I find it hard to write about how much our society would improve if we all took up the Black Lives Matter protest.
I’m going to make mistakes. I have made almost every mistake in the book regarding ways I could be insensitive.
But a friend of mine said I should keep trying anyway. In fact, she is someone who should be the speaker and not me because she’s learned more. Plus, she is nicer than I am. Why do I have to be the one who’s always shouting into the wind? I’m not an expert. More than once, I’ve asked, ‘Why me?’
Because I was born that way. I’m like a bird that only stops singing when it’s asleep. I make noise. It annoys some people and other people like that about me. Fundamentally, I can’t change who I am. I talk. I write. I sing when I’m trying to make myself be quiet.
Why me?
Because, though I don’t know everything, I feel better when I write it out to try to understand it more thoroughly. I am not that person who sits down at the keyboard because she has something to say. I’m that person who, through the process of writing around and around a subject, begins to see it more clearly.
Why me?
Because I know it’s the right thing to do to try. I don’t want to be among the silent ones who became complicit because she didn’t speak out. I don’t like being hated, and there is so much hate out there. I’ve felt it, especially when I spoke out in social media. But if I don’t speak out, I will be complicit.
So, I have to speak out, to write about what I’m learning, what I’m hearing oppressed people say, what I think about where we are in this country right now as long as the light still shines on it.
Here’s what I’m learning:
I know that racism still exists, but I didn’t understand my part in it until I started reading authors who’ve experienced it. My job, though I’m going to babble on, is to keep reading and to listen. So I’m listening.
And that is hard, I’m telling you. How many videos showing abuse, overt racism, and murder can I watch before I turn it off to recover? Yet, what I’ve learned is that people of color can’t turn it off. They have to go to sleep at night knowing that it could be them tomorrow, or worse their children. Yesterday, Mike watched a video of a six-year-old black girl being arrested in her school. I didn’t see the video, but my heart broke listening to her beg. She was a baby, and she was arrested for acting out at school. I didn’t see what happened to cause her to throw a tantrum, but I’d guarantee she deserved to be angry in that moment. The school resource officer called in for backup.
What the fuck?
I thought that a school resource officer in an elementary school was there to protect the children from dangerous people trying to get in. I didn’t realize the children would have to be protected from them.
It would be so easy to stop watching, to go back into my protected shell and try to ignore the pleas of people of color to be heard.
There it is—my white privilege.
So, what does a mother of color do when she can’t take in anymore? I know she can’t turn off her fear, but can she back away from the onslaught of violence caught on video, from the hate that spills onto social media? She has to live with the rest.
I just learned about swatting last week. Did you know that people hoping for violence ‘make prank calls to emergency services in an attempt to dispatch a large number of armed police officers’ to the house of a person of color? How is that a prank? That’s vicious. It’s potentially deadly.
I’m learning so much these days, and it’s hard work.
Poor baby, right?
There’s my white privilege again.
I spent hours during the beginning of the pandemic reading about statistics, about what worked and what didn’t, about the PPE problem and doctors and nurses wearing garbage bags. I felt it was critical to keep looking at the wave of information that kept crashing over my head. Why was the Federal government holding back tests? Why were people of color more likely to die? What were the latest rates of new cases in areas with large groups of people together? What treatments worked? How were doctors and nurses feeling when their beds filled up and so many people died in one day?
And now, I am looking at racism in the same way. Don’t look away even though the next wave is crashing onto the shoreline. At what point will we, the ones who have the privilege to do so, get exhausted and turn to other news? There is always some horrific news, isn’t there?
Syrian refugees, food deserts, healthcare and funding deficits on reservations, botched aid to Puerto Rico, missing indigenous women, refugee children in cages—has anyone released the children from their cages yet?—poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, and racism inherent in police departments.
It’s all about human rights, isn’t it?
Even years ago, when I fought for equal rights, equal pay, and the right not to be groped by a coworker in an elevator, I fought for human rights.
For me, then a young female in the predominantly male engineering community, it was about survival. How could I dress to prevent the belief that I was ‘asking for it?’ Could I afford to have a drink when people would assume that I was drunk so I was ‘asking for it?’ Could I laugh at the dirty jokes while rejecting the filthy propositions in an attempt to sidestep the problem and not appear to be ‘too sensitive or too angry’ all the time? I just wanted to be able to do my job, yet I walked a fucking tightrope in some of the companies I worked for and, yes, my life was threatened more than once. Those people who threatened me were never punished. It was exhausting and if I wanted to keep my job, I swallowed so much shit.
So, at least in a way, I know a little about how racism might feel. Yet, I have only felt threatened by police three times in my life. Other police officers changed my tire, unlocked my car door, and stood in awe with me on a country road while a herd of deer casually crossed in front of us. The videos I’ve been watching don’t make me think of the protect-and-serve mantra I was raised to believe in.
‘Those were just a few bad apples,’ people said of the first few videos and I believed them because my experience was so vastly different. But it’s more than that. This volume of police who are not held responsible for their violent actions can’t be just a few bad apples. I can’t say that there aren’t some police officers who still model the ‘protect and serve’ motto, but we need to make some serious changes in policing. We need to make them now before anyone else dies.
Too late. Somebody else died last night, didn’t they?
Yet, I feel resistant to discount my own experiences with police officers who were kind. I hate to admit it, but I do.
And that’s the problem with identifying white privilege.
Police seem to love protecting white women. I remember the times when I was stopped by a police officer but, even though it chaffed to do it, I put on the charm, tried to look innocent and a little vacuous, and they totally loved it. I shouldn’t have had to do that to keep from getting a ticket for going two miles over the speed limit, but I wore the mask of a damsel in distress and it usually worked. The flip side of that coin is that black men are seen as villains, outlaws, beasts, scoundrels, felons, convicts, hoodlums, thugs.
Look at the synonym for villain and picture the race of the face that pops to mind for each of the slightly different words.
Crap. I’m part of the problem. Villian brought to mind that cartoon who looked Russian, you know, the one with the damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks. But too many of my villain synonyms were black men.
So, I’m a mixed bag here. I may argue for human rights, for police to be reformed and demilitarized so that people of color are safe, for people to be treated with more respect at our borders and within them…
…but there’s still privilege and racism that exists in my own mind. I’m working to discover it.
That’s why I wrote today when I should be listening instead.
Thank you for listening, jules