When Claire was a toddler and learning to speak, she called every black man she saw “my neighbor.” This was cute in some ways, but it was also a little uncomfortable. We have one neighbor in particular – a black man – who was one of the first people to welcome us to our new home five years ago. We were a young white family moving onto a block with many older black families. Claire picked up on the black faces around us, and identified black men in particular with our street. But when you’re in the store with your 2-year-old, who is aggressively pursuing black men with cries of “Hi neighbor! Mama, my neighbor! Look!” you can get some looks.
I think about race all the time. I’m hyper-aware of my white privilege and I over-analyze other people’s behavior in a way that’s exhausting. That’s my truth. But what does it mean? And does it accomplish anything? It is my sincerest hope that I look back on these words a few years from now and am embarrassed or relieved or, at least, reminded of where I started. Because that will mean I kept moving forward, kept questioning my feelings, sharing my impressions. The hardest thing to do is acknowledge that every person is at a different starting point when working toward a common goal.
I’ve been thinking mostly in terms of black/white relations. That’s not to diminish or exclude other races, it’s to narrow the focus of my own attention on one portion of the larger picture at a time. While race relations in the United States seems to be a consistent topic of national conversation, as it should be, the past few years have seen the topic explode, and mostly for the wrong reasons. Social media has brought instant exposure to incidents in real time. And “real time” doesn’t always tell the story in a fair, balanced, or accurate way. Comments left on news stories, or blog posts, on Twitter, Facebook, whatever, are snippets of one person’s experience and never reveal the whole picture. People get defensive, offensive, and it usually devolves. The election of a mixed race president has unearthed a breed of Americans who can’t hide their thinly veiled racism any more (there are plenty of valid reasons to criticize a politician, to be sure, but the “Birthers” and those who seek to discredit the President because his father is from Kenya are straight-up racist.) The killing of Trayvon Martin lit a fuse. The killing of Michael Brown ignited a powder keg. The imprisonment of Marissa Alexander in contrast with the police treatment of Sarah Culhane is mind-boggling. I think about these events playing out on the national stage, but mainly, I look at how I live my life and how we raise our girls and I think and think and think…
This piece sparked something in me in the most visceral of ways. This is one woman’s opinion, and it cut right through me. I can not begin to know her experiences, and I can see she also has a mind prone to analyze. “I often hear good white people ask why people of color must make everything about race, as if we enjoy considering racism as a motivation. I wish I never had to cycle through these small interactions and wonder: Am I overthinking? Am I just being paranoid? It’s exhausting.” And this – “I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.” Seeming good. I’ve rolled those two words over and over in my mind until they make even less sense to me than they originally did. What the author sees as self-congratulatory, I see as living out loud. I truly and completely have no idea how Ms. Bennett expects “good white people” to live if we are working towards the same goal of erasing white privilege in favor of human equality. And therein lies one of the fundamental problems – there is no answer to this problem. There is acknowledgement of the institutionalized injustice that black Americans face every single day of their lives. But we – every person on this earth at this moment – will not SOLVE the problem of racism. We are generations away from that, at best. If every American at this moment suddenly realized that skin color is not a trait to be vilified or celebrated, rather a component of a larger part of a human, there is still the rest of the world. The world in which hundreds (thousands, likely) of Nigerians are slaughtered and the focus remains on 12 Parisians.
Pardon the double entendre, but reaching true equality is not a race. It’s a slow, long journey for each person. Filled with stumbles, falls, questioning, wondering. And mistakes will be made all the time. It’s recognizing and then moving past these mistakes which will allow us to continue on the path.
Last Monday, Emma and I went to see Annie. It was incredible. The songs, the cast, the story. I loved it. And I was blown away by the seamless integration of the cast. It’s still unusual to see a black leading man surrounded by a white supporting cast. A black leading man with a white love interest. To see a child of color as the main character, with best friends of different races. This was amazing to me! To Emma, it was nothing special. Her friends and her neighbors and her dentist and her pediatricians are all black. Her friends and her teachers are Hispanic. Her friends and her family are white. She pretends she speaks with a Spanish accent because she tries to mimic the cadence of her teacher. She dances in a way that’s got decidedly hip-hop undertones because that’s how her friends move. She wants to grow her long blonde hair even longer because that’s something her Caucasian hair will allow. These are her reference points and the only world she knows.
The reference points of the protesters and rioters in Florida and in Missouri and in New York are of suspicion and distrust and mistreatment. They’re called thugs for perpetuating a stereotype, but it’s like shaking a can of Coke mercilessly and then flicking the pop top – when the can explodes, the pop top is blamed for its failure, not the shaking that built up the pressure to the point of an inevitable burst. I was waiting in line at Rite Aid last week and a couple of black teenagers were ambling out the door, wearing heavy winter coats just like I was, guarding against the frigid evening. A very jumpy security guard told them to stop, and they looked at him and kept walking. The guard had been by the front door and could not possibly have seen if they’d taken anything, and yet he felt he had the right to stop and check them. Because they didn’t stop, he followed them through the front door of the store and pepper sprayed them. I have no doubt that I could have loaded my pockets with merchandise, zipped up my heavy winter coat, and ambled out the door myself without incident. I can’t begin to know if these particular teens had caused problems in the store before, if they were known to the security guard. It certainly didn’t feel that way watching this unfold and I was dumbstruck. That’s one shake of the can…
I struggle mightily with victim-blaming. Why didn’t those teens in Rite Aid just stop like they were asked? If they had nothing to hide, why didn’t they stop? Why are protesters turning violent and looting? I see young black men and women making poor choices, to my white eyes, and I realize that they have so little control over so many aspects of their lives, they choose to exert control over things that, to you and me, seem pointless. Why would someone choose to wander into the street, in front of moving cars, forcing the vehicles to stop and let them by? Because they can. They have no control over the fact that they’re waiting nearly an hour for a bus, or that their parents aren’t available to pick them up, or that they don’t have the means to learn to drive, or afford a car, or anything of the like. But this form of challenge provides them with one aspect of control. And, of course, white teenagers engage in risky behaviors too. That’s a human condition. But there’s a difference – a distance – between the behaviors. How do we close that distance?
And therein lies the rub. My friends and I raise our children with the same emphases – education, respect for oneself and one’s family, gratitude, and love. But as our children age, the pressures on each of them shift and my friends of color have added burden, dealing with the assumptions carried by society that their children are somehow “less than.” I can’t comprehend that, nor can I even that out on my own, but I take responsibility for making sure my children work to alleviate at least some of that burden in their lifetimes.
This post has been in draft form for a few weeks now. There’s so much more I’d like to discuss, but will withhold until a later date for the sake of opening communication without smothering it. But the analysis-paralysis continues… Just last night, Emma told me that she’d invited a friend from her class over to play. When she mentioned it to the friend last week, the friend was enthusiastic and they wanted to set up a time. Emma told me last night that her friend now doesn’t want to come over and that each time Emma mentions it, the friend gets cranky. My heart lurched and I got the terrible feeling this friend had gotten in trouble for broaching the subject of playing at Emma’s house. I cringe at the idea of being the overly-friendly white lady, and I cringe at the idea of Emma’s black classmates (because Emma is the only white child in her class) being pinned between their childhoods and their families’ social mores. But the decision is not mine to make, and my astute daughter simply decided she’d give it some time before asking again, and in the meantime, ask another friend to play.
I have mentors, friends, and colleagues who are leaps and bounds ahead of me on their journeys to mend our torn societal fabric. I know others who won’t acknowledge anything needs repair. What works for me right now is to keep living out loud by advocating for fairness, and to keep raising my children to value and celebrate each person they bring into their lives as part of one another’s story.
