On the right side of race
I was walking Loca late this morning as it was pouring down rain and I had to wait for it to clear up. When we got to the park, we saw some of our regulars and one guy, who I usually see going the opposite way, was headed the same way as us so we walked together for a while. We were talking about the weather and he said, “Now there’s some people who will find wrong with right each time.”
And I said, “Well, I walk on the sunny side most of the time.”
And then he curiously said, “Well, I’m about to turn off here, Red” (even though my hair has changed my nicknames haven’t), and then he added, “And I’d better cause I might get shot if I keep walking with you.”
He had turned before I could respond but I wanted to call out after him, “I hope those days are behind us.”
Then my Harper’s arrived and while drinking my tea I read John Edgar Wideman’s essay called Fatheralong on race, and he writes at one point, “Race is myth. When we stop talking about race, stop believing in race, it will disappear. Except for its career historically and in people’s memories as the antithesis of human freedom, the embodiment of inequality and injustice that remained far too long a toxic, unresolved paradox in nations proclaiming themselves free.”
It put me in mind of a joke my mother in law told me the other day, where she said, “An American tells a Russian that their train system sucks because a train that is supposed to come at 9AM shows up at 10AM. The Russian looks at the American and says, ‘And what have you done about the blacks?'”
This is “supposed” to be funny if you see that the Russian has no answer for why the system is not working in his country and so instead goes on the offensive with the one astounding fact that comes to his mind about America.
So today, when my friendly walker passed the comment that maybe he would be shot by walking with a white woman, my heart sank a few degrees, because that was what was, but am I naive in thinking it was.