My former walking and laughing buddy and I began, after her initiation into Oakland's occupy movement, to crash into each other. Her awakening to the mechanics of unfettered capitalism and its effect on her white middle-class experience, repeatedly clashed with my entire being. It clashed because she made so many assumptions about my understanding of myself and my condition. She insisted three times, "You should read The New Jim Crow." Then she instructed twice, "You should read the Black Jacobans."
With each utterance, I breathed deeply and said, "Uh huh," the way my mother slyly does when she thinks what you're saying is nonsense. I didn't say, "I've been black my whole life, Honey." or "Do you think I ever thought Jim Crow ended?" or, "You should read Labor of Sorrow, Labor of Love and How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America like I did twenty years ago at Spelman College." I've been studying my culture my entire life. "Stop." I didn't say that because she had been a good friend. I didn't want to hurt her feelings or shut her down.
I tried to respond when she said, "My other black occupy friends hate Obama. He's a neo-liberal. He's like Bill Clinton. He's a sell out... ."
"Can we not talk about Obama? I don't agree with many of his policies either. And I think I am looking at this from a more racial perspective." Now I've offended her. And I didn't want to do that. But, I would be damned if I was going to sit back and listen to her trash Obama. Why? Not because I think he's right. I cannot defend many, many of his policy positions---BUT---I can defend his personhood and my right not to denigrate this black man with a white woman who's just recently begun to think of herself as at odds with the American mainstream. I've been black my entire life. I am keenly aware of my condition. A complex condition, personally: southern and Californian; middle-class, sometimes broke; educated; both urban and rural. Both old school and modern. Both socialist and libertarian. Privileged sometimes. Black, always. I tried with my friend. Tried to change the subject. To respond thoughtfully. To bite my tongue. What I finally accepted was that she was invested in changing my thinking--which she had no real knowledge of in the first place. She never asked me anything. We had never talked about race. I don't think I ever quite thought of her racially because that's how friendship, real friendship works.
I felt an ease with her, that upon reflection, may have developed over her familiarity with black expression. She pronounced her ex-husband's old school name, Willie, the way I would pronounce it when at home with my children. That's an unstated invitation into my unconscious heart. Heart invitations know little of race and other sublunary realities. But when we are forced to reckon with the borders erected to keep us separated, many of us fail. Our friendships fail. Because in reality, we know so very little about each other. We know what we are shown and told. We don't go deeper. That takes work. And the work has to start by leveling the listening field. That means we toss assumptions.
It ended as inconspicuously as it had began: I stopped walking as she prattled on, insisting I denounce Obama. I stayed my feet, slumped my shoulders and rolled my eyes upward, convinced. I told her as I turned one last time, skipping backwards toward my car, "I'm not able to do this anymore. I just wanted to walk with my friend."
I drove home disappointed. I felt the divide between us grow as I drove away from the pithy waves bumping into the Berkeley Marina. In my rear-view mirror I saw her face, her eyebrows raised in bewilderment. We lost each other as she became more aware of things I'd known my whole life. And I became more aware of my own hurt over this big society infringement on our little relationship. I asked my friend to toss her desire to instruct me and she, for whatever reason, could not hear me.
This is too often the case with the well-intended, liberally instructed white person who mangles herself into a trope (not always white, actually). I once asked an urban teacher-friend of mine, "Do you think the children you teach are unaware of their condition? That they don't know their own reality?" They've lived their conditions. It's deep in their bones. Your students feel insulted when outside folks, especially white folks, try to teach them about their own identities. Why?
First, you assume your own expertise about people whom you've studied, but who are not you. But, more than anything, it's the fact that it's you.
Ask Lisa Delpit, who has written and taught extensively about power dynamics within American classrooms. What Delpit understands and what my friend didn't imagine, was that as a member of a community under siege (by my definition), my agency cannot come through anyone representing my oppressor. There is an automatic resistance. The affective filter is sky high. And in this case a justified resistance to paternalism and condescension. And there is an unspoken knowledge within groups of color: whenever white folks get in a room with us, they readily assume to take the lead, to talk out of turn, to direct the natives, to share their infinite wisdom. We see this as white supremacy in action. And because we don't speak it, out of politeness, they don't know they are fulfilling a stereotype.
It's the dynamic represented in Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson." The do-gooder, come down from the mountain to save the savages from themselves. That's the lesson. And the instructor is a young black woman -- representing the same condescending paternalism. It's not about teaching the students what's wrong with their world. They know economic inequality--that's why they won't tip the taxi driver! The students in the story had common sense and knew how to navigate their environment with agility. They made brilliant transactions representative of what they'd lived. They acted out on their field trip. They didn't trust the teacher. They didn't identify with her and were automatically resistant to what she had to say. And they knew what she thought of them!
I couldn't understand why everyone in my workshop read that short story as a piece solely about economic inequality. But of course, I thought. That's the jargon of the day. The fall back. The easy answer that keeps us from looking more inward. Looking inward is not easy. It hurts. It occurred to me to check myself one summer evening about twenty-five years ago that I carried with me biases, behaviors and a persona that I didn't think possible:
Every summer I returned from school in Atlanta to work my job at Sears Service Center. Eight hours a day answering a phone for three summers almost blew my head off with boredom. It was the late eighties and each summer as I returned to work, my hourly wage increased. I was making more money than women who'd been on the job fifteen years. I drove my dad's van to work or my super beetle--before I blew up the engine. One day I ran out of gas. I pulled the van to the side of the road and stepped out with my pearls (literally) and pumps and trip trapped over to some workers coming out of the strawberry fields I had to pass on my way to our house on Bluebell Place. They wore bandanas across their faces and gloves and yellow mud caked boots and baseball caps. Men and women. I needed a lift and approached a woman not knowing what to say except, "Do you speak English? I need some help."
She measured me from head to toe, rolled her eyes, then said, "No." She turned to her crew and they all laughed and headed to their cars. I wanted to cry. I didn't know what I'd done. But her no made me think. A lot. I don't remember how I got home that day; but I remember my ideas about myself shifting. I will never forget that no. My question and I represented a lifetime of experience for that woman that day. And her rejecting me meant something so deeply powerful to her, she couldn't resist it. We crashed into each other that day in the same way my friend and I crashed so many years later walking along the Berkeley Marina. Only today the difference is libraries and a couple decades full of work on culture and pedagogy and power and politics and resistance.
I unfortunately, didn't know how to respond other than to quit the relationship with this friend. Walk away. She had refused to hear me. I saw her the other day and am very relaxed and certain in my decision. I tried. And remember saying, as I turned around on our walk path, "I'm not doing this again." -- A simple no to condescension, ignorance, assumption and lack of reflection on personal power.
Post Script: I've come to appreciate the council of time and experience and friends who know all of me.
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