It’s 12:49 AM and I’ve just arrived in San Francisco from LA.
On that drive, in which we literally took a road less traveled—we ended up on I-99 for two hundred miles when we should have been on I-5—I had an eye-opening experience.
Driving aimlessly past cramped cows and wind turbines and neat rows of Central California produce, trying to find the right road, my Korean-American co-pilot and I had a lengthy discussion, during which I was, as she called it, “Race hazed.”
I like to consider myself a pretty broad-minded person. Liberal, unprejudiced, open, enlightened even. I believe black people should live in harmony with white people, constantly ask the ‘why can’t we all get along’ question, and made it a point several years ago to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Shit, I get uncomfortable even using the terms ‘black’ and ‘white.’
But it turns out I am in ‘white-man denial.’
When asked what I thought about a recent NY Times article about black and white high school students having separate proms, I of course, gave the stock, enlightened, 21st Century white person response: ‘WTF. Why can’t white and black (for the purpose of this post, the term refers to non-white) kids just have one prom? And while I’m at it, why can’t we all just get along?’
It is easy for me as a white person, my friend told me, to say this. I am “privileged enough” to be able to say this. The world we live in, despite what I may think, is a white-man’s world. A world where white peoples’ cultures, customs, ways of doing things and ideas of beauty are looked at by the powers-that-be as ‘right.’
We live in a world where of course most white people will do the PC thing of saying they want to go to a prom where white and black kids will all go together—and they’ll mean it. But who says the black kids want to go to the white kids’ prom? And who says they should? We are oblivious to the idea that we have forced ourselves and our culture on them.
We may think that it’s white and black kids going to a white and black kids’ prom, but in reality, it’s white and black kids going to a white kids’ prom.
After a half hour of arguing with each other, my friend’s comments subsided, and I was left with the stinging feeling of seeing the world just a bit more clearly, albeit a bit more pessimistically.
Weird post, I know. We certainly ended up on a strange road with this one.
But to bring the metaphor full-circle, I think we should all force ourselves to go down roads we’re not used to in our thinking. They force us to see things we otherwise wouldn’t.
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