When I Glimpsed The World Through Their Eyes
Authored by Peter Rajchert
SE grew up in the Boston suburbs. She played the piano and violin and sang in a choir that once performed in Russia. I remember her voice as operatic. Pablo Neruda delighted her soul and she eagerly read my own writing attempts, encouraging me always. I had met her in a class at Laval University in Quebec City twenty summers ago. She spoke French along with Hebrew and English and maybe other languages I don't even know about. At the end of our time in Quebec City, she invited me to visit her at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
In those three or four September days amidst walks in deciduous woods and campus gallery visits, we had to drive to Hartford to drop her friend off at the city’s grand old Union Station. This friend was catching a train to New York. After we pulled into a parking spot near the station, SE grabbed the UConn Hillel parking pass (where she and the friend were active) from the dashboard and hid it in the glove compartment so that it would not attract attention. The three of us were in a great mood, expecting no danger; yet, SE understood that violent acts of anti-Semitism can happen at any time and anywhere.
The ever-present sense of foreboding that she must have had at the back of her mind did not completely register with me at the time. The tiny narrative we lived through together at Union Station in Hartford however stayed with me, its significance growing over the years connecting to a history of anti-Semitism in the western world. My wife Sandra’s tears of sadness and joy at our son's birth, that he would have to fend through life as a black boy and a black man, did not completely make sense to me either. Then when my son was four, an older boy told him that he should not wear a Superman costume because he is black. Society was already excluding him, telling my son what he could and could not be. I will never forget this painful story. It helped me understand more deeply that like SE, Sandra also grapples with a dreaded foreboding. She knows that on any day, my son or daughter or she herself could be the targets of racism.
“Society was already excluding him, telling my son what he could and could not be.”
Photo by Sandra Excellent
How many indigenous people, women, LGBTQ+ persons, and other individuals carry this sense of foreboding? The anti-racism protesters in the United States and around the world moved by George Floyd's brutal murder are standing up for justice. They are also creating greater consciousness inside minds like mine through narratives of black people who died from police brutality, people who had every right to live, people who knew that at any moment for no reason at all the police could detain them because of the colour of their skin. I bet that emotion of foreboding coursed through their being every time they stepped out of their home.
President Barack Obama has said that Americans must vote the right individuals into office if they want laws and institutions to become more inclusive. Greater consciousness through stories of discrimination will help shift society as a whole towards acceptance. What those of us who take liberty for granted can do is open ourselves to narratives from our brothers and sisters in whose minds foreboding always flutters. When we hear that someone has to hide their identity because they feel that others may perpetrate violence upon them, we will (I hope) more firmly take their side, affirming that dignity is inherent to all humans, no matter what they look like, what they believe or where they come from.
About the Author:
Peter Rajchert spends his days raising his two children and encouraging people he encounters to share their stories with the world. He resides near Toronto, Canada.