I Have Never...

So I've been meaning to write a new post for weeks now, but Things Keep Happening and whatever I was going to say gets eclipsed by whatever else is in the headlines.  I have like three started and discarded posts just in the last month.  Maybe at some point I could get them together and publish them under Things I Might Have Said If They Had Still Been Relevant, or something like that, but I doubt that anybody would be interested.  Anyway, there is only one subject at the moment and it's about people with a skin color different than mine being murdered by police, in part because of an insidious, systemic racism that's been with us since essentially forever.  And what we can do about it.  Yes, even us pale folks.

I dunno about you, but when I was in school, we learned basically nothing about African-American history. Zero. Zilch.  Oh, we talked about slavery for about five minutes in the lead-up to spending three weeks on the Civil War, but it was like, "Yeah, there was slavery, and it was bad, and then we had the Civil War and after that there wasn't slavery anymore, so we're going to spend the next week talking about the Battle of Gettysburg."  I majored in English in college, at an allegedly liberal institution, and out of all the literature classes I had to take (and there were a lot), we got assigned exactly one book by an African-American author.  One.  Seriously, just one (and it was Beloved by Toni Morrison, and if you haven't read it yet, what's stopping you?), and when it came time for the final exam, there weren't any questions on it because we ran out of time to discuss it in class. (Sigh and eye roll here.) And forget the civil rights movement or the March on Washington or Martin Luther King.  None of that ever even got mentioned. "Anything that's less than fifty years ago isn't history, it's current events, and so we're not going to cover it in a history class," said a professor of mine.  I mean, I guess I could have pointed out that it's still going on, but that would have only proved his point.

So everything I know about African-American history, which is still not a lot, I learned as an adult.  The books I've read by black authors (most recently: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and I could not. Put. It. Down.) I read as an adult.  And I'm not sure adult brains are the best, most fertile ground for learning essential truths about humanity, though I guess they are better than nothing. I'd like to think the schools are doing a better job with this stuff now than they were then. 

For the record, I grew up in Utah, and at the time, there were no black people in Utah.  Well, I'm sure there were, somewhere, but I didn't know any and nobody I knew knew any.  (I might add here that the Mormon Church didn't let black men into the priesthood between 1849 and 1978, and I was nine in 1978, so for the bulk of my childhood, African-American folks should be forgiven for suspecting that Utah might not be the friendliest place they could settle.  They would also be right.)  I made my first African-American friend when I was about eleven.   I find this both pathetic and sad. This is also part of the whole insidious systemic racism thing.  Just because all the segregation laws have been thrown out doesn't mean segregation doesn't still exist.

Also, there's this thing called white privilege.  That is, the things that white folks get because they are white that black folks don't get because they are black.  There's a lot to say here because it covers so many facets of life, but I'll try to hit some of the big ones:

• I have never, in an emergency room, been asked if I'm using illegal drugs, or for that matter, had a doctor accuse me of lying.
• I have never, in a workplace environment, had to hunt high and low for any colleagues that might look a little like me.
• I have never, when pulled over by the police (three times that I remember), worried that I might not make it home alive that night.
• I have never thought to take my small child on a walk with me so as to look less threatening and therefore less likely to be shot or have someone call the police on me.
• I've never been asked about my religion as I was about to board an airplane.
  
• I've never had a delivery service refuse to come to my neighborhood. 
• I've never felt like it was necessary to tell my kids how to survive an encounter with the police.  (Okay, I don't have any kids, but if I did, I would think it part of my job to teach them how to stay alive from day to day, and that's just not something I would think to bring up.)
• I have never been fired from a job or not hired for a job because I had the "wrong" first name or skin color.
• I have never had anyone tell me I need to leave a certain neighborhood by sunset.  And yes, for the record, I do live in Texas.

I mean, I could go on.  Lots of people have, and a lot more eloquently than me.  But the thing about racism generally is that it is so insidious.  It permeates every facet of life.  It's in our faces all the time, but most of the time we don't see it.  So what can we do about it?

Well, in a word, lots:

• Here's 75 things white people can do to for racial justice.
• Here are four steps we can take to fight racism.
• Here's a book we can read about why this is so hard for white people.
• Here's another book we can read, especially for folks in the legal field. 

But by far the biggest, most important thing we can do is to listen.  Be willing to let go of our preconceived notions about racism generally and white privilege in particular.  Be willing to listen to people who are actually affected day to day.  And work to change those things that we can change, depending on where we are and in what field and in what station of life.  I had to twist a few arms to get my book club to read The Underground Railroad, but I did it.  It is a small thing, but small ripples of air spilling off the Western Sahara can start swirling around the Canary Islands and eventually become hurricanes. 

Oh, and in case I haven't mentioned it yet, VOTE.  The whole ticket, not just against the Cheeto in Chief.  The small races for City Council and State Senate and who should be judge of what court have a lot more to do with people's day to day lives than what happens in Washington.  They're also the races where your vote really counts, because these are the races that are often won or lost by a handful of votes. And if you don't know who's running for what on your local ticket, this is a great time to find out.  You have five months.  Get busy.