In 2004, Barack Obama said, "There is not a blue America and a red America. There is only a United States of America." At the end of the day on Tuesday, many pundits claimed that he had changed his tone, that he was now speaking about a black America and a white America, but I will beg to differ: There is only the United States of America, it is fundamentally the same for us all, though our experiences are unique and defined by our perspectives and our communities.
I, like Obama, am of mixed heritage, a black father and a white mother. My dad, an American citizen, met my mom in England, where I was born - an American citizen by birth, though in a foreign land. After a few years in England, we came to America, where I've lived ever since. I've been through parts of Europe, and have seen much of the States, from California to North Carolina and New York, with many of my formative years in Oklahoma. Although I haven't been as far as Indonesia or Kenya, I've seen many different cultures and people with my own eyes.
My father, often absent for military duty, wasn't as strong an influence on me as my mother who, a lifelong Brit now living with only her son in the heart of Oklahoma, must have felt as out-of-place as I did. I wonder now if that's perhaps the reason why it took so long for me to become "aware" of the issue of race. Although my school days were as the lone brown face in a sea full of white children, I went home to my white mother and black father and felt that every thing was perfectly normal.
Race, as an issue, simply didn't come up much. When some children started throwing rocks at me in the playground, it hadn't occurred to me that it was because of my race. And, being too young to read, I didn't know that the notes the KKK left for my parents were threats, because they never showed them to me. Even, in my pre-teens in the Bay Area of California, when the waitress at the Denny's refused to take our order and my dad put down his menu, grabbed me and my mom, and walked out of the restaurant without saying a word. Outside of the restaurant, all I heard him say was, "They're not serving us."
For years, the ugly topic of race had kept its way out of my life - even though most of the kids I knew in my neighborhoods were white, because my mom was white, I had always assumed that the race of people just wasn't a big deal.
My best friend at the time, another half-black/half-white kid named Robin, was a perfect friend. Not only did we have the same skin color (which wasn't really paid attention to by either of us), we were both military kids with white moms from England, living just down the street from each other. We had a long, long bond as friends that never really got on to a subject of race and only started to drift away when my dad moved us to a neighborhood a long distance away.
Out on my own, race finally began to enter the picture. I noticed in my early teenage years how all the black kids hung out together in one group, and white kids hung out together in other groups. But that didn't seem as important to me as what else I noticed: that, independently of color, kids generally hung out together based on proximity to each other in housing. The kids in my neighborhood hung out together more than they did the kids who hung out in other neighborhoods.
On top of that, the cool kids hung out together, the nerds hung out together, the skaters hung out together, band kids in one group and every body divided further by what musical genres they listened to and what their favorite TV shows were. Conversations were generally struck up about what classes had just been finished or what somebody had just seen on TV last night.
By then, I had just really started to become aware of race and for most every body else, it was too late - the indoctrination in to social groups was complete. But there were no boundaries that were solid - many whites and blacks had crossover friendships, and the poorest kids always banded together, no matter what color they were.
I look back on myself now as naive, that I just didn't know how things really were - but what a happy naivety it was! I was bound by no color, and as such, I flowed freely from one group to the next. All accepted me graciously, so it never seemed a big deal that they didn't talk to each other.
Over time, that changed. Spending more time with older people, it started to catch on. Working a job, and, while walking to my car after closing the restaurant, see a white woman in front of me take of running to her car and staring at me until I got in my own. Reading old American literature in my English classes, I got a good idea of what the racial situation was like before I was born, but it seemed so far away.
What a matter of perspective! Being so unaware of race, I could talk to anybody, and nobody would make a deal out of it. If you liked the same show as someone else, you had something to connect with. If you liked the same music, if you were in the same class. People were always eager to talk; they just wanted to be approached.
What I saw, though, was that the black kids and the white kids never approached each other. They kept their distance. When they had crossover friends stop by, every thing was okay. There was an understanding. But the groups didn't mingle.
Looking back on it now, I'm sad, because I had always grown up with the perception that every body was open. I still believe they were openly receptive, but the problem was that they never approached. The doors were always perceived to be closed, so nobody knocked.
Being an adult, I found myself pushed fairly hard in to the black world. Not only through means of identifying myself, like what I would fill out on the census or job applications forms: What race was I? Well, I wasn't any of the options, really. There was white, there was black. How did I feel that day?
The cops and the storeowners always knew what color I was. Even from a distance, I learned to identify the headlights of police cars long before I could ever drive. A "black" kid in an all-white neighborhood, heading to the pharmacist in the early evening to buy candy looked an awful lot like whatever purse-snatcher happened to have run past in the last few days. I was often stopped and questioned just to make sure I didn't look suspicious, and the day I lost my CD player in the bushes outside of a park was the day I wound up arms-spread on the hood of a police cruiser because I was a suspicious black man rummaging around in some bushes.
The word, "nigger," came at me most vividly from a homeless woman sitting outside of a bank on Stevens Creek in San Jose. "Beady eyed nigger!" Came again, and it took me some time to recognize that it was me she was yelling at. Me she was pointing at and screaming, and I was still in the middle of the crosswalk.
I buffed the remark, it not even fazing me. I walked past her and off in to the bank with my friend while she kept screaming at me. I felt sorry for her more than anything, knowing that she wasn't in her right mind. But it, like the other times it was yelled at me, failed to incite an immediate reaction. I never made that internal connection.
It seems strange to me, now, that it took me so long to catch on. That the epithets, the rocks thrown at my head, the bullies who picked on me, the two guys who cornered me outside of the basketball court and punched at me, pelting me with basketballs, that they did all of this because of my skin color. For someone who never saw skin color as anything more than graduated shades, I could only imagine it must have been my personality that offended them so.
I'd like to think it still is. But none-the-less, I've learned. I'm extremely lucky, because I've spent so much time in the Bay Area, now residing in San Francisco, that I can put race so often on the backburner. I don't draw attention when I walk around town with my girlfriend, who's Asian.
But the perception is still there. Even in San Francisco, nobody sits next to me on the bus. I like to think of myself as considerate, leaving empty seats next to me instead of trying to block them. I don't mind sharing. But I don't have to worry about that because, even when the bus is full, nobody sits next to me.
Stopping and waiting at a cross walk; I've seen white people walk away from me, then wait on the other edge of the same crosswalk. Police cars slow down when they pass me walking, and I can feel them looking at me. I pay extra-close attention to the way I walk when I pass officers on the sidewalk, lest my gate be considered suspicious.
Simply a matter of perception. But it's planted in my head, and now it won't go away.
Still, I'm lucky to grow up how I have. The distance from racial issues had long protected me from its psychological effects, especially on black men. Angry at those police officers who watch them so much more closely, anger at the people who walk around them at the crosswalk, anger at the white people who would rather stand in the middle of the bus than take any of the empty 4 seats in the back of the bus, where all the black people are.
I escaped most of my formative years without forming a racial identity. But I can only imagine what it must have been like for those other kids, seeing their black fathers or brothers tighten up when they saw the police, hoping not to be stopped; the child that's too young to understand just wondering why anyone would even be so concerned. At that age, bad things only happen to bad people and it hasn't really occurred to them that they aren't as blank a slate as these people are to them. And then seeing those frustrations realized as, yes, that officer IS going to stop the father and search him, for one reason or another.
I was lucky to have grown up in a way that my racial identity began to be formed after my analytical identity. That I could consciously understand these subtle social dynamics and question myself along the way. But yet, no matter how aware I was, I still found myself constantly pushed towards the "black" column.
What's been especially jarring for me was that, after all the times I was pulled over, all the times I was stopped walking down the street, after the epithets and the fights, after a number of job interviews where the HR rep was obviously surprised by my color, was that... I started to get kind of mad about it. That, after all these years, after all these travels and experiences, I wasn't me - I was just black.
It was annoying at first, chatting with people online who would express some shock when I informed them I was black, to the neighborhoods where I would always get pulled over, to knowing which shopkeepers were going to follow me around and which weren't. After a while, I could imagine what lays before me as I enter the store, drive in to the neighborhood, and it was no surprise when the shopkeeper or the policeman finally showed up.
That's what really got me. That, after all the experiences that I've had, through all of the schooling that I've done, the countries that I've visited, the jobs I've held, that my mere physical appearance would pigeonhole me in to a caricature of an ethnic stereotype. I've been me all my life, I know myself inside and out and I know that I have layers upon layers of personality, which I've grown to imagine that single other person on this planet does, too. But time and time again, I've found myself judged by the color of my skin, perhaps the single only aspect of my identity that I have no control over.
I got mad. It bugged me, though I've never experienced it to any great extent. I'd heard about "black rage," or "black anger," and I finally started to nod my head in understanding. But it did not control me. To this day, I still can't imagine the anger at having spent one's whole life feeling this way. I grew up long after the passage of civil rights, and I can't even fathom the idea of segregation: that the very whole of my experience as a person means nothing in light of the color of my skin and that that alone relegates me to a second-class existence. Regardless of how one perceives themselves now, growing up with that idea is perhaps the surest fire way to kill hope, inspiration and faith.
The black anger became clear to me, but what I also could see was yet another part of a vicious cycle: white resentment. The LA riots shaped me as a person who could see both sides of the coin at the same time. At one time, I could hear from black friends the rage and spite for the system that's kept their brothers and sisters in LA poor and without protection from the gangs.
But from other groups of white friends, I would hear the anger at the riots; the anger at the white man pulled out of his truck and beat in to mental retardation over the color of his skin. Black friends would say, "Well, now they know how it feels!" and white friends would say, "I thought it was wrong when they did it to blacks, I don't think they should be doing it to anybody!"
And in came the white resentment. It was fed by black anger, anger at a system built by racists to oppress them. Blacks screamed injustice; they wanted closure, like a mother screaming at a judge to condemn the man who killed her children. But there was no closure - the architects of the system lived long, happy lives, filled with money, honor and, of course, subjects of a law that bent to their needs.
The white children of these early system builders grew up in neighborhoods knowing each other, having enough money from their parents to go to college, become educated and run their own businesses. And so on down the road, and so on down the road.
What I saw in that black anger was frustration at the mechanized racism in the system, where people who, like me, lived their entire lives as themselves, deeply complex people with loves, hates, pleasures and pains, reduced to mere abstractions of people based upon their skin color. And this happens to them, at some level, every single day. From the job application to the police officer to the white lady who crosses the street when they pass her by.
The white resentment is fueled by t he black anger. It's a remarkable dichotomy, fueled entirely by perception. The white business man who has been running his own small company for 20 years, pulling 12 hours day and passing on vacations in order to expand his business, whose mother was an alcoholic and his father non-existent, who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, resents the idea of an entire race of people thinking he achieved his accomplishments by virtue of the color his skin.
The cycle continues. His resentment builds, anger at the black families who get free lunches while he pays for his out of pocket. It becomes a circle that feeds on itself, and yet, the entire cycle is built on perception. That we all reduce the other to abstractions, based on skin color, and make judgments without opening up an actual dialogue.
We need to talk to each other, instead of simply making an assumption and filling it with experiences from a racially divided past. I have seen both sides, and I've seen with my own eyes the openness that people have to new ideas and new experiences. It is in the teaching that we learn not to talk about our identities or theirs, but it is in this silence that misunderstanding grows.
I'm still mad. I am angry that Barack Obama, the son of an African who has never known slavery, must stand on a stage and explain black anger to America, a deep and complex anger that, I must imagine, was once as foreign to him as it was to me. But even more, that the son of a black man and a white woman be, like me, pigeonholed as the black person of the situation. To be the one that must not only cross the divide himself, but also be the bridge across which the two sides may meet.
His speech on Tuesday floored me, stunned me, and yet saddened me. I don't feel that he should be the one to have to come to white America with black America's baggage, to lay it at their feet and explain away the last few hundred years of anger. Like me, he is a mixed-race individual, of neither but picking one side or the other to partner with. Our identities are something unique, yet you can imagine which side we are often pushed towards. For many, the issue of "black or white" is very much black and white.
But at the end, the largest difference between the black America and the white America is the perception one takes with them as they live in the country. The events that shape America only happen to one America, the United States of America. It's our perception of that which we take home with us.
If I could, I would find that younger version of me, the one to whom race was still an abstract, social concept, and I would hug him and tell him to stay that way forever.