Some thoughts on paying attention …
I woke this morning from a dream where I lived in a subtle but unsettling hybrid of The United States and Russia. If little more than a year of political strangeness made that happen, how do you suppose decades as a black person in America has affected me?
I say this to explain why I reccomended Son of Baldwin’s story today. (And I don’t explain because I feel I’m ‘supposed to’, but because I care about human beings trying to understand one another and want to contribute to that.)
He’s an intelligent man and his writing has become important to me because of the places where his feelings dovetail with mine, and also because I need to understand the places where they decidedly don’t. His view is important and he does more than state it provocatively. He walks me through the thoughts that brought him to where he is. And paying attention is how I learn. That’s how we all learn.
Paying attention to Son of Baldwin’s words, and working to understand the view from his position (because, of course, thinking is work) strikes me as just as important as this listening I’m ‘supposed’ to do to Trump supporters who feel slighted by the politics of justice and inclusion and feel left out and ridiculously scared that black people would dare promote the truth that Black Lives Matter.
I spent a lot of time in my younger years denying how much systemic bias against my skin color affected my physical life as well as my self-image. I’m embarrassed by how long I failed to recognize systemic racism even as it affected me, even though by age 29 I had an interminably long list of things white people had shown me that I wasn’t supposed to do or feel or even think about simply because it didn’t benefit what the status quo dictates for a person of color.
Not everyone agrees that things need to change for the better for people of color. I’ve learned that painful truth from all my listening.
But the scales of justice for people of color have been tipped in one direction for too long. That makes it hard now for me not to wonder how a white person in pain or a white person killed by police would be represented by the systemically programmed ‘authorities’ if they had been born black. It’s hard for me not to wonder about it before I think about how sad the situation is.
So far I still get to the part about how sad it is. I pray a lot that mean-spirited assholes and out-and-out racists don’t change that about me.
