I am numb from the news. Another African American man killed by the society that raised him. It is not the police that killed them, it is our society. The police are but one way this occurs every day in America. Another man dead that looks like me. I lied to a patient and myself this week when I said what has been going on has not affected me. I have not been wanting to look at it. I have not been wanting to examine race and how it has affected my life. I did not want to look at the ways in which my life has been lucky. I did not want to face how I have escaped a violent ending. Race has affected everything about my life and has been from around the age of ten when I first began to be bullied about my race(s).
I still remember the name of my Elementary School Principal… Marjean Waford. She was the first of many people in my life to lay down the law against racism. Needless to say Ms Waford was white as were the kids that bullied me. I was first called the N-word in Elementary school. I did not know what it meant, but could tell from the context that it was not good. I came home and asked my mom what the word meant. She was incensed “your not a nigger, your a dougla or a coolie” and thus beginning a lifelong pattern of separating me from the African American experience. My mom seemed more mad that they had called me the wrong derogatory slur. You see I am very racially mixed, 16.4% African by 23 and me genetic analysis but am 50% East Indian and 19% European. By genetics I am more white than black. However, when you look at me, I am very dark skinned from my East Indian mother and can certainly pass as African American… but am mixed enough to pass for just about anything depending on how I do my hair, dress, talk, ect. Brazillians think I am brazilian; Ethiopians, Somalis, and Etrians think I am from East Africa; East Indians can tell I am mixed or just think I am Tamil. I would not even begin to understand the complexities of my mixed race identity until my mid 20’s… For now as a 10 year old in Idaho, I was a nigger. And Ms Waford put an end to the bullies putting me in the trash can at school because I was trash.
Dark skin in Southern Idaho was complicated in the 80s… the Mormons believe that dark skin was the mark upon Cain for killing his brother Abel in Genesis 4:11-16. However, the passage is clear that the mark is so you DON’T kill him or his descendants, and true to form I have never experienced violence from Mormons and generally find them to be wonderful people. But because of this Cain mark and all over in the Book of Mormon people turn back white when they come back to God, I was definitely physically marked as an outsider in the predominantly Mormon community I grew up in. The Mormon church has recently denounced this teaching, but in the hearts of many, the belief lives on. Besides Mormons, Southern Idaho at the time had Neo Nazis, Aryan Nations… They loved drawing swastikas on my desk, notebooks, bus seat and occasionally large lipped caricatures of me.
By High School I was lost. I had a bad head injury that ended my contact sports career, like many boys of color I had long been ushered into playing sports and like many wanted to play as a professional. It was either that or being a rapper and clearly for those that have heard me sing, rap was not gonna do it. I filled the sports void by becoming a drama geek. The drama teacher Kay Jenkins gave me a place to belong and trained us in dialects. The high school drama world was complicated in that non of the parts I have played were of a person of color. I stopped pursuing theater because at the time there were so few roles for males of color. I have always played a white male character and would do so in real life. High school also began the concept of “driving while black” as I was pulled over five times in one month with no tickets. Ironically, many of the boys that bullied me growing up have become police officers…
In college I honed playing the white male, learned the language, mannerisms, entitlement, and culture. I was a rower in college, rowing has got to be the whitest college sport, and there was me the one chocolate chip in a sea of dough. College was also a time of turmoil around race as Initiative 200 passed my freshman year in Washington banning looking at race in college admissions. This put me in the spotlight as questions on campus around race in college admissions were explored. Did I belong at this nice, expensive private school? Or did I get in on the minority quota? The following fall there were very few people of color on campus. Jim Senegal and Jeff Brotman of Costco saw this and its effect on higher education and formed the Costco Scholarship of which I was one of their first scholars and spoke at the first breakfast and many since then. Jim and Jeff changed the course of my life as I was prepared to drop out of school due to the costs.
In medical school there was one dark skinned male per class. Chris Saltpaw was two classes above me. Broderick Wilks in the class above me, then me, then Robert Coleman… It became a joke among us, “one per class otherwise there would be a gang!” We all felt pressure in different ways to not be seen as thugs.
I am often used as an example of things working. I am not. I got lucky and I know it. I grew up in a white society, went to white schools, lived in white neighborhoods and married a white woman. I played the game, followed the rules I was supposed to and get to reap a certain comfort in life. That is my white privilege. My life being immersed in white culture has protected me. I can now see that. I can pass, but at some level we all know I still stick out. I don’t belong here. I look weird hunting, rowing, skiiing, ect. These are the sports of class, one has to have a certain income to partake in these activities. I can now see that my attraction to those things that I am not supposed to do was my way of rebellion. Anything I am not supposed to as a person of color, I have done, from surfing to skydiving. I have even recently purchased a hunting rifle much to everyone’s discomfort after years of defending gun ownership and the second amendment. I have found that nothing makes people more uncomfortable than a male person of color not in a military or police uniform firing a gun. I grew tired of not hunting just because of fear of being around white men with guns in the woods. At the age of 40, I have now put an offer on my first house, the beginnings of a settled middle class life I thought I would never see. Not to mention being 40, I never saw myself living past 33 for some reason, so now at 40 I am not sure what my life will look like. At 40, I no longer fear hunting while black. But others fear for me.
I am dreading having another child. When my first was a girl, I was so relieved. A year after she was born, the Dalai Lama stated that “The world will be saved by the western woman.” The world is changing and the time of the woman is here. She will have a place at the table. Having another would be like playing Russian roulette. How would I explain the world to a little mixed boy? How would I prepare him for what the world would have in store for him? How would I explain all the subtle nuances that have made up my life so that others would feel safe in my presence? How would I teach him to stay safe?
In college I learned about the concept of social contract and its underpinnings in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and it’s Amendments. This is where America is failing. We are failing to uphold our social contract. We only take care of and care for certain members of society. The rest are second class citizens. When those members of society taste the bitter truth of the failure of the American melting pot, then we should not be surprised when they riot at the injustice. Society has always changed through a combination of violence and peaceful protest. For every Martin Luther King there is a Malcom X. For every Ghandi there were many armed uprisings throughout India eventually leading to the ouster of the British from India. The same can be expected here in the American empire if the principles of which we govern and form society are no applied to all members of society. If the wealth, prosperity and hope that America espouses does not reach all of its inhabitants, but a mere few, then the bottom will eventually rise up. America has long failed in examining the racial and class warfare that has made up its history. History as taught here is predominantly whitewashed as it fails to examine the facts that this land was stolen from Native Americans and then labor was stolen from Africans setting up a wealthy class that to this day wields the power. Until we are able to openly talk about this history and its lasting effects we will have our Travons, Georges, Philandos, Breonnas, and Ahmauds. Society will continue to snuff out those who embody the reminder of the inconvenient truths of the reality of what this nation stands for.
My life is a story of white privilege. I am protected by it through the multitude of white people who have befriended me, defended me, funded me, supported me and occasionally protected me. I would not be here without them. If you want to do something to change this reality, do the same. Use your white privilege to change the course of our society. Reach out of your comfort zone. Have the hard conversations. Protest, it is safe for you and not for me. But don’t expect anything to change until you change.