touching down.
“What a relief to have you back”
My loved ones keep telling me how relieved they are to “have me back,” telling me how good it is to see me, at last, “safe and sound” on American soil. I can understand the sentiment — we always feel some inexplicable comfort in proximity, in having our friends and family “near,” as if calamity cannot strike them as long as they stay within the gilded confines of the familiar. And yes, I understand that it didn’t help the matter that I spent the last year traipsing around the Middle East, at times only a few dozen kilometers from ISIS-held cities. Who can blame my friends for worrying, when they subsist on nightly newsreels that render an entire region as a homogenous, dusty haze populated by masked men and veiled, ghostly women.
Still, my life was nothing like a warzone, as close as I came at times to conflict. True, the local government in my home city of Amman, Jordan installed air-raid sirens and advertised emergency evacuation plans. Yes, we were aware of growing domestic tensions, of clandestine crackdowns on extremist “cells,” and the occasional spikes in kidnapping threats. I knew where to walk, and not walk, as a single, blonde woman. I took “precautions.”
Yet I was seldom afraid. Just as I do whenever I move to a new city, I set myself out to learn the ropes of my new surroundings, acclimating myself to the norms and the “no-gos” and acting accordingly. In short, I tried my best to be street-smart, and a little goes a long way in that department. So when I’m told by my wide-eyed American companions that they’re “so glad I made it back safe,” I am never sure how to respond. Mostly, I smile and tell them thank you, but I wonder if they’d understand if I tried to explain just how ghastly America can look from a distance.
What if I told them of the vertigo I felt as I sat helplessly in front of my computer screen in August, and then November, peering through the pixels at the raw grief displayed in Ferguson Missouri? What about the horror I felt as I skimmed social media and found myself bombarded with vitriol, vicious words blasted across the Internet by the masses of distant, non-black spectators? Separated by 8,000 miles, I felt my heart caving beneath the weight of recycled history. Haven’t we been here before? Haven’t these cries been lifted in agonized courage for generations? Why are we, once again, refusing to listen? Those were haunted weeks, when Missouri burned — a repeating nightmare, as Eric Garner’s breath was taken, as Baltimore quaked with indignant grief.
And through it all, in Jordan, I went to work, to my classroom where I taught Palestinian refugees, and faced their well-warranted bewilderment: “Teacher, why are the Americans killing each other? Why are they killing the black people?” I gazed at their wide almond eyes, those olive-complexioned faces that are normally only visible to Americans as “terrorists,” and thought, it really is that simple, and that criminal, isn’t it?
It is the black people who are dying, and the white people who are killing them. And somehow, we make the story about anything else.
My students didn’t know they were supposed to ask for “nuance,” didn’t pad their analysis with a nod to “the other side,” and I couldn’t help but feel this was alright.
My students and I wrestled this year, too, with the barbaric deaths at Chapel Hill — “Did he kill them because they were Muslim? Why?” or the lethal drone campaigns in Pakistan — “Won’t the stop bombing the houses, teacher?”
Of course, more than anything, we were occupied with the atrocities in our own backyard, horrified along with the rest of the world at the barbaric destruction in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. “This is not Islam, Teacher. ISIS is not Islam. Do people in America know this, Teacher?” But the ghastly loop of brutalities against black bodies was unique in its horror, in its flagrancy, and most of all, its familiarity. A nation built, culturally and economically, on racialized oppression, once again wracked by the natural backlash to its crimes, once again proving unable to face its own sin.
“We can’t wait to have you safe and sound back home,” said friends and family, as my return to the United States approached. Just to have me back on American soil would reassure them — to have their golden-haired girl away from the frightening, dark tumult of the Middle East, planted safely in the midst of civilization once again.
I would have liked to tell them how loaded that statement was, how problematic the implied belief that America is inherently a Safe Place. For someone who looks like me — an English-speaking, white-skinned American citizen, life might indeed be easier in the United States than almost anywhere else. And yet. What a radically different world it is for those who wake up in other skins. And what an invisible, irresistible fact it is that my own safety, comfort, and privilege comes in so many ways at the cost of those darker bodies.
And then came Charleston. Only days before I boarded a plane to return to the “land of the free,” another iteration of race-sickness tore another community to the core. At the terminal before my Chicago-bound flight, I stared at the navy-and-gold passport in my hand, my mind full of clumsy, half-articulate grief. Touching down a dozen hours later, I stepped into a milling crowd, shocked to see so many white bodies moving around me. For the first time in a year, I was surrounded by people who looked like me, who would not double-take at my blonde hair and light skin.
Here, being fair-complexioned is a luxury, a protective talisman, a ticket to implicit and explicit privilege — all my inheritance due to an arbitrary fact of DNA. They don’t realize it, but this is what they are really talking about, when they talk about me being safe in America. The mothers of darker children would not be so naive. And my own naiveté is everything — the very essence of the injustice, this ability to be oblivious to the color-selective dangers of living in this nation.
So I’ve spent a restless two weeks so far, back here in America, rattled by the quietness of my mother’s mostly-white, suburban neighborhood. In the deceptive serenity of green lawns and well-paved streets, I worry about forgetting. I wonder at my ability to be submerged in comfort, to pass so freely between spaces, businesses, streets, enjoying the nimble ease of being white- and able-bodied. This is my America, seen through white-tinted glasses, but it is only one of many. White America, which is materially and spiritually distinct, ubiquitous and self-assuming, is a fact non-white Americans must deal with every day.
The opposite is not true. When white Americans stand aghast at the rioting of grieving blacks, wondering “what they’re so angry about anyway,” we expose our incredible, incriminating blindness. When racially-motivated whites carry their racially-motivated violence to the extreme, pulling a trigger, we are apparently “baffled,” and perhaps briefly recognize the need to open “discussion.” But we have not grasped our sins. We have not grieved the violence of the status quo, and we cannot repent until we do. Until we are willing to lean in and hear the cries of the Furgesons and Baltimores, we will never understand that the “cycle of violence” in fact begins at the top, with the comfortable, the satisfied, the safe.
I feel the terminal, unsettling quality of my words. They reflect all I have felt over the past weeks and months — unresolved, remorseful, and vaguely angry. I am doing a lot of listening, these days, a lot of taking stock. I cannot undo my DNA, and it is not my job to pity, nor to speak for, others.
Yes, I’m “back” but I do not want to return. I am looking for a place to begin.
