It’s happened: I’ve started listening to CBC radio on the drive into work.
This isn’t a tongue‐in‐cheek commentary on trading youth for maturity, whatever that means. It’s a declaration: my mind is craving conversation. It wants to be engaged. It wants to be challenged. It wants to consider and expand its understanding of the issues and implications of what’s going on around it. It wants to be free.
And so do I.
Commercial radio was not providing any of the above. Commercial radio is just commercials. The music? Listen carefully. Those are also commercials. A commercial radio station is just one big packaged advertisement. I would jokingly refer to garbage pop songs as junk food for my ears. But things are a little more serious now: what sits between my ears? Like I said, listen carefully.
Yesterday I was listing to an interview with Ijeoma Oluo, a Seattle‐based author whoes book title I have used for the title of this post. I wouldn’t dare attempt a summary of a book I haven’t read based solely on a 45 minute conversation with its author. But from what I heard on the radio, one theme of the book surrounds white privilege. I’m paraphrasing now, but at the core of any racist structure will be privilege. Racism requires privilege, and privilege requires the uninformed. Or as Oluo puts it:
Being privileged doesn’t mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right. It means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.
In 2014 I challenged myself to honestly examine the privileged life I’ve been afforded, a life I didn’t even know I was living for the majority of it.
In retrospect, the first few years of examination went nowhere. I was in denial, groundlessly congratulating myself for believing I was aware and intune with something I was actually preventing myself from seeing. I subtly pushed back on any suggestions of privilege in my life, subconsciously allowing this privilege to continue through some deeply embedded cultural fail‐safe mechanism. I talked a lot of talk.
But something changed in early 2018. I stopped talking—I started to listen.
The voice constantly reaffirming I wasn’t part of the problem was instructed to sit quietly in the back row of the theatre of my mind. I listened to the words my family would say, the words my friends and neighbours would say, the words my classmates and coworkers would say. I would listen to all the words the newsreaders and politicians would say. I’d listen to the words of strangers on their cellphones speaking in other languages, the tone of their talk acting as a translator.
I began to hear something…
In the second semester of my Energy Systems Engineering program, as part of the communications component, I was asked to write responses to a number of readings as part of my assignments. I found myself unable to respond to one reading in the same ease I’d become accustomed to with the others. I wrote of this difficulty, this unease:
Brent Staples in 1986 wrote an essay entitled “Just Walk On By” where he chronicles his experiences growing up as a black man in America during the 1960s and onward. He found himself viewed as a threatening menace, or potentially violent, and undeserving of the benefit of the doubt. People would cross to the other side of street to avoid him or question the reasons for him to be in legitimate places, such as the lobbies of office buildings or even just browsing an open store. Staples—a softy by his own admission—realized it didn’t matter how legitimate his reasons for being anywhere were, the perception was, based on his appearance, that he must somehow be in the wrong place at best, and a threat at worst.
As upsetting as it is to read of what he experienced then, it is equally if not more upsetting to know his experiences are still mirrored today over thirty year later. I recall listening to an address by President Obama in 2013 where he spoke candidly on the need for context in understanding what black Americans, black American men in particular, experience as part of racism:
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
I find myself lacking the context to respond in what I feel is an honest, meaningful way. In what context can I claim to understand or know what it feels like to have to assert myself as a nonviolent individual when I have the luxury of it being assumed? I would have to expend effort to be considered dangerous. I would have to on purpose act intimidating and threatening. Staples only had to arrive where he was supposed to be—the effortlessness of a silent assumption robbing him of his dignity and assassinating his character before he’s had a chance to do or say otherwise. This in part must be why Staples would whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi at times when he wanted to ease potential tensions—as a way to chase away the silence, as a way to swap one assumption for another.
That lack of context for understanding what Staples experienced in his life, that unease I experienced in attempting to relate to something I found unrelatable: that is my privilege. That is the uninformed part of me where racism is perpetuated. The privilege I experience as a white man is one of context. This context in turn drives circumstance around me in a different manor as compared to someone who isn’t a white man. Don’t believe me?
What did the media say white people were doing in Houston during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey as they were trying in desperation to secure the means survive? Scavenging for food. And black people who were doing the same in New Orleans after Katrina? Looting.
Like I said, listen carefully.
As the radio interview concluded, as I converged on one of the most multicultural cities in the world, I felt my eyes brimming. Any understanding I thought I had gained in the last five years surrounding the breadth and depth of my privilege had been challenged as insufficient in less than an hour. I realized there was still so much to hear—and I wanted to hear it.
I will be listening carefully.