Blackout Tuesday played-out like a full-on anxiety attack for whites.
Nobody seemed to know if they were posting the image correctly or not, and few of us had any black friends we felt secure enough to ask, so soon enough sincere white people were scolding other, equally sincere white people, about proper rule compliance and how to be the best ally. In short order a chaotic neurosis—of the type only social media seems capable of generating– had encircled us. It was so predictable it was almost funny, but it wasn’t funny. It was paralyzing.
Everybody scared of doing something wrong.
It sometimes feels very difficult– particularly if you feel that the enemy looks like you–to know how to help. Everybody is already so furious, and a misstep isn’t just easy, it’s inevitable. It can feel like the right thing to do is simply remove yourself from the discourse.
I will be quiet.
Let others speak.
Let others act.
But what the hell does that actually mean?
How can we not act?
People we know and love are in pain.
Of that we can be as certain as the wind.
And this ignored pain, so easy to keep at an abstract distance, is felt so deeply that those outside of its radioactive fallout can only imagine what it might be like. How ever-present and dangerous and demoralizingly predictable this racism is. It must be heavy and all encompassing, a kind of humidity that lives even in the lungs. And this, for generation after generation after generation. And people, always the people who just don’t even see it. Sweet Jesus, it must be infuriating.
And so I am learning that we simply cannot “opt out” of the pain of others. Pain is the enemy in the here and now, and we have to do as much as we can within each day, to eliminate it. I am sure that this will be harder than I can possibly imagine, but it lies in front of me, in front of all of us, and it is in that direction from which our better angels call.