They do that to 'keep the riff raff out' - that's how they think about it," the waitress told us, when we informed her that the closest beaches were $17-$20 for out-of-towners, namely, those "from Prince George's County." (It's $7-$8 for county residents)
This explained why the white women in Chesapeake Beach uniforms were staring at my friends as they walked back to the car I was in. I was weirded out by how intently her eyes followed them as they came back to the car. Were these women grumbling about the"spics" who had just wasted their time? I saw her eyes burn holes in their backs, something I had never seen before. I also saw fear.
"The price increase was recent wasn't it? I don't remember it being expensive?" Asked my friend at the restaurant.
"There was an incident- the Hispanic gang- sorry - if you guys are Hispanic, I don't mean to say any generalization-"
"No," said my other friend, "you're just describing them"
"The gang- What is it called- MS-13!- had taken over the beach."
When she left, we mentally noted that the price increase was racism and classism in the form of collective punishment, and my friend said that the fear that led up to the price increase was "dog whistle politics"- words like "riff raff" no doubt ring all sorts of bells in local's minds, locals being residents of Calvert County, which has one of the highest median household incomes in the United States, who feared the darker neighboring Prince George's County. Prince George's County certainly has the largest Black middle class (just edging out DeKalb County, Georgia), but, especially close to DC, it had neighborhoods born of the sacrifices which the gentrification gods demanded, and was abandoned by public and private investment, leaving them prey to political corruption and criminal enterprises.
We found a public beach - Breezy Point- that was a lot more racially mixed than Chesapeake Beach- a family listening to bachata to our left, and a family listening to Jay-Z's new album on our right. On the beach with my brothers watching the undulations of the Mother Ocean as she runs through the Chesapeake Bay, I began thinking about how I may have ancestors from Maryland blasphemed Her by bringing shackled human cargo down Her.
Whether or not I literally did have those ancestors (some swear we're related to Lord Baltimore), I metaphorically did. The first slaves in America were sold in the Chesapeake Bay from the Dutch (who later went on to found New York). If you're a white American, this is your inheritance.
Everything from our porn to our primetime TV shows ("Popular television shows" like Scrubs, House, and CSI "that put black and white characters on an equal footing as doctors or detectives demonstrate racial bias nonverbally," in their facial reactions, according to a study published in Science that cropped out characters being interacted with and asked viewers to assess body language) bears witness to the white shame and discomfort born of that day. We know in our hearts what we have all turned a blind eye toward, for the heart cannot be reached by the frontal lobe and their rationalizations and self-serving "bootstraps" ideology. Immigrants to this country cannot fully understand the level of obsession whites have, as a whole, with race. Kicking Black people out of our towns by threat of the gun barrel and dynamite, segregation, and pretending to be indifferent to Blacks did nothing to stop, say, states like Mississippi and Georgia from today having the highest porn searches for "ebony" and "Black," according to Pornhub data (and America has "Black" as the highest relative search, meaning, compared to other countries, it's the most uniquely American thing we look for in porn, just beating out searches for "step mom and son.")
My friend, who is the son of immigrants from Latin American and almond-colored, not having to experience the Black or white perspective, looked baffled as he said, "I'm glad that I don't know this obsession. It sounds like so much work."
Exactly. This framing of it highlights the truth of the situation. America is afraid of the work it takes to admit it has a problem and deal with it- but doesn't realize how much work it is doing already, hiring lawyers to find loopholes for Flint officials and police officers, settling lawsuits, being vigilant for the slightest criticism of the police and scouring social media to defend the undefendable in hour-long online debates, finding ways to keep out people of color; defending white supremacy costs emotional energy, stress-and-anxiety freedom, time, and money that it purports to be protecting. Any weight trainer will tell an obese person that it takes a lot of work to maintain being obese- the same amount, in fact, it would take to achieve weight-loss, just that it's out of the comfort zone.
When white supremacy is a path of least resistance, how do we show America that the death of its identity is worth it? Maintaining our calculatedly insane status quo is costly, and it doesn't make death go away; we simply die a million times a year of coward's deaths, because we hide from the cries for us to change as they surround us yearly- from Flint, now from Chicago, now from North Carolina, now from a town just one county over. It's every captured cell phone video, which acts as an alarm clock to some, but the alarm clock is a vague sound incorporated into the nightmares of the still-sleeping others. "And indeed, We are able to show *you* that which we have threatened *them*" (Qur'an 23:95).
For me it was Barry Deloatch of New Brunswick, for others it was Trayvon. I began my process of dying with *humility*, choosing not to see challenges to my preconceived notions about race as a threat. Though I could have just the same have taken the *humiliating* route of trying to defend the innocence of America, of living in denial, Self-Obsession, willful ignorance and fear of changing, like an addict in active addiction. Though people who are not Black or white can fully understand, my friend's comment shows their input and insight into our our blind spots can be something valuable.
" (idea of humility vs humiliation taken from an online 12-step forum I witnessed years ago).
No comments:
Post a Comment