Summer 2016

I keep thinking back to the conversation I had, or rather, didn't have 4 1/2 years ago. Summer 2016 was the summer of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. By summer 2016, I had been back in Maine, staying with my parents for 3 years, after a rebellious but wildly unsuccessful stint in D.C.

I had gotten paid little working as a preschool assistant teacher, and little as an educational technician, while juggling going to my graduate teaching program and barely any friends, certainly none of color, and after a few years, I knew I had hit a personal and professional ceiling. The ceiling wasn't made of glass and there were no cracks in it, like Hilary Clinton would say in her resignation speech. 

At the early childhood center, all the lead teachers were white women who looked after poor kids and kids of color. I was near the top of my class at Deering High School, graduated for Colby College, in a graduate program at the University of New England, and there I was: working under folks much less educated than me, who didn't understand the poor kids or immigrant kids they served, and I had no one to talk to about it. 

I saw the ceiling coming down on me. It was the same at the KIPP school in D.C. under the direction of left leaning yet oblivious white leadership and the elementary school in South Portland, where, I had a cold and a passively adversarial relationship with the white woman principal. We spoke past each other and there was no kindness. During my 3 years in Maine, there was not one conversation or professional development that dealt with race or privilege. 

I suppose it made sense for the time and place but I saw the ceiling while also knowing where the sky was. I applied to graduate school and handily got into each one of the seven. While I was frustrated that Maine schools didn't see my talent, I also knew that they couldn't. I had grown up in Maine schools. I knew the limit of Maine schools. 

2014 was Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Mike Brown. No one at the schools said anything. No one at UNE said anything. There was talk of croissants and the annoying new co-worker and why we weren't stricter on the 5 year olds but no one said anything. The blonde teacher just watched the little Black girl comb her blonde hair and admire how beautiful the white teacher was. No one said anything.

I was in Maine one year at that point. My science project was due. Something about teaching chromosomes to 8th graders and how to keep plants alive in a lab for high school students. At that point I was still watching these tapes of people dying on T.V., I saw Eric Garner and sobbed. Then the next day, I got an A on my science project. Besides the topic, I don't know what I did. 

There was lots of talk of police reform in 2015, accountability and the like. All the while, shootings were still happening. The girl at work complained that Beyonce's work has gotten "too Black". I responded that Beyonce was indeed... wait for it... Black. We were not destined to be friends. Certainly not after the stories of her and her friends urinating in the street after getting drunk and yelling at the cops. The cops thought it was endearing. 

They were white women. Their ceiling was higher.

I met Dr. Sadlier that year who knew I was passionate about social justice but couldn't express it in a class where there were conservatives in the room and no other student of color, certainly no other Black student. We read bits of "A People's History" by Howard Zinn and some of them were interested but most weren't that interested. 

It was a course to get a grade to pass and get a teaching degree to go into a school where folks would say nothing about Mike Brown or Mike's Brown body unattended to for 4.5 hours.

I told her I was disappointed. Ashamed even at our lack of introspection and empathy as human beings. I told her that while I love my parents, I was getting out of here. Not only to further my education, but for my joy, and for my future. Everyone there was fine to me. And even the principal at the elementary wasn't terrible but nice means little. 

I told her I needed more of a challenge, that I would apply to grad school at B.U., at Tufts, at Brown, at George Washington. She asked "why not Harvard?". I was making $16.79 an hour as a paraprofessional at that time... there was no way I was thinking about Harvard. But she just smiled and said you ought to, and of course I did. In December I got my teaching credential and I thought immediately of how to transfer it to another state.

Then 2016 hit. In March, I got the acceptance letter and I knew I was never coming back to Maine. I had reconnected with a friend I had known since we were both in fourth grade when I came back in Maine in 2013. It was friendly enough and she had been there for me when, at that time the dude I thought was the "love of my life" had broken up with me. We went to a bar, dressed slutty and drank.

But there were no interesting rebounds, no men of color in Maine and the ones that were there, well... they were ok being surrounded by the whiteness, the never beneath the surface niceness, the polite politics, and the white women. 

My friend had a ball and I was fine but I knew, I was not finding anyone there but I couldn't tell her that. As a white woman, she had dated every race of man. There was a disconnection there. 

We would go out to eat and talk about water and depression and our relationships with our parents, or sometimes the lack thereof. Sometimes we would touch on race, but not too deep. It hurt her that I was closer to my Black friends from Colby and D.C.

How was she different?

She couldn't help her skin color! How could she be less than? I had gone to Colby and now I'm getting even more educated. If anything, in her eyes, I was better than she was so she wondered why we couldn't be as close.

She reminded me of those days at school.

I paid her back for being there for me through my break-up and was there for her through hers, even though I thought she had an easier time attracting every kind of Maine man. 

And in Summer 2016, on my way out the door. I snapped. Philando Castile was murdered. I saw my father being spoken down to by a white man. I had already graduated with honors so I didn't need to compartmentalize. There was no science project to get an A for. 

I was working in the U.N.E. gym the summer of 2016, watching people work out as if nothing had happened, as if this father hadn't been gunned down in front of his toddler daughter in his own car. 

She asked me to meet her new boo and I said no.

She said I wasn't there for her. How dare I not care about this new potential partner?

I told her to open her eyes. I told her she was privileged and naive. And spoiled. There was a lot happening, and she as a white woman, wasn't affected by any of it. I said this is the reason we're not close. I said the world doesn't revolve around her and her partner. I didn't say it quite so nicely. More along the lines of "are you fucking kidding me right now?"

Then I left for Boston.

We didn't have a conversation.

Two weeks after Trump's election she would write me a lengthy note saying she was proud of me but that I looked down on her. She was never enough for me. That I was always looking for people more worldly than she was and it made her feel small and sad.

I didn't respond. There was nothing to say.

We saw one another again at a friend's wedding 3 years later and there was nothing to say then either.

The conversation was not had and I would argue the conversation didn't need to be.

---

I read "How to Be An Antiracist" and I just thought: my goodness, the explaining, the pouring out of the heart, just to reclaim one's humanity and lived experience. The A to Z of explanations and definitions. The pointing out of each example before one, or a race of people, is seen. My goodness. 

I hope that book helps the millions of people who read it so that some of the untold gets understood but I fear that it may not. 

When we're young, we're taught that nice is what matters. She was, and I'm sure still is, nice. And maybe that's ok since the world lacks a lot of nice right now.

But community also matters and I think that's one thing white folks don't understand. White folks feel as though they can infiltrate any space. Because they are nice, they should be able to be best friends with anyone, talk about anything, be privy to conversations about any trauma or any joy. White folks think that it is unfair to be excluded from certain traditions or friend groups based on their skin tone.

The question I'm confronted with often is the same question that she throws at me: why not? 

And the answer is roots, is ease, is kinship. It's the reclaiming of inside jokes and of space. It's the joy of saying inappropriate things without then explaining that yes, it is a joke that holds no power. 

It is the history and fashion that is not "studied" but inherited. It's the care that's not learned but intrinsic. It's the recognition of structures and the systems and knowing all the steps one has to take to break through that ceiling but always having it lurking. It's having the blood of resilience, pragmatism, and strategy running through you in a way that it only can because the laws were written to silently benefit white people.

And it's the knowing that work is work but the armor must fall off after and if there is an armor outside of work when you are with someone, then it's not a deep connection.

--

What I explain to folks sometimes is that it's ok. For those who want to love everyone and for those who want to be connected to their own and everyone in between, it's ok. But to say that one is better than the other and that folks of color must consistently spread our wings, especially if the people who want to be in our lives are nice white people, I disagree with that.

 I snapped at this year girl who was emblematic of the 3 years I had in a place that did not understand me and did not allow me to be my full self. I am happy. I am vibrant. I am sarcastic. I am witty. I am snappy. I love really hard. I am also pragmatic and business savvy. But what I am not is small.

 And there I was: little. Surface conversations. Surface work. Undignified pay.  Fighting for positions I shouldn't have to fight for and this woman wondered why I could not be the friend to her that she wanted me to me. 

It was because I didn't want to be that. I wanted to be my own friend.

Boston has taught me that more each year but sometimes I think about why we don't teach children that they too, have a choice, that if sitting together in a cafeteria talking shit with your own kind makes you live longer as long as it doesn't oppress anyone else, is a good thing.

---

"Two can play that game, but you win me every time
Everyone before you was a waste of time" - Dua Lipa "Break My Heart"