I’ve been wondering lately if the people of 
, North Dakota thought my dad was an odd duck. Well, maybe not everybody there, but maybe just the people at the post office.
WIlliston has changed a lot since we lived there. We moved there from an even smaller town in 1967. At the time it was a town of maybe 10,000. It was not a highly integrated town. I was all of 6 years old when we moved there, and not aware of a lot of social issues, but I do not remember any African Americans there at all. I could be wrong.
In fact, I remember being something of a minority in Williston because we were not Norwegian. Most of the people in town were of at least partial Norwegian ancestry. But not us. Not a drop of Scandinavian blood. Now, in my adult years I have become aware that most of us Willistonites inherited a cultural blindness regarding real minorities.Williston and all of North Dakota have a rich Native American Heritage but they were invisible to us. Lutefisk, lefse, and krumkake were the cultural beacons we were guided by.
In that environment, I think most of the citizen thought my dad was normal enough. He was the minister at the Methodist church, enjoyed coffee at the Red Owl supermarket coffee shop, and moved comfortably among the social strata of WIlliston. By most appearances he was the same as everybody else in that North Dakota town.
But I’m guessing that a few of the postal workers in Williston may have scratched their heads about him. You see, my dad subscribed to Ebony magazine. I can’t imagine that in those days there were many subscriptions to Ebony magazine in WIlliston, North Dakota that postal workers were placing into mail boxes. So I kind of wonder what they may have thought about my dad.
If I ever asked Dad why he read Ebony, I don’t remember the answer. But I know the times now that we lived in then. North Dakota was a long way from South where Martin Luther King, Jr. was working but I remember my parents were aware of him and the turmoil happening in our nation.I am unsure just when Dad starting reading ebony, but I kind of imagine it might have been soon after King’s assassination.
I think my dad read Ebony magazine in Williston, North Dakota because he was aware that his view of culture was not the only one. I think he read it to learn something of a broader view of race and culture and life in these wildly diverse United States. Maybe it was a small step. But I imagine that my dad was a bit of an odd duck in Williston. Maybe there were a few others who were trying to understand the dreams and fears of people very different from themselves in very white WIlliston. Long before it became a slogan, I believe Dad read Ebony because he sensed that indeed black lives matter.
I know reading a magazine isn’t much in the grand scheme. But if I’m at all right, it was in the least an attempt to understand more than the status quo. I don’t know if the the term “white privilege” was even coined in the late sixties or early seventies when we lived in WIlliston, but I’m going to give my dad and his choice of reading material credit for the seeds of my own understanding and openness to know more.Maybe we need to increase Ebony’s distribution, at least as a first small step to getting out of our own parochial white world view.
expressionist coffee 