I’m taking part in a 21-Day Antiracism in the Curriculum Challenge, and the first day’s assignment is as follows: Reflect, in writing, on your own values, how you bring those values to the classroom, and why you are participating in this challenge. I didn’t follow the assignment exactly, but here’s what I wrote.

I grew up in rural Madison County, North Carolina, just across the NC/TN line from Unicoi County, which is just next door to Washington County, Tennessee, where I live now. My upbringing in the village of Walnut, NC, was on a small farm, in the house where my mother and her ten siblings grew up. Although I suspect that my grandfather’s first wife might have had some indigenous—probably Cherokee—heritage (although I don’t recall anybody in the family suggesting such), his second wife, the mother of nine of his eleven children and my grandmother, was a white woman from east Tennessee. Papa Reeves’s farm was more or less working up until his death in June 1968, after which my family moved into the homeplace with my grandmother. At that point the farm mostly stopped or was sold off, given that my father worked in Asheville, first for a furniture plant and then for the United States Postal Service.

In addition to being home to my family, Walnut is home to four churches within shouting distance of each other. My family, connected to the homeplace through my mother, the next-to-youngest of Papa’s children, attended the Free Will Baptist Church, while Papa’s only other child to stay in Walnut—his youngest—attended the United Methodist Church. Neither the Free Will nor the Methodist could afford a full-time preacher, so I grew up with this arrangement: each church met for its own Sunday School hour; then on first and third Sundays of each month the Methodists came to the Free Will for preaching, and on second and fourth Sundays the Free Will folks went to the Methodist for preaching. We had our weekly youth group and summer Vacation Bible School at the Presbyterian Church. The fourth church, the Missionary Baptists, involved themselves with the rest of us as little as they could, it seemed.

Bottom line: It was a very rural, very Christian, and very white upbringing.

Madison High School had a student body of some eight hundred students, which included just three or four black students. I played basketball with one of them, Eugene Dobbs, and considered him both a superstar and my friend, but I wonder now if I valued him for his skills on the court and our team or as a human being. I can’t say from this distance—more than forty years—how racist I might have been with Eugene and the others. Certainly, I was racist, not knowing any better, so the question is to what degree my racism extended. I hope it wasn’t overtly malicious or aggressive.

As a member of the high-school smart kids club—the Beta Club—I once traveled to an event held at Cherokee High School, on the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina. I don’t remember if I felt under any threat while on the platform there in front of the school audience. What I do remember, however, is that my white friend and I made fun of some of the names of the Cherokee students who shared the platform with us. What I didn’t know at the time was that in just a few years, I would have a roommate at Mars Hill College, who was—and is—an enrolled member of the Cherokee tribe. We became close friends. I sang at his wedding. He named his firstborn son Cody.

Good friendship and shared experiences strip away layers of difference and identifiers of otherness, humanizing people one to another. This is good and moves us toward antiracism, but it would be a long time before I would learn about and wrestle with the horrific injustices that the U.S. government (white men) inflicted upon my friend’s people, in stealing their land and destroying their nation. (Relations between the U.S. and indigenous nations is now different but hasn’t improved that much.) I think when I was ready to see this troubled history, knowing my friend and having a human connection with him allowed me to recognize, name, and condemn the brutal racism inherent in the dominant white culture of the United States, from its presidents down to members of the Madison High Beta Club.

I could and should keep writing, but I’ll break for now. My experience with my friend from Cherokee, along with some kind of unexplained, lifelong attraction to such others,* led me to the development and teaching of one of my favorite courses here at ETSU, which is ENGL 3070: Native American Literature. The intensive study of this literature for this course has, in turn, made me much more conscious regarding issues of race—and not just that of American Indians—in other courses I teach, such as ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865 and ENGL 3280: Mythology

* When my cousins and I were children and would go out into landscape of the Walnut farm to play Daniel Boone or Jonny Quest, I always wanted to play Boone’s Cherokee friend Mingo or Jonny’s Indian friend Hadji—an Indian from India.