Sometimes

Recently I was a part of a panel of teachers and theater administrators at an improv camp. One of the questions was about how we can make our improv shows and teams more diverse. Many of the responses were about how to get people interested and involved, how to reach out to communities that are underrepresented and try to recruit people for classes or even just to get them to shows. These weren’t…

I’m perversely fascinated by the resistance to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. There’s something about it that just seems to get under the skin of so many white people. 

As I’ve begun to tweet more about it, I find myself in some long strange twitter convos/arguments with people whose response to anything #BlackLivesMatter is a fervent and immediate desire to talk about black crime. Why? 

The stream of videos we’re getting from dash cams and body cams display abuses among police that only get more and more indefensible. When I view these, I feel as if I’m witnessing a murder. Because I am. I want to mourn that a human being has been killed. And I have a nauseating outrage at how quickly and casually the life on screen - hands up, back turned, just sitting there in the car - is taken by the officers sworn to protect the public. 

It’s just so strange that it appears half the nation doesn’t see it that way. That there are so many out there who are unable to watch that killing and mourn it. Instead they want to talk about stats of black-on-black crime or the ways in which white people are victimized. I’m not even arguing their stats; I’m just wondering: what makes the activity of black criminals the first thing one wants to talk about in response to news of police shooting unarmed black motorists?    

Imagine telling me your teenage son was raped by his football coach. Now, imagine if I responded to that sad fact by giving you stats on how often teenage boys sexual assault their classmates. If I suggested that - while the victimization of your son by the people charged with his protection was sad - the REAL CONVO we should be having is about how boys like your son need to stop sexually assaulting each other.  

That would seem insane! And so I find myself looking at these people enraged by #BlacklivesMatter and wondering how our views on the world differ so greatly. What makes them unable to hear the serious grievances of their black neighbors? Here are two theories:    

1.) POVERTY OF EMPATHY  Perhaps these people are so used to thinking about blacks as victimizers - scamming welfare, gang banging, stealing electronics and white women - that it’s mentally impossible to make the leap to understand blacks as a population also capable of being victims (let alone individuals separate from the transgressions of the worst members of their group). 

To a person who thinks this way, the news of an unarmed black man being shot must register like news of poachers taking out an endangered shark. Fuck the circumstances, it was a shark! Every piece of film, TV, and news I’ve ever consumed tells me that sharks are killers. So how am I ever supposed to feel sad for a beast like that? Maybe that’s what the subconscious is saying, but since “I don’t feel sympathy for this black man because I view all black men as threats” is not acceptable to say aloud, it comes out as either lazily-researched memes or as a simple hashtag: #AllLivesMatter 

2.) SHAME There’s something shame-inducing about privilege. Especially for white people. There’s no talk that white parents have with their children to explain how to sort through the confusion and guilt that comes with realizing the world will treat them in a way that is drastically different than the treatment others receive. White people are thrown into a highly-racialized world with no tools or language for understanding how that world uses race to organize advantages and disadvantages. In fact they are trained to develop a sort of willful blindness that makes the mere acknowledgement of racial difference feel like a personal insult or an accusation. “Hey, he’s had cards up his sleeve the whole time!” I imagine it must feel like learning your favorite childhood toys were actually things your parents stole from the neighbor boy. As a person of color, I don’t know what it’s like to feel that guilt - like you were drafted into the oppressor team with no say in the matter. I imagine the whole thing leaves you feeling helpless.  And why would you sort through those scary complex feelings when instead you could do what’s much easier: 

A.) Deny the whole thing. Hold fast to the belief that the world is equal. That you experience no unfair privileges. That everything you own has been won fair and square. And, in fact, that you are the victim! The victim of injustices that no one will acknowledge because white skin is perhaps a disadvantage after all!   

B.) Blame it on the disadvantaged. It’s not that you have unfair advantages. It’s simply that those people chattering on about their disadvantages actually created those disadvantages for themselves. This is so refreshing because it means that the way forward is a simple as the disadvantaged just stopping their whining. .  

Perhaps that’s what is making this #Blacklivesmatter conversation so hard for some to swallow. 

The conversation doesn’t simply implicate police, it implicates and taints the ideas that half of the country use to anchor their identity. If the police are racist, then racism exists. And if racism exists, then privilege exists. And if privilege exists, then those who inherit that privilege have to fight through the shame that it makes them feel. 

And no one wants to fight through shame. It’s easier to pretend that we’ve been playing with a fair deck the whole time. That those losers in the game just aren’t skilled or disciplined enough to keep up. That the pleas of parents whose son was just pulled over for running a stop sign and shot dead with his hands in the air are somehow just more whining from a population of thugs and killers.