“Michael Brown? Pfft! That dude was a clown!”
Me, circa 2015
I recently had a social media interaction discussing the recent protests with someone that I knew to be much more likely to disagree with me than to agree with me. Despite this, I had reason to be optimistic that it would be an earnest conversation, even if we walked away not having changed the other’s point of view.
Sadly, that’s not how things went (to put it mildly).
Their response when I even indirectly referred to Black Lives Matter was most certainly negative and rather, uh, “impassioned”–and much more so than I had ever anticipated.
The whole ordeal left me a little bummed out and with a lot to process.
One thing I found myself pondering was, “why so angry, my friend?” Well, I’m guessing ‘angry’ is the right term…I think it would be hard to interpret it any other way if you saw their comment directed at me.
But once I got the chance to really think about it, I realized that not too long ago I think I felt pretty much the same way.
Yeah, that’s right, Buster: I too, was once just like you (maybe)…
This is where Michael Brown comes into the picture. Yes, that Michael Brown.
If y’all don’t recall, he was the young man who was shot by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014. There was a pretty strong community response to this event, and the ensuing protests were often intertwined with the Black Lives Matter movement.
And damn, if all that didn’t ever make me feel uncomfortable. In fact, a part of it still does, to a certain degree.
I could only imagine how shitty it must have been to be Darren, trying to do his dangerous job in an at-times hostile environment, and then to be at the center of a tragic event like this. I could almost feel his pain of automatically and unfairly being judged as a “racist cop,” with an angry mob calling for his head without having all the facts.
In a way, it almost felt like it was a personal attack on me, and that it wouldn’t be long before I would find myself unjustly painted as a racist–potentially ruining my life. I think being so grossly misunderstood is one of the greater fears that I have.
I can’t help but wonder how many other white fellas had a similar emotional response to this as I did. Certainly I couldn’t have been alone, right?
Thinking back on this reminds me that we all deserve the right to have our own fears, emotions, and values. And whether or not its a surprise to you, my baseline response to BLM wasn’t exactly ‘sympathetic’.
And then along came Sara.
A friend of the Boss Lady, she was visiting from out of town around the time Ferguson was still regularly in the news and on the minds of the American people.
God knows how it came up, but much to my chagrin I found myself a captive member of a very uncomfortable conversation.
The worst part was that, as a white woman, she was speaking of the protests almost…positively.
I’m not gonna lie, even if it wasn’t her intention, I kinda felt like I was under attack. I felt like my perspective was being told it wasn’t valid.
It felt grossly unfair.
And it’s hard to hear anything when you feel like you’re being bulldozed over.
Keep in mind, though, that she was as gracious and kind as you could ever be in the moment. She never told me I was wrong. She never spoke down to me. She never for once assumed that I was an asshole.
I felt under assault, yet she gave me the space to feel however I felt, without judgment.
I eventually spoke up in defense of white guys like me, though I can’t remember what I said.
She nodded and acknowledged my contribution to the conversation. It wasn’t a completely unreasonable view, after all.
I’ll never forget, though, what came next.
Trying to hold back tears, she simply said “I can’t even imagine being in their shoes, to live every day with a basic fear for their lives that I’ve never had to experience myself.”
Something about the rawness of the moment, the selflessness, was just enough to knock me off my guard. It was just enough for me to catch a glimpse of the world outside my own perspective.
Indeed, I could only imagine what it was like to be the cop. That’s the person I could most easily see myself being in that situation.
It wasn’t overnight, but in time I came to understand that Mr. Michael Brown wasn’t “just another clown.”
I had never even began to think about it through the other lenses in the moment: Michael’s, his mother’s, his community’s, those who might say “that could have been me.”
Eventually, though, I was able to at least begin to entertain those very uncomfortable thoughts. Once I allowed for that, I gotta say that I felt like my worries and fears paled in comparison to the existential threats others were facing.
And guess what? Even in acknowledging these realities so far outside my own, I found my own was still just as real (and vice versa).
I realized I was going to be okay. I wasn’t going to have to lose any part of myself in order to love others better.
In retrospect, it seems so basic: consider others’ feelings and experiences. Such an easy way to make the world a better place, right? How hard can that possibly be?
Well, for what it’s worth, I still royally suck at it. But I like to hold out hope that, on occasion, I might be getting it right.
And maybe one day, I will have the privilege of being someone else’s Sara.
Content created on: 24 July & 2 August 2020 (Friday/Sunday)
Leave a Reply