Sorry, Dude: I'm Afraid This Is the World We Live in Now

It's Adult Night at the rink on Sunday, and as usual I'm one of a handful of White people on a crowded skate floor, trying to keep up with the mostly Black – and entirely fabulous! – jam skaters. I spot several Latino guys I've seen here before, and there’s an Asian woman on rollerblades with outsized light-up wheels, and tonight we’ve been joined by a group of (I think) Samoan kids who can't skate for shit but are clearly having a blast (and whose self-deprecating camaraderie is infectious). I'm feeling a little tentative, having missed the last month or two. But then one of the regulars gives me a smile and a nod of recognition, and I start to relax. The funky dance moves are beyond me, but I'm fast enough to keep up and agile enough to stay out of the way. I'm welcome in this space, and that feels great.

As I'm sailing past the snack bar, I notice a White guy about my age sitting at one of the tables near the entrance. He looks vaguely familiar -- maybe an old soccer dad acquaintance? -- but no, the second time around I can tell he's a stranger. He looks uncomfortable, out of place, hunched up in a big blue coat, not talking to anyone. What's he doing here? The next time I pass by, he's up off the bench, pacing back and forth by the lockers. I have this panicky moment where I imagine he's some kind of White supremacist terrorist who has targeted this unassuming concrete box in Federal Way, where people of many colors have come to revel in a particularly joyous African American subculture, and that he's about to whip an assault-style weapon out from under his big baggy jacket and start mowing us all down. It's not a serious fear, exactly -- I spend about ten seconds in hyper-aware emergency mode, looking around for the exits and noticing the young couples whose whole lives are ahead of them and so on -- while feeling the irony that here I am literally surrounded by young Black men in hoodies, and it's the White middle-aged soccer dad who's giving me the heebie-jeebies. Then I get distracted by a windmill-armed Samoan guy who nearly takes out the gyrating lady in front of me, and the next time I look Blue Coat is back at his table, and now someone's talking to him. He nods and smiles. I relax again. I'm beginning to get just a tiny bit of a groove on, if I do say so.

Somebody grabs my hip to steady himself as he slips between me and the outside wall. (Note: this is a standard skating maneuver without intimate implications.) He’s tall and gangly, dark-skinned, moving fast on a pair of low-top dance skates. I think about the scary stereotypes that must get projected onto him as he moves through the world, and how it must feel to fly free of them on eight whirring wheels for a couple of hours every Sunday. I think about "The Talk" his parents must have had with him about how to bear the weight of all that projected fear without letting it define him. About how to behave around people in authority, especially people in authority who carry deadly weapons. About how White kids don't have to think about this stuff when they're out having a dumbass adolescent Saturday night, but how he, a young Black man in America, cannot afford to forget -- ever.

As a middle-aged White woman, I know people project all kinds of things onto me – everything from "Aha! You're the one who will step up and call 911 when there's a Black woman wailing in pain under the I-5 overpass because all of us elderly Chinese men are pretty intimidated by her," to "You people can never mind your own f*cking business -- she's just got a stomach ache!" From "I have to explain these budget numbers to you in words of one syllable" and "You'll want help carrying these groceries to your car" to "Of course you’re not shoplifting -- the alarm must be on the fritz again" and “If I sit next to you on this near-empty late-night bus, Mr. Douchebag here will quit hitting on me.” Also: "You must belong on the 'Visitors' side of the gym," "You won’t have anything interesting to offer at this young hipster activist meeting," “Surely you share my racist opinions about that neighborhood you live in," and "I’ve lost my mom at the Fremont Fair and I'm barely holding it together, but you're gonna help me." These assumptions have been utterly wrong, painfully true, terribly sweet, maddening, mortifying, gratifying, alienating, and everything in between -- but not one of them has ever cast me as a physical threat.

I think about that crowd of White Covington Catholic school boys on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, who apparently had never been taught to consider how people might perceive them across a racial or cultural divide, or to recognize the context that might turn their MAGA hats into threats and their school chants into mockery (whether they meant them that way or not). I imagine that the Talks they've been getting from the adults in their lives probably won't do much to help them develop that understanding or those skills. It seems more likely that they're headed down the Brett Kavanaugh road -- that they'll grow up to be the kind of White men who wield tremendous power while seeing themselves as innocent victims, under attack.

I think about the middle school White boys who came to see our exhibit about race back in 2013. Most of the students who came through were focused and somber, but this particular demographic sometimes wandered around the gallery laughing at all the most disturbing pieces -- artwork about slavery, domestic violence, the internment. This behavior was of course incredibly hurtful to their classmates, whose families had lived a lot of that painful history. We were pretty shocked and hurt too, at first. But then we began to see that they were laughing because they were nervous and defensive, not because they were monsters. Like the Covington students, these boys felt exposed and unprepared: they had a sense that something important was being asked of them, but they didn't quite know what it was, and they were afraid of what might happen if they opened themselves up to it. Our solution was to name that discomfort up front, in a compassionate way, and to create space for it as one of a broad range of responses. Our tour guides began to greet incoming classes by telling them, "This show is pretty intense, and it brings up a lot of different feelings for people. Sometimes people cry, some people get really mad, and some people laugh, because this stuff makes them uncomfortable and they don't know how to talk about it." This little setup served a double role: it gave the White boys permission to acknowledge their discomfort, and it transformed the meaning of their laughter. Now instead of  "I find your pain hilarious," their classmates heard something more like: "I feel vulnerable."

I think about my own White boy, who will almost certainly be assumed to be a monster of one kind or another once in a while, the world being what it is. He may play into that perception without meaning to, without even knowing it's happening. This isn't fair, of course -- but he's had enough Talks about the world's inequities to know that it's not the most unfair thing that's ever happened to anyone -- not by a long shot. And he’s learned enough about his own privilege to recognize that on balance, the assumptions most people will make about him will be to his advantage. So when he finds himself tarred with the Covington brush or fitting the Columbine profile, I hope he can set aside his defensiveness and sit with his discomfort. I hope he has the courage to acknowledge the other person's reality, consider whether and how he might be contributing to it, and respond (or walk away) with some empathy and grace.

At the end of the night, I sit down near the guy in the blue coat to change out of my skates. I feel like I owe him an apology of some kind, but of course I'd have to start by explaining that for a second there I thought he might be a mass murderer -- which seems like an unpromising conversational gambit. I settle for a smile and a nod.