Processing My Experiences with Racism

So.

Where to begin.

As a white girl growing up in Texas, I can still remember the first time I knowingly encountered racism. I was homeschooled until the 3rd grade, and on my first day in a regular class, I made a friend. His name was Sean, and he lived a couple of blocks away from me. We loved the same music, the same jokes, and would talk on the phone after school for hours while we listened to records. Sean was black, which meant nothing to me at the time. However, about a year after we became best friends, my mom started asking me questions. Did I think he liked me as more than a friend? I said I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure. She then looked at me very seriously and said, “You know you’re better than that, right?”

I was shocked. It took a second, but the full meaning of her words slowly sank into me like hair down a drain. That was the first time I remember feeling separate from, and even ashamed of, my own mother.

Years later Sean and I did in fact date. He was the lead singer in a rock band, and we traveled around to different cities where he would play shows and I would play groupie. I was young and in love, and did my best to ignore the effect that our relationship had on certain people. My grandmother was initially against it, but as she got to know him her doubts seemed to fade in the warm glow of his charming personality. By that time, my mother had found Jesus and was in a mixed fellowship with believers from across the globe, and her outdated beliefs about race seemed ancient history. I had always been fascinated and inspired by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s (as well as other cultural revolutions for freedom) and was firm in the belief that had I lived back then I would have been right there on the freedom rides, sitting beside my black brothers and sisters in solidarity. I was so thankful that we had overcome those terrible times, that systematic racism was safely behind us, in the past.

One day, Sean and I were walking through the mall holding hands, when a black girl started yelling at us from inside of Claire’s. “Why are you with her?” she yelled at Sean. “We’re not good enough for you?”

I was shocked and embarrassed, and I put my head down as Sean just ignored her and kept walking. That was the only time we encountered a direct insult, and I wrote it off as a crazy anomaly. We never really talked about it. Sean later broke up with me and we both moved on and eventually married other people.

Fast forward 10 years. My husband Daniel and I moved to New Orleans after Katrina, to assist in helping the city in whatever small way we could. I had always loved Nola and was thrilled when a position opened up that allowed us to live there. Daniel and I volunteered our time at the Free Church of the Annunciation, a small church in Broadmoor that was renowned for being the first church in the city to eradicate the ‘pew tax:’ a fee imposed in the late 1800s that parishioners had to pay to attend a church which purposely made it unaffordable for minorities. We had a diverse congregation, and our pastors had served as missionaries in Africa before landing there. Daniel and I led worship, and he also served with the youth, who were mostly black and living in the 9th ward, which was one of the areas most profoundly affected by Katrina. When he asked them what they planned to be when they grew up, they surprised him by answering, “In jail, like my uncle,” or “I’m going to have a bunch of kids and live on welfare like my mom.” We worked hard to encourage them that they could be much more than what they had witnessed around them, that poverty and jail were not their destiny.

For the first time in my life, I lived in the deep south, in a city that was openly divided across racial lines. The hostility was palpable, with every council vote divided by the race of the members, and “slave quarters” still standing behind many of the grand mansions in the Garden District, serving as a stark reminder of a tragic past. I heard new friends who had lived in the city forever make comments and assumptions that I knew were wrong, but as a newbie still learning the ropes of the city I wasn’t sure how to address it. Schools in nearby Metairie were officially desegregating for the first time while we lived there, and I was nonplussed watching the images on TV of families yelling in school board meetings because they didn’t want their kids to have to change schools. “Didn’t we already go through this like 50 years ago??” I thought, shaking my head. In many ways, living in New Orleans felt like going back in time, but not all of those ways were good.

I was also disturbed by the level of crime in the black neighborhoods in the city. The homicide rate at the time was higher than in Baghdad, definitely the highest in America, which the mayor Ray Nagin called a “double-edged sword,” because, “at least it keeps our name out there.” He also loved to refer to Nola as a “Chocolate City,” and promised that that would never change in spite of an influx of outsiders coming in to help with Teach for America, the Road Home Program, and other post-Katrina rebuilding initiatives. It was the first time in my life that I lived somewhere where I was statistically the minority, and it felt very different, even hostile at times. Good and bad areas were patchworked together, and as someone who was still unfamiliar, I found myself many times turning down streets that suddenly felt unsafe. Families sitting on porches would turn and stare intensely at me as I drove past, and handpainted signs adorned the fences and lamp posts pleading “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and “Please Stop Murdering Your Brothers and Sisters.”

Even in the beautiful, tree-lined streets of Uptown where we lived, the violence was never far away. This truth came into startling relief as I walked out my front door one day to find that police had blockaded our street because someone had been shot while driving and crashed into the telephone pole at the end of the block. Daniel and I even saw a body outlined in chalk on our way to the movies one time, the cops standing around it and talking like it was just any old Thursday night. The crime in the city was stunning to me, and I felt as if I was holding my breath as I walked from my car to my apartment every night. I didn’t understand why people were killing and robbing each other at such an alarming rate, and why the local leaders seemed powerless to do anything about it.

I tried to act normal, to smile at people on the street like I always had, although at times my smile was met with curse words when directed at someone of color. The racial tension was palpable. One day while shopping at my local Wal-Mart, I went up to the deli cheese counter and waited as the black woman working there walked around, organizing wheels of cheese and meat. I stood there for about 10 minutes waiting for her to acknowledge me until I finally spoke up and asked if she could help me with some cheese. “I can’t help you,” she said with a steely gaze, then turned on her heel and walked away. Tears sprang into my eyes, as I felt the sting of the rejection hit me, while at the same time realizing that this was not even one-millionth of what black people had experienced all throughout American history. Often when I went through checkout lines in the grocery store, I watched as the black customers in front of me chatted good-naturedly with the cashier, yet when it was my turn everyone fell silent, and the cashier wouldn’t even look at me or say hello. I felt like a ghost. When we finally moved back to Dallas, I literally cried the first time a black man held a door open for me and smiled as we walked into a building. It had been so long since a black stranger had smiled at me and shown me this kindness, and I didn’t realize how deeply the division in New Orleans had affected my heart.

In spite of all of these experiences, I still believed that racism was NOT the central issue, that the current societal problems were much more centered around class, stemming from poverty. I would hear the occasional offhanded comment, usually from someone in their 60’s or older who had been raised in a different time, and shrug it off as the ignorance of a generational mindset that was dying. I mean, we had a black president, how much more equal could things get?

And then, Michael Brown happened. Honestly, the uproar didn’t make sense to me, as he was apprehended in the middle of a crime, and failed to obey police directives. I felt like that could’ve happened to anyone, and therefore wasn’t about race at all. The Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, and people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were constantly in the media, seemingly stirring up division and controversy. My corner of the world didn’t look like the picture they were trying to paint at all, but rather was filled with people of all races working, living, and worshipping together, in relative harmony.

As time went on, more of these stories started popping up in the news, with more angry protests following. To me, it still seemed unfounded, especially the burning and looting that seemed to always accompany the protests. I felt like even Obama was encouraging the hatred, by talking about Trayvon Martin as if he could have been his son, and ignoring the accounts of Martin beating up George Zimmerman. To me, it seemed like Zimmerman was admittedly overzealous in his pursuit of Martin, but had fired in self-defense. Plus, he was half-Hispanic. It was tragic and shouldn’t have happened, but I didn’t understand how it was tied to racism. Although there would always be hatred, as long as there is sin in the world, I just couldn’t see how racism could be systemic in a society with the EEOC and Title VI, with black people working at all levels of government. I mean, many of the police in our cities are black, how can we accuse them of being racist?

However, it is now 9 years later, and the cries have only gotten louder. The death reports aren’t just teenagers who are caught in the middle of crimes or in a physical fight, but men sitting in their own homes, going out for a jog, a woman playing video games with her nephew. These shootings don’t make any sense, they cannot be justified in any way. And no one will ever forget the horrifying video that galvanized the world of a man on the ground with a knee on his neck asking for help and being suffocated to death. What is happening?? With all of these recent killings, many have begged the question, would this have happened to a white person? Would they have been shot for “looking suspicious” while jogging? It’s possible, and I’ve seen some evidence that suggests that police brutality cuts all ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that these images are incredibly painful. These things shouldn’t happen to anyone, of any race, and there must be accountability. I do believe that most cops are just trying to do their job, which is an incredibly dangerous one. I can’t imagine having to make life or death decisions every day. I also know that if an officer is in an area with a lot of black crime, they may start to overreact on instinct, whether they themselves are black or white. Although “black on black” crime is a real issue, it doesn’t discredit the violence being done to black men by outside forces. We have to do better at reaching across the cultural divide and fighting for our black brothers and sisters just as hard (if not harder) as we would if they were white.

I know that I am white, and therefore cannot speak about the black experience in America. Just as a man cannot lecture a woman on sexism, I cannot even begin to invalidate anyone’s experience as a minority in this culture. But as I look back, I see a lineage of racial tension that surrounded me, even though I was mostly oblivious to it, and I know it had to come from somewhere. There are wounds in this country that need to be addressed, and just as men have to play a part in empowering women and stomping out sexism, I believe that white people have to play a part in eradicating racism.

I know that just yelling about the problem doesn’t bring us closer to a solution, no matter what the issue is, and if these claims of systemic racism are true it can feel overwhelming and impossible to solve. But the first step is to acknowledge the feelings of our black brothers and sisters, not to argue over facts. We need to LISTEN, and then show them with our actions and our words that their perspective is important. That they have a voice in this country that matters. It’s not about what we think, or who is right or wrong, it’s about giving them a place to process pain and trauma, from recent events as well as generational wounds, and standing with them in their pain, no matter how long it takes. It’s not an easy thing to do. It’s upsetting, and it is very ugly. We don’t get to decide how long it takes people to heal from the injustices done to them. We can’t just tell them to get over it. That doesn’t help. And if we intend to move forward as a united country, as a people, we have to help them heal. We have to demand accountability for these crimes and apologize again and again if necessary. We have to walk in humility and stop defending ourselves.

These conversations surrounding racism have been going on inside the black community for decades, even centuries. Don’t you want to be invited in? Don’t you want to know what your neighbors are going through? I for one want to hear from my black friends who are angry, mistrusting, and sad, not so I can tell them why they shouldn’t feel that way, but so that I can apologize, hold their hand and ask how I can help. I want to see our country united, in a way for the first time ever. I write this through tears. I want to see the true UNITED States of America. And I pray that the Church will lead the way.