A few weeks ago I was at Rocco’s Pizzeria with my friend Pete; a good looking black guy sat next to me at the bar. We got to chatting, as you do when you’ve had a drink and a good looking man sits next to you at the bar. He was well dressed — “My mom always said a man needs a good suit of clothes” — and had a terrific baritone laugh. We chatted for a while, shook hands, chatted some more. “Man, it sure is nice to meet some friendly white people in Seattle,” he said. I had to ask about that. Because I am an idiot, I couldn’t believe this could be a thing. But of course it is, because we’re racist as hell and I have the convenience of forgetting about race for huge swaths of time.
My neighborhood, which is fast losing its status as Seattle’s last affordable neighborhood, is probably three percent non-white. A mile south and a mile east of me things change significantly. There’s a sizable Cambodian and Vietnamese population, and there are quite a few Ethiopian and Somali families. Once, I went to Lincoln Park, a slice of wild landscape between our largest north-south arterial and the freeway, and it was full of Ethiopians dressed in white. The park looked like something out of a Miyazake film; all these dark faces wrapped in white appearing in the Pacific Northwest green. My friend and I stopped three teenage girls to ask what was up. One of them translated from the other’s Amharic — they were celebrating Meskel, the finding of the true cross. In that moment, Seattle felt very diverse.
But my daily existence is reflective of my neighborhood, mostly white. White enough that I still remember getting into an elevator in Chicago with a bunch of black men in suits and thinking, “Oh, right. Right. People are other colors in other places.” I noticed it again when I traveled in the Mississippi Delta, especially when I headed to the Sunday brunch buffet at my hotel. The tables were full of white folks in church clothes while the staff keeping the biscuits and bacon readily available were black. “That’s weird,” I thought, and I took my plate back to my room because I could. I could walk away from this object lesson in the intersection of class and race.
When we were grade school age, my parents worked for school integration. I only recently learned the implications of this for my parents, which were not pretty. But for us kids, it just meant that the music teacher, who was black, was often on our front porch with no advance notice. He was always invited in and if his timing was right, we would find a chair for him at the dinner table. We have a family story about the time he showed up on Passover just when my little brother went to perform the symbolic act of opening the door to let in Elijah the Prophet. Elijah is supposed to arrive and herald in a new era of peace, at our house we got Mr. Lewis, a black music teacher who joined us for the rest of the Seder.
This is all a very long way of saying that in addition to being able to forget about color as a defining factor in my existence, I also have the remarkable privilege of being raised not to fear color by default. It would be complete bullshit to say I have zero racist tendencies, that stuff is in the water and my city, my life, is white as hell, I notice who’s different. I’d have to literally be blind not to.
Now, the last story about me, I promise. When I was standing on the steps of the bus at the border between Kenya and Tanzania, a young man shouted at me. “Hey! HEY!” and when I finally located the source, he smiled and said, “How’s Obama?!” It took me a minute to walk through the idea that I stood out here, that I was a minority, and then, I thought, “You idiot, this isn’t what it’s like at all because you are in exactly no danger.”
So much luxury. So much time to think through my initial lizard brain spark of other and fear and then realize that I’m fine. That nothing is going to happen to me. Enough time to reach into my pocket for a wallet [Amadou Diallou], to show off my toy [Tamir Rice], to dig in my glove box for licensing and registration [Philando Castile], to run away, even [Michael Brown]. Enough time to say things like, “I’m just walking here,” [Trayvon Martin] or “Seriously, you’re going to cuff me for selling cigarettes,” [Eric Garner] or even enough time to be hostile and angry and say “Nope, I’m not under arrest, so piss off, officer.” [Sandra Bland]. Enough time, should it come to that, to end up in jail demanding a lawyer, instead of choking to death bleeding to death shot to death dying at the hands of the law.
I’m that white woman who dated a black guy in junior college and another one later, when I was single again at 30. And as a kid, I squished over to make room for that black music teacher at the dinner table. And now, I’ll trade witty banter with the handsome black man who sits next to me at the bar. And it’s not just men, black women are my friends too, though again, I will freely confess that my daily life is very white. And I mention all of this not because I want you to say, “Aren’t you cool, white lady, with your black friends as accessories,” because that’s another form of weird racism and privilege, being able to point to your black friends and say, “But look…”
I mention all this because the other privilege I have is that of false hope. What a staggering luxury it is to be able to point at my own life, raised by anti-segregationists, able to think nothing of interracial dating, to wallow in the idea that friendly white people at the bar are not the exception. The facts tell all of us — that includes me — that my desired color mixed up multicultural paradise is a fantasy, get real, already, another black man was killed yesterday for nothing more than being black. People like me, we can claim to embrace the ideas behind Black Lives Matter, but every day, we prove that we are lying. That black lives don’t matter nearly as much as our own white lives.
Writing is what I have, it’s how I make sense of of the world. But I can’t make sense of these repeated senseless killings of our black citizens. This is not a cry for sympathy, please don’t mistake my words as asking for any consolation for my own confusion. I want to add my voice to those saying that the killing of our black friends and neighbors is wrong. A broken taillight is not a death penalty crime for a white man, it should not be a death penalty crime for a man who is black. So I write my path away from this false hope in order to take a step closer to those who have never had it.
“White allies, speak up!” we hear, so often. Here is my voice. It is small and weak. Black lives matter to me. I want to say that out loud. It’s nothing. I know. I know. I know.
But I am on your side.
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.” — Elie Wiesel
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