By Isaac Wood
I’m a Midwesterner living in a small Appalachian city. I’m your typical white man, a member of the nearly eighty-five percent white population you might expect from Johnson City, TN. But I’ve learned there’s a lot more to see in a place than the eye permits, and the same truth applies to people. Every encounter I have with a person here is bubbling with surprising interests and unexpected perspectives, but also possible ways to offend each other. I’m constantly pricked by the question of how to interact with others in light of these potential offenses. Online encounters, cancel culture, and 100% unfiltered takes all give their answers to this question, but I’ve been on a hunt for a better one.
This year I worked in a building that was a high school for black st…
By Isaac Wood
I’m a Midwesterner living in a small Appalachian city. I’m your typical white man, a member of the nearly eighty-five percent white population you might expect from Johnson City, TN. But I’ve learned there’s a lot more to see in a place than the eye permits, and the same truth applies to people. Every encounter I have with a person here is bubbling with surprising interests and unexpected perspectives, but also possible ways to offend each other. I’m constantly pricked by the question of how to interact with others in light of these potential offenses. Online encounters, cancel culture, and 100% unfiltered takes all give their answers to this question, but I’ve been on a hunt for a better one.
This year I worked in a building that was a high school for black students during segregation. It closed down in 1965 and fell into disrepair for decades. In the 2010s, a group of alumni came together to preserve the space and its history, working with the city government to transform it into a multicultural center.
I worked on an initiative called Community History 365, which preserves and shares multicultural history. As part of the initiative, I helped produce a narrative podcast. It turns out that for many, many decades Washington County, TN, has had a thriving black community, filled with interesting people with cool stories that communicate the complex reality of being black in East Tennessee. The podcast tells these stories, and it was my job to write the script.
But I’m white.
DEI is complicated, and so is the way we talk about it. I want to say up front that language can cause divisions and perpetuate tensions, on a national scale and interpersonally. We’ve all been in a conversation where someone says one single word that puts everyone on edge. One word can cause a working relationship to dissolve or a friendship to erupt. One word can tie all my nerve endings into knots. In fact, your nerve endings might have responded to my mention of DEI just a moment ago. I’m not going to dive too deep into the deep sea of DEI debates, but I do want to peel back the layers of my very particular situation.
Someone could argue that my race disqualifies me for this position. What gives me the authority to write about the complexity of being black in East Tennessee? Not only am I a white man, but I’ve only lived here for six years — how could I understand the context needed to write about East Tennessee history at all?
I made this argument, or something like it, when I interviewed for the job. My interviewer had grown up in East Tennessee. He still works in his home county, and he’s heard the stories of being black in East Tennessee since he was young. He literally would sit in the barber shop hearing the older men tell stories. He knows black history. He knows East Tennessee. I don’t.
So I told him that. I said I’d love to do the job, but we both know I’m not black. It makes a lot of sense to want the person writing the scripts for local black history stories to have experienced being black in the local area. I told him I didn’t want to do this job if I would be overstepping.
He shut me down pretty quick. He told me his primary concern was getting the work done, and that he thought I might have the skills to do it. He offered to give his own expertise to help me out. He opened up doors to people who could help provide context — for Johnson City and being black in the South. He graciously welcomed me to the table.
Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. We held history task force meetings with people that included lifelong East Tennesseans and Appalachian historians. They told me things about living in Johnson City that I would never know otherwise. And the production team includes three black coworkers. One is my supervisor, who was born in Washington County, TN. The host and the sound engineer have both lived here for decades. They told me important context for the scripts that I never would have known otherwise.
The host, sound engineer, and I worked together to brainstorm story ideas and interview people. I came to know that, even if my interviewing skills were a hundred times better than they actually are, my conversations with Langston alumni would not uncover nearly as many memories as when my coworkers were doing the interviews with me. They have shared knowledge that sparked memories and jokes from the interviewees. I could never spark these moments because, frankly, I’m white. While I had plans for how the episodes were going to come together, I had to set my plans aside to make room for more natural, enjoyable exchanges that my plans never could have included.
We also ran into contentious language. For the first season, we focused on the stories of Langston High School — its history, teachers, and students. This is the same high school that fell into disrepair after de-segregation and eventually became the multicultural center where we work. One story was about an incredible figure in East Tennessee history: Hezekiah Hankal. He was a biracial man born free. He became a physician, church planter, and politician. He went on to help found the Langston school.
We know a limited amount about Hankal because he was born in 1826 and died in 1904. What we do now comes from one historian who went on a mission to uncover the facts of Hankal’s life. He and a woman who’s a leader in Johnson City’s black community did a lot of research together on local black history and uncovered a lot about Hezekiah Hankal, but sadly she passed away in 2019. Of all the living people, this man knows the most about Hezekiah Hankal.
This historian is also a white man.
So when we went to tell the story of Hezekiah Hankal, he was the one person we could interview. This man is a very meticulous researcher. He has poured over census records and deeds and news clippings and who knows what else, developing a timeline of Hankal’s life and uncovering an unbelievable amount of facts (in case you were wondering, Hezekiah Hankal was sued over a mule).
For scheduling reasons, only I interviewed this historian. If you’ve ever looked at census records from the 1800s, you know they weren’t using the term “African American.” So when he talks about the life of Hezekiah Hankal, he used the word “colored.” So there I am, a white man interviewing a white man about a biracial man and the black community, with antiquated terms all throughout his telling. The whole situation made me a little squeamish.
My supervisor had told me this would happen; he’s known this historian for years. He told me that he’s incredibly knowledgeable and that he’s worked incredibly hard to preserve as many details from Hezekiah Hankal’s life as possible. My supervisor also told me that the historian uses older terms that the podcast’s audience might not appreciate — terms that would exclude certain people from the conversation and fester tensions.
At the beginning of our second conversation, I mentioned that it’d be better to use the words “black” or “African American.” It wasn’t an ask I was excited to make — I wasn’t nervous because I thought he would get angry, or because I thought of him as racist. In fact, I was nervous because I know he isn’t racist. He’s spent an incredible amount of hours researching the black community. He wasn’t getting payment or recognition for this; he just did it because he wanted to learn more.
I was more nervous about how those words would sound to the podcast’s audience . I was writing this story primarily for the black community, made up of people who went to school at Langston High School and are very proud of Hezekiah Hankal, an important figure in their shared history. It just wouldn’t be right for the episode to describe him as “colored” because it would take away from the intended celebration of the episode.
This is exactly the type of situation where language pits people against each other. And there I was, stumbling through.
The rest of the production team knows what it’s like to be called “colored,” so sharing that interview tape with them could have gone terribly. I did my best to explain the fact that he was working with historical documents without dismissing the use of “colored” as completely okay. They could have said, “What in the world? Who does he think he is, talking about our history like that? Why would you let him use that word?”
But they didn’t. They responded to it graciously. The host let it roll off her shoulders, and when the sound engineer met the historian, he talked to him like they were old friends — with no bite or resentment. We easily edited around the sentences where he used “colored,” and the production team helped me write a script that describes Hezekiah Hankal’s racial identity with historical accuracy *and *respect.
A team worked on these stories. That’s the only way it worked for me to be a producer on this project. My being white doesn’t inherently disqualify me from telling these stories, but my lack of shared experience (due not only to my race but my upbringing in another state) required assistance to unpack the context that is crucial to telling these stories. The more people sitting at the kitchen table, the better we can understand and care for the household.
At the end of the day, I had to write the thing and bring it to the editing table. It’s a scary moment. I was doing my best to understand the history and tell stories in a way that 1) makes sense and 2) doesn’t mis-characterize or over-simplify something of which I have zero experience.
For one script, we were telling the story of a Langston alumni who had gone on to be the first black female to enroll in a PhD program for music. Her dad passed away when she was young. In telling this part of her story, the way I worded it could imply that her father had left them when they were young, adding an untruthful contribution to the stereotype of irresponsible black fathers.
During an editing session, my coworker latched on to the wording. Once again, she could have been angry. She could have interrogated me about my intentions or told me how I don’t know anything because I’m a twenty-something white boy. But she didn’t. She explained how it could imply a stereotype that wasn’t true about the story. She was gracious, she didn’t assume the worst of me, and we fixed it.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe about race and difference: First, it matters. Of course, each individual has individual traits and experiences, but shared histories create shared identities. In the lobby of the center where I work, there is a mural that says, “A man without a history is a man without roots.” My roots, as a midwestern white man, are different from the roots of a person with ancestors from the South and, before that, Africa. That, clearly, does not make one set of roots better. It just means they are different, and those differences bring different beauties to the same place. There are centuries of history — in Africa and in the U.S. — that most people with black skin share that I do not . It’s wonderful that we can all exist in the same region, city, and building. That’s what makes the American Project so lovely, and so daring.
Second, with a little grace, tension from racial differences can be easily overcome. The project is possible if we recognize and value each other’s roots and, more crucial to our current social climate, give each other grace. I draw that word grace from my Christian faith, and I use it here to describe a welcoming attitude towards others that allows for missteps. This has to be done in tangible ways in our everyday lives — how we work together, eat together, play together, laugh together. In all these parts of our lives, we can say things that we don’t mean. We say things we shouldn’t. But with a gracious attitude, mistakes don’t immediately sever the relationship. Instead, we make space for those mistakes. Then, in a beautiful turn of events, those mistakes actually lead to a stronger relationship because we have communicated a sense of trust and trustworthiness. We can then trust each other to value the other person and give each other leeway when we misstep or misspeak. When a serious conversation arises, our nerve endings don’t tighten.
We should be conscious of how we speak of each other’s experiences because that helps build relationships. At the end of the day, it’s the relationship that matters most. The relationship takes precedence.
Isaac Wood is a journalist and produces local history podcasts in East Tennessee. He was an inaugural member of the Christianity Today Young Storytellers Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The Dispatch, Christianity Today, 100 Days in Appalachia, and Ministry Watch.