Mary and I were talking about Oklahoma, circling the strange mix of affection and disbelief that comes from returning to the place that made you. We joked about “exposure therapy for Oklahomans”—a joke that carries a heavy truth.
There are people here who genuinely need exposure to difference: races, religions, sexualities, and ways of living. When you’re raised inside inherited suspicion, proximity is medicine. It’s the slow dismantling of the lie that “those people” are less human than “us.”
But as we talked, we realized that was not the cage we had to escape.
We grew up in households where racism was vehemently opposed. It’s easy to flatten fundamentalism into a uniform darkness, but our homes did not teach us to hate based on race. In that specific way, we were given a gift.
Looking back, that upbringing often feels less racist than what I see emerging in parts of the current fundamentalist right. You would expect the 90s to have been more hostile, but today some forms of hatred once deemed shameful are increasingly excused or baptized as conviction.
So no, we did not need to be convinced that other races were fully human. What we needed was different. We needed exposure to other possibilities of mind.
Moving to Boulder did not save us from racism; it expanded our map of reality. We joke that Boulder provided the most diverse group of white people we’d ever encountered. It was not diversity in the full human sense, but it was a diversity of imagination. It showed us there were ways to be thoughtful, spiritual, and alive that did not fit the architecture we had inherited.
The shock was not, “Oh, these people are human too.” The shock was, “Oh, reality is much larger than I was told.”
Some are trapped by inherited hatred and need contact with the humanity they were taught to fear. Others are trapped by inherited certainty. They do not hate outsiders, but they live inside a sealed world: one approved theology, one political imagination, and one narrow definition of goodness.
Our escape was from the good cage.
It’s complicated because that cage was not made of cruelty. It was made of love, sincerity, and people doing their best. But a cage built with sincerity is still a cage.
Boulder gave us expansion. Not enlightenment, just enough distance to see that the world was bigger than the good people said.