Coq au Vin

If I talk about fan bases here, it’s because I see my own white privilege and racism in them. I hate like 75-90% of the sports teams in America for dumb reasons, and will continue to do so forever, but this is not about that. I truly believe I could hear ugly stories about every team and fanbase I care about, here in Minnesota and elsewhere, and I root for one of the teams I talk about below. Anyways.

I love Mike Wilbon.

He reminds me here of a couple of things that really changed my understanding of my privilege, and my own racism. One is the many, many parallel conversations that happen because people of color have long lived in and talked about a very different Minnesota than I have (even if the city under scrutiny here is Boston). The other is the question of ownership.

Ownership is where our own internalized racism comes in. All the times we recognized there was racist behavior, but just didn’t recognize its significance. I’ve heard the same apology from many places in the US and elsewhere for racist taunts in sports (and I could give many examples) and it always comes down to saying it’s sort of an arbitrary thing: they don’t do it because they have hate in their hearts, they do it because they want to rattle their opponents and because they think it works.

It thrives not because of its effectiveness (Torii Hunter’s story that started all this shows black athletes are way too used to hearing it) but mostly because white people don’t attach any significance to this. It may register as a darn shame, but it doesn’t ruin the game for any of the thousands of white fans who all watch this happen. It just doesn’t seem important enough. The last Superbowl featured a really odd set of interviews with fans asked about the tomahawk chop, many of whom sort of cringed but admitted they still joined in. They were actually consciously sensitive to how awful that gesture feels to many Americans, but that feeling of guilt wasn’t strong enough to forgo the feeling of togetherness with the crowd when they joined in. Owning our racism means figuring out why we care, but don’t care enough to do anything.

The Red Sox issued a rare public statement about racist fans, which is a good thing, and surprisingly more direct than most “we regret the feelings stirred by the incident” statements issued by organizations. However I hate one thing they said, invoking once again the idea that a “small minority” who are not “true fans” are the ones responsible. Assuming that’s true, those people will always be with us. The problem is everybody who just watched, and let it be part of their experience, and said, “Oh, the bleachers are like that. It’s a shame.”

In contrast, a few weeks after 9/11, US national soccer team captain and New Jersey native Claudio Reyna (known to fans as Captain America) played in the Glasgow Derby. When he took a free kick for Rangers near the end occupied by rival Celtic fans, somebody stood up to taunt and distract him. Normally part of the game, like chanting during at-bats and at outfielders in America. In this case, the Celtic fan got up and spread his arms and started making airplane noises. Everybody around him immediately recognized it as evocative of the planes on 9/11. You can tell, because they all got up and physically shoved him back in his seat. They knew when something went too far. That same fan base (along with many in Europe) has a history of making monkey noises and throwing bananas at Black players, and while deep inside they may have seen the harm… it took a long time to reach the point where these people are now thrown out of games in Britain. I remember not long ago this behavior was defended by the top officials in the sport in Europe, deflecting and minimizing. 9/11 was somehow easier to understand than 400 years of institutional violent racism. (Also by far not the worst organized thing I’ve seen or read about happening in the stands somewhere.)

The one time I know I was personally present for somebody dropping the N-word at a football game, what happened all the white people took the lead of the people of color in the stands around us, who just clearly wanted to ignore it and watch the game. I will never forget the Black men in front of me saying, “Didn’t hear anything worth paying attention to,” and “Didn’t hear nothing but the wind blowing by.” The Latino man next to me grumbled and shook it off. What the man said was actually directed at white visiting fans and intended to shame us, but it was a threat to everyone else. None of us got up and told security, “This is different. We don’t need to hear that here.” Maybe they would have blown us off (we were visiting fans, I’m totally fine with most kinds of mild abuse, even from security) but it’s weird that we weren’t sure if this would be recognized as transcending football. So they let it go, and we let it go.

I was reminded of that experience for a different reason while watching this clip. These hosts basically turned a decades long shouting sports argument over their Washington Post desks into a tv show, and are never short of opinions. What happens when the n-word is invoked is Tony Kornheiser shuts up and gives the entire time (and more) to his colleague. On Riley Cooper, and Richie Incognito, he introduced segments but noted that this is a topic where nobody is interested in the opinion of an old white man. And I agree with him. Give the floor to Wilbon for as long as he wants it. I like that the producer eventually realized there was no need to show Tony nodding.

BIPOC speakers should take the lead on this conversation and others, but I don’t want to lose that part of this particular topic is the deathly silence of white people. What happens if nobody turned up to an NFL game against Washington? What if you couldn’t buy beer while wearing racist gear? Whenever we hear opposing fans chanting something we don’t like for football reasons, the simple solution is to drown it out. (e.g. We hear “Go Pack Go” and drown it out with “Packers Suck” or “and take the Brewers with you” until they give up.) Fan bases across the country who have inherited the tomahawk chop could start something else and drown it out. A girl in Chicago redesigned the Blackhawks logo to not have a floating Native American man’s head, and it looks super cool. People could wear that, until the old logo stops being iconic and ubiquitous and the team has no reason not to phase it out once fans have essentially drowned it out.

If we want to. If we wanted to, nobody would ever hear this mythical racist minority shouting racial epithets at a Black player, because they’d be drowned out by everything else. Right now they’re not. Because we shake our heads silently, and then let it go, because it bothers us… but just not that much. Love may conquer hate, but along the way it has to crawl through a minefield of indifference.

If I ignore it, I own it.

This time last year my Facebook feed was lighting up with a very tragic anniversary, and many people remembering a friend who left us far too young. It was one that really shook me up at the time it happened, and remembering it in the middle of a LISPA workshop led to some interesting places. At one point I remember sitting on a railing somewhere in Köpenick shouting incoherently about it to an amazing group of men who stood there in the winter and listened.

Being back here, possibly having to pass that railing in Köpenick again, has me thinking about whether that memory would come up again in my facebook feed soon. Because I didn’t know her well, but I do remember her, popping up in small strange ways. On third down when the Vikings linebackers are jumping around to Fallout Boy’s “Uma Thurman” a little part of me remembers how it made me laugh how excited she got about that band, and wonders if she’d approve of using their music to rile up a crowd of 65,000. I grieve a little. But more than grief, it also got me thinking about how I remember people.

I’ve been thinking recently about my friend Andrew, who I hadn’t seen in quite a few years before he passed away unexpectedly a few years ago. I had a lot of grief and regret ove missed opportunities to reconnect, which sadly doesn’t do a lot of good. It’s diving into a hypothetical future that never happened where I picked up the phone, or went to an event he was hosting, and it’s not real. The past was real. And I keep remembering something very clearly about my friend as a young man.

I still smile when I remember his aloof wit, the way he lived in a slightly different world from the rest of us, like a man out of time, interested in warships, the rise and fall of empires, and songs from another century’s wars. A Scottish time traveler, who probably should have been the basis of a romance novel. But I also remember the times I saw him with someone who was hurting, and that demeanor of a delightful Dickensian villain, cursing the urchins in his path, dropped away. He was really listening, you really had his full attention.

I remember talking to him about a class, about a teacher I couldn’t stand, and an uncomfortable experience where once again, it was clear certain religions were welcome in that classroom and certain were not. To me it was just two kids venting in the hallway, with the only real conclusion being a poignant, “Yeah that sucks,” before we moved on. Instead I had his full attention, more than I expected or I think even wanted in that moment. This guy who was only a couple years older than me, but a couple of years makes a huge difference in high school years, and he spoke to me in this voice that was gentle but full, with a real note of pain in it, an empathic link directly to his own heart. He leaned in and looked me in the eye as I looked away, and told me I had the right to speak up if I felt the way I did, and for the first time really made me feel like somebody else saw what I was feeling.

Those people are special. It makes grieve to remember it knowing he’s gone. And it makes me remember somebody else who’s gone, a significant person from my job. At his memorial, one of the students he’d brought in talked beautifully about the presence of the man, even down to the way he said your name. And he really did say your name, pausing to look right at you, and draw breath to really say your name with the weight both it and you deserved. Nobody was a “Hey you” to that man, and I didn’t recognize it until he was gone and H. brought it to all our attention.

Now I will never tell Ken how much I appreciate that. And I’ll never talk to Andrew about Star Wars and the second Punic War. And let’s be honest, Lauren probably never cared if I liked the intersection of Fallout Boy and the Vikings. But that’s actually okay. I’ve been thinking a lot this past year about how time is out of joint for me, with the future dark with depression, and the past vibrant with regret, and the present somehow lost from moment to moment, and this may be another example. The better way to remember these people is not with sorrow for what might have been, but with the joy that they spread. Which should continue to spread.

I want to really listen to somebody, like Andrew did for me and others, many times. I want to acknowledge people the way Ken did, recognize these humans who move through my life. And I also do want to remember to get infectiously excited about something, and share joy with a community. These friends are no longer alive, but the special spirit of being around them, the part that really makes me grieve, is what I should honor about them by trying to manifest it in my own life.

On Monday when my program begins again and I’m tempted to get lost in my own journey, I’m going to ask questions and listen, because that’s what I remember Andrew would do. I’m going to pause, and actually take the time, to greet people, because that’s what I remember Ken would do. And when I try to rev up fifteen people to come out in the cold and watch Union Berlin (I’ll be ecstatic if I get two) I’ll be remembering this is how excited Lauren would have been to share something that mattered to her (probably about something else besides East German football).

I remember you all, and many more. I remember you all best by honoring what you show us of your best selves.

I’ve been told that the penitent silence is not enough. As cis white able christian men, or whatever it is that brings us closer to the normative center of western society, silence is tacit approval of those who would cleave this society apart with violence from the inside. I’ve been told to speak up, but I haven’t. Everything I thought about saying sounds dumb and hand-wringy, and just generally about hearing my own voice.

There are a lot of good reasons we may feel discouraged from speaking up. for one thing We’ve dominated the conversation for long enough. Nobody asked us to ride in like white knights and attempt to fix everything, but only our way. And the most basic show of understanding and sympathy, “thoughts and prayers”, has almost become a dirty word.

So when I kept trying to write a comment on a friend’s post about the murders in Pittsburgh, all of that kept playing in my head and it all sounded useless. It took me a while to hear why. I can’t fix all the crazy white people who are loading guns and making bombs, and it’s not even fair to ask me that, any more than it was fair to get angry to blame a local mosque for the global extremists. I thought all I could do was feel deeply sorry, and if that wasn’t enough, I should just remain silent and let people be angry. I think I finally understand why that isn’t enough, or what anybody was asking me for.

I believe there will always be bigots among us. I think it’s just human tribalism, something we will always struggle with, some harder than others. And maybe some of them will always harbor violence in their hearts as well, and we may hold them back but we will never fix them with words. This is why we offer useless thoughts and prayers, treating these horrid people as an inevitable part of the human race, and our thoughts and prayers are our way of suggesting we all accept the violence that they inflict on our society. Like a freak hurricane, an act of an unknowable and vengeful god.

I can’t say that, because I’ve seen people stand up to racists, to incorrigible dyed in the wool racists, to terrible people we knew we had to live with. In my case I’m talking about family, people we did not choose. It would be so much easier to shake our heads quietly stay silent to keep the peace. But I’ve watched my mom and my uncle Ken speak up anyways, even though all they could say was, “Don’t say it here.”

Sometimes gently, sometimes angrily, but always firmly, they said do not speak that way about African-Americans, and you will not use certain words in my house. Yes they went home and didn’t think any differently or even speak any differently without a sister or brother-in-law to tell them to shut up. So that stinks but the point wasn’t to open their eyes glued shut by their own bitterness, it was to teach them one thing: this is not normal. You are not normal. You do not speak for anyone else. Everyone else in the room had to pick a side, and in their silence they tacitly agreed to the rules of the house, which were simply that this is not normal.

I truly believe that when we accept it as normal, we embolden those who have always had hate in them. These people believe that they are right and the world is wrong. Maybe they always will, but I have to believe that most of the hateful people lack the courage to take up arms alone against the weight of the entire world. When they find pockets of sympathizers out in the world and on the internet, they can tell themselves they are the normal ones. If we remain silent we give tacit weight to their narrative that we’re all behind them, and they are only lashing out at a tiny minority that has somehow wronged them, not against the overwhelming weight of a civilized society. That’s what I believe.

So don’t let them think this is normal. Don’t give them equal or greater weight than those they would inflict violence upon. Normal is the rich diversity of my neighbors whose collected voices make my city hum, the voices that have always been there, whether we heard them or not. Don’t let normal be this happens every day. What happened to Jamar and Philando was not normal to me. “Good people on both sides” of a Nazi rally is not a normal thing to say and it shouldn’t be said in our house. The incorrigible people are listening to see who will stand up against them, let them know it’s all of us.

It’s worth understanding for people whose identity is safe, whose person is not threatened, this is why the little things matter. The little antisemitic comments, the alienation of African-Americans as “those people”, they matter because they make the gulf normal. When that happens, we can feel bad that Pittsburgh happened to them, to those people, and not to us. But it did happen to us. It happened to me. I’m not Jewish, but if a synagogue is not safe, then neither am I. And every slight hurts more than the words because it carries that threat that this is how we will take away your dignity and eventually your safety, one bit at a time and step by step until somebody feels bold enough to take the next step is to take up the gun.

I’ve been welcomed in synagogues, in museums from Venice to Chicago, in schools and community centers everywhere, by Jewish people who opened their doors to me. I’ve been welcomed, fed, initiated into Jewish traditions, and I grieve that I had to walk through metal detectors first.

I grieve that after the terrorist murders in Pittsburgh we have lost even more of that fundamental human trust in the people around us. That belief that things are headed the right way and that we might someday be able to live together without fear and hatred. And this man with a gun stepped up and said, not today. So what are the rest of us saying back?

May we grieve with you? May we continue to hope? Please don’t disappear into the shadows, into the bathhouses, into the ghettos, all the places where marginalized people may feel safe amongst their own. Somebody is building a fence against our neighbors, with the threat to take away their spaces, their identity unless they hide it, and their very lives. If we don’t speak up they have to assume it’s all of us against them, and the haters will think it’s all of us behind them. So speak up. You won’t change the ghastly people, but if somebody is to be marginalized and pushed into the shadows, let it be them.

I grieve for everyone whose world just got uglier and more dangerous. Including me. Do not let this be normal.

“I hate that I’m not wearing my hat.”

It was terrible to not be able to wear the hat like she was supposed to when in uniform, but the roof of the cab was just too low. For want of a nail, thought Helena, the kingdom was lost. You took off your hat to fit inside a cab, and next you’d leave it behind, and then somebody else in the marching band would take their hat off to match you and keep the line balanced, and then soon there would be no hats and no standards at all. Dyed and messy hair making a rainbow, uniforms half on and half off, each line drifting to follow each individual’s musical expression, and soon it wouldn’t even be a marching band at all. It would just be a bunch of hung over musicians who’d stumbled into the same field. At least she still had her clarinet in her hands, at the ready.

The boy next to her tried for the umpteenth time to pretend he wasn’t looking at her hands, but his pursed lips, furrowed brow and the way his nose stood aloof as he glanced out of the corner of his eye gave him away. Or maybe it was the smell of the cab giving him the universal expression of someone who has smelled something terrible but would really like to avoid commenting on it. He could have made some sort of comment in response to her outburst about her hat though, thought Helena to herself, if only to be polite. Catching his gaze on her fingers again Helena adjusted her sweaty grip on the clarinet and nervously ran over her fingering one more time. Maybe that was what was so interesting, that she could deftly work each key independently. Why hadn’t she just put the clarinet back in its case before leaving her room? Continue reading “Helena and Her Stupid Hat” →

I’m tired of fake apologies.

I’ve seen so many recently from celebrities, and I could so easily take the word recently out of that statement. But I feel like I’m getting better at recognizing them. The word “but” is often the most obvious clue, invoking the conventional wisdom that nothing that precedes the word “but” ever matters. The problem is finding all the implied buts.

Every time I hear, “I apologize to anyone who was offended,” I can hear the “but” that follows that phrase. But this is ridiculous. But you’re all overreacting. But you shouldn’t have let it bother you in the first place. The fake apology has moved the actual inciting act into the head of the viewer: our problems began when you chose to become so upset. This is part of a larger pattern of the fake apology, it’s always trying to re-write what happened.

This is why it’s different from an insincere apology where one says the minimum required words without meaning them. In my childhood I was often accused of flippantly saying “Sorry” like the problem was solved. But even an insincere apology admits something happened. The fake apology changes everything, with complete sincerity. Continue reading “Fake Apologies” →

I didn’t want to talk about what happened at UVA. I don’t mean I don’t want to hear about it, because I never want the conversation to stop about what just happened. Every generation must continue to talk about this. I mean I thought the discussion didn’t need to be started by people like me whose opinions are still informed by the fact that we could still turn our heads and look away if we wanted to. We’re the people who can still say, “I can’t deal with this today”. We can still say, “It’s a one-time thing,” because the thousand other small ways this happens in a single day across our country do not happen in the lives of white people and in our newspapers. We’re the only ones who are acting shocked and surprised, and I don’t know if there’s time for that attitude anymore.

When I got the news about the white pride march I was literally staring across the road at a section of the Berlin Wall, one of the great symbols of division and fear and violence. The panic of some people in power was so great that the Iron Curtain had to cut through the heart of this city, lest anyone make the choice not to be part of their regime. On one side was a pressure to conform to an ideal form, of society and the individual, enforced by violence and spread by paranoia. We are a certain way, we have a certain history and a certain destiny, and all must fall in line: it’s not just for us it’s for you too. Neighbors couldn’t trust neighbors not to report them to the bullies who were empowered by this system. It echoes in all the frantic attempts by the twitterverse to identify and excommunicate all those who could be identified at the march. I don’t completely know how to feel about that right now, but I’ve always been in favor of knowing who are the assholes in our society, who marches on the side of fear and bullying.

What’s striking in Berlin is the lessons of history are very stark, as are some of the reminders that they will be ignored. There’s a Topology of Terror museum about the Nazi era, the beginnings, the consolidation of power, and then then how the war and the Holocaust that spread across Europe affected Berlin. All of this is in the shadow of a section of the Berlin Wall. At the biggest memorial to the Wall itself, there’s history of how this affected individual people and even buildings, as those who lived directly on the border found their houses to be first a gateway, and later taken away from them so they could be demolished or bricked up. Many people didn’t go right away, thinking it would all blow over and the Soviet & GDR posturing against their former western allies couldn’t last. The people who’d lived through National Socialism, the distortion and rewriting of history and religion, and even the extermination of an entire people still sort of believed a wall couldn’t happen. This is how it starts. Later I went to the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a title that pulls no punches in its place in history, a haunting space, and found shouting tourists with dogs and selfie sticks and bubble gum who held nothing sacred… you can stand in the tombs of those who were burned anonymously and still feel nothing holy, feel no weight of history. The beginnings of a historical moment insignificant compared to the clamoring needs of the day, the ends hazy and belonging to yesterday.
In the past I have deplored hysteria, and I think every president has had nothing stories blown into cause for national alarm when some reporter who hadn’t had anything printed in a while realized they could create a story by taking taking a few words, removing them from context and blowing them up to epic proportions. Does the president’s mumbled remark at a grocery store photo op signal a sea change in foreign policy or that his declining mental faculties have been hidden from the public?? No, probably not. That used to drive me nuts, but right now the minimization of what’s happening actually scares me the most. We’ve called so many people Nazis who didn’t actually deserve it (although some may have deserved a few other nasty names) that we’ve removed the power from it when the real ones show up. If most so-called Nazis turn out to be garden variety idiots, the focusing and highlighting power of that comparison is gone. I would like to believe that only a few idiots, the ones we’ll never get rid of, showed up to shout Nazi slogans like, “Blood and soil!” I’d like to believe they’re like the skinheads at a punk concert: they’re the people who will always show up and act like they own the place even though everybody hates their guts. But the real Nazis also started with just a few idiots who everybody ignored or tried to give the benefit of the doubt.

The minimization also takes the form of equivocation. When we have a family argument, within a community that’s built on trust and familiarity, we often forgo justice. They started it, mediators will admit, but then again, your response didn’t help. Everybody tries to give a little, and by lowering ourselves and by giving, we remember we’re all family, or community, and that’s more important than a thorough accounting of who did what to who with appropriate consequences. Everything may become equal, as it all contributes to the rift. You’re still an asshole but I will sacrifice this peace offering of words and possibly cake to you, because you’re MY asshole friend or sister or collaborator.

This doesn’t work when we don’t care about the rift more than we care about the hurt. I don’t particularly care if I’m disliked and not accepted by the kind of people who march with torches in support of white pride and white fear. Maybe I should, and I hope someday to build bridges with those who can be reached, to hope they can see the world and the people around me more as I do, and I can see how it is they grew so fearful and angry, to see what spark of truth, what experience, fanned into such an awful flame. I would meet them halfway, if they wanted to heal the rift as well. But what happens instead is lowering yourself to somebody who wants to feel higher, giving to someone who feels they’re entitled to take more. They march and threaten because they want people afraid, of their guns and their fists and their trucks, but then when counter-protesters refuse to be intimidated, refuse to be moved, they say, “They made us afraid with their counter protest, they contributed to the rift, everyone is equally guilty, it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter who did the killing, it only matters that we speak and you have to listen in silence lest we become afraid again.” When I marched with Black Lives Matter I felt like nobody was angry because they were afraid, or angry about what was being taken from them, they were marching for injustice that made everyone very angry but somehow also hopeful that it could be recognized.

There was a time when we had presidents who said there was nothing to fear but fear itself. There was a time when we had presidents who said every citizen of the free world was a citizen of Berlin. There was a time when we even had a postmaster general who said we must hang together or we shall surely hang separately. Now we’re told to be afraid of the violent left. We’re told to be afraid of Mexicans. We’re told to be afraid of everyone (except for Russia), and that we need to start a third war in Asia (we had a president who warned about that too). Our leadership is truly failing us, and nobody will step into that void, stop talking about everyone we need to be afraid of (including President Trump), and find any message that makes us back into builders of a nation and not soldiers in the service of ideology.

The two craziest things I’ve seen so far in the comments about this event are the inevitable rush to blame President Obama for wanting a divided country (without specifying how), and the immediate “But what about white women? Who’s thinking about us?” I read this and I almost feel like I can’t do anything to help white women anymore, not right now, but that’s a whole other conversation. So I’m thinking today about the women of color in my life, and I’m thinking about parents of brown boys they need to send out into this world, and I’m thinking about how far away I feel from all of you in this divided society and the divisions and biases and fears in my own heart and mind. And today I’m feeling very white, under the gross approval of these men in Virginia, an experience that has almost never made me feel closer to anyone in our whiteness.
Writing from Berlin, and feeling a very long way from home.

Part three of a three-part series of issues surrounding racism and inclusivity I felt like writing about somewhere other than social media. A lot of what my friends are posting about is emotional, and I don’t feel like hijacking that as a place to thrash this out. But like the kid in Dear Mr. Henshaw, sometimes we need the exercise of even an imaginary audience, and so, this (hopefully for now) anonymous blog.

What is it that keeps getting us in trouble? Nobody I know will admit to harboring hatred and bias in their hearts and minds, even me, and yet we still say things that get met with a chorus of angry boos. I recently started thinking about how often the divisive things we say, that are viewed as –ist or –phobic, can be split into two parts, and how it’s so often the second part where our troubles really begin.

One way of splitting speech in two seemed fairly obvious: when we say something, we have an intention for our speech, and then that speech has an effect. If you don’t care about the effect, you’re liable to do something stupid. The proof that you just don’t care happens the second part, when you’ve utterly failed to get the reaction you expect. Maybe it sounded smart and sexy in your head, but when the rubber hit the road, when the words coming out of your mouth connected with the ears of an audience, something turned ugly, and you’re looking at a room full of people demanding to know why you would say something so horrible. This is all too often my life.

The weird thing is, most people will probably give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps note something in response then just let it go because most people are actually okay with you being in the wrong. What we regard as ignorance in others really doesn’t bother most people that much unless it’s somehow intrusive in our lives. I don’t care how bad it is, most people will still ignore it, out of generosity or just a weary lifetime of practice born out of being “one of them” in a society that prefers to speak to an audience that are each and all “one of us”. I think this is mostly true, and that there is a division between those unaffected by foolish speech and those who hear it so often and have so few allies that they learned to cope.

I once saw the N-word cracked out at full volume at a stadium, and all the white people shuddered and commented, while the people least outwardly affected were the people of color who all clearly decided this wasn’t a unique enough event to let it ruin a decent football game. This utter stupidity would remain far below their attention: as one man remarked, “I didn’t hear nothing but the wind going by.” On a milder scale, I don’t know a single white person without an awkwardly racist relative with whom they’ve decided to selectively edit their conversations. If we can ignore all that, people will gracefully ignore you inadvertently stepping in a conversational pothole too, and they actually only speak up because they think deep down you know better. You’re getting a second chance… which we so often completely blow.

Some people choose to act like the whole problem lies with their intended audience, who refuse to process their obvious eloquence. This was probably me in my younger days. It turns out acting like everybody was too stupid to keep up with what you were actually saying, and this is not a failure of the words coming out of your mouth, is what psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists who study human culture describe as a “classic dick move”. Even if it’s true, it’s still a dick move to point it out. No winners there. But most of the time, there’s that magic moment when you can say, “I’m not explaining this very well, I’m clearly stumbling into some bad phrasing,” and lean on the benefit of the doubt. Or, like the younger, coiled-up like a tense spring version of me, throw it out entirely and insist that you’re not speaking badly, everyone is hearing badly… it was the second part that really cemented being an asshole.

The worst second round performance isn’t just being an arrogant asshole, the worst is suddenly deciding you’re the real victim and everybody has ganged up on you. There’s a consistent theme, the classic iteration of which is, “But I’m not racist!” Speaking for myself, I am racist. I am sexist. I am ablist, I am heterosexist, I am so many things I am striving not to be. I will not claim to be the only person who grew up in a society with strong norms and violent ways of reinforcing them without ever absorbing any of it. But I still don’t enjoy being called out on it, because nobody in their right mind would. And sometimes I do think things go too far… in a classroom discussion I witnessed somebody brought up a peer-reviewed anthropological study of primate behavior that was intended by the authors to better understand analogous human behavior, and I thought it was a huge irresponsible leap to accuse that person of “speaking in code” about a certain group of human beings. Sometimes a monkey really is just a member of a closely related non-human primate species. Occasionally there is cause to be defensive.

The problem is, before that response, figuring out what has been actually accused of racism (for example): you yourself, or your words. There are racial slurs I had no idea were in common usage before I was able to speak, that still resonate with those whose communities have heard them. Brown paper bags, the verb to shine, various fruits, the list of things racists have turned into something ugly is boundless. It’s quite possible to stumble into something that makes a fellow human cringe without realizing it. And of course sometimes we should know better, like the idiots, usually artists for some reason, who decide having a lot of black friends qualifies them to talk about the N-word or BPT or any of the other hallowed classics of American racial slurs and stereotypes. So sometimes things get said by people who think they know better, who think they’re one of the good ones.

And here’s the problem: most of the time nobody cares if you’re one of the good ones, who has some sort of non-racist credential stamped on your heart. At least at first, they care more, and respond to, the words that just came out of your mouth or off your pen. So there’s this magic moment when maybe you can change those words or acknowledge the difficulty of clear human communication, and maybe an apology or retraction will be accepted or maybe it won’t. But instead so often it turns into a debate on the essential character of the speaker whose very person is now under attack. Common expressions by onlookers include, “And, here we go.” If you make the whole thing about you, things like, “But I’m not racist!” seem like valid counterpoints to, “That word has a long and ugly history, makes some people uncomfortable, and frankly isn’t appropriate.” Maybe a certain interjection of “ouch” is called for after that, but the only way to stay on the moral high ground is to keep the second round focused on how to move forward, maybe reach out and apologize for your ignorance, consider rephrasing, apologize for the impact, accept the paradox that sometimes one must lower oneself in order to stand higher, and just generally give some indication you were actually listening with your mind and not entirely with your heart that feels only the pain of being called out.

That emotional reaction leads to one of the other awful second rounds. In But I’m Not Racist! Kathy Obear describes this through the lens of “white women crying”. When somebody is so affected emotionally by the topic that they just cannot keep it together, that’s actually okay. I have friends (especially actors) and also relatives who just feel everything, wide open all the way down, tears well up easily… and it’s beautiful. I would never change that. When these people hear a story of hatred and bias and exclusion, they may really feel it almost like it happened to them. It’s not having this reaction that’s the problem, it’s what happens next and who else needs to be involved. Sometimes the entire room needs to get up and go over and be consoling, and rub the person’s back, and bring tissues, and now the whole inciting incident (and whoever it actually happened to) has been left behind, because there’s a new problem and she’s crying.

Recently I’ve also tried to become more cognizant that sometimes we’re starting at round two. It may feel colossally unfair, but it happens. We can say things that to us sound innocuous but are landing on a historical context and usage going back decades or centuries. This is the hardest for me, because I try not to surround myself with people who are inventing or reviving new ways to be horrible and alienating to other groups of people, so I’m not always aware of their continuing work to deface our language. And there are the days when asking a friend a question about a Spanish-language song would be fine on a Tuesday, but on a Thursday it’s hitting all the awkward buttons because the world has just spent two days throwing micro-aggressions at your friend. These are the times when it’s not really about you, and it’s certainly not about your good intentions, it’s just about the legion of assholes who came before you, and have helpfully worn some of our friends and neighbors and colleagues down to their absolute last nerve. Fair, unfair, I don’t know. But it is up to us what round three looks like, and to understand how much of this mess was and will be crafted for us by other people.

And so I just wrote this all out to remind myself that while I will foolishly step into conversational bear traps, again and again and again, I can try not to let my ego and my own feelings stop me from trying to restart and do better.

Part one of a three-part series of issues surrounding racism and inclusivity I felt like writing about somewhere other than social media. A lot of what my friends are posting about is emotional, and I don’t feel like hijacking that as a place to thrash this out. But like the kid in Dear Mr. Henshaw, sometimes we need the exercise of even an imaginary audience, and so, this (hopefully for now) anonymous blog.

Recently I find myself thinking about the subtle art of underlining.

It started with the proposal this summer to add colors to the Pride flag in Philadelphia that stirred up a lot of feelings on the internet, and some of the defenses I read of the proposed change seemed to be fairly ham-fisted or awkwardly missing the point, at least as I understand it from friends who are people of color, and have more at stake emotionally than I do. I can’t tell anybody how to feel about it, but I did get a bit frustrated watching people make valid, reasonable points while completely talking past each other. All the unrest I heard was over the brown stripe (for people of color) and not the black one (for those we’ve lost to AIDS), so most of that I’ve been thinking about has to do with that brown stripe. Continue reading “Underlining and the Pride Flag” →

Part two of a three-part series on race and activism and other things that I felt like writing about privately, to hash out certain thoughts and admit to certain things without having to argue about it on social media afterwards. And honestly I don’t want to ask a lot of people in my life to read one more white person’s epiphanies about racism. But sometimes like the kid in Dear Mr. Henshaw, I need a largely imaginary audience to make me focus and do it, hence this (hopefully) anonymous blog.

The boxes. It’s a classic list, use the:

1. Soap Box
2. Ballot Box
3. Jury Box
4. Bento Box

And use them in that order.

That last admonission gets dropped sometimes, by those who want to skip to the end or mix them together. And since I live in America, it’s usually “ammo box” in that last spot, but I felt like it needed another line. I know a lot of people who are willing to go out and fight for the things they believe in, and believe the first three boxes are failing, but almost none of these people have an actual ammo box. The failures of the first three boxes do resonate right now, like when “Grab ’em by the pussy” became a rallying cry for creeps everywhere, a perennially befuddled progressive party can’t win an election unless it’s handed to them, and every courtroom verdict seems to confirm that it’s the people who seem at all different who need to be the most afraid.

The Bento Box

But what do you do with a bento box? Everything. Sometimes literally, as in Tulsa, where a juror admitted that if they’d just fed him he would have continued to vote guilty and the manslaughter case against a police officer would have to have been retried. The jury box literally failed because of a system that uses a lack of food to compel consensus and make sure the strongest voice in the room wins out (which always seems to be for the protagonists of Law & Order, a show where everyone is guilty except the cops who are constantly getting unfairly framed). But I don’t mean we need to feed people and offer them cookies so they’ll be nice to us. I don’t think offering to share his skittles would have helped Trayvon, and I don’t think Sandra Bland should have had to put out her cigarette. I hate smoking, and I still watched that video wishing she could have packed and lit up a full-on Sherlock Holmes pipe. I’ve engaged in victim blaming in my life, and I’m trying to stop. And I respect the feelings of my friends, colleagues and neighbors who might lose their last vestige of patience if they were the ones being pulled over for the 47th time for looking wrong. The bento box means something different for people on the wrong end of the ammo box than it does for allies.

When I was younger I didn’t understand I was growing up in a racist society, in which institutions and traditions and speech and the memes of art and entertainment and the legacy of history all did separate me from the people of color in my world, physically and in my own mind. One of the consequences is also victim-blaming, but there are reasons we do that. A friend of mine extensively researched how sexual assaults proceed through the judicial system, and found one stunning, counter-intuitive fact: prosecutors don’t want women on rape juries, because they turn on the accusers. They ask first why this accuser would put herself in that situation. “Why did she drink that much, why did she go there, can we really believe she didn’t know exactly what was going to happen… how can she now say she didn’t choose this?” My initial reaction was the easy one, “Wow, women must be crazy.” And then I realized I was often willing to do exactly the same thing, as long as the person I was judging black. Not just people of color, I find I am far more willing to pick away at the stories of African-Americans than I am Asians or Latinos or Native Americans. And I think it’s the bento box that made me realize it.

Some years ago now, President Clinton once said that the problem with race relations in America is very few white people actually know a black person well. Really know a person. Throughout the course of my life I have been far closer to Asian people and exchanged a lot more words, and I would say in general Asians are the one group where white people feel unabashedly comfortable with “ironically” racist humor, even while our Asian-American friends inwardly may be less enthralled. I also think Latino or Native American or Middle Eastern or even North African heritage is very easy to erase in our minds… as The Rock said on SNL, he would win the minority vote because “Most people just assume that I’m whatever they are.” ESPN actually printed the headline “Chink in the Armor”, because it was a joke we were all in on… we would all chuckle at this ironic reference to the racial barrier Jeremy Lin was chipping away at with his great run for the Knicks. Because Asians can be “we”, when we as a dominant culture decide want them to be. I think everyone knew this wouldn’t fly with a different cultural meme around African-Americans, and it’s because they… are still always “they”. Even John Mayer, whose friends bestowed a “Hood Pass” which made him some sort of honorary black man, found out pretty harshly that he still didn’t get to say the N-word in public… ironic racism, which is basically what happens when a white person uses the n-word affectionately, is much harder to pull off, because the gulf is still widest. And it turns out this changed some things in my mind without me being conscious of it.

Blame the Victim

Tragic events, like a young man getting shot by a vigilante or a woman getting raped behind a dumpster by a swimmer, are a lot like horror movies in that they have these classical genre rules. Characters always make bad decisions, any number of which could have changed or curtailed an inevitable tragedy. The kids in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre pick up a hitchhiker who looks exactly like somebody who’d pull out a dirty knife and start cutting himself (or others) with it. And like the kids who go to the Evil Dead cabin, or spring break at the cabin where Jason Voorhees killed seven kids the year before, or the kids looking for the Blair Witch, they have to go to some creepy haunted woods, because within the film, danger can only exist in that place, all else is safety. And looking back on that era I realize that outside the films, we had a place called The Ghetto, in which all violence was ensconced. As long as you could choose not to live in that place, you were kind of okay. Within these films, you the audience were safe both because you were not in that place, but also because you could identify the series of bad decisions that you yourself would not make. Scream riffed on a lot of the rules, and let the danger insert itself into a teenager’s house by phone, and yet still noted some terrible decision-making, highlighted when Jada Pinkett Smith yells at the film within the film, “Bitch, hang up the phone and star-69 his ass!” Even some of the movies I thought broke that trope, like the gang-rape and murder fantasy of I Spit On Your Grave where violence just sort of descends on the protagonist still had that geographical safety barrier: our protagonist has to choose to go to an isolated cabin in redneck country and then provocatively sunbathe all alone, like she’s laying herself out as bait for the rapists. It’s not her fault, and nothing in that film invites you to blame her, but if you don’t go to the danger zone, and if you don’t look hot in a bikini (I don’t), you’re perfectly safe there on your couch watching her.

If you’re really looking for it, you can probably always find some way, big or small, that all the victims in the real world made a choice that contributed to their troubles as well. Once I went to a party where I felt drafted into preventing a rape from occurring, and followed a woman for hours after my alcohol buzz was long gone because somebody else was following her too. And he and his wingman were getting increasingly aggressive as he realized I was never leaving him alone with my friend. My host that night was a black-out drunk who had continued to be friends with someone who didn’t believe her that she really, vocally, did not want him, and just never stopped making advances. When everyone finally fell asleep and my friend was safely tucked away in her own bedroom, the would-be rapist’s sister seized the opportunity to sneak her brother into my passed out friend’s room so he could try and have sex with his dream girl. I learned an important lesson that night: some women don’t believe “No means no” either. I doubt that woman has ever acknowledged being an accomplice to an attempted rape, because neither she nor her brother were “that kind of person”… I didn’t get to ask her, but on their way out they did express that the guy who broke down the door and physically threw them out of the house was overreacting and lament all the “drama”.

My friend did make some choices that made it possible for her to be in that position. I won’t even call them bad choices. I also made some choices that put her there, like when I got tired of this would-be rapist’s aggressive behavior towards me, and I trusted another woman who put my drunk friend to bed, and decided to sleep in my car away from him, instead of trusting my gut and sacking out on the floor in front of my friend’s room. It wasn’t my fault for not seeing the situation through, it wasn’t her roommate’s fault for pursuing consensual nookie with a girl in another room, and it wasn’t my friend’s fault. The person who put her in that position, alone in bed, very drunk, with a drunk would-be lover in her room, was the creep who was so damned determined to rape her that night. This isn’t a story about blame, it’s a story that people hear and immediately think, “Well, it wouldn’t happen to me.” We could say it wouldn’t happen to my friend Jasmine, because she wouldn’t ever get so drunk that she wasn’t safe. We could say it wouldn’t happen to my friend Sabena because she wouldn’t invite an amorously-inclined guy to an alcohol-fueled party knowing he might take it as encouragement. And we could say it wouldn’t happen to my friends Quinn and Eudora because they always arrive together and leave together and watch out for each other and for each other’s drinks. All possibly true, but maybe thinner threads than we realize, that night when you don’t judge your limit quite right, when your friend wants to go off and get laid with somebody else, or when you refuse to be driven out of all social circles because somebody there might invite somebody else who might have the wrong intentions. You can’t run away from a world that might hurt you.

Breaking Bread in Your Head

What makes victim blaming harder for me is the bento box, because it’s harder to judge somebody you’ve broken bread with, and that effect spreads. It’s not because they’re somehow validated as “one of the good ones” by being my friend and I now like them and don’t want them to come to harm. Again, the point is not that marginalized people should buy me lunch so I’ll like and support them, or some more broad belief that they just aren’t doing enough to be likable and fit in. I have heard that message, I’ve possibly even said some form of it myself in the past, but now I’m trying really hard not to repeat it again. The point is rather that I need to reach out and break bread with the people in these tragic stories, even if it’s just in my head, to start breaking down my own biases.

When a person’s skin color carries with it this immense baggage of violent imagery, it’s very easy to see what they might do. I mean I was loaded full of violent images of black people from an early age. As one of my coworkers said to me recently, she probably didn’t see a black person in media who wasn’t a criminal until the Cosby Show came out. Sure we may be able to differentiate TV from reality, but what if you have no reality to balance that out? What if there are two black kids and one latina in your class, and you realize you made it to graduation without getting to know any of them? I’m sometimes shocked when I look back and realize how few normal interactions I actually have with people of color… it makes me wonder exactly what percentage of my unconscious perceptions and biases are even based on the real world.

When somebody I know told me he’d known Philando Castile, something changed for me and I found myself growing more skeptical of every attempt to paint him as some kind of Bad Dude. Real people are so complicated, where the instant snapshots we take of them can be boiled down to one word written over their heads: mugger, brat, angry. The simple re-framing of, “What if this was my boss’s kid he’s teaching to drive,” adds those extra layers of reality back in a hurry, and makes me do one unexpected thing: I stop thinking about what kind of person they are (was he a criminal, did he have a history, was he big and threatening) and stop thinking about what they might do, and start seeing what they’re actually doing right now.

I know this is clueless, but what got me to start doing that was the stories of black parents. Sometimes social media is like a conversation at a party where you may be talking to your friends, but anyone in the room can choose to overhear. After one of the umpteen police shootings, black professionals in my Snapface feed started talking to each other about The Talk, the day they want to put off as long as possible that they knew they’d face when they had to sit their kids down, especially their boys, and talk to them about what it means to be black in America. They started talking about the extra layer of fear to teaching their sons to drive out onto roads where they may not be welcome. And somebody finally told me, face to face, about the relief of finding out her first child would be a baby girl, and that she wouldn’t be bringing a little black man up in this world that sometimes seemed determined to hurt him. It’s really only because of social media that this conversation started happening in public where white people like me could finally hear what’s been going on around us our whole lives.

The world looks very different when I stop and do one thing: take all the people of color in all these violent tales from the news, or the strangers around me I’m most inclined to judge, and sit them down in my head at a dinner table with someone I know. It sounds silly, but it makes these people real. When somebody told me he’d even briefly known Philando Castile, I got much more skeptical of every attempt to paint him as some kind of Bad Dude. Real people are so complicated, where the instant snapshots we take of them can be boiled down to one word written over their heads: mugger, brat, angry. The simple re-framing of, “What if this was my boss’s kid he’s teaching to drive,” adds those extra layers of reality back in a hurry, and makes me do one unexpected thing: I stop thinking about what kind of person they are (was he a criminal, did he have a history, was he big and threatening) and stop thinking about what they might do, and start seeing what mundane thing they’re actually doing right now.

I don’t have to be stupid about it, and I know you can still very well be mugged by people with loving parents. I think we actually know a lot about the people who bully us the worst, in school, in our families, in our workplace, and in the rest of our lives. Assholes will continue to abound. But every human connection I can make between these strangers and my own world, my own network, that virtual bento box makes me more at ease and less apt to be a paranoid asshole to somebody else. I hope.

Yeah but without privilege this all sounds like crap

Yes, which is why this is only half of the bento box metaphor. The original list of four boxes is a list of ways to fight back, not four ways for a privileged person to feel better on the inside. However, Martin Luther King used the bento box instead of the ammo box. Mohandas Gandhi used the bento box instead of the ammo box. When African-Americans in Montgomery boycotted their city’s public transit system, they could have broken it for everyone by having 75% of the fares drop out. Gandhi did the same thing, breaking the colonial economy by refusing to participate. In Montgomery reaching out with the bento box, doing something practical, helped sustain the boycott as cab drivers (or at least black cab drivers) offered ten cent rides to black commuters. And I’ve seen Black Lives Matter using the bento box instead of the ammo box in my city every time they block the interstate. They may drive everyone crazy for a while but it’s because they’re taking away the bento box, the metaphor I’m using here of home and comfort. Sorry, you don’t get an easy commute and to quickly get back to your life today, because many of our friends and neighbors live in fear of violent injustice.

I believe there are countless ways to push back, to force some cracks into a system that isn’t working, ways that don’t require taking up the gun. This is where these things come together, because I hate that everyone’s first thought at a non-violent protest is that it might explode into violence. Some people will argue that this menace is the point of a non-violent assembly, to gather in such mass numbers that it will reminds the powers that be of all the trouble we could cause if this assembly turned violent, to be a potential menace. I still think this is how we get Bloody Sunday, and fighting fire with fire, a metaphor oddly ignorant of how real firefighters fight actual fire (with cool water, fire-proof blankets, and many other classic symbols of comfort that go well with the bento box). The protests are a lot less scary when you look at what people are actually doing (walking in your path) and not at what they MIGHT do, but I still think the effect is still there for everyone who lost the use of the street for a day: if we can not ALL live our lives, neither can you, and you will not be able to just turn your head away.

And so, the Five Boxes

 

1. Bento Box
2. Soap Box
3. Ballot Box
4. Jury Box
5. Bento Box

Maybe it’s all circular. We all have to live together for whatever time we have. But where we’ve failed to build bridges, speak out. When words fail, make your leaders hear. When leadership and justice fail, remind everyone we all have to live together, and this will be impossible without peace and justice for all. Offer the bento box, but know when to take it away.

Also I probably could have said lunch box, but obviously that wouldn’t have had quite the same touch of white, upper middle class pretentious whimsy. So substitute whatever box you prefer: be it the the lunch box, the toy box, or the matchbox car.