Miser Family update toward the end of Black History Month

Life continues to be jam-packed full with richness in the Miser Family household!   Highlights of the week include

• the flu (N-son, and also my husband),
• recovery from the flu (both of the above),
• attending a dance and then unfortunately not sharing details with one's mother (N-son),
• studying the reproductive system as part of the Sports Therapy curriculum and then fortunately not sharing the details with ones mother (J-son), 
• shoveling snow (a bunch of us),
• giving an exam, grading an exam, and then holding office hours for all the students who thought they knew the material but discovered otherwise (erm, me, in case that wasn't obvious),  and
• taking a bunch of students to a local math conference (me again).

I attended an amazing talk by Daryl Davis, a Jazz and Blues musician, an author, actor and activist.  His musical career has been enough to be remarkable all by itself, playing with the likes of Chuck Barry, Bruce Hornsby, and more.  But his talk was about his 30-year endeavor to befriend people who want to kill people like him.  He's interviewed and befriended many leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, a number of whom eventually leave the KKK.  Davis is a black dude with a small museum of KKK robes and hoods!

This is a bit of a digression into his story, away from my family's, but this really stuck with me, so I figured I'd share it.  He showed a short video clip from the riots at Charlottesville -- a white guy (dressed in normal clothes, but who Davis told us he found out was a KKK member) firing gun shots at the feet of a black man with a flame thrower, and then walking past police who stood behind barriers, doing nothing at all.  Davis asked: "If you saw this, what would you do?  You could blame the white guy with the gun, blame the police, blame the black guy with the flame thrower . . . think about it.  This is your country.  What would you do?"    

Davis said, "I called the KKK guy up and met with him."  He let the guy talk and say anything he wanted.  Then he invited the guy to the Black History museum with him.  They spent two hours there, wandering through the place.  By the time they came out, they were buddies.  When the guy got married a few weeks later and his bride's dad couldn't attend because of health issues, they had Davis walk the bride down the aisle.  He's one of the many who know Davis who have quit the KKK now.   Davis urged us all to be brave enough to listen to people who disagree with us. "Establish dialogue. When two enemies are talking, they're not fighting."

Our giant living room mirror, decorated.

The week ended with our family's second ever Black History Month Dinner.  Our first one was two years ago.   Back then, I put up thirty pictures of notable African Americans so we could play a matching game together.  It was such a great evening that everyone there kept telling me, "next time, you should have this person!   and that person! and the other person!"   Let me tell you, it's a bit of work to compile all these photos . . . but this year, we had 45 faces decorating our walls.  N-son came back from school and helped me put them up. 

Then, everybody got pages of random sticky notes, which they worked together to put on the right pictures.  Every picture had a name (on a yellow sticky notes) and two facts (on a pink and a green sticky note).

My sons J-son and N-son and two friends working together. 

I-daughter's friend is thinking hard.

Getting close to being done.

Somehow, I missed pictures of the dinner itself.  We had three friends, plus four kids (I-daughter, K-daughter, J-son, and N-son) and a grandchild who was more interested in Prewash the Dog than in pictures on the wall.  We had fried chicken, mac-and-cheese, collard greens, and cornbread, and then after dinner I read a snippet from Richard Wright's Black Boy, a book that gripped me when I was a teenager.    It was a great evening, with lots of "how come I never knew this?" moments, and a lot of friendship and helping.

The view into the cleaned-up dining room,
the morning after the Black History Month Dinner.

And now that the dinner is over, for a little while longer, my walls are decorated with well-labeled pictures of people who shaped our world for the better.  So that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.