The Stories Told Are Not Mine by Erin Roycroft
“Finding racism in your own heart is embarrassing and hard and painful”
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Now is the time for white people to listen, not talk. To hear the voices of people of color living in America. To let the stories of racial profiling and police brutality into our hearts and break them. Our hearts have to be broken.
Last week, I stood with several hundred protesters outside Moda Center while the Portland Trailblazers game wound down. The day before, my heart was broken when I heard the news that the New York police officer responsible for the death of unarmed 43-year-old African-American Eric Garner would not face trial.
As we waited for the game to end and the crowd to come out of the game, protesters took turns standing on a makeshift podium and speaking their minds into a bullhorn. In their voices, I heard my own rage and frustration. Rage at the injustice of another black man being murdered by a police officer who would never be brought to justice, and frustration at not knowing where to start to fix it.
So many of the stories that were told were not mine, would never be mine.
A young black girl took the bullhorn. She said she had turned eighteen two months ago. She was protesting because she couldn’t sit at home anymore. Her grandmother and grandfather had marched in the Civil Rights era, and now that they had both passed away, she was continuing the work they had started.
Then a brown woman spoke. She has an eight-year-old daughter, and she was protesting because she didn’t want her daughter to grow up thinking that the police killing unarmed black people was normal. She didn’t want her daughter to grow up and ask her, some day in the future, “Mom, why didn’t you do something?”
Another black woman spoke. She was from Seattle, she said, which is pretty white. Portland is even whiter, she said. For this reason, she wanted to thank the white people who had joined in solidarity, because there aren’t enough people of color in Portland to bring about change on their own. She has a thirteen-year-old brother who loves video games and taking machines apart to fix them. She was protesting, she said, because she would be damned if a police officer was going to put her brother in a chokehold or shoot him for holding a bag of Skittles.
These were not my stories.
Then a white guy took the bullhorn. First thing he said was, this isn’t about black lives matter, and it’s not about white lives matter. It’s about all lives matter. This isn’t about black and white, he said. His whitesplaining was booed off the bullhorn.
I’m sure I’ve said many dumb, racist things, but one in particular sticks out. It was Martin Luther King Day, during my college years, and about half a dozen of my roommates and friends were sitting around a table, drinking tea and talking. The topic of Martin Luther King Jr. came up. I honestly can’t remember what exactly I said, or what point I was trying to make. Something ignorant along the lines of, “I don’t understand why Martin Luther King gets a whole day.”
What I do remember crystal clear is that the next thing I said was, “Well, there’s no black people here, so I think I can say that.”
It felt wrong as soon as it came out of my mouth, but I didn’t know exactly why until my friend Fred ripped me a new one for thinking I could say something racist as long as I was in all-white company.
I was raised in a small Pennsylvania town, where adults still think it is acceptable to use the n-word. Really, there is no excuse.
“How do you know there’s not any black people here?” Fred asked.
Fred is tall and lanky with wiry blonde hair and bluish gray eyes. His entire family is black. He just happened to have been born with light skin and blonde hair.
I went to high school with only two black kids, and Crystal and Charles both had dark skin. I had no idea ‘black’ skin varied in shades. I was a privileged, ignorant, twenty-year-old white girl who wanted to think of herself as an enlightened liberal, and I had been exposed. In front of people I wanted to respect me and like me. I was mortified.
It was probably an embarrassing moment for that white guy at the protest, too, being booed by hundreds of people. I felt for him. I’d seen him earlier in the night, when the protest had wound around the streets of downtown Portland. Like the rest of us, he’d been walking and standing in the rain for hours, so I have to assume his heart was in the right place. But he was also brash and ignorant. He stood up in a public forum and told hundreds of people that these protests were not about race. I’m sure he probably felt awful, too.
You know what feels worse? Being shot by a racist cop. Being shot for holding a bag of Skittles. Being shot for holding a toy gun. Being shot for asking a neighbor for help after you wreck your car. Being choked to death. Saying I can’t breathe eleven times while those who are responsible for protecting and serving you stand by and do nothing.
Finding racism in your own heart is embarrassing and hard and painful. I understand why it was tempting for the white guy on the bullhorn to deny the issue. If we, as white people, can convince ourselves this isn’t about black or white, we don’t have to look in our hearts and confront the racism there. That is our privilege. We can, if we choose, decline to acknowledge that racism exists.
That’s a luxury that people of color don’t have.
Last week, I stood with protestors chanting Black lives matter. It was the one chant in which I could not participate. Every time I tried to say the words black lives matter, a knot in my throat made speaking impossible. To need to stand in the streets and chant black lives matter in 2014 is shameful and depressing. And yet, it needs to be said.
Black lives matter.
I sincerely hope that white guy that was booed, or anyone else who thinks racism in America doesn’t exist, will shut up and listen. Listen to the stories of people of color. Read the work of brilliant writers like Roxane Gay, TaNehisi Coates, Cornell West, and Jacqueline Woodson. If we want to be allies, it is our job to uplift the voices of people of color, not shout over them. Now is the time for us to listen and to let our hearts be broken with the painful truth.
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To read a poem in response to Ferguson, "Frisked on Fraiser and Woburn Death Fugue," by Robert Lashley, go here.
To read an essay about race and white privilege, "I'm From the Lou and I'm Proud," by Zinn Adeline, go here.
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Erin Roycroft is a young white middle-class woman who is getting better at owning her privilege. She writes in Portland, Oregon, and she hangs out in Tom Spanbauer’s basement. Erin is currently working on a series of short stories about performing surgery on a chicken.
(Photos of the protest rally were all taken by the author.)