Cross-posted at Lens Out
When I was eight years old my family moved to a CMHA subsidized housing project, the end of a short, frayed string of bad housing choices. The home that I still idealize in my mind was the old Victorian in Price Hill where we moved when I was four, which had been split into two apartments, of which we had the second floor. This was where we stayed until my Dad lost his job as an office clerk at Queen City Metro a couple of years later. Then came the first floor apartment of the house in Clifton Heights, where the insulation was so bad the toilet literally froze over in the winter, and the upstairs neighbor ruined many quiet weekends with bone-vibrating performances on their hi-fi of Another One Bites the Dust. (When I think back on those days I am always amazed by how differently time moves for a child, how two years in that old green mansion signified as a lifetime, while two years in an apartment now is a gradually diminishing percentage of relevance.) One year in that place must have been enough, because the next thing I knew we were moving to Millvale, a couple of streets wedged between the neighborhoods of South Cumminsville and English Woods.
We were the first all white family to move in to those apartments, and we became an immediate curiosity to those who had lived there for years. Our first day after moving in, my older sister and I decided to explore the new neighborhood on our own – a pastime still forgivable in 1982 – and we quickly discovered a swing set down at the end of one street in a small park. As we sat there, we noticed a couple of girls, about our age or a little younger, staring at us in the unabashed way of youth, and they eventually made the decision to approach us. We said hellos, and then one of the girls asked a question that still echoes down through the years and remains a vitally important moment in my personal history. This little black girl asked us shyly, but in point-blank fashion, “Why did your granddaddy make our granddaddy slaves?”
That question has burned inside of me for nearly four decades, politely but insistently demanding an answer that I could never give without incriminating myself – like responding to the question of when precisely I stopped beating my wife. My first response was to deny it. Within a few years of that encounter I had my answer all worked out. “My grandfather did no such thing. My grandfather was a Polish Jew who fled the Bolsheviks in 1907. He didn’t have slaves, and escaped from an oppressive state, so don’t lump me in with slave owners!” I had my spiel down, and repeated it as the need arose, all the while dutifully ignoring my Mom’s Dutch side, who were rumored to be distantly related to Peter Stuyvesant, who ironically did not want Jews to settle in New Amsterdam because he considered them “a deceitful race” – but I would deal with that later. I was also 1/32 Mohawk after all, and that seemed like a better identification to my teenaged disposition.
I longed to be seen as one of those oppressed.
In part, I imagine that longing stemmed from a desire to have an answer to that girl’s question that could somehow let me off the hook. I was Jewish, I was Native American, I was anything but the obvious, slightly pasty thing right in front of you. If you believed my story, then I would be exonerated. If not, well…then I would have to figure out what exactly my whiteness meant, both to me and to my place in the world. I think I instinctively knew I would not like the answer.
When I first started my undergrad coursework I was working at the public library part time to help pay my way through. A couple of girls who also worked there as shelvers were taking a political science class together and had to interview people about stories of oppression. They were explaining the project to me and another shelver, a black man, and in an almost mirror image of that scene at the playground, they turned as one to Norman and asked point-blank, “So, what’s it like being oppressed?” Being a gracious guy, he spoke to them at length about the types of situations we now understand as being a regular part of the African-American experience: being pulled over for DWB (driving while black), being tailed in stores to make sure you don’t shoplift. All of those things happened to my friend every day, and I sat there, barely listening to his personal narrative because by now, in my early 20s, I was furious.
I was livid at these young women for making what I saw at the time to be a racist assumption. This guy here is white, so he could not possibly know what it means to be hated or oppressed, to know fear. But this guy over here is black, and therefore must have stories of mistreatment and inequity. Seeing the words on the screen now, it seems so obvious. But back then it was about my own bitterness of growing up poor, not being able to do so many of the things that my friends could. On top of that, while we were on friendly terms with our immediate neighbors back then, there were plenty of folks who did not like us living on their street. We had rocks and trash can lids thrown through our windows; we were occasionally harassed, even told to go “home.” My whiteness (as I saw it then) did nothing but act as a shield to render my oppression invisible to everyone else.
Of course, by then I was struggling with a different kind of invisibility. Going to college meant socializing with a group of people who valued education, and many came from working class or middle class backgrounds. But most people there in the mid 1990s were white, and I began to realize that everyone assumed my background, my personal history, mirrored their own. And I finally began to see first hand that those assumptions, even as they negated my true narrative, could be used to my advantage. I could make whiteness work for me; instead of constantly fighting against it, I could blend in, disappear in an entirely different way.
Over the next decade or so I filled my time working in an office on campus, and playing in a couple of different bands. Rachel and I began dating, got married, and there was a kind of equilibrium for a while on the identity front. It wasn’t until I went to grad school for Communication that I began to discover just how much damage growing up in poverty did, how much time I wasted on trying to craft an identity, and how much denying the cultural value of my whiteness to myself prevented me from recognizing just how easy I really had it. Poverty was certainly a barrier to success, and one that should not be casually dismissed. But in my case, those hurdles were all psychological. The hurdles of race are in many ways external: cultural, systemic, and for that reason, seemingly insurmountable.
I can be far more outraged now on behalf of my black brothers and sisters in this country than I could be back then. But, as a friend of mine recently put it on Facebook, “Mine is the comfortable rage of the hegemon.” There is still a “wall between” my anger and yours, even when it is pointed in the same direction. Because no matter how much I feel when I see these videos of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, no matter how much I may be horrified or saddened, I know that tomorrow morning I can get in my car and go to work and never once worry that it could be me that doesn’t make it back home.
