Facing Race.

That’s what this conference was called, but it’s about more than just that. It’s about facing all of our privileges and the power structures that we’re not even aware of – until someone gives it a face, a voice, a story.

This is what I faced. The fact that I have never fully recognized my privileges as a heterosexual woman – that I have never even had to consider the experiences of trans-gender women or lesbian women who identify with male characteristics, much less how that is compounded by being a woman of color. Because I fit within the norms of gender and sexuality that have been constructed by our society, this has been an invisible community to me. Until there was a face, a voice, a story. Of women who identify as female but whose bodies society feels free to scrutinize for male characteristics. Of women (and men) who endure ridicule, violence and even death because of how they identify themselves – and to which the media and the general public is largely ignorant.

I faced, again, my privilege of whiteness – that although I might be “enlightened” enough to be attending a conference about race and seeking to engage these issues, when my mind gets overloaded I have the privilege of turning “off” that engagement – because I, unlike women and men of color, am not forced to constantly engage my race. I have never had to wrestle with questions of “what category do I fit into?” like the bi-racial daughters of one presenter, one of whom identified as white and one as black on the Census form. I have never been harassed and excluded from public spaces like an African-American teenager from Baltimore shared, who is organizing her peers to address it. And I have only ever engaged the school-to-prison pipeline and prison-industrial complex from a detached, academic standpoint – never experiencing the oppression and dehumanization of the people of color who are trapped in it.

As I sat on a bench outside the hotel, eating an authentic Baltimore pork chop and getting barbeque sauce all over me, I considered how if I were black or if I were not dressed as nice, the hotel security would probably question my right to be there. Later, after buying a homeless man a sandwich, he sat on a bench outside the hotel – and after I went inside I saw him get up and walk away. My first thought was concern over whether or not he was actually eating the sandwich – and indignation if he had wasted my money. That was quickly followed by a recognition that sitting outside the Hilton was probably the last place he wanted to be – in fact, he’d told me earlier that the security would often tell him to leave. How could concern for $10 be more important than concern for a man, regardless of his circumstances, who was homeless and jobless? Who was not even allowed to sit outside an establishment where I was privileged to belong. And what about outrage over a system that makes it possible – even acceptable – for such disparities to exist? Even with a face and a voice in front of me, I still must overcome my tendency to protect that which is closest to me (my money, my pride) rather than turning the kingdom upside-down.

I had lots of honest encounters with poor people of color in Baltimore while waiting for the bus or sitting on the train. I pride myself in not being afraid of taking public transportation or going to the “bad neighborhoods” – but I kid myself if I think sharing a few minutes in the cold makes me understand their experience – it is merely a glimpse. When talking about a homeless person up the street, one woman said “I’ve been there” – and someone else said “everyone has”. But I haven’t. And smelling perfumes being sold on the train, one woman commented that “this would smell good on your skin but doesn’t smell good on mine”.

If only I – and we as white Americans – can so honestly face race, and our own privileges. We like to talk around race – even as I was explaining my initial discomfort of arriving at an unfamiliar bus stop after dark to a fellow conference-goer, I caught myself not immediately acknowledging the racial aspect of my discomfort – and this was to a fellow white anti-racist! Even the language we use is toned-down – to us it is “discomfort”, but the sisters and brothers of color at the conference over and over referred to it as “the struggle”. While we can choose whether or not to put ourselves in “discomfort”, the “struggle” is a constant one that cannot be avoided. One presenter said that his friends call him a “walking uncomfortable conversation”. That is what I (and we) need to be challenging ourselves – and others – to be in truly be facing race every single day.