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.