Jan Miler | Jul 22, 2020


I grew up near Palmerston, a small Ontario town with a population of 1,800. A monochrome kind of town, so I was pretty sure I didn’t have any prejudices or systemic bias. How could I? We were farm kids, so I didn’t even know about white privilege. My father, who left school early to work on our family farm, was serious about his children having an education. “Do you want to be a nurse’s aid or a house cleaner?” he’d say. “Do well, get good marks and make something of yourself.” At the time I wasn’t doing so well at school.

The minister and his family had become friends with my parents and invited me to visit them in their new parish in Caledonia, Ontario. When I arrived, they explained they had to leave for a family emergency. I was to make myself at home. They had their cleaning lady coming, but I could just stay out of her way.
Mary was friendly and probably in her thirties. I didn’t want her to think that I thought I was better than a cleaning woman, so I was sociable in return. I made some lunch to share. She told me about Caledonia. At the end of the day, she asked if I’d like to go for a drink with her. Since I grew up in a teetotaling family and was visiting this one, that didn’t seem like such a good idea, but I was afraid she’d think I was being snobbish if I said, “no thanks.” I accepted.

The bar was not the den of iniquity I expected. I followed Mary to a corner. The waitress was barely civil, but it was a small town and I guessed that she had disdain for working-class occupations. I was glad I didn’t. None of the patrons were that friendly, no smiles of welcome for us. I ordered a Coke. A man came to our table, a friend of Mary, and then another couple. They were also agreeable and pleasant. The waitress was abrupt with them too, bordering on rude. If she wasn’t so friendly to the other customers in the room, I’d have thought she hated her job.

Then I noticed there was an “us and them” feeling in this bar. We were on one side in the corner and the rest of the people on the other side. I looked at our table like you do when you have one of those pictures that is all squiggles and dots. After you stare at it long enough, a pattern emerges, and something surfaces that you didn’t see before. I slowly realized that I was the whitest person there. Possibly cleaning houses was not Mary’s only challenge. The attitude in the room was a bigger one. I was with residents from the Six Nations of the Grand River.

Forty years later, I’m explaining to my mother that our financial advisor will be joining us for lunch. He’s Deaf, I tell her, and I’ll interpret. We will be meeting with him for a yearly review in the afternoon. After Rohan leaves and I go in to my mom’s room, she asks, “Why didn’t you tell me that he was an exceptionally handsome Black man?” Well, it isn’t that I didn’t notice that he was handsome, but I guess I can still only focus on one bias at a time.

I was blind to bias when I was young, but then it served me to stay oblivious. I went out into the world and saw individuals, not their labels, and I either liked them or not, based on our compatibility. As a result, I have a rich and diverse array of friends. The have different religions, cultures, abilities, genders, and sexual orientation. We learned about each other and our realities.

Now it’s time to notice and pay attention to what’s going on in the world – a larger phenomenon. It’s especially not a good time to have an opinion, as it most assuredly will be based on my white entitlement. I will likely be wrong or insensitive. It’s time to look at the squiggles and dots of the landscape and let something that’s been there all along emerge into my world-view. I will save myself and be quiet, listen, and learn.

Support local
independant journalism by becoming a patron of the Frontenac News.