Rush to Judgement

When he approached me he stuck all the right chords. He had a hesitance to his step that I interpreted as an awareness of his black maleness. He walked up to me, but not too close. He stayed on the opposite side of my car from where I stood and spoke softly. My heart ached because I recognized the cautious posture of a black man approaching a stranger, it screamed, “don’t be alarmed, I’m not a threat.”

And so I stopped what I was doing and smiled slightly and nodded just a bit in his direction. And he began.

“My daughter was killed last week. We are stuck here and need $12 to get…”

I don’t remember where he was trying to go. Maybe he never said. Maybe I was already sold. Working in violence prevention work where weekly staff attend funerals or visit patients at their hospital bedsides. 

“If you tell me which one of these mailboxes is yours I’ll return the money there.”

I rustled through my purse and came up with a twenty dollar bill.

“Which one is yours?” he asked, pointing to the row of mailboxes.

“Don’t worry about it,” I responded. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

That was more than a month ago. And the memory of it stayed with me for a long time. The bare bones of the story he told me mingling with the wisps of stories from my work. It lent a heaviness to me for a few days because a father had to scour the streets of Oakland to find $12 to get himself and his family…wherever they were trying to go.

A lot has happened since then. His family, right or wrong, no longer dominates my thoughts when I pull up to my apartment. But a few weeks ago, flustered in my morning routine because I was late for work, a familiar sight unfolded. A man approached me with the cautious posture of a black man who wants to be sure the person he is approaching knows he means no harm.

“Do you know the manager ?”

“what manager?” I was impatient. I was already late and he seemed to be meandering around his point. I did not smile. I was not encouraging. I am not proud of this.

"The manager here," he pointed vaguely. Was he indicating my apartment, one of the many beyond it? "What do you need, I'm late." My voice was stern.

"My daughter died and I need money to..."
I stopped him mid-sentence. Unwilling to hear what he had to say any further. "You don't remember me. I gave you money last time you asked for the exact same reason." He looked at me and tried again.

I cut him off. "I have to go." I got in the car and sped off toward work. Sped off to a building that represents grieving families in need of things... help with applications, shoulders for crying,  money for burials.

In my haste I wasn't sure who that man was. I assumed the worst. Cast over my crappy morning, he became a scammer playing off my sympathies and I became a chump suckered out of $20. All I could see was the abstraction of faces of legitimate need in the shadow of what I perceived as his greed. What kind of person impersonates a grieving father?

Maybe nobody. Maybe he was still a grieving father. Maybe he was still in need of $12. Maybe I rushed through and over a man who needed at most a few bucks and at the very least a kind face or gentle voice to send him on his way.

As soon as I rounded the corner and headed for the freeway, my feelings collided. Anger crashed against disgust...anger that it might all be an act, disgust at myself for assuming it was. Given the work that I do, where was my compassion? How did I react so horribly?

Growing up my dad always told me I couldn't control what other people said or did, only how I responded. If I wondered if someone said something with malicious intent he urged me to take it in the best light - less harm comes from that he explained. I wish I had embodied that credo standing by my car, late to work, with a man's expressed grief on display. I didn't. And there is no rectifying that.

Benevolent (Shopping) Dictator?

Four a.m. and awake despite heavy eyelids and the desire to sink into my mattress, but I wrestled sleep down, held it at bay to finish the last few pages of The Hunger Games. And when I found myself at the end, I was no more sated than the few pages before because there I was, dangling on a cliff…or rather a cliffhanger. There was not neat packaging of the characters for me to file away as happy or sad or tormented or anything in particular. I wasn’t looking for a particular kind of an ending but I was looking for an ending.

But The Hunger Games is a trilogy and that was simply part one and so there I was, awake enough to wonder “what next?”. Ten years ago, hell, five years ago and I’d have had to wait. In the morning I’d have trotted out to the library to see if they had a copy lurking in the shelves or gone to the closest bookstore and purchased a tangible copy. But the gift of a Kindle and the ever available internet convenienced the patience right out of me. 

Instead of settling in for a few hours of sleep and time enough to conjure up my own scenarios for what happens next, I instead grabbed my phone and went to Amazon and downloaded the next instillation. And before I had exited the browser the book appeared on my Kindle and my eyes burned with fatigue as I read on.

I share that to put into context what I’ll say next. 

Amazon is big and we, the reading and buying public (not to mention writers) are in a precarious position.

In recent weeks Amazon and Hachette Publishing have been in a very public feud. It is easy to get caught up in the largeness of the story and immediately apply archetypal characteristics to each in order to understand what is going on. But in this news story there is no “little guy”, at least not in this particular fray. Amazon has become the megastore of megastores but Hachett isn’t a little startup or indie operation either. These are both big companies with specific aims and interests.

So why care? Stephen Colbert, among others, has weighed in on the dispute about the undisclosed demands of Amazon on Hachette, Hachette’s refusal to acquiesce, and Amazon’s subsequent delay in the shipping of Hachette books, deliberate counter-marketing of their books when people seek them out, and raised prices.

Insert deep sigh here because Amazon, a website that makes my life - as someone who hates to shop - so much easier, is essentially proving itself to be the online version of Wal-Mart. 

Great, one more thing I might slip up and my give business to in a moment of desperation and then feel guilty about. Did I mention deep sigh?

The thing is, I see how this gets dangerous. Or at least how it could. 

I sent a friend this Ney York Time’s piece knowing all the while what his response to the notion that although there is a need for old school publishers to adapt or die, an Amazon unchecked by competition could be problematic even in the areas that they currently shine. My friend disagreed:

I don’t see a problem with Amazon dominating the industry. If there is a competitor who can provide a better end user experience for the consumer…then the market would react accordingly. That entity doesn’t exist and Bezos/Amazon’s success was hard won…they have earned the right to dominate. 

In theory I agree with him. In theory I believe that markets correct themselves. But that is theory and theory happens in a vacuum, something Amazon does not exist in. and so a hundreds of things impact Amazon’s ability to dominate and what that domination could mean long term. 

Right now, Amazon treats its authors well. Right now it provides incentives that lure them away from traditional publishers and line their pockets with cash. The writer in me is drooling just a bit wondering how I can get my name in an Amazon cue. But even my greedy would-be-artist senses see the similarities to this method of reeling people in and say…drug dealers. At least all the drug dealers I saw on tv growing up. You know the ones, “sure, have a joint/rock/whatever; enjoy yourself.” And then when you are good and hooked, all of a sudden there is a price to be paid.

The difference here, of course, is that high on publishing royalties (so to speak) and all of the other publishers pushed out of business, if Amazon doesn’t want to pay me anymore than what recourse is there?

It is an imperfect metaphor, sue me. You get the point though.

Sure, people are smart and in theory, someone will enter the fray and provide a supply in that aching chasm of demand (for a platform to publish and purchase books that allows decent pay and decent prices) but still…we aren’t in a vacuum. And then my mind wanders to our government’s seeming unwillingness to enforce antitrust laws and some emerging (seemingly unrelated but so very related) issues like net neutrality and I wonder how successful emergent competition could be.

I think competition is a good thing. I think it pushes innovation. 

Competition (and technology) produced the ebook and made it possible for me to sit in my underwear and access almost any book I want at any time I want it. And I appreciate the addition to the market and do not mourn for traditional publishers because it is impacting their business model. They need to adapt. 

My cousin urged me to frequent local independent bookstores because they are slowly dying out. And she’s right. But token purchases won’t save them. People nostalgic for the telegraph couldn’t save it in competition with the phone; new technology and a new business model established itself and brought us here. This may sound like I am arguing the counterpoint but I’m not. Extinction by unnatural forces – acting quickly and without balance – wreak havoc. Living things have no time to adjust and instead are wiped out. Think what the stoats did to the kiwi in New Zealand, the nutria to the wetlands of Louisiana, and humans pretty much anywhere. Adaptation is as necessary for businesses as it is plant and animal life. 

Or better, think of the one crop nations that collapse when the prices fall. The West Indies with sugar, South America with bananas, West Africa with cocoa. No one seemed to mind there was one market and once source until that one source decided prices were too high. Crisis is never a good time to negotiate especially when there is so little leverage. 

I’m not sure how to ameliorate this situation. Thigh high in Amazon if only through my kindle (never mind the abundant shopping items), I’ve cut down greatly but I’m not sure where the alternative is just yet; but I’m looking. I can’t complain about the beast all the while feeding it.

Colored Perspectives

The thing is…I get it. A little. I can’t actually know to the fullest extent because it isn’t my day to day reality but I can catch a glimpse. I can hear the whisper of the micro if not the full shout of the macro.

I was skinny in college. Fit or whatever. I had a friend who wasn’t. in our general day to day it was never a thing until one day it was. I don’t even remember how it came up, or what conversation morphed or meandered and landed us where it did…but one day she chastised me for being sad or frustrated with life because…well because whatever I was going through I was going through it skinny. 

I was bewildered because sometimes my life was less than stellar. And when it was (and when it wasn’t) I seldom, if ever, linked it to how much I weighed. 

But she did. In her world it was at least tangentially related. And in her world, because I didn’t tip the scales at the same place she did I was not afforded a place in certain conversations. I wasn’t allowed to not like something about my body or the way that I looked because…skinny. 

Weight was the thread she saw woven throughout the world and everything that happened it it.

So when a friend and I recently found ourselves talking earnestly about race and she, being white, talked about the cone of silence that is imposed upon her in any race conversation, I got at least a flash of understanding. An inkling. 

It is different of course. Race is not solely a micro conversation among friends it is a macro- if often whispered- subtext throughout America. It is woven into conversations about poverty and education, immigration and the president. What is it to be muted on such far reaching conversations?

Our conversation, randomly enough, began with recalling a conversation about Orange is the New Black where someone commented on the racial tensions inherent in the show and how the other character’s stories are told. 

“You mean how the stories of the women of color are only important if they are first filtered or validated through the presence of a white protagonist?” I asked.

“I just don’t see it like that, not really. I mean, I see it more now from having conversations like this with you and others but that isn’t how my mind works.” For my friend the stories that are told through a white character are white only because the person telling the story is white. The story of Uganda and Idi Amin distilled and made important only when told through the eyes of a young Scottish man indicate only that one writer and producer and director -while I know that to be true AND also see the power dynamic inherent when the people deciding what movies are made, what stories are important, look like the writer and that Scottish main character and not like people of color (or women, or LGBTQ). 

Race doesn’t color her glasses in that way but for me, a lot of things are distilled through a racial lens. It is a Rosetta stone in my understanding of America. Not racism but race. Not intentional prejudice but an unconscious (often unwanted) conditioning of all Americans – by media and skewed history lessons - and how they/we move through it. 

We covered a lot of ground that night. I conflated a lot of thoughts because my orientation of the world has a common thread that is not common to her. She tread cautiously because she has learned she must tread cautiously. 

I am colored and she is not. And because she has always surrounded herself with people who do not necessarily look like her, Beth has learned that her place in these conversations is to be quiet. Her voice – silent.

I don’t want my friend, my kindred, to be silent. When we are talking we are a team. We are her, and me, and us. Part of our conversation is made for us. Shared space of different experiences. And I hear her stories not as the frustrations of a white girl but the frustrations of a friend. And i will not dismiss them. I cannot.

But part of our conversation is the greater Us. The Us of our coloring, of the teams we didn’t pick but we were born into or at least had dictated to us by history and media. She is blonde and I have kinky hair. Society mostly casts us on opposing sides. And while we both know we are not truly in opposition, we also know there is something different in our experiences and perspectives, something that makes us almost understand each other’s point of view about race and the things it impacts…almost…but almost doesn’t count. 

More than weight, CISism is the great equalizer for CIS identifying people of color. Maybe I should have started here. A chance for me to navigate the world as Beth does complete with a specific brand of privilege that I did not ask for but benefit from. In this role I can be a knowledgeable and eager ally or willing to learn even if learning is sometimes uncomfortable and fraught with mistakes. I can be a bigot or simply silent and unengaged. I can be blind to the thread of sexuality and gender identity.

Conversations about pronouns emerge then, like conversations about hair; and “I have a gay friend” comments replace “I have an Asian friend”. Examples, at their worst, of someone being an ass but at their best, examples of people leaning into what may be the unknown for them.

And it can be exhausting. God it can be exhausting to explain that you really really are American, that your first language is English, or that you don’t put car grease in your hair- and not to be angry at the seemingly constant proof of how other you are to some people. And so people carve out spaces for themselves that provide respite from the microaggressions of the wider world that hasn’t caught up yet. That doesn’t understand. Special classes, clubs, places of worship. We retreat to spaces where people recognize the thin thread weaving itself through the pages of our lives and don’t assume it to be random. Don’t assume a thread is just a thread.

The thing is that we can’t stay there. 

Having conversations in our self-identified enclaves is rarely illuminating and it sure as hell isn’t helpful. And if people are silenced before the conversations even start we are still just talking to ourselves.

The thing is, I don’t need Beth to be silent in conversations about race, I just need her – and anyone else – to not assume that their voices or experiences are the definitive ones. Not because I’m right, but because my voice and voices like it- the ones marginalized and historically invisible in American media - need space to be heard.