I haven’t posted about this yet because I’ve been too upset to respond in a measured way. But I’ve kind of had it. I’ve had it with a lot of the responses to Ferguson, and to Staten Island and to Ohio, and to countless other incidents. I’ve had it with the extremes on both sides. I’ve had it with the willful ignorance. That is what so much of this seems to be, at best: willful ignorance, or perhaps blind denial. The other option, of course, is outright bigotry. Unacknowledged yet unapologetic prejudice.
I don’t know exactly what transpired between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson. Perhaps only Brown and Wilson do. It may be that Brown acted in an aggressive manner with the police officer, as he did with an area store clerk. But it also is likely that he was treated much differently than a young white man in similar circumstances. It is never a good idea to get physical with a police officer, no matter your race.
But it is also undeniable that race plays into the way we react to each other. I see this all the time. The way my niece and nephew are received in public places is much different from the way my GLOW mentee and her nephew are received, even though their ages and behavior may be similar.
My niece and nephew are white, privileged kids who live in an upper middle class home with two parents who have an advanced education and steady income. My African American GLOW mentee and her nephew live with their grandmother in an impoverished area. My mentee does not have much of a relationship with her parents and her grandmother struggles to make ends meet. I don’t know that anyone in the family has ever attended post-secondary school.
When I took my mentee, her nephew, and her cousin to a dress rehearsal of the Kansas City Symphony and Chorus, they were exceedingly well-behaved and did better than I would have expected my niece and nephew to do. They followed directions and behaved exactly as I asked them to, and yet I don’t think they were treated the same way that my niece and nephew would have been treated. When we arrived at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, several of the volunteer ushers’ faces froze, in seeming shock, as if they feared they must inform us we were in the wrong place, that we didn’t belong there. When I explained that I sang with the chorus and that the kids were my guests, they softened slightly and directed us to our seats, but they remained rather stiff, skeptical.
Today I took my mentee to another dress rehearsal, for Handel’s Messiah. She was interested but eventually nodded off. Symphonic music often has that effect on me, too, and I am confident that if my sweet niece had nodded off, people would have looked at me with kind faces, as if to say, “the poor, sweet dear—she’s exhausted!” But instead people looked at my mentee—who was already tired and hungry when I picked her up for the evening—as if she were disrespectful. She was not disrespectful; the child was just tired! And we left at intermission, out of respect for the performers and their guests.
To pretend that black children and white children, that men and women, boys and girls, people of different races, genders, classes, sexual orientations—you name it—are treated equally under the law or amidst “society” is to live in a fantasy world. We all know that we are treated differently because of how we look, what groups we are affiliated with or our level of wealth and education.
I am not saying I know what exactly went down with Michael Brown, or Eric Garner, or Tamir Rice. But I do think that they had a different “starting line” and that they did not enjoy the benefit of the doubt that many white Americans do.
And it’s not okay, America. It makes me sick when I see my GLOW mentee treated differently because of her color or her class. Make no mistake, not all white people treat her as a second class citizen. Many people treat her with kindness and respect, as they would a child of any color or class. But many do not.
And it’s not okay, It’s not okay and it’s undeniable. So let’s quit trying to deny it, shall we? Let’s quit pretending that the American experience is the same across racial and class and gender lines. Because it’s not. And to pretend otherwise is at best to assume a willful ignorance, a kind of protective denial, and at worst to perpetuate the very racism and classism and sexism and homophobia that is at the heart of the deadly injustices that are tearing our communities apart.