Injustice Rage
As a white girl from the suburbs of Philadelphia I didn’t learn anything about black history. There was slavery, it was bad, it ended. There was segregation, it was not as bad as slavery but inconvenient so Martin Luther King Jr. fixed it by being a well-spoken reverend who everyone listened to. He solved racism with non-violent, totally legal actions and speeches but was shot and killed anyway. Malcolm X existed but was radical/militant and that is bad. I wasn’t raised in a world that lobbed injustice at me with any regularity. As a woman I have experienced sexism and as a queer person I’ve had some small moments of homophobia but in general I’ve been largely protected against the rage that comes with experiencing truly personal injustice.
I now know people of color are taught so very young that to exist in society you must actively work for your survival. Be humble, step down off the curb, go to the back of the bus, don’t act uppity, do exactly what the cop says no matter what, don’t talk back, don’t wear a hood, don’t play with toy guns, don’t take up too much space. I know all of this academically but have never had to feel what it feels like, that is my privilege.
When we started the second parent adoption process to provide my partner with ironclad parental rights for the child we made together and raise together in our collective home I was mad about it but accepted it as a thing we had to do. As the process dragged on into the second year of paperwork, conversations with lawyers, a social worker home-visit, finger printing, and background checking I started to understand what the strong hand of the state feels like when it’s on your back. When we were called in to the judge’s chambers to have an extra meeting to discuss our ‘complicated file’ I felt so acutely what it means to have your rights in the complete hands of the state.
Before the meeting I had posted about it on social media and my cousin, a wealthy white lady from Pennsylvania, wrote “just do what they say happily and it will be over whether they are right or wrong!!”. What a messed up thing a person with privilege who has never had to “do what they say happily” gets to say to someone else. It sounded like what people say after another black person is killed by police “if only s/he had done what they said”, as though that would have mattered.
Sitting in the judges chambers I focused on wringing my hands and biting my lip as privately as possible. I felt a combination of rage and deep sadness, I wanted to both scream and ugly cry all his smarmy, smiling face. I kept it together because my partner needed me to, we need this man to sign our adoption paperwork, and this was just one isolated incident. I cannot imagine having to deal with this level of injustice rage on a daily basis.
Outside the courthouse our pro bono lawyer gave a moving speech about how we were experiencing state-sanctioned violence and that this process is a way for the government to keep their thumb on it’s more marginalized constituents. I don’t generally feel ‘marginalized’, I have privileges I don’t even recognize as privilege. I am not worried about being killed by the police or having jobs or apartments denied to me because of the color of my skin or my gender identity. And yet, I think back to the era of terror lynchings and the current era of business as usual when police kill black people and I am not sure I would have or could currently survive it. I don’t think I could bite my tongue that many times, wring my hands privately enough, step down from that curb quick enough or at all. I can understand how it’s done academically but having had one afternoon of that feeling in me I’m not certain I could sustain a lifetime of that rage.
