The alleys of Philadelphia are nasty, and when I say nasty I don’t mean a few pieces of greasy hamburger wrapper. Hypodermic needles between wire fences, a lot of used condoms, a curious amount of mussel shells, and also hamburger wrappers, all collected by me and a bunch of other idealistic young people in trendy white Hazmat suits. It was last summer; on a leadership retreat for my alternative break program at school, our goal was to learn about best practices for running a sustainable volunteer program by doing a week of volunteer work ourselves. So we piled into rented Priuses and drove to Kensington and worked on this community project, which had been funded by the mayor’s department but, as far as we could tell, was staffed entirely by young, enthusiastic, and white volunteers. On three separate sites, a cop would wander over and hang out with us. They were chatty with us. We were chatty with them. But none of the residents of the all-minority neighborhoods would talk to us, and I couldn’t figure out why until one day, as we were leaving, one lady called to the police officer from her front step, scornfully, “So I call you last week about my house being broken into, and it takes you this long to show up?” I got it then, and was a little ashamed it had taken me so long. The cops weren’t protecting the neighborhood. They were protecting us from it.
Protection would have been nice for Michael Brown. Hell, a sense of human decency would have done some good, however slight. An unarmed eighteen year old kid was shot six times and left in the streets for hours. According to his friend at the scene, he had his hands up in surrender as the officer fired.
John Oliver recently did a pretty good piece on Ferguson – focused on the ridiculous militarization of the police, the blithely racist remarks by the (white) mayor, the tone-deaf remarks made by the (white) police chief – but it rang a little hollow. These things are all true, and it’s good that he brings them out, but what is missing, however faint, is a sense that this failed system is partly our fault. John Oliver is, of course, British, so maybe I shouldn’t fault him for that. But he’s speaking to an American audience, an audience that elects leaders who vote on laws and policy, and that’s where the needle of truth should prick at us. The truth is that Ferguson is not an island that we can watch through binoculars. Ferguson is like a thousand other small towns in the US, Ferguson is like a part of DC that’s twenty minutes away from me. Ferguson is a piece of American tissue, and it should feel like all of us are under the scalpel.
White privilege is the negatives of the pictures of #IfTheyGunnedMeDown – being given the benefit of the doubt. It is Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children in an elementary school, or Dzhokar Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon, who are both subjected to long media explanations about how their unhinged minds explain their actions, while people of color represent 70% of exonerations by the Innocence Project. White privilege is what makes this Onion article, about a white girl being sentenced to be tried as an adult black male, painfully accurate. White privilege is what keeps me from being afraid of the police, white privilege is what assures me that my body would never be left in the street, or that my death would never be excused by whatever I shoplifted or whatever drugs were in my system or any other irrelevant facts about my messy, human life.
This is unignorably systemic, and this is not news. Black men are more than six times as likely to be incarcerated as white males, that 1 in 3 black men will go to prison during their lifetime, and the leading cause of death for black males under 25 is homicide. Education in low-income areas is historically very sketchy, due to a hundred different reasons but largely boiling down to lack of economic investment. The cycle of poverty is vicious and largely unbreakable.
Yet I see people unmoved by this, uninterested by this. How? Amnesty International is deploying in the USA for the very first time ever. Reporters have been arrested in McDonald’s, have been corralled far away, are donning bulletproof vests on air at 3:15 pm. Ferguson is turning into a war zone, an authoritarian zone, and it’s because people on both sides are angry and afraid, and justifiably so.
White privilege is pretending that this doesn’t concern us. But this is our country, our governments, our legacy. We must admit that we bear shame – and we do, oh we do, and this is a hard and maybe unfair and nasty truth to accept. But accepting it can’t paralyze us. We have to act.
I am a feminist and feminism and racism fight a very similar battle. #NotAllMen is maybe the same empty battle cry as #NotAllWhites – there is a group that is privileged, their daily lives are different than mine simply because of who they were born as. But I ask men to look at themselves and recognize their security in walking down dark streets at night, and to recognize their place in sexual and economic double standards. So now it is time for me to look at myself and recognize that no shop assistant will follow me around a store, that it might not be safe for me to walk alone at night but if a police officer pulls alongside me it will be comforting and not, as in the case of Michael Brown, life-threatening. Just as I expect men to at least try to stand up as allies for women (even if they mess up), I should apply the same standards to myself. It’s time to find some way to extend a hand to that woman on the Philadelphia step – and to understand that I might be rejected, that these wounds are deep, but that my job is to keep offering.
I struggled for a long time to find words to say this, but didn’t know how or if I should. It was only after I saw someone post on Facebook that they didn’t see all the white kids dumping ice buckets on their heads for Michael Brown that I decided I had to. These words are imperfect – and this is a narrative that belongs, first and foremost, to those whose rage and grief should be heard and responded to. But I can’t stay silent. This isn’t a burden for black America to shoulder alone, and to fight for equality means to fight for all equality – of the races, of the genders, of religions and of the increasingly blurred area in the inbetween wherein reside the people who don’t fit neatly into any one category. Everyone’s blood flows the same, and our goal should be to stop proving that.
A 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was arrested in St. Louis at a protest,and I was reminded of that famous Martin Neimoller quote that may be clichéd but still holds true – “When they came for the Jews, I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.” I am not black, but I am speaking up in this very small way, because this should be a howling storm of voices, of every color, demanding justice for Michael Brown, and for every other person who is damned by being born.
Suggestions for things to do, by people who know better than me:
http://www.stlamerican.com/news/editorials/article_aead72b4-2350-11e4-83a0-001a4bcf887a.html
http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/08/14/ten-things-white-people-can-do-about-ferguson-besides-tweet
http://qz.com/250701/12-things-white-people-can-do-now-because-ferguson/
Emily Wolfteich 