I think that I am not like other white people. Then I wonder if that’s what all white people think, and if that is the problem itself.

Angry white people, especially white men, and especially in numbers, are terrifying to me. They have the rage of a baby after the first time someone absconded with his binkie, eyes revealing the shock of betrayal, utterly horrified that something so inequitable could occur in this previously just world. Except these are grown white men, who feel cheated by affirmative action, throwing a temper tantrum because they think someone took their rattle. Unlike a tiny human who has not yet developed the neural connections to perceive abstract concepts like social injustice and systematic inequality, they have the cognitive ability, but not the exposure because the world has been easier for them, whether they can see it or admit it or not. They kick and scream and rage about how it’s not fair that a person of color got the job to which they felt entitled; they congregate at Trump rallies. Like hysterical shrieking toddlers, they are utterly blindsided by possibility of inequity in the world, a simple fact that most people of color have experienced and digested before kindergarten.

I’ve seen Boys Don’t Cry.  And I wept, really wept, soul-wrenching, gut-aching, heart-pounding, unstoppable sobbing.  So in a midnight rainstorm this summer, driving from Columbus, OH, to Tupelo, MI, somewhere in northern Mississippi, I stopped to pee on the side of the road instead of venturing into a dimly lit roadside gas station.  I had only seen rural white folks around me for hours. It felt safer.

48 hours later, driving from Tupelo to Columbia, SC, I was approaching Birmingham, AL, and I saw in a car beside me the first black face I’d seen in days. Instantly, subconsciously, consciously, I felt better. I stopped to pee at a gas station.  The cars parked beside me were full of young black people with neck tattoos, gold teeth, low slung pants. There was bullet-proof glass between the cashiers and the patrons. There were loiterers.  I felt safer.

I’ve thought a lot about these two feelings, because they weren’t products of deliberate pondering, but reactive emotions that I observed within myself.  I shared the thoughts with the two sets of sisters and brothers-in-law I was visiting on my journey.  One brother-in-law extended his sympathy and apologized that the world was such that I felt unsafe.  The other brother-in-law was reactive, defensive, insisting that there was no possible way that anyone could feel safer around black people, that it must have been because I was a white woman traveling alone in the dark.  Simultaneously he was convinced that there was no possible way that a queer person could feel unsafe around white people, and also that there was no possible way on this God-given green earth that a white person could feel anything but unsafe around black people.

I gently tried to help him unpack his invisible knapsack, to no avail.  I choked back my anger because I thought that would just throw up a wall which would make both of us deaf to each other.  Tilting his head forward and off to the side, he kept using phrases like “… those… people, you know what I mean… right?”, like he wasn’t a racist as long as the n-word didn’t actually slip from between his pearly whites.  As we talked over beers sitting on their kitchen counters, my sister tossed in lighthearted apologies for him, but nothing overt enough to create conflict. “Oh honey, you don’t mean that.  Would you like another beer?  Tell her about your garden.”  We got nowhere.  I fell asleep watching Jane Elliott videos.

In any given group. I hope to be surrounded by people of many colors, many religions, many backgrounds, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, queers.  Even if we each have widely different, deeply held convictions, I believe, and I think with good reason, that we are more likely to live and let live in peace, to acknowledge and celebrate both our shared humanity and our differences.  I feel safer.

I also feel something that I don’t know how to name, like I’m finding refuge in a place I haven’t earned.