Have you ever been in a situation where someone said something offensive to you, but you couldn’t think of a great response until at least 2 hours later? Well, this is my response to a couple of “sidewalk peddlers” who have been increasingly aggressive in their tone towards me recently.
“So you don’t care about police brutality?”
The words seep in through my ears and twist around my brain.
My stomach grows heavy as concrete as I turn slowly.
My eyes land on the speaker and I restrain the urge to scream.
She stood there, natural hair in an afro, glasses atop her nose, as if expecting me to smile wide and join her in her fruitless attempt to garner support midday on a progressive Ivy campus. I resisted the urge to cock my head sideways and insult her effort.
I usually ignore the comments (“seasoned” Brooklynite that I am, brushing off the catcalls en route to the subway). But this was different. The situation, my emotional fatigue, her tone. I couldn’t gather the words fast enough, but soon came face to face with her.
If only she knew, I thought! That a black body lying prone, hands up, could have very well been my brother. My father. My student. The person I love simply because the police are threatened by the color of his skin as it glistens in the sun when he reaches for his driver’s license at the traffic stop.
If only she knew that I’ve organized with others at Howard when Trayvon was shot, when all of this came into focus. That I sought the comfort of my mother when Zimmerman was acquitted, and that I’ve been numb ever since. That the killing of black women isn’t the priority right now in this country and that I’ve been dismissed in conversations when I try to assert my right as a woman of color because of the fairness of my skin.
Excuse me for not wanting to donate my money, my mental energy, my exhausted emotional state to your organization. Excuse me for not being ready to address the trauma I face when I hear about yet another civil rights violation. Excuse me for not allowing your anger about standing on the sidewalk in 95 degree weather affect my resolve. Excuse me for not letting your guilt-inducing tactics sway me into wavering on my stance.
So I’m not ready to sit down with you near the end of my lunch break (after I’ve spent all morning creating ways to engage my black and brown students in discourse about their lives and before I scroll through my feed for the umpteenth time, trying the scores of images of black bodies in the street).
Because even though I’m not ready to take the action that might suffice in your eyes, I am in front of my black and brown students day in and out, collecting the strength to look them in the eyes and say that they are worth it. That they matter.
I want them to understand who they are and why their presence in their communities is important. I want them to feel valued and know that their voices can be loud enough to enact change. I want them to see things from another perspective, so hopefully they can understand that we are all more similar than different.
As I waited for the doctor, a small boy went in through the partition with his father. He couldn’t have been older than 4 years old but I distinctly heard the word “
Musings of a Burgeoning Brooklynite 