What’s Going On?
I’ve been wrestling with my feelings these past two weeks, researching, talking to family and friends, and thinking about the subtle and not so subtle ways racism has impacted my life and those of my peers. The only way I know how to deal with these feelings is to write them out. Here it goes.
One of my best friends called me this week and reminded me about a time in middle school when I got a group of friends together to perform “What’s Going On?” by Marvin Gaye. It was the 2001 version with various artists like N’Sync, Destiny’s Child, P.Diddy, Nelly, and Christina Aguilera. I wanted the group to be as diverse as those artists in the song: There was me, the Afro-Latino, two white Jewish-Americans, a Dominican-American, and (I think) a Filipino-American. We had no idea what that song really meant, its historical background, or what our multiracial motley group singing and rapping on stage looked like in front of the overwhelmingly white audience. But maybe we unknowingly made a statement.
When one of my old friends posted a Newsday article about how our home district of Nassau County, Long Island is one of the most segregated counties in the nation, and that our hometown of Merrick is 88% white, I started to think about how institutional racism might have affected my life trajectory. I asked my parents if they were victims of “steering”, and they said absolutely. “When we moved out to Long Island, we had to demand to be shown neighborhoods other than the minority neighborhoods”, they said. I wonder: if my parents hadn’t taken that extra step to see other neighborhoods, I would have never grown up in Merrick, I would have never met my lifelong friends, maybe I would have never gotten the kind of education that set me on my current professional path. All because my two brave parents said “no, we want to see some other houses.”
I remember that each time a new family of color moved into Merrick, my mother would groan, and I would always scold her.
“Why are you angry about that Mom! We should be happy that another family that looks like us is here!” But I didn’t know about the white flight phenomenon back then. My mother, an immigrant from Panama, grew up in Brooklyn’s East New York. When she was young, she remembers having Jewish and Italian neighbors. But as more families of color moved into East New York, the white families “fled” out to the suburbs, taking with them the much-needed tax base to provide basic social services and education. My mom saw her neighborhood deteriorate around her because of white flight; she didn’t want to see the same thing happen to Merrick.
During my childhood in Merrick, I think that I was largely shielded from the racism that so many other people of color- especially black men- face in America. I had incredible friends and teachers who made me feel equal. Looking back, yes there were the occasional off-handed comments like “you’re the whitest black kid ever”- as if being around white people automatically made me like them- but otherwise my childhood was largely positive. But what were the other subtle ways in which racism seeped into my standards of what was good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly? If acting “white” meant speaking standard grammatical English, then didn’t that inherently mean that “black” meant uneducated? If I was only surrounded by whiteness, then did whiteness inherently become my own standard of beauty? In other words, while growing up and trying to fit in with my white peers, did I become unconsciously biased towards my own blackness?
This week I sent a message to my favorite high school teacher thanking her for always making me feel valued and respected. “I never told you this but I quite literally shielded you”, she replied. “Some sick student wrote nigger over a picture of you outside the library. I freaked. Took it down. And never told you. There was absolutely no reason for you to be haunted by one unfortunate soul. You were so incredibly and broadly beloved by the whole school.” I teared up after reading that. It was as if a bubble had burst around me. Racism has always been there, lurking in the shadows, seeking to devour me. But heroes like my teacher fought the battle for me, protected me silently, without me even knowing it. For that, I am eternally grateful.
My experience with the police has unusually positive. Why? Because my dad is a retired NYPD cop. I remember riding with him in his cop car, eating a donut (I know, so cliche) in his precinct, and meeting his coworkers on Take-Your-Child-To-Work days. My dad is one of the most selfless people you will ever meet, who spent more than 3 decades protecting and serving New York City. And I would like to believe that the overwhelming majority of his peers in 18,000 police departments around the country are like him.
How do we fix these problems? I don’t have the answers, just knowledge of other people’s ideas. After white flight, minority communities can come together to demand that their municipal governments allocate more resources to social services and education. We can expand programs like President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, to provide mentorship and job skills training in communities of color. We have to pay as much attention to the local elections of city councilmen and district attorneys as we do with presidential elections. With policing, we must have a functioning mechanism to catch and prosecute the bad police officers, and limit their capacity to kill. That’s why I’m heartened by the recent moves by city governments to ban chokeholds, weaken police unions, strengthen district attorneys, and create a national record of police brutality.
Despite all the problems we still have in this country, I am still so proud to be an American. The calls for justice by everyday Americans on the streets reverberated in London, Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, Seoul, Melbourne, and elsewhere. They inspired people around the world to not only demand racial justice in our country, but also their own. That is the power of the American people.
Over these two weeks, my wife and I attended two marches in Miami, adding our voices to the chorus of protests around the country and the world. It felt so cathartic, so freeing, to feel part of this movement. But just as important than protesting in the streets is speaking to loved ones at home. I’ve had some of the deepest conversations with my closest friends and family members over the past few weeks. We’ve challenged each other’s assumptions, shared our ideas, and mostly just listened. And each time, after the video chat or phone call ended, I came away feeling cleansed, understood, whole. Now, the lyrics to “What’s Going On” has new meaning for me, and hopefully, for all of us:
Barricades can’t block our way
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see