I find basic human interactions interesting. I suppose I always have. Specifically the social norms and cues of politeness and small talk between strangers and acquaintances. The United States is a massive nation and I know that interactions and figures of speech and vary greatly depending upon the region one is from.

I was raised near Richmond, Virginia, and politeness is paramount. In public social situations, you always ask how someone is doing. It doesn’t matter how well you know them, and it certainly doesn’t matter whether or not if you care. This is almost always true no matter the event whether a birthday, a memorial, a graduation, a baptism, a wedding, anything. This basic conversation is always a short exchange and very much goes like a scripted protocol:

“Hi, how are you doing?”
“I’m fine, thanks, and you?”
“Doing fine as well, thanks.”

That is where the conversation with an acquaintance or stranger ends. There might be some other small talk, but it stays on a very superficial level and never delves into health or family or personal lives. The encounter concludes with the knowledge that everyone is doing just fine.

But sometimes, at a party or a wedding or a funeral or a graduation, you run into an acquaintance, Helen, and there’s an encounter in which the response to “How are you doing today?” isn’t the obligatory “I’m fine, thanks.” Instead, even though it happens almost immediately you somehow instinctively know something has gone awry, and Helen’s response is something like:

“Well, you know, I have just not been well. I’ve been dealing with a lot of congestion lately and I think I’m coming down with something. My kid came home from school the other day with a runny nose and you know those schools are basically germ factories…”

And now you’re stuck. You only asked how Helen was doing because that’s what you were supposed to do – not because you actually cared. Helen broke the rules. You couldn’t care less about Helen’s kid or her congestion and you certainly have better things to do than to listen to her drone on about her health issues. But here you are, stuck, and Helen has just made herself the center of the encounter and she’s taken the focus away from the event and placed it on her.

Veruca Salt

Remember Charilie and the Chocolate Factory? It was one of my favorite books when I was a kid. I really enjoyed much of Roald Dahl’s work, though his personal history has turned out to be problematic. Dahl’s stories almost always included child characters who were misbehaved or self-absorbed and then received hilariously outlandish karmic responses for their misdeeds. I think I liked the stories so much because I was a good Christian boy who was a rule-follower and always strived to stay inside the box.

Veruca Salt was the last of the “bad” children to get her come-uppance in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She is a stereotypical, self-absorbed, rich girl who does not understand what is it like to be told “no” for any reason. Veruca is the center of the universe – hers and everyone else’s. You might ask why everything has to be about her and she might answer, because it IS about her.

Both Helen and Veruca are skilled at making things about them. Helen is most likely unaware of what she’s doing; Veruca almost certainly knows. Regardless, they manage to place themselves at the center of any situation they are in, which means that the focus is taken away from where it should have been in the first place.

Caucacity

I opened with those two examples because of a conversation I had with a Black friend over the recent Juneteenth weekend. She shared with me about how a well-meaning liberal white coworker decided they would “celebrate” Juneteenth by recommending several books for people to read about racism. Every book this white person recommended was written by a white author. She centered whiteness on a holiday that is exclusively about the Black experience in the United States. Do we see the problem here? This, my friends, is where we get to talk about one of my favorite words: Caucacity.

Caucacity was, as far as I can tell, first coined by Black social media influencers to describe white people having the audacity to say or do stupid white people shit. A white person recommending a list of books on racism written by white authors for a Juneteenth reading list is a textbook definition of an act of caucacity. I am guilty of caucacity myself. The number one reason why I’ve done something white and stupid? Because I haven’t listened to Black people. Fortunately I have reached a point where many of my most caucacious moments are internalized, but they still happen.

Listen, Learn, Share

I was reminded of how I need to continue the work to free my mind from White Supremacy when I attended worship and listened to a dear friend, a Black woman, offer a prophetic sermon on Juneteenth weekend. When she spoke of the ignorant (and frankly, racist) ways in which historians generally assume that the enslaved Black people of Galveston, Texas had not yet heard about the Emancipation Proclamation before Union soldiers arrived on June 19, 1865, it hit me pretty hard. She spoke of the generations of resistance. Enslaved people learning to read and write. Methods of communicating across vast distances. And my brain, tainted by the disease of White Supremacy, had never once considered any of that as possible. (Maybe it was more coloring inside the lines?)

I think the point of all of this as I write is that I am reminded that the defilement of the Way of Jesus into an imperialistic, colonizing religion is what allowed and continues to allow the rot of White Supremacy to reign in our minds and our culture. What white people need to do is be quiet, listen to Black people, learn as much as we can, and then share what we learn with others. The truth is going to sting. It absolutely will. But telling the truth is the only way we will all experience liberation. And if we’re committed to following in the Way of Jesus, then there is no other Way but the Truth.

---

Book Recommendations (from a Black friend)

• Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
• Kin by Tayari Jones
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Rootwork by Tracy Cross
• Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow
• Reformatory by Tananarive Due
• Ring Shout by P. Djélí Clark
• A Committee of One by Opal Lee