biracial

Liuan Huska 3-06-2014

Nora Howell modeling her dress made of crackers

ONE RECENT WINTER day, Nora Howell stepped out of her house in the Sandtown neighborhood of Baltimore and took a walk down the street. People in the predominantly black community did double takes as this white woman promenaded past them in a sundress made of saltine and oyster crackers. Some stared in disbelief. One man doubled over laughing. In the corner coffee shop, one of the regulars warned Howell not to walk by any homeless people because they might just eat her up.

Later Howell, a community artist and director of the neighborhood Jubilee Arts program, set the video footage taken during her walk to Mister Rogers’ classic refrain, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” The piece, which emerged out of Howell’s ponderings on what it means to be white living in a black neighborhood, became another part of her answer to a call: to use art to address systemic racism and bring about the kingdom of God.

From Race Riots to White Suburbia and Beyond

In 2001, Howell was an eighth grader living in a biracial community in urban Cincinnati. When race riots erupted after a young black man was shot fatally by a white police officer (sound familiar?), her family took to the streets on a prayer walk through the riots. Howell remembers being shocked and terrified, thinking, “Why do we still have race riots? Cincinnati is so far behind the times.”

In the aftermath, Howell talked with peers at school on the reality of racial tensions and observed with curiosity how white and black churches throughout the city responded. She realized race riots weren’t just a relic of the ’60s. “When you lived in a place where different racial groups interacted daily, [racial tensions] could no longer be denied or ignored,” she said.

Yet when Howell moved to suburban Chicago to attend Wheaton College, conversations on race were largely absent. “I found that very odd,” she said. She got involved in a campus group to promote awareness of racial injustice.

A.J. Mack 8-06-2012
Photo by franckreporter / Vetta collection / Getty Images

Photo by franckreporter / Vetta collection / Getty Images

My biracial niece, Hannah, and I were talking about Martin Luther King, Jr., and what she had learned about him in school. She was only in second grade then. She was piled in the back seat of the minivan, along with my kids Caitlin and Cameron, and their cousin Austin. We were on our annual spring break escapade to the Travis County fair, Children’s museum, San Antonio Zoo, and every place in between. I asked her about what Martin Luther King did.  ...

Hannah and myriad others like them in the Millennial generation, embody Dr. King’s original vision. The very seed of the dream has germinated. They carry it in their DNA, literally. In fact, they are the living, breathing incarnation of interracial harmony. Come to think of it, no one wants to choke on a seed. We prefer the fruit. In the same way, we expect words to go beyond pie-in-the-sky imagination. We want them to be fleshed out into reality.

 
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