On Race (or, White People are Awkward)

In North Carolina, people are going to talk to you in line at the grocery store. This is a form of communication that I once abhorred, small talking with strangers about the contents of my cart. I’ve gotten over it. In the South, strangers are not so strange when they feel like they have something to share. I was buying a half a watermelon at the Piggly Wiggly when an older couple behind me asked the price. I told them it was three dollars, and the woman said, “Oh no, child, you need to go get you one of the whole ones. They’re just four dollars.” Before I could object, the man took my half watermelon and high-tailed it to the produce section to replace it with a whole. He returned in 30 seconds with a huge watermelon, rolled it gently into my cradling arms.

“Thanks,” I said. “Jeez, I don’t know if I’ll be able to eat this whole thing by myself before it goes bad.”

The woman said, “Oh heck, just share it with your neighbors or your friends at church.”

I nodded, filed this idea somewhere in my mind and came home and hacked the sucker in half. I recalled the suggestion of the couple in line, just share it with your neighbors, and thought, “Yeah, that’s a really nice thing to do. I’ll do that. I’ll share this with my neighbors.”

I live on the second floor of a building that was constructed sometime in the 1930’s, with two mirror-image renovated apartments upstairs, Clay and I occupying one and our best gay husband, Barry, living in the other.

Below us in a rear apartment lives a guy who doesn’t often speak to me, but does talk to Clay and Barry. For the record, his unwillingness to speak to me seems to have less to do with any sort of contempt or disregard for women, but rather, he seems like the kind of youngish-man who is still sort of scared to talk to girls, which is fine with me. He wears camo every day (unless he’s going shirtless), talks about being a professional boxer, thinks people are breaking into our building all the time (as evidenced by his calling the police so many times for imagined reasons that I heard them once firmly ask that he stop calling them. And, yes, I was totally eavesdropping from my deck), and it was his chew spit can that spilled all over me when I took out his recycling. He’s a polite odd fellow who I wave at, who returns the wave, but that’s largely the extent of our interaction.

The street-facing space in our building is a beauty shop called Natural Creations catering largely to African-American clientele, owned and operated by a lovely woman named Pam, who is always friendly and warm when I see her. 

During the day, when I’m at home being a starving artist, the building is largely quiet save the soft music from Pam’s beauty shop, which sometimes drifts from her door up through the open windows of my apartment. And since it was mid-day, and since I could faintly hear music and conversation from outside drifting into my window, and everyone else was at work, I thought, “Share with your neighbors, yeah, great idea . . . who’s home? Pam’s working downstairs. I’ll take this half watermelon down to Pam.”

I covered the exposed half of watermelon with plastic, put the whole thing in a grocery bag, and made it half way down the stairs before I stopped mid-step.

Am I seriously about to walk into a black-lady beauty shop with a half a watermelon and say, ‘Hey, I thought you’d like this.’?? Pam doesn’t know me very well, and who knows how many customers she has in there, and am I really gonna be a white person walking into an African-American owned business with half a watermelon and nothing else to say for myself? I can’t share this watermelon like that!

This is a testament to how fucking awkward white people are, even very progressive, very supportive, very informed about race, white people. I sat in my kitchen thinking about how awkward I was being about this fucking watermelon.  I love black people. I love black music, I love black art. I love thinking about race in terms of politics and culture and society and history. This is my thing! I teach African-American Literature, for jangus’s sake. I’ve kept a race journal and made my students keep a race journal, documenting for a period of time each instance that the issue of race is brought to their attention. I own books by Cornell West and Michael Eric Dyson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and I’ve actually read them. Why am I being so god-damned weird about this half a watermelon?

A few days later, Barry mentioned a vehicle he saw while making his commute from nearby USMC- Cherry Point, where he teaches an English course. “It was one-a those big ol things, those big trucks that are extra wide and extra loud. And in the back there was a big American flag on one side of the bed, and just as prominently, a Confederate flag on the other side.”

“Why does that surprise you?” I asked.

“Because they’re Marines. They’re supposed to all be brothers. Closer than brothers. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It’s because they don’t know any better.” I said.

“How can people not know any better, in this day and age?” he asked.

This is what I told him. This is what I’m telling you, readers, this is what I’m telling myself and this is what you need to know, perhaps not what you want to know.

I think MOST people are not racist in their hearts. There are obvious exceptions . . . the Klan, Neo-Nazis . . . but those people aren’t reading my blog anyway. MOST people aren’t racist, but MANY people do and say racist things because they don’t know any better. They’ve never had cause or occasion to seriously consider the experience of people outside their own race. In fact, most people don’t frequently consider the human experience for most people outside their own tribe . . . immediate family, extended family, family friends, church families, and so on in concentric circles outside of one individual.

When white people say things like “C’mon, the Civil War ended a hundred and fifty years ago. Slavery is not an excuse for trouble in the black community.” I have always been the first to jump in and try to correct them: What about the legacy of slavery? What about the post-Civil War removal of Union troops that resulted in demoralizing and humiliating and unjust Jim Crow laws that affected every black citizen? What about lynchings? What about church bombings? What about poll taxes and voting exams? What about contemporary redistricting? What about continued police brutality? What about the exploitation of blacks in the entertainment industry?

These types of rebuttals frequently fall on deaf white ears, and I never understood that until recently. Why can’t the average white person take all of this information and develop a greater understanding for the experience of people of color who are living right beside them? The answer is this: they don’t HAVE to. The system is constructed in such a way that white people don’t often have to consider the experience of people of color, because they’re taught to believe that all people are equal but are given no further information. Honestly, try hard to recollect the middle and high school lectures and units we studied on the Civil War. One or perhaps two days are spent on the subject of slavery, and that’s it . . . moving on . . . in fact, let’s just skip ahead to WWI. (P.S. I have a similar argument regarding Vietnam, but that’s a story for another blog.)

I don’t want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, even though to some degree, I probably am, but I suspect sometime in the very near future, Americans are going to have no choice but to get it together. We have lived in an infinite growth culture in an environment based on finite resources for far too long. This is the end of the American Empire as we know it, and soon, the things that keep us divided are going to have to evaporate, or we’re not gonna make it.

And white people in particular (god love em and I am one) are going to need a crash course in how to empathize with people of color. And we all need a lesson in patience and a desire to connect instead of isolate ourselves and our tribes from one another.

I want America to consider this: Think about our country and the people in it as one family. That sounds really woo-woo and hippy-ish, but wait, I’m not finished yet. Imagine that within our family, there was a deep, dark, dirty secret. Imagine that long ago, Daddy used to beat his kids, beat his wife, keep them locked up, separated us from one another, made us do things we didn’t want to do, made us work for no pay, had sex with his daughters and sired children with them. Imagine he set up rules that applied to only some of his children, not all, and that those rules denied the children their basic human rights. Imagine your brothers and sisters were hung from trees for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Imagine all of these horrors and THEN imagine that suddenly the family says, “Ok, all that is over, and we just aren’t going to talk about it.” Imagine how fundamentally fucked up that family would be, having experienced unimaginable horrors for generations that they aren’t allowed to talk about or consider relevant. Imagine, as a family, that we just didn’t talk about all that shit that went down, all the things that continue to go down as a direct result. Generations of the family would briefly mention the subject, but only when absolutely necessary, and expect that everyone in the family should abide by this example.

After some time, those least affected by the horrors of the past will forget them. It will not be part of their family narrative. After some time, that family history will be distilled down to ‘America had slaves, it was horrible, Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King fought for Civil Rights, and Obama is president.’

But for the members of our family who were MOST affected by the horrors of the past, the legacy is different. Legalized slavery may have ended in 1865, but we have continued to foster the unbalanced power between whites and minorities through systemic inequalities. That is an inarguable fact. If you are a white person reading this and you’re seeking an argument that illustrates somehow that there aren’t systemic inequalities in American culture, then please ask yourself why you would like to believe that there aren’t.

We need to stop talking about ‘colorblindness’ with regard to race. I question whether or not the phenomenon actually exists in a racial context, but even if it does, colorblindness is just another form of blindness. And who wants to be blind? We need to LOOK. Look at what we’ve done to ourselves. Acknowledge our shared history. See what happened within our family over the last three hundred years or so and say, “Wow, we really fucked up.” Examine our past and our present with open, color-filled eyes. Take it in. Cease to be a fearful bystander in a community that is flawed. Enter into your own discomfort and come out a more thorough person on the other side.

And black sisters and brothers, know this. . .  most white people don’t know any better. They just don’t. It is easy to be exasperated with us. We ask you stupid questions and do stupid things like try to touch your hair. Please try to be patient with us. Most white people have a vague understanding of the black experience, at best, and know that when people do and say racist things that it may not mean that they ARE racist. More likely, no one has ever explained HOW the thing they said or did WAS racist. The guy with the Confederate flag on his truck might not have any sort of prejudicial feelings toward minorities, but has been the recipient of largely awful sources of information. It is certainly not the job of enlightened people to teach the ignorant, but in an effort to make America a better place, we’re all gonna have to do some time connecting with people who just haven’t had occasion to consider the experience of other human beings.

We’ve spent centuries creating little divider tabs for ourselves. We are woman or man, we are religious or not, we are white or black or Asian or Native or Latino, we are democrats or republicans, we are feminists or anti-feminist, we are Jews or gentiles, and of those gentiles, there are like 200 sub-categories: Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Episcopal. Or we are Muslim or Hindu or any other of the various underrepresented religions in America. We are pro-life or pro-choice. We are athletes, or cosplayers, strippers, or gamers, potheads or rockabilly rude boys. A time is coming when we have to start putting ourselves back together instead of ceaselessly dividing, a time when we need to stop senseless divisions and open our eyes to the richness around us, a time for us to stop being a problem-based culture constantly seeking to place blame on one group or another, and begin a cultural shift based on solutions and shared pursuit of happiness. It’s coming fast, and soon there will be no time to dissolve the fences between us. Better we become truly united by each of us making a concerted effort to see, to look into the faces of everyone and feel connected by our shared experience, with all its failings and flaws, and still support one another and help one another and re-establish an idea of neighborhood and know that we are all part of the same tribe.