Recent calls for white people to “be anti-racist” and “do better” have been flooding my media stream. I don’t like the term anti-racist, but I understand what it means. I think it triggers emotional reactions in the people who most need to understand it, but to me it’s just a level of self-awareness that creates room for those emotions before the reaction happens. If you truly wish to be “anti-racist” though, and you’re not just reacting to some social media post, then maybe this story is for you.
Calling yourself “anti-racist” is not a magic pill that will make race-driven tension go away. It’s the contrary. It’s about seeking out the stress of racial injustice and sitting with it in order to build the mental and emotional strength to “do better.” Here is a story that helped me understand this.
Last fall I was part of a group of men with one goal: have an open, honest discussion about race and racism. I had never done anything like this before, but when I heard about it I thought it might be good for me.
There were 15 men in the group. Only one of them is black. I’ll call him Jon for anonymity’s sake. The rest of us in the group have white skin.
As I walked up to the room, I was legitimately afraid there would be black men in this group. I don’t know why, but I was. When I walked through the door I and saw Jon, my stomach dropped. As I took my seat I made awkward eye contact with him and gave a weak nod. I anxiously waited for the room to fill up so we could just get on with it.
Finally we started the meeting, or I should say Jon started the meeting. Right off the bat he asked, “So does me being here make anyone uncomfortable?”
My stomach wrenched. My sides were physically shaking, but the goal was to be honest so I piped up in a voice I’ve never heard myself use and said, “It does for me.”
Silence. Jon just looked at me, not at all in disbelief. We just sat with it. Everyone in the room just sat with it. I felt like shit, and I realized this is how the next two hours would go.
The group continued to talk, and I continued to feel like shit. Finally, someone had shared a story that I could relate with! It was Jon’s. He was recently pulled over in his neighborhood for an expired registration, expired one day. He was maybe 100 yards from his workplace parking lot and asked the white officer if he could leave his car there until he renewed the registration. The cop required Jon to have his car towed under the law that prohibits driving an unregistered vehicle.
About a week earlier I had been pulled over for an expired registration, expired 6 weeks. I was a mile from home and got that visceral gut-wrench when I saw the lights come on… but not a “fear for my life” gut-wrench. I was pissed because just that morning I had scheduled my emissions appointment for the next day to take care of this. I stopped, the white officer wrote me a ticket and kindly explained how to appeal it online. Then he said, “I’m going to need you to pull up into that parking lot and wait for me to drive away. I’m not supposed to let you drive off with an expired registration and you’re on my dash-cam.”
So I did, and when I told this story to Jon I added, “… and I feel ashamed because why do I deserve that?”
Jon’s honest response: “To me, you don’t.”
My stomach wrenched hard and the trembling increased. At that moment I was small. A little fuckin’ boy wishing Jon had said something like, “Don’t feel bad, man. That’s just the way it is.”
Now we have arrived at my point. And if you’re hung up on the details of each man’s story thinking “we need to gather more facts,” you’re missing it.
The reason I’m sharing this story is not to prove whether or not I deserved to be let go without towing my car. Quite frankly I think I did, but the law says otherwise. This story is about the shame I felt surrounding that, and more specifically how I unknowingly expected Jon to lift the emotional load for me.
His brutal honesty when I expected comforting words granted me new clarity. It’s not Jon’s job to make me feel better about stuff like this. Feeling guilt and shame is my burden to carry, not his. I think this is what a lot of white folks are blind to. There’s a collective emotional burden that each race carries. For black people it’s the cumulative trauma of oppression. For white people it’s the guilt and shame of the historical atrocities our ancestors committed, and more so, the lingering systemic flaws that resulted and remain in effect today.
Everybody has emotional baggage, and each race has its collective baggage. The difference lies in who has the strength to carry it. Black people like Jon have learned to carry their own baggage. Their social survival has depended on it! What many white people don’t know is that Uncle Sam has been hauling the emotional load for us for quite some time.
Slapping on the badge of “anti-racist” will not offload this burden for me. I suppose that’s why I don’t like the term. It’s a trendy label readily available for misuse as a way to self-medicate my own humanity and bolster up my self-image. But if anything it’s just throwing that baggage deeper into the closet where it will remain out of sight and silently weigh me down. I need to pick my baggage up and start carrying it myself. This is where the change all us “anti-racists” want really begins.
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: Illustrated by yours truly.
The post What Talking About Racism Actually Looks Like appeared first on The Good Men Project.