Trayvon Martin got murdered when I was in high school. The Diversity Club at Hopkins hosted a not-as-poorly-attended-as-usual meeting in a bio classroom where they showed a powerpoint about police brutality. After those 26 children at Sandy Hook were massacred, the school hosted a day of conversation.
Police brutality didn’t rise to the forefront of social and political conversation until I was in college, when Michael Brown was killed. My college became an epicenter for racial demonstrations and education. I witnessed my peers bravely face administrators and demand humanity. Countless cultural groups, that had been fighting for a voice for years but never given a mic until then, stepped up and set up demonstration after demonstration until actionable change happened.
I attended protests and teach-ins. I read and read and read. I changed my course-load to reflect my crystallizing passion for racial equity. I felt it personally, viscerally. The rhythms of the movement mirrored the rhythm I was raised it, and some part of me that had been dormant re-awokened.
As did intense anger. At first, the source of was unclear, and so it manifested as defensiveness. I wasn’t one of “those” white people. I grew up listening to patois and “ayo, gringa!”’s. I couldn’t go to all the protests because I couldn’t skip work because I needed to stay in school because I had nothing else. Since I was eighteen, I had no financial support besides myself: my mom had stolen thousands of dollars from me and ghosted my financial aid applications and payments. I had four on-campus jobs to pay my tuition and living costs. My grandma had died, my aunt overdosed, my dad got hospitalized, my brother was suicidal, and so was I. I watched my peers of color find inspiration and life during the demonstrations, and I envied their ability to assert their power in public. I wanted to wear my struggle and demand respect in a megaphone. I wanted to dance and rejoice in my resilience. Most of all, I wanted community. I had a chip on my shoulder: Shit’s hard out here for me, too, and I don’t even have a community or music or movement in which I can find solidarity. I’m struggling, too, but I’m alone.
What I resented most , however, was the fact that some of my peers who were demonstrating also had to work to keep themselves in school. They also bore the weight of their own future and a nation’s history. Their families’ livelihood also balanced on the investment in this education. But they went out anyway because they couldn’t not. Although financially similar, I could afford to choose my progress over the movement’s. What I thought was anger and resentment was actually the familiar shame of my whiteness. The inventory of adversity I was keeping was just to protect me and justify my self-oriented lifestyle.
I abandoned my foundational friends. I chose my whiteness and the privileges it allotted me above my friends that had shaped me, taught me, listened to me, loved me. They were two babies or jail sentences deep, and I hadn’t talk to them since I learned how to code switch to academia and cashed in my whiteness. I was fake. I was a flake. I was white.
I now hold more empathy for my younger self now. I see clearly the dichotomy I created (between advocating for the liberation of others versus my own) is false. Also, having lived through more years and experienced more people, I’ve learned this polarized thinking isn’t unique to me or white people. Years of studying psychology has taught me this: we’re more alike than we are different. Black or white, we grew up in a culture that values and thus rewards individualism and independence. We learn “success” means to “get ours”. This leaves feeling many of us— especially without solid home lives— feeling valueless, lonely, unseen. We need to work to prove our worthiness, but society gobbles up our time without giving us just enough to sustain us to the next day, when we can do it all again.
Thus, there seems to be no time to “work” for someone else. This is the problem, though, of deep unhealthy psychology such as hyper-individualism or depression. The “cures” require exactly that which the diseases prevent. People struggling with depression need to get up, eat, exercise, socialize, do acts of service, shower; depression, though, renders them nearly catatonic, lethargic, without appetite, anti-social, self-oriented. Individualism is a lie that must be countered with community and time and space and honesty; it devours community, time, space, and honesty and promotes isolation, efficiency, and self-aggrandizement.
“I am not free while any woman is unfree,” activist and author Audre Lorde declared. This first half of the sentence is more often quoted than the second: “Even when her shackles are very different from my own.” We must reconfigure the entire system. Regardless of the demographics of the oppressed, oppression will continue as long as a hierarchical system scaffolded on historical inequality persists. Throughout the era of modern nation-states they teach us in school, we’ve been playing, as a globe, King of the Hill. At any moment, we can be the one on top, and you can just as quickly become again the one on the bottom. We can never be confident in our position while the game persists unless we do one of two things: 1. Resign ourselves to the bottom rank, out of which no one will try to knock us, or 2. STOP THE GAME ALTOGETHER.
We have stakes in any conversation for freedom, for equality, for ourselves or our peers. The fight is for humanity, and we all benefit from acting more humanely.