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 naïve 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.