Once a small zoo, it is now a shady site for sitting, playing, and enjoying a stroll, all under the watchful gaze of giant lions, frozen forever in a silent roar. Throwbacks to a different time, they guard this same spot.
Today, between a morning, spent teaching out of town, and afternoon meet-up with my family, I sat on one of the black iron benches, reading. A young man rolled up to me in his wheelchair, engaging, smiling, asking if I would like a map to his city. I began to reach for my pocket, assuming the map he offered was for sale. He smiled and said the map was free, but he would like for me to enter a little information about myself on the top sheet of a stack, mounted on the clipboard he extended to me.
With the attached pen, I wrote the requested information about our visit to Oaxaca, Mexico. Four of us, here for x amount of days. And then there was that blank, the one that asks where we came from.
Well, that's easy, isn't it? Sure. There's nothing inherently difficult about writing "United States." There's not even anything ideologically difficult about writing "United States," because I have always thought of my country as an anything goes, free to be me, live and let live sort of notion of a nation, sort of.
It's about as patriotic as I get, thinking of the wide range of true things about the United States that make it decidedly, dividedly, united. No particular way, that's the rule. We all have to live together, grumble about each other, help each other, and do our best to ignore each other. Go to that homespun holiday dinner, avoid politics, pass the turkey, and let live, right?
Yet, I felt a pang of shame, stating on that sheet of paper, where I come from: a direct result of paying attention to what is happening there now. Who is saying what, about whom, all the outrage, praise, and deafening silence it garners. Even though I am thousands of miles from home, I feel close to events already starkly in the sharp focus of a 20/20 vantage point of the future- one I hope will be "a different time," but, I know better.
Growing up in the United States, I thought a lot about racism. It almost fascinated me as a child, the history of slavery, segregation, the struggle for civil rights, and systematic oppression. The clearly terrible bad guys in white hoods, the clearly noble good guys stirring the masses with soaring rhetoric about a better future, one which should have happened already.
It was at once unbelievable, and unnoticeable to me, how atrocity and inspiration formed the story of the United States: the place I come from.
All the places and times I have been, in that mostly lovable, earnest mess, they all have something in common. Although I was told the black and white good and bad of U.S. history was thought to have happened in "a different time," it still happened all around me, frequently.
A neighbor shouting a racial slur at her annoying dog, insisting it wasn't racist, because she used it for everybody.
My sweet great grandmother closing our front door in the face of my mother's employer, a black man she did not know and certainly would not be inviting indoors.
The scowling elders who once smiled at me kindly. As a cute little blonde girl, I was adored by them. As a young woman, holding hands with a man I had loved for years, I was a troublesome example of the changing times.
The store employees who followed that boyfriend whenever he shopped out of their sight.
The word that was scrawled across my dorm room door when he and I first fell in love.
Horrible remarks jokingly made to me about my co-workers in high school, because we sat together at lunch.
A bus ride to school, during which a classmate retold his dad's favorite jokes, and I came home with so many questions. What did those words mean? Who was he talking about?
So, why take to the blog to telescope back into time and look at just a few instances in which the privilege of being white meant I got to witness, first hand, the unvarnished view of some who shared my skin color? Why bother writing about how casually they committed the same category of crimes as the bad guys in the those black and white photos in history books?
Because sometimes I fancy that the things I write here might be read by people younger than myself, people whose early memories coincide with news stories about human beings whose lives should have mattered more, if only they had been the right color. I want to say something to them, to you, that was never said to the younger me. It is a hard and solid truth that was denied, though it roared, not so silently, at the corners of my existence. Racism in the United States is not the stuff of history books. It rarely wears a white hood, and it never admits that its story never ended.
That "different time"? Is now. Unless those who know are believed, unless those who come from it can call it what it is, it is tomorrow too.
