think of Pop Pop, I smile a lot, and I laugh at some of the memories.
But I remember other things as well. He didn't often reveal it to me because I was just a kid, but he was angry about the racism he'd encountered as a child, as a young man, and as a proud black man in the prime of his life. He didn't usually express his social activism to me, but he would talk to my mom and other adults in the family. I think I could sense it, though, around the edges of his smile, his playfulness with us kids, and his immense joy in the simple passions of life. There was hurt and anger there.
It makes me wonder.
I wonder about this dapper man in a Kangol hat who made a lot out of himself despite the limits society imposed on him. I wonder why he so often said to me, "When you're black, there's always a ceiling." Was it because he knew he was living a life destined for limitations and he was just making the most of it?
When he said, "You can go only so far up the totem pole," were his words a challenge to me, or were they a warning? Did he want me to know that even today I don't have the same opportunities as white people? Or was he calling me to step up and overcome the obstacles, just as he had?
Isn't that the real dilemma of the race problem?
What was the message of Pop Pop's life? Was it all of the above?
I wonder.
And I wonder why the Washington Monument seems to stretch only halfway up for black people. Why is it that, even today, in the United States of America, we as a race are so often kept from touching the sky?
* * *
I'm angry because white people don't get it.
I'm angry because black people don't get it, either.
And now that I've ticked off everyone equally, let me say my piece.
Five generations and 150 years have passed since the abolition of slavery.
You'd think that after all this time we'd have reached real parity between the races, that there would be truly equal opportunity, and that we'd be seeing and experiencing fairness in society between blacks and whites.
A lot of white people believe that's actually where we are. A lot of black people know we aren't.
Certainly by the time of Pop Pop's life — smack dab in the middle between slavery and the present — you'd think there would have been a lot of social progress, a shaking out of the issues and biases, and a lessening of racial conflicts. If you pinpointed a specific year of his adult life — let's say when he was thirty-five, some ninety years after the abolition of slavery — you'd think we as a nation would have reached some level of equality and social fairness between blacks and whites.
But Pop Pop's thirty-fifth birthday was September 24, 1955. Rosa Parks had not yet refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That wouldn't happen for another two months. Ninety years after slavery, blacks were still segregated from whites. They still had separate drinking fountains, separate restrooms, separate neighborhoods, and separate schools. They still were expected to sit at the back of the bus.
Ninety years is a long time. And yet not such a long time.
And here's what many people don't really understand.
Though the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the post–Civil War union, it really didn't end it. A new era of slavery — or as Douglas Blackmon so poignantly describes it, an "age of neoslavery" — had begun. This became an age of human trafficking, forced labor, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the ever- present terror of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
This was not freedom.
Rather than milk and honey, the Promised Land for many black Americans was filled with more blood, more tears, and more repression. And so, ninety years after abolition, Rosa Parks was still required to sit in the back of the bus.
Much of my anger arises from the largely untold stories of men and women who faced a legal system that arrested, tried, and sentenced them for crimes they did not commit (if they were fortunate enough to even have a trial). I come to a slow boil when I watch documentaries or read memoirs about these post-slavery generations whose lives have been largely disregarded in history books.
There's a feeling in white America that everything is equal now. But black people know in their bones that there's still a residue of neoslavery that sticks to so much of life.
Yes, today, 150 years after slavery, it's true that we're not as segregated as black people were in Pop Pop's day. But perhaps I should say "not segregated in the same way."
Black people still are limited by the quality of schools they're able to attend. Black people are often grouped into segregated voting districts. A disproportionate number of black people are rotting away in prison, its own form of segregation.
"Twenty-first-century segregation exists overtly in our school systems, communities, and prisons," writes Reniqua Allen in The Guardian. "It also permeates our society in ways we don't even realize."
Many today might agree that a lot of official segregation has been eliminated (though some would quarrel even with that), but certainly segregation is still here, embedded in social systems, cultural biases, and prejudice. In an article in The Atlantic titled, "Is Racial Segregation Legal, If It's Not Deliberate?" Garrett Epps writes, "The sunny, 'look how far we've come' view seems particularly hard to justify in housing. Anyone who can look at American cities — their housing patterns, their employment figures, or their police policies — and see a new dawn of color blindness is wearing glasses unavailable to me."
And then there's church. The church, I believe, has the greatest opportunity to effect change in our communities. Yet it remains the most segregated institution in America. Christianity Today reported in January 2015 that "Sunday morning remains one of the most segregated hours in American life, with more than 8 in 10 congregations made up of one predominant racial group." I'm angry that so many still try to argue against the truth of these basic facts.
Some say that blacks themselves choose some forms of segregation, preferring to live and worship among themselves in their own communities and their own churches. Some of that may be true, though research indicates that black people are much more inclined toward diversity than white people are. Whatever the case, the point is unchanged.
We're still segregated.
Some say that there is a disproportionate incarceration rate for blacks because blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites. It's hard not to interpret that assumption as inherently racist, but either way we still must account for the fact that there are six times as many black people incarcerated as white people. Really? You mean there's nothing in that number to even remotely suggest that blacks are disproportionately targeted and arrested?
But again, regardless of the argument, we're still segregated.
Not many people would suggest that education isn't a serious problem; however, some have argued that it's such a complex problem that nothing can be done about it. I agree that it's complex, but many also say that nothing ought to be done — that it's a "poverty problem," a "money problem," or a "ghetto problem," and that any effort to change the status quo would disadvantage people who are wealthier.
And while people argue, we're still segregated.
I'm also angry that this has become about one side or the other winning an argument. Therein lies another hidden attitude toward the race problem. Why is this about winning and losing? Doesn't anyone else see that we're all losing?
Why don't we get it? Why can't we grasp the truth that, by separating ourselves as whites and blacks, we are so much less likely to understand one another, show compassion, and prevent violence?
Why can't we get past the talking points of the debate and see clearly the young boy who was shot, the mother who tragically lost her son, and the confusion and fear of the cops involved — some of whom, too, were black?
Why can't we drop the posturing, the media skirmishes, and the shouting arguments and do something about this? If not for our own sake, then at least for our kids'?
A hundred and fifty years is a long time — and yet, apparently, not such a long time.
* * *
Then there's the quiet echo of Pop Pop's life.
His life says, "Make the most of what you have."
It says, "Be proud of who you are."
It says, "Don't let the obstacles and injustice and unfairness limit you. Overcome them."
Well, I'm angry because too many young people — black and white — live down to the lower expectations people have of them.
I'm angry because systemic prejudice and bias, though just as real in our time as in Pop Pop's time, have become crutches for young people today and excuses for underachieving.
I'm angry because the brooding hate that paces the streets of a small town is a cowardice that leads nowhere. It's cowardly because you can do better, achieve more, and rise above, but you're afraid to try. It leads nowhere, because it never accomplishes anything — it doesn't lead to pride or respect or opportunity. It just leads to destruction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Under Our Skin by Benjamin Watson, Ken Petersen, Dave Lindstedt. Copyright © 2015 Benjamin Watson. Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction, xi,1. Angry, 1,
2. Introspective, 23,
3. Embarrassed, 47,
4. Frustrated, 67,
5. Fearful and Confused, 85,
6. Sad and Sympathetic, 111,
7. Offended, 133,
8. Hopeless, 153,
9. Hopeful, 169,
10. Encouraged, 185,
11. Empowered, 195,
Acknowledgments, 205,
Notes, 209,
About the Authors, 217,
What People are Saying About This
Packed with germane insights, this eye-opening book challengescurrent trends in American race relations, providing an important context forconversations about finding roads to racial unity. Read this book and be betterprepared to narrow the gap between our national creeds and deeds.
Benjamin Watson is one of the most intelligent and thoughtful men I have ever met,inside or outside of football. When he examines a topic, it is never from theperspective of societal norms or cultural traditions. His observations arealways based on sound, biblical principles. I know you will benefit from hisinsights into race and religion in the United States today.
If you thought you were moved by Benjamin’s words in the wake of Ferguson, wait until you read this book. It is intensely personal, provoking real race discussions based on his own life and the issues still plaguing this nation. More importantly, though, my friend Benjamin leaves us with a sense of hope.
Benjamin Watson is an important African American voices of balance and sanity in a world of racial chaos and confusion. He has used his platform as an NFL player to speak God’s perspective on race. In this work, Ben will encourage and challenge you to think rightly and righteously about addressing the sin that is destroying our nation.
I am honored to recommend my friend Benjamin Watson’sfirst book, Under Our Skin. Ben has grabbed the attention of our nation with insightful writings on many of the issues that divide us. God has expanded Ben’s reach way beyond the football field. I believe Ben is a voice for our time. In Under Our Skin, you will soon see why his wisdom on the issue of race in our nation is so needed.
Not many people can speak so honestly and eloquently aboutsuch a tough issue. Benjamin Watson shows great perspective on every side andchallenges us all to embrace a higher moral and spiritual purpose.
In his first book, Under Our Skin, Benjamin Watson does a superb job of exposing the many racial stereotypes that exist on all sides, and he helps people to understand that we are all human beings created by God and intended for great things. If we invest energy in understanding others, we will improve our own lives.
A must-read for anyone who is frustrated by the racial strife and problems in our world—and ready to become part of the solution. Stop everything you’re doing and read what Benjamin Watson has to say.
Benjamin Watson has been an outspoken advocate for racial unity based solely on the fact that Jesus Christ died for all people. Jesus came to this earth to cover the sin of mankind with His precious blood and to wipe out the sins of disobedience, immorality, and racial conflict. Under the skin of every human being beats a heart that has the potential to love and serve the Lord and Master of the soul made alive by the very breath of God. Thank you, Benjamin, for pointing people toward the One who came and dwelt among us, who died to save us, and who lives to prove His everlasting salvation to all who will come to Him.
This is a message every one of us needs to hear, and we’re listening to what Benjamin Watson has to say. Under Our Skin is unflinchingly honest, strong, and authentic. You won’t be able to put it down, and it will surprise, challenge, and inspire you in ways you never expected.