The other night, after meeting a friend for dinner, I took the bus home. I usually take the bus home from work, but it's the nice bus, the rush-hour bus filled with weary professionals and hipster students returning home after a day of office work or comparative literature studies. Dinner went late, so I took the bus that takes forever to get home. The bus that stops at nearly every single corner between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The bus filled with loud cell phone conversations, blaring hip hop, and the occasional teenage fight before curfew kicks in. This bus makes me feel scared for absolutely no logical reason. Nothing bad has ever happened to me on this bus, but I'm the only quiet white girl in sight. Logic has a long way to go before it can fight the movies, the way we're taught to fear people who aren't quite like us, and the mysterious reasons why we make such effective zenophobic sponges.
In the July issue of The Sun, there's a great interview with Tim Wise, an author and activist who's fought to challenge white privilege and describe the racial situation in American to its bare, honest bones. He describes how girls are subconciously taught to fear black men, how denying white privilege and racism are tantamount to saying that someone else's experience has been false, and how fear cuts across all racial (and other) boundaries. He describes the fear that comes from challenging oppression, the fear of being considered an instigator, the fear of being considered a criminal based on one's skin color.
As I mentioned, this bus stops at every single bus stop known to man. As more and more people get on, folks are crowded in the back and standing in the aisle, and I'm the only person without a seat partner. As I start to look around, I'm wondering if I'm sitting next to the most dangerous seat in the bus - the seat next to the young white girl in the dress and heels.
I've written a lot about fear in the past, mainly because I'm a big fan of looking at it long enough until one of us blinks. Usually my fears only hurt me - they make me less open with other people, they make me focus on things that aren't terribly important. If my individual fears and our collective fears as a society when it comes to race - talking about it, turning it on its head, looking at it from every conceivable angle, and listening, paying attention always - are hurting other people, then that's a problem. I hope I can learn to be the one who blinks in that instance. And smile. And listen.
