Talking About… Lenses of Lived Experience
In this series of conversations, Maggie and Sarita talk about our ongoing journeys shifting from “not racist” to “anti-racist.” This conversation is from early June 2020.
Sarita: Last time we spoke about privilege and the idea of “white fragility.” Today, can you share the confrontation you had when you were canvassing for the recall-petition?
Maggie: Yeah. Oh my goodness, what an experience last week. I am taking signatures for a recall campaign, related to the murder of George Floyd. Political in nature, obviously, and we’re doing it in the lawful way that recall campaigns work, we’re carefully following state law.
For anybody reading this who’s not familiar, recall campaigns require a significant number of signatures from the registered voting public to recall the elected official whom we believe has done serious wrong; this would then trigger a hearing and after that an election to replace somebody new into the role. So I’ve been out taking signatures on the petition. This involves standing near a table on a street corner and holding up the sign and waving at the cars and pedestrians that come by.
Last week a white man, probably older than me (I’m mid-forties) driving a black Lexus pulled by slowly, flipping us off yelling obscenities out of his window at us. He passed us by, but then suddenly escalated: I watched him drive up a block, stop at a red light, pull out of the left turn lane into a U-turn and speed back at something like 50 mph down the block. He slammed on his brakes in front of us and started yelling at us out of the car.
I was taking signatures with another white woman who’s maybe 15 years younger than me. So it’s just the two of us with this white man screaming at us, calling obscenities. Racist overtones and the n-word. At a certain point, he took off his seat belt and opened his door, starting to get out of the car. Which immediately became from our perspective as women, a life-threatening situation. And while I didn’t hear it, he did tell my colleague he wanted to shoot her. I don’t know if he had a gun, but he said the words. I think the color of our skin absolutely protected us.
The other thing that protected us was that there was a donation drop site happening diagonally across the intersection. The men and women staffing it were all watching this man and what he was doing. When they saw him open the car door, they all stepped forward, crossing the street. And they were very clear. Shouting him down. Forcefully shouting, “No, no, no, no, no.”
He eventually then saw them and that scared him off. He got back into his car and drove off. What was very disturbing is about 45 minutes later, as we were packing up for the day, he came back, he sought us out again and drove back, again, with the obscenities, railing and ranting. And he made sure that we knew he lived a block away. We got in my colleague’s car and drove off, and luckily we were unharmed.
Well, before he had come back, I was talking to one of the donation people who had helped protect us; she came over to double-check on us. She was Black — this becomes very relevant in a moment. I had said to her “Yeah, that was weird. It was really scary. Thank you guys for your support. We’re so grateful. That man was really crazy.”
Even as it came out of my mouth, I saw I was looking at it wrong. This was a great example for me of noticing differently, in the moment, which is a practice. I am actively practicing noticing what I do and say as a result of my lived experience and my privilege as a white person. I realized I was framing this man’s behavior through my experiences and my skin color, and that there was another, more relevant, deeper explanation of his behavior.
I said, “Actually, what I just said was wrong. He’s not crazy at all. So easy to write off that behavior. This is a man who’s down in the depths of his racist rage. Just, just purely and specifically racist rage.”
What I realized was: let’s, let’s name this for what it really is.
Let’s not write it off as crazy. Doing that is a way of just perpetuating and almost normalizing this behavior. Oh, that’s just some crazy irate man, a lone-wolf troubled individual. No. This is a man so deep in his racist rage, that he wanted to take physical action to harm two people doing a lawful, constitutional, process-of-government activity. He wanted to frighten us, shut us down, put us in our place and do harm to us in order to stop what we were doing. And what we were doing is directly related to the murder of George Floyd, a racist murder.
Sarita: This story is tough, for so many reasons. I mean, it’s textbook constitutional free speech — I can’t imagine he would have accepted someone trying to stop him from speaking. I think you’re right about the rage. I also think it’s interesting you were two women, and not large and imposing. I wonder if this would have happened if you had been two large white men.
My head goes so many directions with this. More than anything, I’m so sorry that happened to you.
Maggie: Thank you, as a personal friend, I really appreciate that. At the same time, I know this harassment was nothing compared to what activists of color face on a daily basis. This was nothing. I recognize that. I just want to call out to our readers that this risk of personal bodily harm is often very real for BIPOC activists. Remember, he threatened to shoot my colleague. I’m pretty sure our skin color helped protect us.
Sarita: That is terrifying. Your point about skin color reminds me of a story I heard recently from some of my college girlfriends. With the exception of one blonde and blue-eyed friend, we’re a group of women of color.
On a Friday night pandemic Zoom, my friends Amy, Chanda, and Lydia told us a story about a beach trip, years ago. So, on this beach trip, my friend Amy, who is Chinese American, didn’t bring her ID. When they got to the beach, they needed their IDs for something and Amy said, “Oh, I never carry my ID with me!”. Lydia, who is Latina, and Chanda, who is Black, were astounded. “We would never leave the house without our IDs.”
I heard that story, and I also realized that I frequently leave my ID at home. I don’t take my ID on walks. I might not take my ID if I’m getting a ride somewhere. It’s these little things, the little difference in our experiences based on race, and privilege… you don’t even think about it.
So let me pull this back to this idea of being anti-racist versus just not being in favor of racism. With being anti-racist, there’s an element of seeking out that type of understanding. Listening for it with the people we know and the stories that they tell. Or taking that even further and deliberately seeking out voices and experience different from our own. Seeing how people write about it, or seeing it on film or in talks, priming ourselves to see more clearly.
Maggie: Then being mindful of how we are in the moment, if we’ve got a different level of knowledge and understanding, how are we reacting in the moment? When we’re witness to this type of thing, or standing up for friends, or for strangers in the moment. I feel like that’s the link to being more active and proactive as an anti-racist.
Sarita: Stopping and saying, no, actually, the guy that harassed you was not crazy. Unfiltered in the midst of his rage, yes, but actually saying what he really believes is true. That’s heartbreaking and at the same time helpful: back to where my mindset was before George Floyed was killed and the uprising began, a little willfully-oblivious. The man that harassed you reminds me that people with these beliefs are out there but not way out there, thousands of miles away in some city you’ve never heard of. People are right here in your own neighborhood, living a block away perpetuaing racist ideas and actions.
Here’s another example of how close to home this is: My grocery co-op. In the Midwest, there are these grocery stores that are cooperatively owned. They’re about sustainability and the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. So they tend to have a pretty progressive clientele and a more upscale or wealthy clientele or more wealthy clientele because organic food tends to be more expensive.
My co-op is located on the edge of Minneapolis at the border of one of the wealthiest suburbs in the Twin Cities. In the midst of all the protests, there was Black Lives Matter artwork done by Black co-op staff, prominently posted in the store and on the plywood window protection (put up during the protests).
Someone came into the co-op yesterday, demanding that the Black Lives Matter artwork be taken down. She said, “This is where I shop for my food. I don’t think it’s in any way appropriate for you to be promoting a political stance.”
Eye opening because I didn’t think I didn’t think justice and equity were a political stance. Maybe I sound a little bit too cavalier when I say that, but I did think that there was a shared American ideal around quality, particularly with the progressive co-op crowd. Particularly if you live here in Minneapolis.
These bubble-bursters, they’re hard and so disheartening, but also his is like reality and we have to stop the ostrich thing and ignoring it. We have to acknowledge that people in our close communities are truly thinking and behaving this way. You may consciously believe these are not people that you’re typically around or whom you choose to spend your time with, but in reality: this is part of your neighborhood.
Maggie: I get that it’s fatiguing and upsetting to many white people to have to think about racism and privilege consciously all the time, when we didn’t have to before, because it’s in the news and community all of the time right now. We need to remember that a lot of people have no choice about confronting this all the time, by virtue of living in a poor neighborhood or being a vulnerable adult or having Black or Brown skin. It’s fatiguing and upsetting to have this a hundred percent in one’s face with no escape from it. White people have got to get over this discomfort with being asked to acknowledge these problematic truths.
Sarita: There’s something almost liberating for me. It took me a long time to get past that fatigue and upset myself. That’s the ideal of white fragility right there — the guilt, the shame, the when will this ever end? Well, newsflash folks. If you have Black or Brown skin, if you are a vulnerable adult, if you live in a poor neighborhood, like it doesn’t end for those folks, right?
The ability to get to a place where this is “over,” or you don’t have to hear about it any more, is s a huge hallmark of privilege. That’s privilege at work right there. And at the co-op here was somebody, processing for her feelings of shame and pain, out loud on to the co-op staff and management. She couldn’t support the BLM messaging. She spoke as though she represented a broad group…but you never know because the loudest voices don’t necessarily represent the majority.
Maggie: When we see this kind of behavior, and even if we get a little frozen up by it, how do we effectively confront it? How do we effectively address in the moment somebody who is so willfully like in that place of denial or in that place of anger or in that place of rage? I want to dig further into that with you next time.
