Whiteness
Whiteness
Can we please talk about this, white people? This is an opening - summer, 2020. Black people are saying what they have said so many times before - and white people didn’t hear them. Hear what? That my friend goes to a grocery store and a clerk follows her from aisle to aisle, where the cans next to where she is looking suddenly need rearranging. Where another friend gives up shopping at local stores and orders from Amazon. It is exhausting to go through the checklist when you enter a store downtown: keep your hands out of pockets; don’t browse too long; don’t pick up things unless you can take them directly to the check-out person — the one who won’t cash your check, even though it is from a local university. It will take you an extra half hour and three levels of managers to pay for your goods because it is unbelievable that a black woman would be receiving a check from a major university.
I’m waiting for my friend as she goes through this check cashing dance at a grocery store. I’m wondering if I should say, “She’s ok. She’s my friend.” That my whiteness would be a cover for the prejudice against her. Like having your parent sign for you when you get your first car loan or rent your first apartment. Only my friend is no child: she is a writer, an activist, an intellectual, an artist, a teacher. None of this is read by the clerk who refuses to allow her to be all that she is. To them she is a black person who is untrustworthy. Who must be watched. Monitored. It wouldn’t matter if she had the Nobel Prize she deserves - she’d still be a black-skinned person who sets off alarms in the not-black person observing her.
Those alarms:
They come from a dog-walker who is asked to put her dog on leash and responds by calling the police to say a black man is attacking her.
The alarm goes off when a white couple sees a black man chalking “Black Lives Matter” on the sidewalk in front of his building and calls the cops.
They go off when a man falls asleep in his car in a Wendy’s line and someone calls the cops instead of just waking him. The cop escalates it and now Rayshard Brooks is dead.
The go off when George Floyd, who may have used a counterfeit bill, is sitting in his car. Police are called. The one who responds has eighteen counts of excessive force on record, but is sheltered by the police union, whose president promotes “killology” instead of de-escalation techniques. George Floyd dies as the policeman slowly chokes him.
I’m white. Black bodies can make me nervous. But I am aware that that is my problem. It is my set of assumptions about what is happening and I need to ask myself what is going on in my head as well as what is going on in front of me. I believe in fear as a protection but I’m aware some fears are based on stories I’ve made up. I try to catch myself telling those stories, so I can interrogate them. I need to hear new stories, like how white people make my black friends nervous.
I’m trying to understand what it is like to be black in America right now. I want my friend to know I too am working on prejudice so she doesn’t have to respond alone. Doesn’t have to spend her energy confronting daily racism. I want to be a person who will take on some of that, who has her back, who challenges her ordinary tormentors so she can write her books or make art. Because that’s it, isn’t it? I can paint pictures every day - no one hassles me when I buy a can of beans. I have energy left over from daily interactions to do what I want: cook a nice dinner, play my guitar, listen to a friend, write a letter. I’m not carrying daily humiliation. My white skin gives me a pass when the cop stops me to say my taillight is out, when the clerk wants to know if the clothes I’m trying on fit, when I park my car a little over the line in the garage downtown. Any one of these things could trigger a race-based suspicion or hostile response for my friend. Which she would have to carry all day, like any of us do when we are treated badly. It is exhausting. It is relentless. It is everywhere, every day, waiting to turn a good day into a bad one.
We white people, who have the privilege of not being treated badly for our skin color, are being called to create new stories for everyone.