Stop the Bleeding:

understanding hospitality in the context of race.

Late last year, reading “Small Great Things”, a book by a favourite author, Jodi Picoult, this line stopped me in my tracks, moving me to tears:

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“It’s as if the little Post-It note on the patient file of Davis Bauer has nicked a vital artery, and I can’t figure out how to stop the bleeding.”

The line appears in the thoughts of Ruth, a black nurse who has been prohibited from caring for a newborn baby, Davis Bauer, because of her black skin, by the infant’s white supremacist parents. A Post-It note is placed on the baby’s file, and the story spins out from there. This particular quote is over 100 pages and many sadly unbelievable but also likely events into the story of “Small Great Things”.

Why did this line stop me in my tracks, and bring me to tears?

Because it made me realize that a part of the exhaustion I have struggled with over the past 8 years came from having been nicked, not only in one vital artery, but in a few blood vessels. It made me realize I had slowly been bleeding out. My very soul was feeling anaemic.

As a woman of colour (visible “minority”, brown woman, BIPOC person - so many terms to describe differences - take your pick, whatever works best for you), back in 2016, when Donald Trump ran for president, I was a relatively newly ordained Lutheran pastor.

My first call was in Cambridge, Ontario - a city that had become popular for South Asian students to go to college as a first step in making their lives in Canada. In other words, taking the same steps any non-Indigenous Canadians either took themselves, or had their forebears take within the last 500 years. A common immigration transition for centuries, often happening out of need, which is quickly losing public approval in Canada.

Perhaps it was the influx of brown people into Cambridge. Perhaps it was that Donald Trump’s open campaign against immigrants and Muslims was affecting people in our city too, making underlying white supremacy thoughts surface in behaviours. Whatever the reason, I noticed an increase in microaggressions¹.

I began being more intentional in wearing a visible cross, or my clergy collar, not as a symbol of my faith, but as a means of indicating: “[Yes, I am brown but] I am Christian, not Muslim.” A sad way to try and protect myself: claiming a faith that seemed to draw less push back than another faith, Islam.

Back in 2009, when I came to the Christian faith (or more accurately, the faith came to me), my understanding was “we are all one family in Christ.” You see, 2009 marked a number of things in my life:

• my experience of coming to faith in Jesus (a dark night of the soul story, which I will save for another post).

• my baptism into the Christian tradition as a Lutheran (April 11th, 2009).

• my decision to finally settle in Canada, as now I had a whole family (in Christ).

• the beginning of my journey at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary.

When I was baptized at St Mark’s Lutheran Church in Kitchener (which no longer exists), the warm open arms of an entire congregation welcomed me. It was a welcome into a family in which I thought (presumed? assumed?) I was as equal as everyone else.

My faith transition was very emotional. I was taken under the wing of a white elder, Norma, whose husband had died a few years before, and whom my pastor felt could relate to the flood of tears with which I was afflicted when I started coming to church. So, every Sunday, in my newfound family gathering, I would beeline to sit with Norma. She brought the Kleenex. That was the deal.

St Mark’s at that time had one brown family who attended alongside the otherwise white congregation. After a few Sundays in church, one of the brown church members invited me to come and join them in “the brown pew”. They used those exact words: “the brown pew”. I chuckled to myself, thinking: Norma is expecting me.

I did not think the colour of my skin had any bearing on my belonging in any pew of any church. Now, when I look back on it, my naiveté makes me sad. It was like the alcohol swab on the skin, preparing to be nicked to the artery. Preparing for the flow of blood.

Fast-forward to Fall 2016. I’m a newly ordained minister, and I tap my Continuing Education Fund to attend a conference with a beloved friend and colleague of mine, Sylvia, who lives near Windsor. We left on a Monday, from her house, via the Detroit airport, to fly to Denver, Colorado, proceeding to the beautiful YMCA of the Rockies at Estes Park, where the conference is to be held.

We’d had some flash floods that weekend, and Sylvia’s water heater got fried when her basement flooded. I drove to her house after church on Sunday. Monday, before leaving for the airport, a scant cold-water shower prepared us for this transcontinental journey.

The first arterial nick: Who will I sleep with when nobody sits with me?

Sylvia and I arrive at the retreat centre in Colorado: my first experience at a Christian conference in the USA. On our drive to the retreat centre, we pass a number of Presidential election signs, including many Trump/Pence signs. “This election is actually happening”, I think. “This is the time we are living in.”

We pick up our packages, check in to our shared room, and soon we are seated in the main conference room, theatre style seating at the opening session. We look around us, as one does, taking in the people-scape. Sylvia makes the observation to me, that I am the only non-white person in the gathering. I concur – but think nothing of it … back in Canada I am also often the only non-white person.

Those who are gathered are all either pastors, deacons or lay leaders. It is a conference about Sunday school and children’s Christian education. Everyone here is that salt-of-the-earth, well-intentioned church type. You couldn’t want a more wholesome group, surely?

After opening remarks, we are invited to go to break-out sessions. We are excited to learn, and we decide to split up and go to different break-out sessions, so we can share our learnings afterwards. Everyone seems friendly enough, and as we bustle to our rooms, there is chatter all around us.

People introducing themselves. Asking “where are you from” of each other.

But not of me.

I go to my break out room and find a seat near the front. Middle of a row. Seats on either side of me: empty. The room fills with people. They greet each other and introduce themselves to each other, but nobody speaks to me, other than a hello in response to my smile and initiation of conversation: “hello”.

I discretely sniff my armpits. We have been traveling from before dawn. Maybe I’m past due for my next shower. Everything seems ok in the armpit department.

I continue to bear my usual friendly face. I smile. I say hi. After all, I am no wallflower! But no deeper conversation happens with me and anyone else.

Nobody sits beside me.

I try not to let it bother me.

More seats are brought in. They are all taken up. People sit on the floor.

Nobody sits beside me.

To my left, there is one empty seat between me and the aisle. To my right, there is one empty seat, and someone has sat on the other side of that seat. I am flanked by empty seats in a room with people sitting on the floor, and standing at the back.

A realize again ... I am the only person of colour here. I feel myself turn from brown to red. In part a dirty, shamed feeling of being ignored. In another part a deep and hot anger.

I understand now - this was the first arterial nick for me.

In the moment, I am profoundly hurt … I know that, like myself, the other Christian leaders at this gathering are all basically good-hearted, well-intentioned people. They have paid hard-earned money, traveled some distance to be more than keepers of stained-glass windows and paraments.

But they have neglected, despite their innate good-will, to see me.

To draw a wide enough circle.

Despite my hopeful smile.

Despite my acceptable armpits.

One angry response of arterial nicking is to ignore the bleeding. I try to focus on the speaker as we are now in-session. The excited friendly conversations have died down. The seat on my right remains empty. At some point I glance to my left.

Someone has taken the empty seat from that spot and moved it elsewhere to sit.

My soul hurts. My heart breaks and a hot anger that doesn’t want to care pours out. How do I give faithful witness of God’s love here?

Somehow I get through the break-out … make my way back to the main room, find Sylvia and sit. She can see from my face that something is wrong. I couldn’t make eye contact when I said to her simply:

“The room filled with people. People sat on the floor. Somebody moved the seat beside me … but nobody sat beside me.”

The tears just fell at that point. Unchecked. Sylvia and I have a history of my tears and her shoulders from Seminary days. Norma carried Kleenex for me, Sylvia bore a shoulder for me. We’ve often joked about it. Without denying my truth or my reality, she put her arm around me. As I sobbed quietly, she said, conspiratorially:

“Listen, I’m the lucky one. I get to sleep with you tonight.”

And despite the hurt, through the tears, the joy that is friendship puts a bandaid on the nick. We laugh, and light breaks in.²

2016 - 2024: many more nicks, much more bleeding.

Since that conference, I’ve been through many more nicks and much more bleeding. We all have. If nothing else, COVID helped the world to see that gradients in privilege run parallel to gradients in colour: the higher your colour, the higher your privilege³, the darker your colour, the lower your privilege.

Racism is not only real, but now is growing in open sanction. The Jodi Picoult book I mentioned at the beginning of this post describes the organization of white supremacy in today’s context. It helped me to understand why, when masking became mandatory, the George Floyd line:

“I can’t breathe.” echoed so loudly with the blood that would pound in my ears, driving me to near panic when I would have to put on a mask.

In Canada, during the pandemic, when schools pivoted to online learning, I had many friends whose children and grandchildren could not attend school online, because they lived on reserve where internet access was limited or non-existent. This dis-privilege did not exist the same way for any other racial group in Canada.

Until a few weeks ago, the many nicks and the bleeding just continued. In the soul-anaemia that ensued, something terrible happened to me. I became racist too. I became suspicious and guarded in predominantly white contexts. I didn’t like being that way, but it had somehow happened, almost as an act of self-defence. I needed to remind myself of where I came from, and my own heritage. So I wrote.

Something changed the day I wrote the story of My Father’s Skin: the story of how my father chose, intentionally, to move us to a country where the colour of our skin would give us an advantage over the dominantly black population.

I wrote that story to remind myself that, despite what the world may say, despite what unwitting microaggressions may say, my father made the intentional effort to make sure I understood that I am privileged. My father also intentionally taught my sister and I: that with privilege comes responsibility.

Writing that story of My Father’s Skin was an act of responsibility to myself. It was an act of resistance in a world snowballing in hatred and “other-ing”. It was a way to get up from my place of victimhood and take hold of the privilege which cost my father his homeland, a land to which he dearly wanted to return.

In writing that story, I also reminded myself that most of the people who made it possible for me to make Canada my home were/are white people. For that matter, most of the people who made it possible for me to make Canada my home were not church-going people. They were friends I made in Engineering school, or from my neighbourhood: John from the comic book store Lookin for Heroes, and his dear mom. Andrea from the Post Office, Janet from Cambridge, and then the many white people from Bruce County who have adopted me.

I decided, I needed to get out into this world again, in spite of the fear of racism. To trust in the privilege my father secured for me, and to trust in the universal power of community and love, which is so much bigger than the institutional church.

Open Mic Night - Tobermory.

So, courage in hand, I ventured out to Open Mic Night in my village of Tobermory back in December, 2024. Open Mic Night happens at a local community spot called The Meeting Place. I arrived at the half-time intermission, and my (white) clergy colleague and friend, Reverend Sheryl Spencer, welcomed me into the packed room. I was warmly greeted by people I had met only once or twice before, and others who I have hiked with. Neda was my only non-white friend there (Neda and I have a story)⁴.

This time, there were no empty seats when I arrived. But Sheryl went out of her way to get a chair, and place it beside her chair. I was in between two occupied seats, in a seat a white person brought out just for me. In an environment where, if I chose to be friendly, friendship would be available in return.

Perhaps we all have some responsibility:

• If we’ve been nicked: to pay attention enough to notice and staunch the bleed.

• If we see someone nicked: to be compassionate, to offer Kleenex, a shoulder, or bring out a chair.

• If we’re affected by harmful racist or privileged actions of others: to take care to not return racism for racism, to try not to return harm for privilege.

• To choose friendship, community and love - even when it means trusting in vulnerability and the healing of our own wounds.

As fate would have it, that night, the first act after intermission, after I was seated, was a written word piece. I was featured in that piece, by the white lady author, as the woman with the beautifully coiffed hair at a party!

1. “microaggression” - a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/microaggression

2. Photo credits to Sylvia Swiatochik and two chairs Photo by Paul Zoetemeijer on Unsplash

3. My own father used the colour of our skin to intentionally seek privilege when we moved to Jamaica: https://janakibandara.substack.com/p/my-fathers-skin

4. When two brown women feel powerless, Purolator better watch out!

https://janakibandara.substack.com/p/canada-post-purolator-and-power