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Living While Black
I am a Jewish White Guy. All I can say is that this column is long overdue. I am writing to white guys about what it is to be a black guy in the United States. This is not Dr. Lane becoming “woke” – it is just one guy stating the obvious to an audience he hopes will see themselves and their world differently. I don’t actually pretend to know all of what I am writing about. I have a graduate degree in Anthropology so I may have a small insight but I cannot pretend to be an expert, but I am going to speculate.
I have lived a charmed life not in the simple fact of having reached my goal in life of being a doctor and having my own office but because I did not have to deal with stupid things that other people do just because they see me, the way that most Black men have had to deal with their whole lives. Being Jewish was a small issue to deal with daily as people asked questions (“did your people kill our Lord, Jesus”, “Do Jews really make your matza from the blood of dead Christian children?”, “Why do Jews have so much money” and other crap. The answer to all of these inane questions is “NO! We are just people who are living our lives. If we are financially successful it is because we tried hard, went to college, and succeeded. You can do that also). No one walked away from me when they saw my (WHITE) face.
Nobody makes presumptive declarations about me the moment I walk into a room. Nobody has decided that I will steal from them or that I play basketball or that I like jazz music or rap or anything. Just another (boring) white guy. Most Black men would love to wake up and fade into the crowd and be seen but ignored for the right reasons. They can’t do that, they are Black and everybody knows it.
Do you want to know why Black guys hang with each other, a kind of self-segregation? They do it because they just want to be themselves and have no hidden meanings put upon their actions. They don’t want to be ‘the Black guy” or “the only Black guy” in a room or a situation.
Women, in general, know better what Black men go through only in that they can go from invisible to very noticed just by putting on make-up or wearing clothes that accentuate their bodies. Suddenly, the world sees you and you can use this noticing to your advantage, usually.
For Black guys, it is 24/7 being looked at and judged (misjudged?), Living While Black (LWB). The day-to-day world of “Driving While Black” (DWB) in a world of white people.
This is not a screed about Black Lives Matter (BLM) because I am really asking White guys to understand that a great deal of what you have accomplished by going to college, getting a job, moving up, getting the right experience, and even just shopping in a store or walking down the street while minding your own business is due to being White and not because of your unique physique or hard work. Sorry, but you are not a genius so much as you are a guy who doesn’t scare other people by just being in the room. You exist in a selective worldview that doesn’t let you understand that your accomplishments, though they may be great, are not diminished due to your skin color or how people judge you negatively.
You can’t “turn off the black” and not have people respond to you as a Black guy. Women will cross the street if they see you, if you are with your Black friends you are assumed to be a gang of some kind (despite, possibly, being nerdy or dull or, in some way, very inoffensive), and on a job you are assumed to be there for the wrong reasons (despite the necessity of the right background or degree/license) – to be there due to a quota of some kind.
Years ago I was involved with a woman who hid her racist view of the world from me very well for years until it was too late for me to get out of the relationship cleanly and I had to divorce her. She truly believed that there was a coming revolution of some kind where Black people would just take over the offfices and jobs of white people and pretend to do those jobs for the same paychecks (yes, very strange), despite no formal education. Yes, this was weird and not able to be understood in any rational way. It is not the reason that I left her (because I thought, at that time, that reasonable dialogue would bring her to her senses) but it came in a close second after she attacked me with a knife in our kitchen (the left arm defense wounds are healed). She had been trained to think this way by her Israeli father who did not know better than to think this way. He was furious that I did not share his ideas and, because she owned the apartment, I had to move out. There was no reason that these views and opinions would have come up in normal conversation and, had I known, I would have never gotten so deep in a relationship with her. Besides, who would readily admit to such trash opinions?
So where does that leave us? It is hard to say that people will not have questions about each other. It is impossible to assume that things will get better for any of us in the future when it comes to race and racial identity. We just have to respect each other and let other people live their own lives without judgement.
Let’s just try one thing: give every person a fair chance to prove themselves in every situation. They may turn out to be just as charming and talented as you; as dweeby and nerdy as you, as insightful and intelligent as you. Try it (maybe) you’ll like it.
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