When my daughter was three, she used to place her brown arm
on my white leg and study the difference between her skin and mine. Over the years, it has been a difference she
sometimes felt, but one that I never did.
It’s not that I was oblivious to it.
It’s just that it never mattered.
That changed two days ago.
My daughter is in high school now. Like many adolescents, she struggles with the
increasing responsibilities of school. I
had checked her grades online and noticed that she had failed to turn in an
assignment last week. It’s a recurring
issue, and I’ve talked myself hoarse trying to get her to be more conscientious
about her schoolwork, to convince her that her choices now will affect her
opportunities in the future. When I picked
her up after school that day, I resigned myself to yet another talk about the
same old issues.
We’re alone in the car.
It’s an ordinary conversation, one that my daughter and I have had so
often that as it starts again, already I feel the seed of frustration. But there’s something more this time,
something else where that seed is growing, an anxiety that hasn’t been there
before. I look at her, this beautiful,
funny kid I’ve raised, and the reality of our new world order comes rising up
my throat like bile.
You can’t afford to do
this, I think looking at her. You can’t afford to throw away
opportunities. You might not have as
many as you expect. She is brown
skinned, foreign born, and this country is once again governed by brazen bigotry.
As I park the car in the garage, I turn to her and say, “Listen,
there’s something you need to understand.
This election changed a lot of things.”
I pause, searching for the right words, not sure of where
I’m headed with this. I wish I had a
better story to tell her, one full of hope and happy endings, but this isn’t a
time for fairy tales. I take a breath,
and I tell her the truth. I lay it out
as clearly as I can. I tell her that the
world she will inherit is not the same one I grew up in, that this
administration is doing dangerous, damaging things. I explain that they are changing the laws in
ways that will hurt a lot of people.
I slowly wind my way to the point I’m trying to make, afraid
to make, must make. The people in this
administration seem to believe America should be white and Christian and
straight, and others who aren’t white, Christian, and straight are somehow not
American enough. There might not be as
many opportunities for a good life, and people who aren’t white will suffer the
most.
She sets her jaw and reminds me that we can vote them out in
the next election. I say yes, we’re
already working toward that, but the people in power are changing the laws so
they can stay in power, and it might take a lot more than the next election to
stop them. In the meantime, they can do
a lot of damage. We have to recognize
that a lot of Americans agree with them, at least more of them do than I ever
realized.
I impress upon her that she must see this for what it is,
must understand that this is much more than the random inequities of life, that
this is strategically unjust, a plan purposely set in motion and kept in motion
by people who will never have to say these words to their children, never have
to worry about the damage it does to them.
I tell her she can’t afford to throw away opportunities,
that she, a girl, brown skinned, foreign born, with lesbian moms and no
religion, must – MUST – hang on to every opportunity she can, that the best way
to fight back against the injustice is to succeed in life. It’s such a heavy load to hand a
fifteen-year-old.
I wonder if I’ve gone too far, said too much. I hear myself telling her, I’m not trying to
scare you, but I’m not sure that’s honest.
I don’t want her to be paralyzed by fear and hopelessness. But she needs to know these things. She needs to understand, and it’s my job as
her parent to tell her. I don’t want to,
but I don’t think I have a choice. I try
to keep it simple and undramatic, but this truth is so big, it makes me feel
small.
I make a point to hold her gaze. I want to show her that it’s possible to face
this reality and remain steady and calm, resolute, even hopeful. She stares back at me, silent. Her eyes search my face to find the weight
and the truth behind the words.
We are alone in the car, and yet, we are not alone. The eyes I see looking back at me are not
just hers, but the eyes of millions of brown-skinned girls and boys who have
heard these words, millions of young people across place and time, back through
generation after generation after generation, all hearing the message that this
society believes they are not equal, not enough, not deserving. I didn’t want
to say these words, not to her and not to them.
In the silence of their gaze, I feel even smaller.
It dawns on me that I am seeing these millions of eyes for
the first time. I’ve known they were
there. I’ve thought of them, studied
them, talked of them, their pain, their struggle, from somewhere in my head. I knew them the way I knew history, a series
of facts and events, grand and momentous but remote and indistinct.
In this moment, finally, I see them not as a single mass of
humanity but as individuals looking out from warm, breathing bodies, each one
with a unique heart and mind. I look at my
daughter, this one girl I love, and I see the millions who were also loved by
mothers and fathers, grandparents and siblings, these millions who have lived and
died, these millions who heard and continue to hear not just these words but
others so much uglier, so much more damaging and unjust. For the first time in my life, I feel with my
flesh how big the divide is between white and black, white and brown, white and
every other, the divide between me and the millions staring back, the divide
between me and my own daughter. This
realization, this divide, this more than anything makes me feel small.
This moment is complicated. I am acutely aware of my whiteness and what it
represents, the position of privilege it affords me, and where it fits in our
shared and often shameful national history.
I am aware of my daughter’s brown skin, different from mine, in
opposition to mine. I am giving her a
painful truth, one that men and women of color have passed on to their children
for generations, but in our case, this truth is coming from a white mouth. I go to great lengths to make it clear I am
not defending my race or vilifying hers.
Nevertheless, I am handing her a burden I have never had to carry,
myself.
Somewhere deep down I question my
role in this moment. By exposing the
truth, am I attacking it, or only acknowledging it? And if I am only acknowledging it, does that
imply that I accept it, that this is just how things are? I tell her I know how unfair it is, but do
I? Do I really know? What do those words mean when they come from
a white mouth? They strike me as
disingenuous even as I say them.
I had expected these words to
taste sharp and bitter, that I would feel pain and righteous anger at having to
say them. I am surprised to find that
the words are a tasteless mush and I feel nothing. Or not nothing, really, but a sense of
nothingness that feels like an empty duty. I hope it is not futility in disguise. I feel like a pawn, a puppet, a player on the
stage saying the words that have been placed in my mouth, words that are
unfamiliar and foreign, words that have never been said to me. Where is the honesty in saying words I have
not had to live with, myself?
These are not my words because
this is not my world, not the America I have believed in, the one I as a white
child grew up in and thought we all shared.
I realize that my America is not my daughter’s America. I sit with the knowledge that my America has
only ever existed for some of us.
The fact that as a white woman I
never expected to have this conversation, never expected it to be necessary,
does not make it any worse. I know I am
not the first to do this. I won’t be the
last. And I am getting off easy compared
to so many others. Still, in some way, my
daughter is every girl and boy who ever grew up in a society that deemed them
other and less because of their race or religion or some equally meaningless
distinction. I am every parent who ever feared
how far that society would go to enforce this hierarchy. I need her to understand this, to feel it, to
know it without thinking, but to know it for the injustice that it is. I fear that she will internalize this message until it becomes her own inner voice. She needs to know that this is not about the random chance of life,
the freak accidents, the unexpected windfalls, the individual circumstances
that lead some to success and others to failure. This is something more sinister, something
planned, something ugly and unjust intentionally woven into the fabric of our
society.
My daughter breaks the
silence. “They’re afraid,” she says,
referring to those who are dismantling our civil rights protections and writing
discrimination back into our laws, those who support an administration that
welcomes white nationalists. “The world
is changing, and it makes them afraid.
That’s why they’re doing this.”
I nod.
She continues, “They’re naïve if
they think they can stop it from changing.”
I allow myself a tiny moment of pride at her use of the word "naive." I hope she’s right.
I’m not sure what I feel at this
point. I am at once saddened and oddly,
comforted. That night when I go to bed,
these feelings wrap around me as I fall asleep.
In the morning when I wake they have settled in and I know they live
here now. The sadness I expected. The comfort is as clear as it is surprising. It seems to come from the millions of eyes
watching me. They are not accusing or
shaming me, but inviting me in, urging me to see a larger truth, that my
daughter is one of them. And so am
I. Not because my daughter has brown
skin. Not because I had this conversation
with her. I am one of them because we
all are.
They are me with brown skin, and
I am them if they were white. We are all
players on the same stage, each cast in a role by birthright and circumstance. In a different play with different casting,
our roles might be reversed.
This is the truth we must see in
order to break the cycle of prejudice and injustice. It’s a truth I thought I already knew. I have always believed in equality. I have been an outspoken advocate for civil
rights my whole life. I have always been
proud of that. I still am.
But I have spent my life
advocating for others instead of
advocating with them. I have lent myself to others’ struggles
instead of seeing those struggles as my own. If advocacy is only offered as an expression of noblesse oblige, then
where is the moral imperative to achieve equality? It cannot be dictated from on high, even with the best of intentions. It is not enough to fight for the rights of
others if you still see them as others.
We must learn to fight for one another as though we are fighting for our
own lives, because we are.
I am still unpacking this
conversation, examining it, feeling my way through the layers of meaning. I’m not sure what else I will learn from it,
but I do know this.
I am small. We are all small. But we are not alone. Our fates are intertwined, and we will all
succeed or fail together. This is the truth,
but to truly know it, we must learn to see ourselves in one another.
