“What is your preferred pronoun?” That is a standard question now during introductions in many spaces. And that is what they asked my Black, trans classmate on the first day of his internship with a major news network. After stating “he/him,” the air in the room shifted. We often invite people to “speak their truth” but then have no idea how to respond when someone actually does. This was familiar to him. Others around the room continued with introductions trying hard to remember that their assumptions about this person were wrong. He preferred “he,” and they better get it right. At the first break of the morning, a fellow intern who is cisgender and racially assigned white walked over and said, “What was it like to tell your parents? It must have been really difficult.”
People in dominant cultures often cloak our feelings of entitlement to someone’s story in a false premise of care and concern. The reality is that we want someone to recount their pain for our benefit – not theirs. With a story obtained, this young woman can claim she has tried to listen to the painful stories of trans people to absolve herself of guilt, shame, or responsibility the next time she is called transphobic. This is how we are socialized. To believe something exploitative is the right thing to do.
The woman did not know my classmate’s middle name, the street he grew up on, or what his major was in college. She didn’t know his favorite food, what he did the day before, or what train he took that morning to work. Yet, she felt entitled to a casual, succinct account of quite possibly the most traumatic moments of this Black trans man’s life in front of her on the first day they met. “Uhh, yes it was,” he stammered as the young woman took his trauma, her mini-croissant, and walked away — her ally status intact.
Similar interactions around race are happening all over the country right now as non-Black folks scour their Facebook friends and IG feeds for contacts trying to find a Black friend to check in on while seeking an education on “how it really is to be...African-American...Black uhh...BIPOC?” Eyes avoided contact as the news cycle reminded folks who recently returned to cubicles and break rooms all over the country that for 9 minutes George Floyd suffered under the knee of Derek Chauvin a year ago. I wonder how many messages I’ll get this week wanting to know if I think things are better now that more people know about Juneteenth. After all, MLK did say the arc of justice is headed that way, right? And isn’t it always the right thing in a race conversation to reference Dr. King?
These kinds of inquiries are a cry for release from the burden of the knowledge that the everyday lives of every American are animated by White Supremacy. They desire nothing less than the continued possession and exercise of the privilege of bypassing the pain of their neighbors and acquaintances like social potholes on their way to their desired destination. There’s nothing like Black reassurance to set a white heart at ease. All it takes is one comment from someone with brown skin that things are better than they were before, slavery was a long time ago, or that Derek Chauvin is a bad apple.
All of these encounters center not the hurt and hurting but those desperately trying to appear kind and caring. The reality is that they are painfully unacquainted with present and generational violence, suffering, and death. Instead of creating an environment where suffering can be acknowledged and processed, these conversations unwrap wounds and leave them open.
On top of that, the vast majority of these interactions have nothing to do with ending police brutality against Black and Brown people, dismantling institutional racism, or empathizing with the queer experience. These conversations are about absolution. They have to do with saving a country, company, or an individual’s perception of themselves; and their perceived credibility with the oppressed and marginalized. Black forgiveness is like a racist hall pass. Absolution in hand, white people can proclaim their Black friend, that one Black professor on YouTube, or Black commentator on the News “told me I could (insert racist thing).” So, any challenger who might say otherwise, especially another Black pundit, pastor, or professor, is wrong. This is a tragic merry-go-round as minds and bodies that are weary of educating across lines of race, sexuality, class, and complex indifference meet wealth and whiteness concerned primarily with collective self-preservation.
If things are going to be different, we don’t need political correctness, short stints of self-care, or civility. What is necessary is an ability and willingness to center the story of the “other” — to grieve as though it is one’s own body laying in the street, one’s own mother’s stomach that has been kicked, and one’s own child who feels like a stranger in their own body. Beyond sympathy and empathy is compassion — meaning to suffer with someone. And even further is incarnation — where we choose to physically and emotionally inhabit the space of those who are suffering and marginalized. This is what Jesus did. And what we must do if we want to follow Him into the work of liberative reconciliation.