This is going to be a lot harder to write than my last post (“Confessions of a TERF”), and that last post was really hard to write. BUt….
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Critical Race Theory has become the new boogie man of the right and it scares me how effective that has been. I’ve been saying for years that the most effective way to wake up white people is education. As it is, we’re given less than Cliff notes on the topic- in fact, I truly believe that if the Civil War hadn’t happened we wouldn’t have been taught about slavery at all.
My public education taught me that yes, racism is bad, but we fought a war to end it. Then it bubbled up again in the fifties, but a black pastor from the South made a speech and it ended again. It was never a constant, never built into the fabric of our society. Racism was a bad thing that bad people did way back when, but good people stopped it and it has been stopped since.
I was just a child. Hadn’t even reached five feet in height yet, and I had no reason to doubt the adults in my life when they told me racism was a thing that only happened in the past before a better generation fixed it.
That one of my best friends was a black girl proved this.
To be fair, I was, at the time, colorblind like people preached we should be. I didn’t see Ella as a black person, she was just my friend. I never thought anything about us being friends until adults pointed out it was “good” that I befriended her, or “compassionate” for including her.
On some level I understood what the adults were saying but it really made no sense to me otherwise. Ella was just another friend. I didn’t spend time with her for egalitarian purposes, I spent time with her because we were a lot alike and I felt comfortable being myself around her.
I wasn’t picked on or bullied back then but I wasn’t popular, either. I was this sort of in-between, and Ella was right there with me. We loved to read, but we’d take our noses out of our books if there was a game of kickball happening. We loved Math, but not enough to defend it to our other friends when they complained about assignments. We loved going to the library together, but when our other friends saw us in there amongst the pile of books we amassed they made fun of us and we didn’t even care.
Thirty years later I still don’t understand the pride so many Americans take in being barely literate. But Ella and I, we loved words. We loved stories.
We were excited about the upcoming field trip our class was going to take to the airport. We got to see a lot of cool stuff so I shouldn’t roll my eyes about it, but it was a very small airport with maybe five to ten arrivals or departures per day. The entire airport was smaller than our school, and we started getting bored and restless as we were shown and led through yet another conference room.
I don’t remember what we were being led to at the time, but we were all following a woman to an upstairs area. A boy from class looked back at me over his shoulder, laughed, and asked why I was hanging with a N*****.
I had never heard that word spoken out loud before and I immediately got angry and lunged toward the kid. Ella and our friend T grabbed me and held me back, but I promised Doug I was going to kill him when the final school bell rang.
My threat didn’t stop the boys from picking on Ella and I had never seen anything so cruel in my life.
They kept picking at her and I kept fighting back and Ella kept grabbing my elbow and telling me to let it go, it was OK. BUT IT WASN’T O FUCKING K. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing as the boys in our class taunted and tormented her. I couldn’t believe the adults there heard most of it but kept threatening me and never told the boys to STFU.
When we got back to school and into our class, our teacher called me to follow her into the hall. She was furious. Demanded to know why I was so disruptive through the entire field trip. So I told her.
I told the truth and nothing but the truth. She furrowed her brow and looked deep into my eyes. “This really happened? I need you to name names if this is true.”
So I fucking named them.
Named every fucking name.
Brandon.
Jesse.
Chad.
Doug- especially Doug. He was the one who used the N word.
Mark.
Dan- he was the one who said something I won’t repeat.
Cory.
And Derek.
I always thought Derek was my friend and a good guy. He didn’t say anything, but he stood there with them as they taunted Ella. And when I wanted a fist fight to settle the score he just walked away.
The teacher thanked me and said I did the right thing but I was still in trouble, then she opened the door to the classroom to let me back in and yelled the names I’d just named. I thought justice was coming.
I’ll spare you the drama, but at the end of the day I was the only one who faced consequences.
At some point, I remember it being the next day but I could be wrong, my mom barged through the school doors and ripped the principal a new one. It was so embarrassing- it was a small school building but that didn’t justify her voice ringing through the halls for all the school to hear.
To ten-year-old me, this wasn’t a case of racism. It couldn’t be because that didn’t even exist anymore except among really awful people. They were picking on her because her hair was weird and her clothes were old. They were picking on her because she didn’t know who or what or where her mom was. They were just picking on her to be mean, like the time the same boys cornered another girl- a white one- and spit loogies on her for what was probably two minutes but seemed like an eternity.
Ella, T, and I all stood back watching it happen, glancing back and forth to each other expecting someone to say something, but if WE did, we would be the ones with loogies in our hair, so we just watched it happen, stoic and silent.
It’s embarrassing to admit this today, but it was years-decades, even- before I realized that I had witnessed outright racism when with Ella. And I wish I had a great redemption story, but I’m going to be honest about how I finally realized it, which is not a redemption story at all.
I was riding around in an old truck (with a girl who was supposed to be a booty call but quickly became my girlfriend, and a few years later up to the present day, my wife). I lived in a great neighborhood at the time (Boise North End represent!!!) and we had just come down from the foothills, where we had taken our dogs to run free. She drove up and down each street just looking at all the cool houses and such. We got to about a block from my house and I told her to take a right.
On the street just around the corner from my house, two men were leaning against a truck talking, but one of them had a gun in his hand. I inhaled sharply, terrified, and the beautiful lady driving the truck asked what was wrong. But before she had even finished her sentence, the threat and the terror had completely changed. I smiled at her “oh, nothing” I lied. “I just almost spilled my beer.”
The honest truth was, there was never a gun, but there was a black man. And I clearly saw a gun in the black man’s hand.
It wasn’t real. It was just his fucking hand.
In less than the time it’s taken to me to write and you to read this story, we pulled up in front of my house and I was a different person. What had been a beautiful, sun- and laugh-filled beautiful late Spring day turned into a very dark one. I hid what I was feeling and thinking because I didn’t want to ruin the day for the pretty girl I was with, but it tormented me.
HOW did I see a gun in his hands? He was just a guy chatting with his neighbor and I immediately saw a threat.
It made me sick, it made me angry, it made me disgusted with myself.
It also made me realize that, despite my persona as an “all are equal” person, I had been influenced enough by the culture I live in that I saw a gun in a black man’s hand when he was just leaning against a truck, drinking a beer with his buddy.
I fell asleep that night but had a very fitful sleep, and at one point at 3 or 4 am I woke up to the realization that what I was fighting when I tried to protect Ella was racism. How stupid and naive had I been to not even know that? How had I gotten through almost three decades of life without realizing that racism was, in fact, a very real and current ongoing problem?
White privilege, pshaw. I’ll see your privilege and raise you a blissfully and willfully ignorant!
…..And yet, that wasn’t enough to fully open my eyes. What bothers me the most is that (and I think I’ve made apologies but I probably still owe a few) there were black people here who tried to tell me about racism and my attitude was basically, yeah, I get it. But we don’t have to talk about it.
Then in 2015, at the age of 36 because I never fucking learn, something happened.
I’ve hesitated to write about this in the past because I don’t want it to become a flame war (and seriously, if you’re tempted to comment about this just let it fucking go already), but the #BLM protest at Netroots Nation finally woke me up.
I believed that #BLM had done a solid, necessary move. We talk a lot about black voters- specifically black women- being the driving force behind our electoral gains, and we talk a lot about how we need to listen to them and have their backs the way they, sometimes inexplicably, have ours. But then they “caused a scene” and all pretense of caring about their concerns evaporated.
The thing that got me, because I’m nothing if not self-centered, was how much I saw myself in the comments against the protest. There I was, stripped bare and speaking plainly, that the #BLM protesters should know what’s best for them, how could they not understand that by their actions they were turning natural allies into enemies? How DARE they insinuate that progressives also have implicit biases at best, complete indifference to the cause at middling, and outright scorn at worst?
It was verboten to call progressives racist because we’ve already proved we’re against racism by our very ideology. We don’t have to actually DO anything, or STAND for anything, let alone FIGHT for something to prove ourselves. If you don’t understand we’re not the problem, that’s on YOU.
But I wasn’t the one saying these things this time. I had actually started thinking and listening after Trayvon Martin was killed and the #BLM movement began. I had never before noticed how little I actually paid attention, let alone give deference, to Black Lives. I had internalized everything society had taught me. I am a Good Person, therefore I cannot be a racist. Period. No pun intended, but this was all very black and white to me, with a very clear line between right and wrong.
It was as I watched the trial of George Zimmerman that I realized I had been wrong.
So very, very wrong.
We knew he was going to get away with literal murder.
And how did we know that if racism isn’t a very current and prevalent thing? How could I watch the news and wipe tears from eyes about little Tamir Rice if I couldn’t acknowledge that there is something wrong with white people- myself included? Indeed, how could all this racism, this violent, blatant racism, not exist like it used to if it has completely broken me in the current era?
And how could I have not been part of the problem if I’ve always been part of this culture, this society? This pattern of denial that racism exists at the level black people keep telling us it does? The very obnoxious idea that I ever felt qualified to tell black people how to get by in this world without seeing racism everywhere? For fuck’s sake, who did I think I was?
The truth is that I didn’t think I was better, just more qualified to speak about the American experience because I am totally American. I know how real people feel about this stuff. And yes, I totally sympathize with your plight but I am here to tell you how to talk about said plight- go easy on the racism, heavy on the patriotism- so that you don’t alienate potential allies or, worse, normal voters.
Your life is only going to get better if you approach the world in this specific way that makes people- oh, not me, of course, I’m already on your side but, you know, other people- feel comfortable. Maybe take some time to acknowledge how not racist your potential allies are. Why assume the worst of them?
I wish I could say that I became a better person by listening to what black people told me, but the truth is that I didn’t acknowledge any of my wrongdoing until I saw other white people doing it and found myself appalled and disgusted.
The comment about #BLM alienating allies may as well have been written by me. The one about how they were clearly doing this for partisan reasons? Something I could have recommended a few years earlier. The comment about them shooting themselves in the foot and losing all legitimacy? Yup, something I could have given a thumbs up to mere months earlier.
Oh, and my favorite, the “when we have Trump because of you I hope you’re happy” even though it was never going to be black voters who gave us trump. It was always going to be white voters who brought that travesty to us, but Dog forbid we blame them when there are a dozen black people all lined up to take the blame. You hurt their fees-fees, see, and if you’d have just shut the fuck up about implicit bias and systemic racism this NEVER would have happened.
At the time all these arguments were made I fought against them but the truth is I had made all the same points at some point in my life.
*********
In the days after the 2016 election I barely functioned. I was gutted and sick and if I had to be awake I required a lot of marijuana to get through the day even though I had previously very rarely smoked pot.
I woke up with a terrible hangover one morning and checked my phone then tried to get back to sleep but I couldn’t. At the top of the rec list was a highly recommended post by a staff writer who explained that in the future, we needed to somehow get black voters on the progressive train in order for us to win future elections.
If my head hadn’t been pounding already I would have slammed it repeatedly into a wall.
I wanted to writing a scathing comment, but I didn’t have the energy. I pulled my comforter tighter around myself and laid in the dark thinking that, if anything, black voters needed to get white progressives on the bus because we’re clearly missing the scenery as we stand where we are and refuse to move. Insist that others join us over here because that’s what best for them, regardless of what we’d been told by those same voters.
Mercifully, I fell back asleep. But as I drifted off I remembered how hostile moderate to progressive people had been to me and my lesbian self in previous years, and how that seemed to change almost overnight. It was now a given that any Democrat running for office had to support full rights for LGBT people.
It was beautiful but troubling, because we need/needed our party to also unequivocally support #BLM. If racism is a thing of the past, why are our candidates so skiddish about it? Why is “Defund the Police” a certain political loser but “Love is Love” a winner?
Why does an entire nation have to be traumatized by watching snuff films before they decide that maybe we shouldn’t kill black people indiscriminately? And why does that passion for black lives have such a short half life?
Why do white people always rush to the front to say they ARE NOT RACIST when everyone is looking, but still passively accept our racist system and aren’t willing to take a knee for that?
And why, dear Dog Almighty, why, why, why, does it take so much trauma and despair to bring said white person to their knees and vow to not enable the culture of white supremacy?
Finally, when will we realize that the racism we see and acknowledge is baked in and we have to actually do something to stop it?
We all cried hearing George Floyd’s final words in his final moments.
Then we did nothing, believing the guilt and pain we carried was our cross to bear and just the price we pay for privilege.
“It was because he called for his mom,” my own mom told me. “That’s what hurts the most and why it’s gotten more attention and support.”
But it wasn’t that for me. It was everything else.
It was that no matter what Floyd had done differently the day would have ended the same. Another black man dead- maybe not under the circumstances that made white people so sympathetic- but in the way that these things just happen.
But we’re supposed to believe that racism isn’t pervasive.
And we’re required to believe that we’re not racist.
But something has to fucking give, because maybe none of us are racist, but at best we uphold and support a very racist structure.
We’re so scared of being called a racist that we’ve become exactly that. And yes, I mean you, too, random white person reading this.