Same House Different Rooms
The Universality of American Racism
Twelve Years
I’ve had a neighbor for twelve years who doesn’t trust me. If
you ask him, I’m sure he has every reason in the world to build
this wall of suspicion between us. I’m sure it makes sense in
his mind that I am, in fact, Lex Luthor and the twelve years
I’ve lived here is all part of my master plan to have the homies
break into his house and take his dusty old Steely Dan records.
Or maybe I’m a child molester who’s waited all of this young
girl’s life until she is on the cusp of adulthood to step out of
the shadows and attack. Whatever movie is playing in his head is
not one I’m particularly interested in, and my point in even
bringing him up is not to accuse him of racism but to point out
that twelve years is a long time. As you work your list of
reasons someone doesn’t like or trust you, sooner or later
you’re left only with the improvable. The ugly. The stinky.
When I first moved here, the rumor began that I was in a gang.
This was told to me by the only other black man living on this
street, who found such a thought amusing. This was precisely the
same kind of lunatic fringe, racially-based assumption ignorant
racists make about President Obama. Based upon nothing more than
his skin color and his name, these idiots--and that's precisely
what you are if you believe this--have widely accepted the
bizarre notion that the president is a Muslim, even while
criticizing his 20-year Christian church membership under The
Reverend Jeremiah Wright at the same time. Most anything anybody
would want to know about me can be found online, on Wikipedia or
on my own sites. But racism is bred and nurtured by ignorance—by
stupidity. Over these twelve years, these same people have never
once failed to jump to the worst possible conclusion—no matter
how insipidly stupid or far-fetched—about my motives for doing
whatever I was doing. They never, ever, even once, simply asked
me. They are so incredibly nosy about what I am doing or what I
am not doing, but rather than simply ask, they make up their own
stories and spread them around. And, in their twisted version of
events, I am always, every time, doing something negative or
behaving improperly. Worse, this invented history of theirs
gathers steam over time, creating—in their minds—a concrete
history of wrongs I've perpetrated against them. If I am found shot
dead, and there's every possibility I might, it will be because
one of these people sought to avenge the voluminous wrongs they've
invented in their heads.
I was almost 40 years old. I was a comic book writer. "What
would make anyone think I was in a gang?" I asked, and my
black neighbor
pointed to my durag, which I
wore most of the time because I was moving and, thus, sweating
all the time. I didn't defend myself. I didn't deny being a
40-year old comic book-writing church-pastoring gang banger. I assumed,
correctly, that they'd eventually tire of that idea and move
onto something else to accuse me of. This is precisely the same
mentality historically employed by vengeful, hateful lunatics
who would jump to insane conclusions—Emmet Till, a young boy,
whistling at a white girl—and lynch blacks for little or no
reason. It's almost never an overt action but an invented
history of perceived wrongs, building up over time, that
ultimately explodes into violence. This is the insanity of white
conservatives' irrational and outsized, personal hatred of
Barack Obama. It's personal. Most of them could not articulate,
with any reasonable or factual evidence, why they hate him. They
sputter vagaries and grasp at words. They just hate him. And not
the way conservatives hated Bill Clinton. With Obama, its
personal. Most of the wrongs they feel he's perpetrated against
them were invented in their heads. This is how racism works.
It is a kind of insanity. First you hate, then you grasp to find
reasons why.
In twelve years, I’ve never seen a black man, woman or child so
much as visit my neighbors' homes. Not to fix something, not to deliver
something, not to Trick Or Treat. I’ve not once bumped into any
of them
somewhere in town where any of them were even talking to a black
person or, for that matter, a Latino or Chinese person. Which
isn’t to say it doesn’t happen, but that twelve years is a long
time. I eagerly admit I’m not so invested in what these folks do or
don't do that I’m actually up on all the particulars. In
the many neighborhoods I’ve lived in, from birth to this late
stage of life, I’ve never had a more stand-offish, strange
relationship with someone as I do with one neighbor; a man who, absent the skin color, might as
well be my clone. We are, in many, many ways, exactly and
precisely the same person, New Yorkers with similar biographies,
temperaments, and problems keeping a woman in the home. He is,
to my observation, actually kinder and more invested in people
than I am, which makes me a little jealous of him. An earlier
glance at a Romney political yard sign on his property became
all the more perplexing when I got a second, better look at the
sign and realized it didn’t say Romney but Forward.
He will be furious if he reads this and, likely, feel I am
accusing him, which I am not. I am drawing a picture of a
complicated relationship. When his kid was four, she used to
wake me up almost every morning around eight o’clock. She’d just
wander out of her yard, come over and ring my bell. It was
incredibly annoying. Not just that she’d wake me up but that
she’d talk. And talk. And talk. And talk. She was, in her own
sweet, annoying way, my best friend. I’d be working and see her,
at four or five, wandering down the street by herself. I’d
think, “This must be an amazing neighborhood for her parents to
be so trusting,” but the New York in me required I stop what I
was doing, go sit on my steps and keep an eye on her. And that
was our deal early on: she was my wake-up call, and whatever I
was doing was never more important to me than her safety, so I’d
spend summer mornings on my steps keeping an eye on her way, way
down the block. I could never not watch out for her. It
was what neighbors did for each other. As I told her dad, “If
you have a four-year old, I have a four-year old."
For what I assume are obvious reasons, I never allowed her in
the house. In fact, the only time she’d ever been inside my home
was when her mother brought her over once, along with another
neighbor lady, under some quixotic pretense of a friend of
theirs looking for a local rental and considering my home. I had
no plans to move, had announced no intention to move, but there
was some presumption that eventually I’d be on my way and their
friend could move in and they asked, sweetly, if they could take
a look around. I didn’t care. I knew why they were there. They
were either just being nosey, or wanted to increase their
comfort level with this strange black man living down the
street. Or, they wanted to see if the little girl knew her way
around my house. Which was stupid. My house is almost exactly
like their house. It is essentially the same floorplan—the
bathroom, the bedrooms are virtually in the same place. Same
house, different rooms. It was a stupid I Love Lucy
scheme—does she know her way around his house? Five
year-olds have really weak poker faces, so the kid’s genuine
lack of familiarity with the place likely satisfied whatever
sick, jacked-up suspicion the neighbor lady may have had. This
is the same senior citizen who, only a few weeks ago, stood on
her lawn, screaming at me at the top of her lungs, WHY DON’T YOU
JUST MOVE! JUST MOVE!! I am quite sure it was not the mom (from
whom I’ve never gotten so much as a whiff of Curry Goat) but the
hateful neighbor lady egging the mom into that degrading
invasion of my humanity.
It was also the disconnect between myself and the child. She
never rang my doorbell again. And, if she had, I would not have
answered.
I Didn't Hate Her Dog:
Does she know her way around his house?
A degrading invasion of my humanity.
In Search Of A Reason
The neighbor lady tells everyone who will listen how much I hate
my neighbor’s dog. This Dog Controversy has formed the basis for
the unbridled hatred shown me by this woman, who has gone out of
her way to infect my relationships with other neighbors and
isolate me as “The Other.” And, this is what racism is: hatred
in search of reason. Hating someone for no reason leaves you
vulnerable to the most obvious motives, the stink of Curry Goat
all over you. But, aha! He hates the dog! That’s why he’s
a bad man, and because he’s a bad man, I hate him. Racists will
cling to the thinnest excuse, the flimsiest of reasons, to
justify their hate. When my wife left me, we’d had an argument
over some store-bought chicken. But we both knew the chicken
wasn’t the reason the marriage failed. The marriage failed
because of who we were, because of problems we were not
addressing. The Dog Controversy is a shameful and deeply
insulting excuse for these people to do what they’d been doing
all along, in their hearts, in secret. A reason—no matter how
silly or, as in this case, untrue—gives the racist license to
bring their hatred out into the open.
I don’t hate that dog. That dog is the only friend I have on
this block. The only one on this block actually happy to see me.
I love that dog. That’s the greatest, nicest, best-tempered,
most loving dog I’ve ever met. And that dog loves me. Comes
running when he sees me, wagging his tail. It’s gotta irk my
neighbors that this dog responds to me, is excited to see me. I
don’t hate the dog. I hate the dog’s constant barking—a
distinction my neighbors cannot seem to make. The vibe, and this
is certainly me and my issues reading into the problem, seems to
be, “He hates my dog therefore he hates me,” which is patently
untrue. But this is the insanity of assumption, filling in
blanks where we are either unwilling or unable to communicate.
I have never done anything to this woman, who professes herself
to be a Christian while obsessively harassing me to move off of
her block. Never said an unkind word to her. I have tried,
repeatedly, to be friendly to her and was rewarded with long,
rambling, condescending, offensive lectures from her about how
lucky I am to have them as neighbors. To have them as
neighbors. I have checked on her during storms, shoveled her
walk, and confronted a local idiot who’d been using our cul de
sac as his own personal test track, racing through here on
unlicensed uninsured off-road vehicles operated at unsafe
speeds. I visited this woman’s husband in the final days of his
life, chatting with him in his hospital room. YOU’RE NO
NEIGHBOR! She screams at me. WHY DON’T YOU JUST MOVE! JUST
MOVE!!
All of which is to make a point: racism is not a simple, Black Hat issue. It is a layered,
nuanced, and complex disease so deeply rooted in America’s
DNA—among blacks, Asians, Latinos and whites—that I despair that
there will ever be a cure. This is a racist nation born of other
racist nations. Liberals always go out of their way to not
accuse or to qualify our suspicions, "Well, I'm not saying
so-and-so is a racist..." We have to bend over
backwards and parse every statement so as to not falsely
accuse anyone of racism, while people who commit offensive acts
never seem to pause, even momentarily, to consider the
context in which those acts could be seen. Here I have two
neighborhood women conducting a search of my home, bringing a
child along for no apparent reason, yet I’m the one who has to
be cautious about the context in which I place this conduct.
I am describing racist acts. By
definition, people who commit racist acts are racists.
If We All Were White
All of which has led me to wonder: what if race stopped being an
issue? What if some genetic catastrophe evened out the playing
field, turning everyone dark-skinned? What if we all were white?
Would that fix it? Would that solve the problem? Would that end
the squabbling? Would this woman stop yelling at me, demanding I
move, if I had an operation of some kind and returned home a
white man? Would the U.S. economy suddenly rebound if the race
questions was suddenly and definitively resolved forever? Would
we all suddenly join hands and sing? And what would we sing? In
what key? At what tempo?
The sad truth is, I believe, if we all were white, we’d just
find other reasons to hate one another. I don’t actually think
we literally hate one another over skin color so much as over
issues of tribalism and identity. Black progress is a virulent
threat to White Supremacy, something most whites would tell you
they have no investment in, yet the collective response of those
least enlightened among them tells a different story. Rather
than be happy for an end to ignorance—the rising black middle
class, increasing rates of blacks seeking higher education—many
whites feel threatened by this browning of America.
Growing up, I had no idea Jews were a minority. I just assumed
all white people were Jewish. I did not actually know what being
“Jewish” meant. I assumed they just went to a different church,
something they called “synagogue,” and they worshipped on
Saturday instead of Sunday. Having attended a primary school in
a Jewish neighborhood, I had absolutely no sense of racism being
directed at me or directed from me. We were kids. What did we
know? If I had a beef with another boy, it was about whatever it
was about—race played absolutely no role. This experience was
both enlightening and damaging on some level as, when I arrived
at high school, I was, on my first day there, terrified of all
the black kids. I attended a vocation Journalism high school in
New York’s Hell’s Kitchen section of lower Manhattan. My first
morning there I was confronted by two thousand black kids—every
one of them seeming hostile to the new kid. I was terrified. I
heard myself thinking, “My God—there’s all these black kids
here…” I knew I was going to get beat up every day.
It took months for me to assimilate into the new environment,
where I’d hear racism—directed at whites—most every day. I’d be
offended by it. At least half of my friends were white. Right up
through middle school, my girlfriend was a little Jewish girl.
My rival for Maxine’s affections was this guy Barry Felton, whom
I disliked not because he was white but because he was trying to
get my girl. Now lost in the Zulu Nation, I struggled with my
ethnic identity and experienced an irrational anxiety toward
these kids who barely noticed me.
As a result, I am incredibly slow to point fingers—at my
neighbors, at the guy on the street, even at the conservative
white voting bloc. Because they’re not the only racists. I have
experienced their anxiety firsthand. I understand it. My anxiety
did not turn into loathing; I have never in my life hated a
white person simply for being white. I have actively disliked
white people who have mistreated me, who were jerks. And I have
been actively disliked for being a jerk. But, as a result
of having spent my formative years surrounded by Jewish kids who
didn't seem to notice I was black, I have been, for the most
part, racially colorblind all my life. I was certain "those black kids" were
going to routinely shove me into lockers. I assumed they were
ignorant and hostile. But my fear had no
foundation. These kids had to apply and test to be admitted to
this school. This meant, right off, these were all exceptional
children whose investment in their future was predicated
upon staying out of trouble. If you got into a fight in my
school, you could end up being shipped back to your local public
school with the rest of the clowns, and nobody wanted that.
Graduating my high school earned you a diploma from New York
University. These were not thugs. Most every kid at that school
was thinking of college and future..
I’d spent my formative years virtually surrounded by whites. Now
at my new school, I assumed things about these kids based solely
on the color of their skin. I am in absolutely no position to
accuse or condemn anyone. We lash out at skin color but it
really isn’t literally the color of someone’s skin that angers
or threatens us so much as what we assume that skin color
represents: a threat to our sense of self. Skin color, accent,
the kufi (Islamic cap), are simply flags, external symbols of a way of
life not our own: The Other. But it’s not always true. I’m no
different from my neighbor. I’m just a cranky, divorced old guy
living next door to another cranky, divorced old guy. I don’t
hate his dog. I'm no threat to his kid. I don’t bother anybody and I mind my own business.
So, what’s different about me? YOU’RE NO NEIGHBOR! WHY DON’T YOU
JUST MOVE! JUST MOVE!!
I assume, if we were all white, we’d separate ourselves into the
wide noses and the thin noses. The straight hair from the kinky
hair. Wait—you have kinky hair! You’re not really white, you’re
one of the Newly White. We’d fixate on some other cultural
flag—our music, our dress, the color we paint our house—to
divide us. Hate simply is. It is typically birthed out of fear.
Rather than deal with it, we in America have covered it up,
painted and spackled over it, since the heady days of the Civil
Rights Movement. If the Age of Obama has demonstrated nothing
else, it has shocked the world with the sad truth that America’s
tragic legacy of cruelty and hate is not behind her.
"Our" Country: Most people sneering epitaphs about American values don't really understand what they are.
Clouds
I empathize with the president, who seems to handle this kind of
thing much better than I. Of course, we can’t see behind closed
doors where his children likely cry and his wife is undoubtedly
angry and frustrated by the singular and historic denigration of
a sitting U.S. president by ridiculous, unfounded, tinfoil-hat
conspiracy theories denying not only his American citizenship
and heritage, but the legitimacy of the president’s storybook
life achievements, all of which are consistent with this
nation’s best values. We suspect him. We demand, over and again,
that he proves he is not, somehow, a nefarious, dishonest, or
illegitimate person. This is precisely the cloud I must drive
through, my fog lights running, every day I pass through this
block. It feels like these people never have anything positive
to say about me, always think the worst of me, and, rather than
simply ask, they quickly assume the most negative things
about my actions. Because of this essay, they can now label me paranoid, or defend
their bizarre behavior as somehow reasonable,
but this is the cloud hovering over this street.
And, to answer my neighbor lady’s question, the reason I
don’t move is I have no guarantee that, wherever I go, I won’t
find someone just like her waiting for me next door.
Christopher J. Priest
October 21, 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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