For a long time, I've been someone who wouldn't be armed with much more than headlines and an underlying gut-feeling of what was right and wrong in regards to social issues, political issues, etc. My ideas had been curated through the pop culture I consumed: as a little kid, Indiana Jones beat up Nazis, MacGyver had a black friend murdered by racists, and Star Trek envisioned a future where we all got along. In high school, I was obsessed with Living Colour, and their first two albums gave me insight into the socio/economic issues I hadn't before known (paid attention to).
Of course, parallel to this pop culture, I was getting the usual broad strokes of (white) American History, that didn't give much more than the usual footnotes to Native American history and the Black experience in America: slavery was bad, but (the white) Abe Lincoln freed the slaves, and after that? Well, it took a bit, but Martin Luther King, Jr. made everyone equal. Time for math.
Rodney King was beaten by the LAPD; and through the prism I grew up on I saw it was so different from what I knew. It was wrong, to me at 17, and I wanted the cops to face the consequences. It was an introduction into the treatment of people of colour, but soon after the riots receded from the headlines, the subject receded from my front burner. With the pop culture I was consuming, I wasn't connecting the dots about police brutality.
As I got older, thankfully, I understood that just listening to Living Colour didn't mean I could shrug off the myriad forms of my privilege and bias. I mean, if you asked me if I was a racist in, say, 1999, I would have snorfed with a head cocked to the side and said "of course not," and meant it honestly. I didn't understand that having (at that time) 3 records from 1 band and 1 viewing of Amistad under my belt didn't mean I had an insight into the black experience in America; it meant I had 3 records and 1 movie. Pop culture to that point, to me, meant BA Baracus, Hawke, and Lando Calrissian: supporting cast.
A couple days ago, as NYC began to thaw from its standstill of Covid-19, one of my neighbors and I had a stop-and-chat and while discussing the latest in American climate, and she began to angle from our conversation's path by dropping the old "now, I'm the farthest thing from being a racist, but..." and after a brief accounting of non-racist bonafides...well, said some stupid shit. "Why does everyone have to loot;" "...the cops were arrested, what more do they want;" etc etc.
But now, understanding that I'm at the bottom of a very large hill, I've tried to read deeper than the headlines. Instead of thinking I've educated myself through music and TV, I've been open to being educated. And with all that I've been reading up on, and trying to understand, I was able to kind-of "Luke Skywalker" her argument: "every word of what you just said was wrong." (Without...exactly, using those words.)
She left amiably, but instead of giving her various versions of "because it's wrong" with increasing derision and volume, I was able to give her opposing arguments with facts and perspectives that dismantled shaky scaffolding she was holding her own up with. Did I change her mind? Who knows? But I didn't allow her to get away with saying some stupid shit and not calling her on it.
I have to be prepared for more of this; I have to be ready to call out stupid shit when it arises, as uncomfortable as it may be. White people have to treat white privilege like it's a white problem, not something that other people have to point out to us. If that neighbor is no longer on my side, or our stop-and-chats don't continue because her arguments don't get assenting nods, so be it.
I haven't learned enough. And this one episode with my neighbor isn't something to be celebrated; it needs to be challenged: "you knew this stuff was going on, you know people say this kind of shit, why did it take you so fucking long to confront it in real time?" I have to be educated, and I have to pick at each of my biases and find out what's below, and confront it. Be educated. And it has to continue beyond the headlines. As Living Colour says in "Fight The Fight:" "You got to know what you're fighting for."
