My Life Talking with White People

On November 6th, 2012, I drove five minutes over to my local polling station in white, suburban Michigan. I cast my vote. There was no line. The woman who took my registration smiled, waved me through, and wished me a good day. I straightened my tie and got into my car. I spent the rest of the day in Detroit.

The barriers that we erect between neighborhoods are largely imaginary. In Southeast Michigan, fifteen minutes in a car can mean the difference between an upscale organic grocery chain and a boarded up convenience store. Blink and you might miss it.

As an election attorney, I spent the day driving from polling station to polling station along 8 and 9 Mile. Houses, blasted and abandoned, lined parts of the streets. At one polling station, I had to wait a few minutes to leave my car. A stray Rottweiler had come up to the car after I parked it. I make an effort to rescue stray dogs when I can, but this one was showing erratic, aggressive behavior. It wandered off into an abandoned field next to a rundown school.

Each polling station was the same. People were piled on top of other people in lines. Library, school, church. It didn’t matter. Everyone was trying to vote. Some were asking about registration. Others were getting directions to a different polling station. Many just stood there with children and grandparents waiting in lines because they believed in Hope.

I don’t need to tell you what color their faces were. I don’t need to tell you what I looked like in my tie carrying a notepad and pushing through clumps of people to check in with election officials.

I watched one polling station struggle to handle the crowds. They only had a handful of officially sanctioned polling booths. The lines grew to become hours long. The news stations came, happy to interview the waiting masses. Why would you do this? Where did you get that lawn chair? Who is taking care of your children while you are here?

Every institutional barrier was stacked against those people. Those voters. But they believed in Hope, so they overcame.

Like most white people, my network is predominantly white. My social media connections are largely white. The professional conferences that I attend are largely white. The people that I see on the weekends are largely white.

I live in an echo chamber of male whiteness that I must actively work to overcome each day. If I do nothing, the perspective is all-encompassing.

And why should I expect it to be anything else? I grew up with Luke Skywalker and Kevin Arnold. With Kurt Cobain and George H.W. Bush. Society reflected myself back to me. It’s no wonder that white boys are the only ones to see self-esteem gains correlated with watching TV.

Over this past year, though, conversations about race and status have become unavoidable. In my echo chamber world, that means cagey, guerrilla comments on the internet and a handful of authentic in-person conversations with close friends. It’s not something that my network wants to discuss. Apparently, we don’t know how.

I was struck by Michael Eric Dyson’s op-ed in the New York Times last week. I know too well what he meant when he wrote of white people:

At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class.

For so many the conversation becomes about things, not people. What angle was the camera at? Was the gun registered? What was his arrest record?

The black man at the end of the gun has become objectified to the point that many conversations becomes clinical. Unreflective. Maybe, some seem to say, it is the victim who has caused us all so much grief? How dare they! If only they would have complied faster, it seems, we would be spared the choking, awkward conversations of our own whiteness.

“I am for the police AND black lives” suddenly trends as the only reasonable thing for a white person to say, and at the same time it becomes code for the status quo. It becomes code for victim blaming. It becomes code for “we do not want to discuss this”.
 
If you are a white male reading this and feeling as helpless as I do: I am sorry, I don’t have a clear answer. I only know that the status quo is not the answer. I only know that I should not feel as awkward writing this post as I do right now. That conversations about race and privilege and the Empathy Crisis must happen in the open if there is to be change.

In November of 2012, my privilege manifested itself as the ability to vote without waiting in a line. Four years later, Hope has run its course and the institutional barriers are still there. It will take more than two terms to fully curve the arc of the moral universe, but I do believe it is possible.

It begins with a conversation.