As a good Left Coast liberal, I have a confession. I got really nervous in a situation where I was the only white person.
When I was travelling through Alabama this spring, we pulled off the highway to buy gas and water. Our two year old was having a fit because this woke him up from a nap, so after my husband pumped the gas, he took the car and drove around for a few minutes to try to get him back to sleep while I went inside the convenience store to go to the bathroom and shop. He got a little lost, so it was a while before he returned, so I was basically loitering at the convenience store for about ten or fifteen minutes.
When I entered the store, I recognized that the faces I saw were all black. This didn't really bother me at first because it wasn't a new situation. I went to the bathroom, came out, got the water and a couple of snacks, paid for them and then waited.
As I waited, it became more and more obvious to me where I was. Probably thirty people entered and exited while I was standing there. And there wasn't a white face among them. Then it hit me.
Part of the black experience in America is ghettoization. Laws and property owners for decades made sure that black people had limited options on places they could live, leading to concentrations of them into specific neighborhoods. But living in those neighborhoods is also a form of safety and solidarity--there's a lot less daily racism in a neighborhood where the racists don't live.
And I realized that I had intruded into that space. With my white face.
The people who saw me in that store didn't know who I am--they only know that I look like those who hurt them on a daily basis. That I am the sole representative of the oppressors.
I didn't expect to be attacked or hurt or anything--part of my privilege as a white person is the invisible shield I carry around with me: black people know what happens to them when they attack a white person, especially a white girl. Why would they risk that?
But unlike other situations where I've been the only pale face, I had no friends here--no one who knew me or could speak up if I ran into a person who had had some white person trod on his last black nerve. I was literally a stranger in a strange land. And the face of centuries of violence and abuse. Of COURSE I was nervous. Having been to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute the day before and seen in ugly detail exactly what had been done to these people's parents and grandparents--to the point where I was almost irrationally angry--how could I expect them not to be?
And of COURSE, as I intellectually knew would be true, nothing happened. A few glances as I tried to make myself as inconspicuous and unthreatening as possible, but nothing more. Eventually, the hubby found his way back, picked me up, and we were back on the road.
But that experience stayed with me.
Because throughout my life, I have been racially aware enough to recognize color imbalances in my environment--times when there was only one or two people of color. And I again intellectually knew how this might make them feel--hell, I'd fought for the inclusion/hiring of more people of color at schools and jobs because I knew that people of color (and women) need a community to feel safe and empowered. But now, when I compare my nervousness with what a black person must feel walking daily into an environment (as in school or work or even just a grocery store) where they are not only alone but do not have my shield of privilege, I have profound respect not just for the people--depicted at the museum--who sat at those lunch counters and rode those buses in the middle of the last century, but for those who, today, walk into work, brave the danger, and just get through the day without shrieking in terror and running for their lives.
Fucking heroes. Every day.
This post is inspired by a piece written for Medium by Ijeoma Oluo. You can read it at here.