The They, the Us and the Them

When I was a kid (we’re talking 1976–1994, guys…not that long ago), I thought we were somewhere. We were in America and America was awesome.

We listened to newfangled things like hip-hop and r&b, and it was totally okay that this chubby suburban white kid liked PM Dawn and Boys II Men and tittered naughtily at Ice-T and Wreckx-N-Effect.

In 1991 we watched Rodney King get the shit beat out of him on television, and it was terrible. But then again, he wasn’t a good guy…he was kind of a crappy guy, actually, so it was bad that he got beaten up and nobody deserves to be beaten up, but those cops went on trial and the justice system…they were okay, right? They did their job…didn’t they? Somebody went to jail…I think. Right?

And then the 1992 riots happened, and this chubby suburban white kid went back and listened to those lyrics from gangsta rap (isn’t gangsta rap fun? It’s totally fun. It’s like a movie. Like a Hollywood movie. Not in real life though…nobody’s like that in real life, because the cops are good guys. That’s what they teach you when you’re a kid, right? Find the officer and ask for help. They’re here to help you. This was an overreaction; people were angry but they needed to stop breaking things and burning things because that’s not polite. And we got equal rights in, like, the 60s or something. So this was just people being horrible. They were hurting their own cause.

There was a sense of unease even then. But it was far away. I knew maybe three black people. I grew up in a heavily Hispanic town. My best friend is Hispanic! It’s all okay, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

I remember befriending a woman who moved from LA in 1992 to my hometown. I asked her why and she said “I am terrified of black people since the riots. They screamed at us in their cars. They torched homes near me. You don’t know what it’s like to be afraid to live in your own neighborhood.”

I realize now, with horror, that she didn’t realize that they lived there, too. And they didn’t get to leave.

They. They were a they. The They. The Them. But not Us.

At 12:10 a.m. on June 13, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found murdered in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. And we watched as O.J. Simpson drove his white Bronco down the freeway, presumably with a gun held to his head. And he had become a Them. He was a Them now. A celebrity Them.

And I went to college as the trial began, and it felt like such a weird farce…because California was Hollywood and nobody was really real there, and the Them and the They held a comedy show and we chuckled at gloves and Broncos and smug lawyers and O.J. never looked entirely…normal, did he? He always looked like he was waiting for a taxi. He didn’t look like he was waiting for a verdict.

They announced the verdict at 10 a.m. on October 3, 1995. I was eating breakfast in the college food court. Everybody groaned. We were sure he was guilty. He was a They and a Them and he got away with it. Because he was wealthy.

Now the unease got bigger, darker. Now it was two kinds of They and Them; wealthy Theys of any race, any color, who didn’t have to go to jail for murder. And savage Thems (probably black, because that’s who was on TV) who reacted with fire and flames. But again, those people were never in my life…our life. They weren’t real, still.

I got older. And the unease spread. A few more celebrities dodged jail. Remember Robert Downey Junior? Before he was Iron Man, he was a fucking druggie criminal. HE PLAYED IN A MOVIE AS A DRUGGIE CRIMINAL and still he dodged jail.

Now kids play with his action figure.

A few more teenagers got shot, too. But we didn’t really see that. We got that side of the story by watching Colors, American Me, stories of Them and They that were very clean around the edges. You could walk out of those films feeling very good about yourself.

If somebody got shot, they were a criminal. They were bad guys. Occasionally a kid got shot, but it was always by a bad guy doing a drive-by, shooting into a house and killing the toddler, and it was sad, that They and Them wouldn’t think about the children. We assumed the They and Them were animals. It’s fine to push back against Them as hard as they push against Us. For the greater good. Teach Them that violence will be met with violence. Only way to stop it really.

The unease grew. Watching the news made you want to buy a gun. I wanted to buy a gun. But I’d look out into the dark beyond my window and think “They’re far away and I’m okay.”

Around the same time there was an explosion in America of religious renewal. People, deeply uneasy, just like me, with the fear of They and Them, started renewing their faith in God and they bonded together in confirmation of specific values. Some of those values, however, removed us even further from the They and the Them. Remember Left Behind? That series of books about The Rapture? Nobody read those and thought “Gee, I can’t WAIT to be left behind.”

People began arming themselves for the Rapture. Against the potential Theys and Thems that might come.

Nothing’s wrong with faith. But when you mix it with fear you create something insidious, like rose-scented dynamite. Antifreeze sweet to the lips but toxic to the liver.

We’d started to fracture under the veneer.

And then we started watching people die.

Not at first. At first we started watching police slam people into curbs and drag them down. But there was a LOT of it. And the police are still our friends, they still keep us safe. These were bad cops. These were a part of Them. We justified the chokeholds and the bodyslams because They were violent. They needed to be shown that you didn’t buck authority.

I want to back up and confirm to you that I’m not now, nor have I ever been a racist. I’m a liberal up the wazoo. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. I’m just painfully white, growing up in a painfully white town with not a single solitary clue as to what the hell the world was like anywhere but my home.

But when you’re white, you don’t really see the privilege.

Of course I was going to college. Of course my family paid for my car insurance. Of course I was gonna graduate. So was everyone else I knew.

You don’t have to be a racist to take advantage of white privilege.

Anyway, back to the timeline.

Cellphones happened. And then cameraphones. And then we started watching people die in real time. We watched cops shoot unarmed men in the street, then looked awkwardly uncomfortable as they stood around the body, wondering what to do next, like frat boys with a passed out friend too heavy to lift.

Then in the last few years I started watching kids die.

I watched a police officer gun down a naked guy. I watched one jump a curb and gun down a kid with a toy gun.

It was getting harder to call them…Them. That little girl tossed around after going to a pool party, crying and screaming for her mother…she wasn’t a Them. She was just a girl. That guy who cried and begged for help because he couldn’t breathe after being choked down, then died begging. He was just a guy.

Where were the They? Where were the Them?

Why did they start looking like….Us?

It was so easy to say that this happened in Hollywood, until it happened in Missouri. And the sudden realization that people were living in fear everywhere, fear of They and Them and The Other, fear of police authority that seemed to operate without limits. Fear everywhere. Fear of being Raptured. Fear of not being raptured.

Watch the Walking Dead through that lens some time; the people who got left behind with all the horror that pursues them relentlessly. They shoot, kill and stab Theys and Thems all the time, and then when one of them becomes a They or a Them…it’s with a solemn promise and last kiss that you have to kill them before they turn. It’s not subtle.

We take comfort in being Us. It’s nice to be Us.

But underneath that there’s the unease that we’re gonna one day be turned on, and we’ll become Them. We’ll fight and die and kill to stay Us.

My friend Randal is amazing. He’s a college student, turning 30. He’s paying his way through school. He rides the bus everywhere because he can’t afford a car. He’s a great, hardworking, super capable and fun guy. One day I told him how, as a kid, we were told to always ask a policeman for help.

He looked at me, dead serious, rubbed a hand across his wiry black hair and said “Yeah no…we didn’t learn that. You see a cop you walk the other way, that’s what we learned.”

I realized a few years ago that the people I work with…hardworking, kind and passionate advocates, spend a lot of time ensuring that we address disparities in health care, because the prevalence of black and Hispanic death due to chronic disease is painfully high. Meanwhile the black and Hispanic people in my workplace are almost all administrative staff.

I realized a lot of things.

I don’t have answers.

I’m not going to apologize for being white.

Saying sorry never fixed anything.

We live in a world where people of all races and colors can sit at the same lunch counter…but it’s still not safe to walk through a neighborhood without the cops being called for “suspicious kid walking through area, possibly casing houses,” when he’s the neighbor’s son and he’s knocking on doors asking if you need your lawn mowed.

I don’t think all police officers are racists. I still think you can ask them for help. But I do want to know why my friend wasn’t taught that, growing up.

I want to know why we aren’t asking communities why they’re afraid, or angry, and I want to say “What can we do to bring that level down, without drawing lines between Them and They and Us?”

And I see, now more than ever, that whoever we are, we have to own our privileges.

Race, wealth, geography, religion. You have to own those things. Because if you don’t, then all you can do is see through the lens of your life, and if it’s a Midwestern life in a painfully white town with painfully white buddies and a white outlook in the midst of white middle classness…it’s a world of Us and Them.

I’m tired of that mindset.

I choose We.

I choose We in everything, moving forward. No more They and Them, We. We can be assholes and killers and saviours and sinners. We can be poor and rich and arrested. We should be We. No more Them and They.

We should be We.