The soil we're planted in

The soil you plant in matters.  My work with the Wittel Farm Growing Project in these last few years has given me much to reflect about in my life.  I grew up in a farming family in Upstate New York.  Started in the 1920s by my great-Grandfather Lenahan, we were a large commercial green bean farm and dairy, until the 1970’s.  Gradually, we transitioned from a commercial cash crop business toward a small market vegetable and fruit business.  We grew hundreds of acres of crops that we sold in a farm market store we built, similar to our Reiff’s or Hoover’s.  I grew up working on the farm, harvesting crops, tilling, planting, and selling.  As a teen, I loved taking my pickup truck load of fresh-picked sweet corn to a weekly outdoor farm market (like Lititz Farmers market) to sell.  I also loved to eat what we grew on the farm.  Summer was a daily diet of fresh fruits and vegetables.  It was hard work and in 1992 I left for College with a strong desire to follow another path.  I heard a call to ordained ministry while I was at Susquehanna University, a call to leave behind the family farm and pursue another work.  I never imagined that this path would bring me to another farm to grow fresh vegetables for hungry neighbors.  Along this journey I have learned many things about God, myself, and other people.  Now I am learning the role racism and white advantage has played in my life.     

I had my only encounters with non-white people on the farm.  We hired migrant Hispanics from Guatemala and Mexico to labor and live on the farm in the summers.  They taught me Spanish, hard work, and how to eat hot peppers.  They didn’t watch TV.  They played guitars and sang together.  They were generous and happy men, who sent their paychecks home. Nobody worked longer or harder than they did.  They rarely took a day off.  Now I know that their charm for me was based on racial inequality and white privilege (dominance).  At the end of the day, I went home to a comfortable place with my family.  These men spent months apart from their homes and families in order to support the children they left behind.  I will never have to do that because their work provided income for my family that helped me to go to College.   

I was always a passive racist, not personally prejudicial toward people of color, but not aware of systemic bias and oppressive inequality either.  Only now am I learning to become an active anti-racist.  Like an emerging seedling, I'm beginning to see the light above the soil in which I was planted.  I recently had a conversation with my parents about race, because I knew that our farm used to employ and house southern blacks migrants on the farm to pick 800 + acres of green beans in the summer time, in the years before mechanical bean pickers.  I learned that over 50 people came up from the south, men, women and children.  In the 50s and 60s, they came up to our farm, lived in crude shacks with no plumbing, and worked hard for very little pay.  They held dances and played music and drank beers on Saturday nights---to feel human and free, and not like a “negro”.  Now I understand that my family’s livelihood, my childhood, and college education were bought by the hard, cheap labor of poor southern black families.  It was understood then that they needed the work and that they were willing to live under those crude conditions. I don’t blame my ancestors, least of all my parents. (They were kids then). This was the way of things. It was a cultural reality, a system, a way of life.  My ancestors' ignorance and prejudices were embedded in the American story. How many of those black migrant workers were the grandsons or granddaughters of former slaves? Though I lived in a racially homogenous, predominantly white rural community, my life was also bound to the black experience in America in ways I am only now beginning to understand. This is hard to share. But it is my truth.  

What is your race story?  What is your experience with people of color?  How have you benefited from being white? I understand how uncomfortable these questions and this conversation can be for us.  I am uncomfortable, too. But I am also enriched by this awareness of race and by a growing passion to actively resist and oppose the systemic racism that effects American life in so many ways.  I cannot live in ignorance or denial of my own story anymore.  And I believe God is calling me again to till this soil and plant seeds of courage and water with hope and ready us for a harvest of love and understanding, justice and reconciliation. 

In peace,

Pastor Matt