Stranger in a Strange Land

Imagine for a minute that you have a hankering to go to some far distant land that you have heard about. You’ve heard that the people there dress differently, speak another language, grow different crops, and live in homes constructed differently than anything you’ve ever seen. It sounds like a place you’d like to get to know.What behaviors do we engage in when we want to learn more about a place before we travel there?

Many people turn first to other travelers who have been to this place, or to people who have lived there. Although the travel brochures and documentaries are informative, we give a lot more value to first-person accounts of life in that land, and what they tell us about the human experience of being in that place.

That is why, right now, in our quest to become anti-racist, it is important to pay attention to the individual stories of people of color who have lived with racism all of their lives. No matter how many general ideas we gain from reading commentary on racism, real stories from people’s daily lives convey the human impact of life lived in that world.

Watch these stories. Let yourself feel the impact.

• Four You Tube videos of Amber Ruffin, a Black woman who is a writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers. She taped a series of short videos, each with a story from her ordinary life, of interactions she has had with police. They are all frightening. She has, she said, dozens more stories. She is only 41 years old. All of her Black friends, she said, have a host of similar stories.
• An Instagram “In the Know” story from July 16, called “I just got pulled over by police.” A Black police officer pulled over by a White cop, the driver describes the incident in chilling detail, and gives viewers practical advice in case they are ever in the same position: Call 911 and say you are afraid you are going to be hurt.

Before you try to enter into the racist world that people of color have been living in, talk to them. Listen to individual stories of their interactions with police, or with other angry White people. Feel the rage, the grief, the impotence, the oppression, and the discrimination. Try to wrap your head around how much trauma is being caused to each person by each and every encounter with White people.

In the past week alone, I heard the following stories:

• A Black woman in my own progressive college community tried to get a refund from a big box store on a brand new, unopened electronic device. She was told immediately that it was past the return date and no refund would be given. A Black sales clerk whispered to her on her way out, “Get a White person to bring it in.” She did. She gave it to a White friend. As soon as he asked someone for a refund and showed the receipt, he was given the refund.
• A Black man, leaving a park in the Midwest, was pulled over by four police cars, handcuffed, talked to belligerently by white cops for an hour, then given a traffic ticket. How many White people have ever had to go through that?
• A newly retired Black woman drove from Massachusetts down to Alabama to see relatives. She is physically disabled, and had handicapped plates on her car. On the seventh day of driving, leaving Tennessee, she was very tired and trying to find a place to pull over when she saw blue lights flashing in her rear view mirror. She was approached by a White policeman in riot gear, including a vest studded with grenades. Behind him, six other police cars lined up, each with two cops standing outside their cars.

The stories are everywhere. Every single Black person you know has them, no matter where you live. We need to talk to people of color, and listen to their stories. We White people will get much more depth of understanding out of the bestselling books on anti-racism and the local anti-racism workshops if we acknowledge that we have lived our lives in an altogether different nation-state, and that the place we are entering demands our respect as aliens in an alien land.