gotcha!

Walking up Hyde this morning, I paused to lean against a building and focus on a rather complicated text message I was trying to send with my incredibly low-tech phone. So I was looking down when someone walked by carrying a boombox pumping out some loud gangsta rap, all where my niggaz at and so on. I'm going to set aside for a moment how much the "where [blank] at?" construction makes me crazy. The rant I can feel foaming up in my throat is just going to have to wait. The point is that I looked up, expecting to see some big threatening African-American guy swaggering by.

I was dead wrong. It was a big guy, all right, or more accurately a wide guy, but he was about as physically white as it's possible to get. We're talking Nordic here. My eyes followed him up the block, and locked on an African-American couple coming down towards me, pushing a stroller with a little girl in it. They're looking at him with barely concealed amusement, and then they face forward and see me looking at them looking at him, and I can't help smiling. And we have a moment where all three of us know what exactly is going on--who does this guy think he is? They're laughing, I'm laughing. They're even with me now and I can see that their little girl, with her hair pulled up in a puff on top of her head, is incredibly beautiful. I wave at her. Say hi! her mom tells her, and we say hi to each other as she rolls past, turning in her stroller to watch me.

Sometimes, often, the whole question of what we (and by we, I mean WE, all of us) are going to do to end racism in this country just overwhelms me. Especially when I can see that despite my best efforts and those of my parents (who moved us to inner-city Detroit when I was six, very deliberately) and my teachers (I knew all the countries of Africa on a map before I mastered Europe), I'm still carrying all sorts of soul-deadening junk around. Beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, totally wrong-headed ideas I'm ashamed to admit to. If I, with all my training and hypersensitivity and Detroit upbringing, still make snap judgements, still think that people are less capable of or interested in certain things solely because they're of African descent, if I still hold my breath a little when a black man walks past me and think please don't hurt me, how can I expect anyone else to get their act together and stand up and say, no more?

This is something Mom and I talked about when I was in Michigan last, and AX and I talk about it occasionally on a more theoretical level. My essay in the Seal Press anthology Under Her Skin, which comes out in the fall (and yes, brace yourself: when I have a release date and an ISBN I'm going to make you all buy a copy) consists of me fumbling around with this issue. I start writing about race in America over and over; I stop in frustration over and over.

The only thing I can suggest is that we need to talk about this more. Air it out. Too much damage has been done by our pretending that there isn't an issue, or that the issue is no longer meaningful because there are African-Americans at every level of government and excelling in every field of endeavor. We need to talk about what happens inside us, and we have to live with the possibility that we're going to say horrible, off, things even though we have no intention of being hurtful. Something I just read in a completely different context floats back to me: Dr. Deborah Anapol writes, This is a process of trial and error. There will be trials, you will make errors. Too often I say nothing because I fear making an error. Is it possible that there are opportunities I've lost as a result? What opportunities have we as a society lost because we haven't been brave enough to be truthful, vulnerable, compassionate?

For the moment, I'm just glad I had that moment on the street, that brief flash of being completely present and at ease, of laughing with other people. The past few days have been pretty rocky, for a host of reasons; I badly needed the respite.