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Black in the Midwest
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in West Michigan)
The Christian Reformed Church is a Dutch Calvinist denomination that dominates race, culture, and religion. And I have a love/hate relationship with it.
Last month we published a special series on what it’s like to be Black in the Midwest, and invited you to share your own experiences. Following is one of several submissions by Medium writers that we are excited to share with you.
My first real job after grad school was at Planned Parenthood, raising money for critical reproductive health care for West Michigan’s “most vulnerable people,” i.e. Black and Latinx women. The adult salary meant I could finally upgrade the brokedown Pontiac Grand Am I drove through college. I leafed through the classifieds until I found the perfect listing: “Volkswagen Golf in ‘Bristol condition,’ for sale by owner.” (“Bristol” is the same as “mint” but it’s more often used to describe yachts than automobiles.) The car was about 30 minutes away on a farm outside Zeeland.
I called the number and spoke to the seller, an elderly widower who had continued to maintain the vehicle after his wife’s death. He sounded lonely, so I let the conversation continue beyond car specs. I told him I lived in southeast Grand Rapids and was a graduate of Calvin College. He laughed and said, “Calvin College? That’s great. Because you know if you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.” He’s going to be real surprised when I show up to test drive, I thought as I hung up.
Grand Rapids, Michigan, is one of a number of Dutch American enclaves concentrated in the U.S. Midwest and Canada, which retain strong ties to the Netherlands, via the Christian Reformed Church and its slightly more liberal cousin, the Reformed Church of America. Unlike other White-majority Protestant denominations — and that would be all of them; the Pew Center reports that more than 75% of evangelical and mainline Protestants are White — Reformed churches and affiliated schools not only reinforce shared faith, they also reinforce the shared ethnic identity of its members.
Dutch Reformed immigrants arrived in North America in the mid-1800s. In addition to…
