A friend and community
organizer, John Rasberry, invited me to come down to his barbershop on Myrtle Avenue in January of 2011 to join in on a community meeting. This
meeting included residents from the micro-local neighborhood, as
well as adults and minors who have lived in the villages of Bushwick,
Bedford Stuyvesant, and Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York. The discussion during the meeting was
centered on the heightened police presence in the immediate area surrounding
their homes, and what this presence would mean for them, their families, and their safety.
Mr. Rasberry started out by
having us go around in the shop, stating our names, where we were from, and why
we were here. When it was my turn, I explained, “My name is [redacted], I’m
originally from Providence, and I moved to Brooklyn to study photography at Pratt over on Willoughby. I am committed to social justice, and
that’s what brings me here.” I looked up to see faces of surprise; I was
looking for acceptance. It was more than just an acceptance to pacify, to make
me feel less intimidated and uncomfortable. I was looking for an acceptance, a
trust, that would allow me to be a constructive member in such a gathering.
This night would have a more
profound effect on me than I had originally anticipated. It was a humbling
experience to be in this space, to sit in solidarity. No matter how
many times I put myself in situations where I see a dire and immediate need for
social action, the same feelings reoccur. This one was particularly intense.
For the most part, I listened.
After all, this meeting was about them, their homes, and their human rights
being violated. It was about these white police with no sensitivity nor
connection to the area’s deep seeded and systemic social and economic issues. I
was captivated by their forwardness and honesty when recounting their
experiences.
The only woman other than
myself in the room had a compelling story to tell. She was beautiful, and you
could see it immediately, even through the thickness of her skin. She spoke of
how she had some degrading experiences at the 79th precinct while
she was in an abusive relationship. The precinct’s refusal to help her forced
her into staying in a dangerous situation with her children. It was not the
police, but other members of the community in Tompkins housing, that pulled her
out of her situation and helped bring her life out of darkness.
As I heard more and more
stories I became increasingly more depressed about the state of their lives. I
had barely walked a mile down the road to find a group of seriously oppressed
individuals. All I could do was internalize this information. It weighed
heavier on my mind as we sat and talked. My life as a young white woman is no
comparison. I do not have these daily struggles. I tried to imagine these
experiences happening to me, the constant harassment, the violation of my
personal space, the helplessness that comes with asking for help and receiving
none, but they just plain don’t. At one point the room silenced for me to speak and all I
could do was look down at my hands. I said “I truly wish I could relate to you
all better, but all I can say right now is that these hands of mine are white,
and it disturbs me that a certain pigment of skin has eliminated all of these
worries throughout my life. Because it’s so ludicrous an idea. ”
After the meeting adjourned,
John came up to me and told me that he had a lot of respect for my openness and
honesty towards my skin color. It was refreshing to have a conversation
about race in what they are calling a ‘post-racial’ world. I’m sick of hearing
that there is no need to talk about it. We need to talk about it. It is not an underlying problem, or a single
issue, but rather an intersectional reality in peoples everyday lives. This experience
taught me it was possible to feel acceptance as the other. It was to eliminate
the feeling of otherness, to see the commonalities, and to let the differences
fade away, if even for a brief moment.
Donnell Alexander’s essay “Cool Like Me” explains something that has been fluid throughout the history of
African American culture. They have been able to create and maintain despite
their oppressions as a people. “Cool is all about trying to make a dollar out
of 15 cents…they devised a coping strategy called cool, an elusive mellowing
strategy designed to master time and space. Cool, the basic reason blacks
remain in the American cultural mix, is an industry of style that everyone in
the world can use. It’s finding the essential soul while be essentially lost.” (Alexander)
Alexander’s essay is
essentially a comment on the revolutionary nature of black people. When
economic and racial systems pushed them one way, they pushed back in a genius manner. Now their ideas have dominated mainstream culture whether it is through
hip-hop music or “Air Jordans, Tupac, and low-riding pants.” All of these
styles and movements are reactions to how society has declared their human
lives somehow inferior. (Alexander)
Cornel West is a leading
scholar in racial justice. His book Race
Matters speaks of intense black nihilism in which “the accumulated effect
of the black wounds and scars suffered in a white dominated society is a
deep-seated anger, a boiling sense of rage, and a passionate pessimism
regarding America’s will to justice.” This could have easily and understandably
caused the majority of those sitting in the barbershop to react to my presence
with a number of different, but nonetheless negative, emotions. After all, we
were discussing brutality and ignorance among the mostly white people of the 79th
precinct police. (West)
But otherness disappeared this
night at the barbershop. It was powerful to witness it. The beauty in this
situation is that I was supposed to be the perceived ‘other’ because I was with
people who were in very different situations in comparison to my own. In the context of patriarchal,
capitalist, white supremacist society, though, these black and brown people are
constantly perceived as the ‘other’. The roles were reversed, but there was
this intangible cohesion between us. We never left race out of the discussion. We
didn’t tip toe around it. We didn’t pretend like the differences did not exist.
We were, however, honest about our differences, and with this came an
overwhelming amount of respect. I walked out of the barbershop feeling renewed.
It’s that intangible feeling that I must hold onto, hold onto it with everything, I thought. Call it trite, but I still
think it’s worth saying. I have hope, and hope is powerful to possess.
Works
Cited
Alexander, Donnell. Cool Like Me.
West,
Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon, 1993.
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