This morning, I was explaining to my son the amazing LeVar Burton. And ... oh my.
You see, growing up on the farm, in white German farmer territory, everyone looked like me. Everyone was white. Even my elementary school was filled with white students and teachers. The rare Asian kids in school were children with white adoptive parents. Oh my Lord, the hoopla when the completely Jewish family moved into the Gar Creek community! I didn’t understand the problem. Eliyahu was cute.
My introduction to diversity was found down on Sesame Street and through the Reading Rainbow. Before then, the old westerns told me that dark skinned people were servants or slaves, ‘dumb’ injuns, or just plain worthless. Something just rankled me deep inside about that.
You see, I noticed that the darker skinned characters in those old westerns may have been written as the dumb worthless characters, but they were the ones who had information, knew who all the players were, and through their faces, told me where to look. Through non-white actors, I learned about expressions and how one can speak through their expressions without uttering a single word from their lips. As an adult, I now realize that those actors were doing that on purpose and on the sly. They knew what they were doing even if the white men in charge didn’t. What’s THAT say about the superiority of whites, eh? Lol Plus, Yul Brynner was gorgeous. Clark Gable, Rock Hudson, John Wayne... eh, not so much.
On Sesame Street, I saw children and adults of all colors and ethnicities. I saw them all working and playing on that street and learning to count together and learning about cooperation and reading. I learned that we could indeed all live and work together in harmony. The idea that someone was inferior because of the color of their melanin was preposterous to me.
Through Reading Rainbow, I learned about orchestras, and music, and television and stories. Stories that are told through so many mediums imaginable. And as far as I was concerned at that age, LeVar Burton was one of the smartest and sweetest and kindest people in the world. He also had a voice that calmed even my most darkest fears. I knew he told me I didn’t have to, but I always took his word for it.
All this ran through my mind as I explained who he was to my son. You see, LeVar now has a podcast here in 2019, where he reads short stories and then talks about why he loves the story and how it makes him feel and think. His voice has not changed in the slightest and it still puts me in a complete and utter state of calm. But do you know how jarring it was for me to hear him read a curse word?!?! Oh lord!
I realized as I was talking to my son that LeVar is one of those people from my childhood that carved a huge chunk of my morals and social beliefs. I realized that he’s quite a bit older than me and as I face my birth father's mortality, I have to face my own mortality and the mortality of my role models. As I told my son how important LeVar was to me as a child, I found my mouth saying that I would be absolutely devastated if I were to hear something had happened to him or that he had died. As my mouth formed the words, my eyes smarted and watered and my throat started to close up and my words became choked.
Even the idea of someone’s mortality, a someone I have no hope of ever meeting, tore my gut up. In short, LeVar Burton isn’t allowed to ever die.
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