PLAY ANYWHERE

Seesaw, Korea - Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic

This picture is up for me, and me only. I need to stare into it imagining what it sounds like, what it feels like for those children playing together. What was their yesterday? What was the culture like and so on because the riff created by Koreans in the United States is a deep chasm between them and Black Americans. Koreans and Black Americans are polarized by the racial cue cards white Americans handed us. Koreans and Blacks read from it and it informs each succeeding generation.

Reconciliation, for me, is an individual task built person to person as the number of Koreans I interact with, admire and get to know grows. Slowly I've begun a thinking process that, at some point, has to melt down to the children's level of play. It is how I came to develop better relationships with white folks. I altered my perceptions deliberately and created rituals to facilitate the process. It worked but it took at least 2 decades before whites became my relative, and I am only four years into this process with the Koreans! © Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories  1.9.13