On staying silent

We can't any more. we just can't.

“I want you to tag three white friends who will also hold you accountable,” —tinybrownqueer

It’s Friday night and I’m back on my favorite chair in the living room with my computer balanced on my lap. I can see myself in the reflection of the window. It’s black outside, which means it’s later than I want it to be. I’m in pajamas, leaning back with my feet up. We’ve recently turned the chair away from the fireplace, now that it’s nearly June, spinning it around on the floor to face the windows. Our backyard view has been taken over recently by the vines that have sprung up, literally overnight, reaching out of the woods and pressing our wire fence down toward the ground in a chokehold.

My spouse Janyce is on her laptop, with her headphones in her ears, immersed in one of the crime dramas she loves to watch to relieve tension. I can hear her laughing to herself. “The main character is the woman from Happy Valley,” she says from the couch. “And she has an old dog she takes with her everywhere—named Jessie—the dog is always farting.”  Both of us simultaneously glance down at the floor to where our old dog is sleeping. He is sort of a barometer for us lately. Today we didn’t get out of the house at all. It was a day when our work life seemed to bleed into our home life even more than usual, and our dog was even more vocal than usual.  

“I’ve got to take him out,” she said. “He’s driving me crazy.” I was at the kitchen counter dipping corn tortillas in hot oil and assembling the tightly rolled chicken enchiladas all in a row in the baking dish. It was getting late and I was hurrying through the dinner prep, ignoring the barking, and thinking about what I had planned to write my post about. 

What were the threads of my thoughts over the past week?  Motivational podcast quips by white wealthy entrepreneurs, the latest adaptation of Anna Karenina on Hulu, our adorable aging dog?

At 5pm, I took my laptop with me to the dining table where Janyce was still standing before her computer. “Did you watch the videos that are circulating on the Internet?,” she said.  “I just don’t understand how we went from a man with his hands cuffed behind his back to three policemen on top of him until he was dead. It’s outrageous.”

“I heard a little. I can’t watch them,” I said as I typed the words “Streptococcus Constellatus” into a Google search on my computer. I scrolled through grim scientific reports of this particular disease until I found a case study. Just this morning, I was on a Zoom call with a friend who lives alone, listening to her tell me about her nephew, a strong young man just barely 30 years old, hospitalized in another state with none of his family with him, all of them waiting by the phone for the doctors to call and give them more news. “He tested negative,” she said.

I don’t hold much faith in a negative test result, and I don’t think she was convinced either, but we remained silent on the subject. I hit copy paste and sent part of the case study off to her in an email. “Thanks, will share,” she replied only moments later, “it is almost paralyzing Kris.”

I waited too long to write my blog post again, now I’m trying to conjure up the memory of what I had originally planned to write about and I just can’t do it. I can’t manage the incongruity of my own benign musings with the horrors in the country and the sadness in the world.

“I’m going to bed,” says Janyce. “Don’t stay up too late.”   

Instead, I pull up multiple windows on my computer of protest marches that have started to turn violent in Minneapolis. In Atlanta. In LA. In San Jose. In Denver. I keep a browser window open with my helicopter view of people on the ground as the camera zooms in close to the highways and around buildings, and I can see the facial expressions of all the young angry people. Some are in masks, but more have their masks off, dangling on their chins and around their necks.  I text my son in Nashville when I notice his messenger screen says Active now.  

“Are you still up and watching the news?” I say.

Photo credit: Jeff Schad Imagery

It takes him a while to answer me so I scroll through Instagram while I wait, checking out the stories of friends and colleagues, only to see that every one of them has voiced their outrage on their posts and in their stories. And if I’m being truly honest, one of these posts has paralyzed me with my own discomfort. It’s from one of the more outspoken and brave young colleagues of mine who has dedicated himself to a career in social justice.

And he says this:

My challenge for white people:

Social media posts have been great. Now, let’s continue. I want you to screenshot this and repost with three things (other than social media posts) you are going to do to combat racism. I want a realistic timeline. Then I want you to tag three white friends who will also hold you accountable.

The rioting, the looting, the fires being set, from all the frustrated, daring, reckless and angry protests—all of it— is happening because young black people and their young white allies are mad as hell in our racist country and won’t stand for the injustice any longer. Can I take on his challenge? Will I do it? Do I want to do it? As a privileged and mostly silent white person in America, I’m realizing that everything I don’t do, and everything I don’t say is the problem. I am the problem. Who will hold me accountable?