Striking a Minor Chord
Have you ever been in the
minority? Not the kind of minority where you had options and chose a dissenting
path. Not when you voted against the majority on your HOA board. Or PTA or
departmental meeting. I mean the kind you can’t choose, deny, leave behind, hide,
abstain or retire from. The community I grew up in was 100% white, Christian,
conservative. (Oddly, there was a small lake adjacent to ours with a 100% black
population, and that is an interesting story for another day.) As a child, my
most exotic neighbors were a Polish couple who escaped to Michigan after WW II.
It was not until I went to college that I lived in a more diverse community,
and it wasn’t all that diverse.
Twice in my life I have been
in a true minority position. Both times were short-lived, so I cannot claim a
real understanding of the life-long
struggles of someone who is seen and/or treated as different or less than. I
barely sampled that sense of not belonging, not having a voice. I knew I’d be
going back to my safe and comfortable life. I only sampled a bit of the fear,
self-consciousness, and uncertainty felt by members of minorities in our
society. We might be more tolerant if everyone experienced this now and then,
perhaps going to minority camp for a couple of weeks every summer.
The first experience was in
grad school when a friend and I received a grant from WJBK in Detroit to
produce a film. The University of Michigan was trialing a program to bring
students from small black colleges in the south to the Ann Arbor campus for a
few semesters. We proposed to document one young black man’s experience coming
to an affluent, predominantly white campus. We approached a participant with
this proposition: he would be interviewed in Ann Arbor and in South Carolina. We
would drive to South Carolina to visit and film his campus. He would get a free
ride back for a long weekend with his friends. He signed on.
These were not the days of
iPhone videos. We had a lot of equipment in large cases, long cases, heavy cases.
Tripods, studio-sized film cameras, and cans of film. We stuffed my partner,
our volunteer, and me plus our suitcases into a Karmenn-Ghia. (One degree
removed from a Match Box car.) I, being the shortest, was twisted like Gumby,
poured into the spaces in the back seat around the equipment. It was one long
trip, and we drove straight through.
We were shown to dorm rooms,
and our volunteer disappeared to spend the weekend with his friends. We
strolled the tiny campus; you easily could see from one end to the other. We
were the only two white people on campus, at least as far as we could see. My co-producer
took off for a bit, and I went to my room. It was a second story room that
looked out over the commons area, right over the entrance to this lovely brick
building. I opened the window, sat on a window seat, and watched the students
walking to class, chatting, doing the usual student things. Then, across the
commons I saw a long black limo enter
the main drive and wend its way slowly to a spot just under my window. It
stopped, and a crowd materialized, streams of excited students from every
direction, all gathered around this car. The car door opened, and a tall,
handsome black man in a perfectly tailored suit emerged. He was greeted with
cheers as he climbed the steps below my open window and turned to face the
crowd. The top of his head was now about10 feet below me.
I knew exactly who this man
was. I had heard him speak in Ann Arbor. Radical rhetoric, eloquent,
confrontational, exciting. He had stood on the steps of the Michigan Union. I had
been walking to class when I stopped and had to listen to him. I was mesmerized,
stunned at how bluntly he spoke about racial issues. Now, I was about to hear
him speak to a very different kind of audience. He soon had them laughing and
clapping. The one line I recall most vividly had to do with white women who
wear bright red lipstick so they can find their own skinny lips. I sucked in my
own skinny lips and slid slowly down off the window seat and out of sight. This
experience gave me a tiny taste of what the young man we were filming
experienced every day in Ann Arbor. In school, at work, shopping, driving. Just
a tiny taste, but a memorable one.
Decades later, just a few
years ago, I found myself in a van with 8 Jewish women from New York, a Rabbi
from Israel, the Rabbi’s brother, the van driver, and an armed guard. I had
never been on a trip that required an armed guard. It was a Jewish heritage tour,
and we were in Lodz (pronounced Ludge) Poland. The buildings in the old
neighborhood we were visiting were covered in hateful graffiti. Before we
walked anywhere, our guard strolled ahead to assess the situation and then
trailed after the group. Faces stared at us from upstairs windows, and not in a
welcoming way. If we wandered the slightest bit, the guard nudged us back to
the group like baby ducks. We walked down a narrow alley to search for the
house of one participant’s grandparents. We were walled in. That is not a
feeling I will soon forget.
A few years after adopting a
child with dark skin, we were traveling from Iowa to Florida and found
ourselves traveling across Mississippi. We were running low on gas, but there had
been no gas station for miles. With the needle nearly on empty, we left the
highway to see if we might find a small town. Only a seriously naΓ―ve white
person would have thought that was a good plan back then. In about twenty
minutes, we coasted into a wide spot in the road with a few houses and one
ancient gas pump. I can still feel the fear that pulsed in my chest as people
stared into our car. Truly, it felt as though we had wandered onto the set of
Deliverance. This fear is what parents of children of color feel every day
around the clock. Every minute. This is not a history lesson; even today, this same
gentle, honest son cannot shop for chips at a convenience store without being
followed by the manager. He cannot drive past some police officers without
getting a stare I never experience.
I know some people scoff at
the phrase “white privilege,” but most of us acknowledge the privilege of getting a good education, a fair
a chance at a job, and freedom from unjust treatment by law enforcement and
courts. What I have learned is that I take for granted some other privileges as
well: day to day peace of mind, a sense of belonging, freedom from constant vigilance,
freedom from anger at all of the above. I am grateful for the few moments when
I was educated by these experiences.