Books — A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

 A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing

David Mura, The University of Georgia Press (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Mura’s website here.

One of the thorniest issues in teaching creative writing, particularly from my position relative to the issue, is exploring how best to create and write about characters of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds than the author.

This is particularly difficult for young white writers who are likely just coming to terms—if they have found those terms at all—with the way their racial designation acts as a pass-through rather than definitional label. This positioning of whiteness as the baseline for cultural expectations often creates assumptions about others’ race and identity that are prone to flattening and stereotyping. And that’s if they acknowledge those other groups at all.  

This is why David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey is such a powerful resource. It explores these issues in direct but applicable ways, identifying issues that cause such assumptive thinking, the barriers to identifying them in ourselves, practicable ways writers can improve, and all while holding writers accountable for engaging this work as diligently as they study elements of craft and voice.

“...[A]s long as white writers unconsciously assume whiteness and the whiteness of their characters as the universal default, both as a literary technique and as an approach to the world, they will almost always fail when they attempt to portray people of color, whether in fiction or in nonfiction” (34).

To delve into this unconscious assumption, Mura cites a raft of writers and thinkers on the subject, compares in parallel the efforts of various writers to convey issues of race and identity, and describes his own process in examinations of writing he has done. And in the process, the work he does with the sources he connects offer a fantastic set of resources readers can mine as they continue exploring perspectives that de-center whiteness.

The effect of the whole—which rests on the author’s ability to move between the registers of writer, educator, and theorist—is truly impressive and allows Mura to dispense hard truths without shutting down the potential for writers to commit to doing the work and growing more competent with their representations of people from other backgrounds and life experiences.

“I am not saying authors can’t cross racial boundaries and write about characters not of their own race. But one can do this in a way that falsifies, simplifies, and fails to portray the complexities of a character of another race—or one can do this in a way that does justice to the reality of that character, that acknowledges the character is complexity and the full nature of his or her reality and experience” (33).

In all, A Stranger’s Journey offers a needed and immanently accessible guide for writers to starting the process of deconstructing our racial assumptions and blind spots for the sake of rebuilding ourselves as better storytellers and people in general.   

Injuries, Meaning, and Grafted Essays

If trying to understand our lives is this cloud, the hole where the light shines through is so often opened up by the injuries we experience along the way.

This the fourth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

As a writer, I find myself pulled between writing multi-voiced fictional stories and multi-concept literary essays. Another way to put it: I don’t make it easy on myself and writing is already difficult enough. 

But I am drawn to the narratives found in the spaces between people’s varied accounts of the same events or ideas. I also love when I find connection where there should be disjunction. Maybe it feels like meaning when there shouldn’t be any. Maybe that’s just faith found in another form.

Anyway, one of my creative projects over the sabbatical was planning a series of pieces I’m calling grafted essays that bring together injuries I’ve had over the years and a seemingly disconnected topic or concept. This form has been working its way to the surface of my aesthetic for a while now, as can be seen in this essay I wrote about a terrifying medical moment in my dad’s life and the way it intersected with a realization about my own role as a father.

The challenge of each of these pieces is connecting the reader with the ways in which my view of life is so often bound up in how I’ve been hurt…something I think is fundamentally true for all of us.

This work has been, surprisingly, enjoyable despite that fact that I am dredging up some physically painful experiences and casting a very wide net in looking for complimentary ideas that feel estranged from my personal stories while remaining connected in relevant ways in my head.

That last part is as confusing while I’m working as it was when you read it.

But the process has opened up some perspectives into how much I’m still carrying the injuries I thought I had walked off and how centrally my systems for making sense of the world run through the less-than-conscious remnants of those pains. This was the through line of an essay I wrote about the relative difference in thinking about my own childhood injuries and those of my children, which found a home at Punctuate Magazine.

So, I’ve been spending time in the middle of my most painful moments. The night I tore my ACL and the afternoon it was my hamstring. My bouts of depression and my more than 30 years of regular periods of severe insomnia. Losing my singing voice permanently at 19—which subsequently found print life in The Jabberwock Review—and greeting my 40s with a heart scare.

All of these bear on the way I see the world and move through it on a daily basis. The remnants of my pains—small and large, physical and psychic—are often the glass between me and my experiences, generally transparent but definitely impacting how I see what I think I’m looking at. And sometimes, the most surprising thoughts come when I take the time to look at the window rather than the view. 

Sometimes you have to see the dirt before you know what needs to be cleaned, and there’s nothing like writing to highlight where to starting scrubbing.  

Books — Heavy

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Heavy

Kiese Laymon, Scribner (2018)

Find this book here. Check out Laymon’s website here.

I spend my time—writing, reading, and teaching—moving between the ways we consider some stories true and some invention, most often left in the uncomfortable in-between where neither of those descriptors fit because they both apply.

This is likely why Kiese Laymon’s Heavy was such a powerful read when I encountered it. Laymon lays bare his life in a stunning fashion, wrestling with the truths and fictions of growing up Black and male and large in America. Constructed, in some ways, as a letter to his mother, the author frames the entire work in the midst of that contested space, as can be seen in the last lines of the introductory chapter. 

“I wanted to write a lie.

You wanted to read that lie.

I wrote this to you instead” (10).

The constant metaphor of the book is weight: physical, spiritual, emotional, and cultural. Sometimes those burdens were visible and others so embedded in his experiences it took years to identify all the ways he’d been carrying them. In some instances they led to stark truth, while in others they birthed inventions required to survive, even as those inventions ate away at him.

Truly, this is a stunning work that lays bare the effort required to endure the shadowy spaces where we either make our stories concrete truth in order to preserve a fundamentalist’s certainty of our self-perception or shade our truths with self-preserving fictions because the rawest parts of ourselves are most difficult to look at.

Resisting both of those impulses, though, is exactly central to Laymon’s efforts in writing Heavy and the dominant preoccupation I carried throughout my reading of his work.

“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require a vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory” (86). 

This is the benefit of a work like Heavy. It holds us in a posture of attention, both to the weight Laymon carries and our own burdens. But, if we’re attentive and willing, it also forces us to consider the ways we may have weighed on others, intentionally or not. And that is work we all must do.

You mean I HAVE to go to San Diego for research?

As far as locations that need to be studied go, the hometown is not half bad.

This the third installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

A lot of the work that I was able to accomplish toward my novel was doing extended research on a number of subjects I needed to have pulled together in my mind in order to finally push the story (and the stories that make it up) forward. 

Sometime about halfway through May, a friend asked me what I was spending my time learning about and after I listed several of the subjects in my browser tabs and the books I’d read, she looked at me like I was spouting gibberish. I stopped and thought about it outside of the context of my novel and had to laugh.

My research for the novel includes delving into:

·      Postal network art;

·      Suicide as performance art;

·      Podcast production;

·      Terminology connected with the creation of eight separate forms of art;

·      Security procedures at a decommissioned nuclear reactor;

·      Military supply clerking norms and duties;

·      Portable barricade technology;

·      Police investigative procedure;

·      The history of the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego;

·      Ray Johnson;

·      The relative differences between various forms of suicide bombs;

·      Remittances;

·      Marine recruitment procedures;

·      Crime scene photography;

·      Currency markets and trading;

·      About 30 other topics…

This doesn’t include the trips I took to San Diego so I could walk routes and take pictures of where the characters in my story exist in the moments I depict them. Add to this the overlay of the cultural, spiritual, moral, and regional frameworks of it all as my characters range from a day trader to a high school dropout-turned Marine recruit to a journalist just to name a few. To say there are a lot of moving parts in my head would be a massive understatement.  

A key location in my manuscript, in reflection.

Part of a Hillcrest mural that made it onto the page in a later draft.

To combat the near-constant sense of overwhelmedness I felt, I started charting and mapping my storylines, trying to figure out where all of this was taking me. As you can see in the pictures included with this post, even exerting that level of external on it all left a lot to deal with.

With 12 separate first-person perspectives and a shared narrative that absents it’s central figure, some of those charts got complicated pretty quickly.

An early map of the neighborhood where most of the story takes place. Sure, I could have used Maps and dropped pins in various locations. Sure, most of these details have changed. Sure, this is evidence of why I’m not a visual artist. But I wanted a sense of co-creation in these notes.

Graphing paper was really helpful in picturing the exact size and spacing of an important location in the story. This is one of 24 charts of the space I made.

But this work also began to clarify matters I hadn’t been able to get at before. And while I can’t claim I see it all yet, I can see where I’m headed…at least until the next unexpected divergence in the road…

From one of my walking tours of the neighborhood, this seemed like the cliched thing to do.

Books — An American Marriage

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

An American Marriage

Tayari Jones, Algonquin Books (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Jones’s website here.

There is a moment early in An American Marriage that frames the entire tragedy of this great novel.

Roy Hamilton, one of the book’s three main characters, has been accused of raping a woman at a motel near his small hometown. Celestial, his wife, knows he could not have committed the crime as they were together in their own room when it happened.

At Roy’s trial, she is called as an eyewitness for the defense and testifies to this effect. Regardless of this, Roy is convicted despite the fact that there is no physical evidence he committed the crime and an eyewitness who could vouch for where he was when the crime occurred.

But none of this truth matters in the opinion of the jury. Reflecting back on the trial, Celestial remembers the moment this way:

“What I know is this: they didn’t believe me. Twelve people and not one of them took me at my word….Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him” (38).

This is the power of An American Marriage, the story of three lives torn apart by the pervasive racial bias and violence against black bodies perpetrated by the American legal system. By all accounts, Roy should have been found innocent and returned to his life of middle class striving in Atlanta.

But, because he is black, the presumption of his guilt supersedes any advantages he may have had and he is sentenced to 12 years in prison. Torn apart, their marriage strains more and more at the seams until Celestial forms a new relationship with her childhood friend Andre (who introduced her to Roy), and all three are forced to weather various ways America is still constructed to destroy black families.

Against this backdrop and in a shared narrative between these three voices, Jones weaves a masterwork of fear and longing and strength and failure. I could spend an entire post on the way she merges a traditional novel format with the epistolary mode of storytelling and a multi-voiced construction so seamlessly and with singular power.

But what I am more interested in here is the way in which the setting of this novel is a mute but never voiceless fourth main character. The world is a force bent on the destruction of relationships, forcing Roy, Celestial, and Andre to bear up under its constant, crushing weight.

Their efforts are imperfect and the ending is anything but neat as Roy is released and tries to reconcile with Celestial—the hope of which kept him alive in prison—only to discover she and Andre have grown together in his absence. But they are real humans in the face of great inhumanities.

The fact that they survive is a testament to their strength. The fact that they have to is a testament to our great weakness as a society.       

This novel is an open question regarding whether or not we will ever look long enough at the stories that could show us how badly we need to change.

A novel concept that needs to be a novel

This the second installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

One of many charts and diagrams I’ve created over the years trying to get an handle on this novel.

The whole point of my sabbatical, on paper anyway, was completing a novel that has been eluding me for close to eight years now. The problem: the sabbatical application that goal was written down on committed me to actually finishing the thing.

About that…

I first had the idea for the story when I was teaching in San Diego. It’s sprawling and complicated.

• Twelve independent voices collectively telling the story without the main character every getting her own chance to do so. 

• A major incident around which the entire story is built, but that never gets expressed directly on the page.

• A secondary story that may or may not draw all the threads—material and metaphysical—together as a coherent singular.

• The small question of why bad things happen and whether or not that is even a possible outcome in asking questions about those bad things in the first place.

• And doing justice to my hometown that is so often invisible on the literary landscape.

No pressure. But I had six months and a mandate…yeah…no pressure at all.

And in the end, is it done? Of course not. It’s drafted, mostly, and the rest of the stories that aren’t quite there are in process. I think it might actually happen if the sprint that is teaching my classes doesn’t completely derail my progress…which it might. *Narrator’s Voice* It did indeed derail that progress.

I needed the sabbatical because of that barrier in the first place. The problem, though, was that other barriers, good and bad, sprang up in my time away and I’m not where I wanted to be on the story. It’s not ready for others to read what I’ve come up with so I can refine it and get serious about looking for a publisher.

But I’m close. Closer than I’ve ever been with this story. I have hope. Maybe that was the best possible outcome of the sabbatical because before I took it, I was starting to lose any sense of every getting this book done. 

Or the three other ideas I have behind it.    

Or so the song goes.

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash

My essay, “On small towns, protests, and backs turned…” relies heavily on lyrics from nine songs that punctuate the end of each of its sections. Some are ironic, some directly connected, but all coalesce around a particular thread in my thinking.

All of these songs end up—intentionally or unintentionally—focused on the divides between us.

What we don’t do about those divisions might just be our defining characteristic as a nation.

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“Devil Inside” by INXS

"Devil Inside" is the 2nd single from INXS 6th album "Kick". ------- Subscribe for more INXS: http://bit.ly/subscribe-to-inxs Facebook: https://www.facebook....

“Small Town” by John Mellencamp

Music video by John Mellencamp performing Small Town. (C) 1985 John Mellencamp under exclusive license to the Island Def Jam Music Group #JohnMellencamp #Sma...

“For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield

There's something happening here What it is ain't exactly clear There's a man with a gun over there Telling me I got to beware I think it's time we stop, chi...

“Hell You Talmbout” by Janelle Monae and Wondaland Records

Janelle Monae and the entire Wondaland records family perform her socially conscious song "Hell You Talmbout" live at the kickoff night of the Eephus Tour at...

“Silence” by PJ Harvey

Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group Silence · PJ Harvey White Chalk ℗ 2007 Universal Island Records Ltd. A Universal Music Company. Released on: 200...

“Biko” by Peter Gabriel

'Biko' is taken from Peter's third self-titled solo album. Video directed by Lol Creme. Follow Peter Gabriel on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7C4s...

“Know Your Rights” by The Clash

“Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie

You can support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/QueenHouse85 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/queenhouse85/ Facbook: https://www.facebook.com/Quee...

“Behind the Wall” by Tracy Chapman

Provided to YouTube by Elektra Records Behind the Wall · Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman ℗ 1988 Elektra/Asylum Records for the United States and WEA Internationa...

Books — I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Still Made for Whiteness

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Still Made for Whiteness

Austin Channing Brown, Convergent Books (2018) 

Find the book here. Visit Brown’s website here. And check out her show The Next Question here.

Before I read I’m Still Here, I caught an interview with author Austin Channing Brown on the Seminary Dropout podcast that opened with her recounting how her parents named her Austin as a way of preventing people from responding to her out of their prejudices before they’d actually met her.

This, of course, collapsed for her when a librarian looked at her name on a library card and said it couldn’t be hers. And there it was: regardless of how Black people attempt to engage or adopt dominant, normalized notions of white culture, they end up excluded because that is the nature of white supremacy.

Sadly, as Brown’s book describes in various settings, this is exactly the way that Evangelical organizations end up treating Black people who have been invited in, ostensibly, to address the very issue of lacking diversity. This sad irony is distilled in the following passage: 

In this way whiteness reveals its true desire for people of color. Whiteness wants us to be empty, malleable, so that it can shape Blackness into whatever is necessary for the white organization’s own success. It sees potential, possibility, a future where Black people could share some of the benefits of whiteness if only we try hard enough to mimic it….Rare is the ministry praying that they would be worthy of the giftedness of Black minds and hearts (79). 

This insight, in my opinion, is critical both in Brown’s decision to stop playing the diversity game by rules that maintain the status quo and for reshaping the issue for those of us who may not understand how our choices are exactly what keep those rules in place in the first place.

The starkest racial divides often exist in spaces so deeply ingrained in the systems and thinking operating so seamlessly in white culture that they’ve been rendered invisible. They manifest only in the erasure of Black people.

By nature, this erasure of others also sweeps away the very traces of its existence in the eyes of those who benefit from it. This requires marginalized people to choose: do they continue to conform or do they resist in an attempt to be rendered visible despite all the potential costs that come with that resistance?

I’m Still Here, then, is the story of Brown’s path to claiming her own space by stepping outside environments that made her have to ask to be seen in the first place. It’s also her moment of pivoting away from trying to create messages for a predominantly white audience who aren’t listening in ways that enable hearing they’re being told.

That makes this a book a service and gift to white readers Brown was not obligated to provide us. To read it as anything else is a vestige of a power structure that demands every message must protect the sensibilities of a group that actually needs to see and feel the pain we cause others—as much as it is possible for us to do so—in order to understand our need to change.

Note: This book made the New York Times Bestseller List this week, and rightfully so.

“So you got want you wanted…”

At the beginning of my sabbatical, I laid out this daily calendar and filled my days with plans for what would do. Let’s just say that was a touch optimistic.

This the first installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

Traditionally, academics are eligible for sabbaticals every seven years or so. The practice, ostensibly, is to set aside a time for scholars to renew their studies, pursue projects that teaching does not allow them to focus on solely, and to recharge for their work in the classroom.

Put another way, it’s not a vacation. It’s a time for the work that’s usually fit in around the edges of the myriad shifting commitments be teaching and facilitating the business of the academy.

It’s also a phenomenal opportunity to choose what you want to work on along with how and when you will do that work. It is, as I said when I received my confirmation letter, the Golden Ticket. Truly, it’s something most writers never get and not a privilege I take lightly.

Which means it’s also a lot of pressure.

When I applied for the time away, I said I wanted to finish a novel that has been eluding me for eight years. I was also “encouraged” to complete an academic task of creating an annotated bibliography regarding literacies in digital literature, a field I find myself increasingly working within.

Spoiler alert: neither of those projects is done.

Double spoiler: I’m totally fine with that, even with the fact that the bibliography will likely never be done at all.

Completion just wasn’t the theme of my sabbatical, even as I completed a ton of work. Wrote more than 100,000 words and finally—maybe—figured out that novel.

No, the point of my solo hike through my own interests was to see just how estranged I’d become from what matters to me in the day-to-day of my teaching. When I slowed down and looked around, I realized I wasn’t doing what makes me a better than decent instructor. I wasn’t doing.

This isn’t to say that the lack of total progress didn’t (or doesn’t) bother me at all. I actually had to wait closer to nine years for my first chance at sabbatical, so I felt extra pressure to perform, feelings exacerbated by my Type-A tendencies toward workaholism.

Factor in some bouts of depression and a number of unplanned but unexpectedly great projects landing in my lap over that time and there was a lot of being forced to adjust my expectations, not just for what I would accomplish on sabbatical, but in how I need to live now that I’m back. How I need to appreciate what I do complete. What I need to cut loose from my perceived load of responsibilities.

That last part is a work in progress, but the change is set in me, and I believe that is for the best.

The following series of posts, then, is an accounting of the specifics of that season—delayed six months by the trivial matter of a global pandemic—and the changes it created. It’s not a justification, though. I’ve done enough of that in my life.

Like everything else I’m interested in, it’s a story and one that needs telling, if only for my own clarity and to serve as a reminder that I’ll be doing this thing differently from here on out. 

On small towns, protests, and backs turned

Photo by TVBEATS on Unsplash

“If you see something, say something.”

Simple, right?

Injustice? Call it out. Violence? Don’t stand by silently. Danger? Let people know.

But what if the people you tell refuse to listen or believe you? Worse, what if they erase your warnings and then use the fact that you spoke out against you?

If this seems hypothetical for you, there’s a good chance you’ve got advantages others don’t. If this sounds like an impossibility, I’d call that way of thinking snow blind.  

“Words are weapons, sharper than knives. Makes you wonder how the other half died.” Or so the song goes…(1)

* 

I live in a town built on the illusion of its smallness. But in ways that matter most, the smallest elements of this place are likely its most dangerous.

Thirty miles from Downtown Los Angeles, it is—at least part of it is—an island of sorts. Trees trimmed like gum drops line an “Uptown” shopping district yearning to exist fully in the 1950’s of its buildings’ façades. Local parades and wine walks and youth sports are the height of social life here. People drop the word “community” like it’s synonymous with the town’s civic temperament.

The city’s marketing tagline, of course, is “The Pride of the Foothills.”

That term pride, though, is not so simple as the Mayberry dreams of the people living in the overpriced homes in the city’s northeast corner. Then again, most people invested in White pride, including the ones who live here, would love nothing more than a return to a past where overt racism was a community value.

“No I cannot forget where it is that I come from. I cannot forget the people who love me. Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town, and people let me be just what I want to be.” Or so the song goes…(2)

*

The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were seismic, splitting open the greatest civil unrest of my lifetime like the fault lines in California’s foundations. Conversations surrounding police brutality and the drastic imbalance of violence directed at Black and brown bodies have become a violent referendum on what it means to value and protect life in America.

It’s also returned us to some familiar—if completely ineffective and bloody—scripts we’ve run so many times before. Violence imposed by the state. Resistance and protest built on anger about that violence and the fear it will only get worse. Power structures frame protests as dangerous to “good Americans” and center property damage at the expense of human loss. That framing is used to justify more violence in service of returning “order” to the streets where people are pleading for peace.

Curfews imposed. Tear gas and rubber bullets fired at people. Batons and fists provide punctuation. Pain and blood and brutality drive home the point.

There are reasons these protests are happening.

The tremors shaking the nation reached our “little” town in the form of a march in protest of police violence and racism, culminating in a brief collective moment of silence and grieving on the lawn in front of City Hall. It was, from beginning to end, completely non-violent and very powerful. None of the looting and damage locals wrung their hands about across fences and on social media in the run up to the event became a reality.

But it did draw out like a magnet several overt White supremacists who live in the city.

Their presence began small. The raised-truck set leaned on their horns as they drove through the intersection where we gathered before the march so we’d definitely notice them. Rolling down their windows, several called us losers before shouting the ever original “Go home ________!” You can fill in that blank with idiots, shitheads, assholes, or Commies because they did.

But there were far more honks and fists raised in support than these drive-by shootings off at the mouth and soon enough we marched east toward Uptown.

Ten minutes later, I noticed a small white Dodge pickup circling around our route to get in more verbal shots at protestors. Over the top of his camper shell, Trump 2020 and Gadsden flags flapped in the breeze, as if we needed the reinforcement regarding his political leanings.

On his fourth pass, he slowed to a crawl near me and my kids, screaming “Fucking, sheep!” hard enough spit flew from his mouth. Our masks and the social distance likely protected us from that, but there’s no PPE designed to defend against the look in his eyes. 

“Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid. You step out of line, the man come and take you away.” Or so the song goes…(3)

*

A few years earlier, my daughter’s 13th birthday party ended up at a park just about a block over from City Hall for a water gun fight. We’d intended to get there well before sundown so we’d be done before dark, but one thing led to another and we weren’t able to start until the pink smear in the western sky had faded enough to brighten the yellow sodium streetlights.

Before turning the kids loose to soak each other, I had a very abbreviated but pointed version of The Talk with them all. Most of the kids at the party were white and listened with a confused tilt of the head. None of what I was cautioning them about seemed plausible. Catching the looks they were giving me, I ended with the following summation.

“Look, if you see the police pull into the area, just drop your guns and stop running.”

“But why?” one boy asked. “We’re just playing.”

The video of 12-year-old Tamir Rice being gunned down by a police officer while “just playing” in a park looped in my head as I considered how to answer in a way that was clear but didn’t rob the evening of its fun.  

“The reality is that police don’t look at my daughter the way they look at you. So, if you keep playing, it makes it unsafe for her.”

He looked at me for a few seconds then shrugged and ran off to join in the game. And that’s all it amounted to: a group of kids running and screaming and trying to get each other wet until we told them it was time to head home for cake. That’s all it ever should be.

A postscript to this: that same kid’s Instagram account later became an intersection of MAGA and pro-gun rights posts and I really wish he’d just stop playing.

“Sandra Bland, say her name. Sandra Bland, Say her name. Sandra Bland, say her name. Sandra Bland, won’t you say her name?” Or so the song goes…(4)

*

Police officers called in from four different neighboring city’s departments along with the locals lined City Hall’s lawn, all watching us walk by intently. One threw a thumbs-up in our direction, for what I’m not sure. A couple directed traffic at the intersection we needed to pass through.

For scale, there were likely around 100 of us marching that day.

Before the rally on the lawn, we continued straight into the Uptown for a lap in front of the local businesses. There the sidewalks were lined with locals, most with phones out to record the moment. As we passed a group of white guys about my age standing in the plaza, one looked at my younger son’s sign—it read “End Black Discrimination” in his own handwriting—and shook his head.

“Now that’s a damn shame,” he said to my boy before looking me in the eye. I gave him the old North County San Diego up-nod reserved for people who need to check themselves and pulled my son closer to me.

On our return trip down the other side of the street, another man ran his camera over the protestors before turning to the group on the other side who’d just tried to intimidate my son and, in a scene straight out of something I’d never make up in my fiction, threw a Nazi salute to his friends.

In the middle of our “small town.” In the middle of 2020 and all that’s happening in America.

What stood out the most? Only protestors did anything about it. Not a word from the folks in our “community.” I wonder if they understand that their silence is agreement.

I’m afraid they do.

“I go to these places intending to think, and think of nothing, but anticipate. And somehow, expect you'll find me there, that, by some miracle, you'd be aware.” Or so the song goes…(5)

*

The day after the protest, black squares flooded social media as people tried, imperfectly but visibly, to show digital solidarity with the Black Lives Matters movement. Videos of protestors being kicked while kneeling, shot with rubber bullets or tear gas canisters, and driven into by police cruisers continued to flow online as well.

In response, other voices returned.

“Rioters.” “Looters.” “Thugs.” “Dangerous.” “Destructive.” “Enemies.”

And these just from the man who currently puts the white in White House. The same guy just fine with teargassing protestors for a photo op in front of a church he never attends holding a book he has no desire to understand, let alone be impacted by.

This matters because, like clockwork, his words are picked up and amplified by people more concerned with losing property than lives, in many cases because losing the second at the hands of the police does not feel possible but they are sure the first is going to happen to them.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why they can’t imagine this kind of death for themselves or how that lack of imagination is a primary reason people have taken to the streets in the middle of a pandemic to demand they try harder.

But figuring it out and understanding are two very different things.

“You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire. Once the flames begin to catch, the wind will blow it higher.” Or so the song goes…(6)

*

More than two hours after the rally broke up, I drove by and found the intersection near City Hall filled with police officers and the streets shut down in all directions around them. I parked, walked over to see what was happening, and it immediately hit me:

Every single officer was facing a small group of protestors standing on the sidewalk on one corner of the intersection. All. Of. Them.

At the same moment directly across the street, Nazi Salute Guy and a few of his group were chanting “White lives matter” and “Get out of our town.” To drive their salient political points home, several made lewd gestures at protestors.

Yet the police paid them no mind. Not even a token amount.

I’ve thought a lot about the backs of those officers, many of whom came from other communities and wore riot gear even though there had been literally no violence or property damage or any of the other riot straw men people build with the raw material of their fear and prejudice.

Turning their backs to that side of the street means they not only felt no threat from the group of loud white men and their loud white prejudice, but that it was familiar to them. When the same group threatened protestors with “We back up our police,” the word that came across loudest was “our.”

“Our police.” “Our town.” “Our community.” “Our lives matter.”  

I expect these sentiments of ownership from people accustomed to seeing the world as inherently theirs, even as I detest the reality of those ideas and the impact they have on the marginalized. This is what the world has taught these men and what they have come to see as an article of faith.

A faith confirmed wholly by the backs those officers offered them. 

Consider, then, what articles of faith are confirmed in the hearts of those who saw the eyes of the same police as the men at their backs chanted and threatened and hid behind the façade of free speech those “public servants” have become.

Their servants. 

“Number three: You have the right to free speech as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it. Know your rights. These are your rights.” Or so the song goes…(7)

*

The day after the protest, my daughter was actively out celebrating Black excellence. The cognitive dissonance of it all, I can only imagine, must be exhausting.

But she’s the president of the Black Student Union at her high school and had worked determinedly with her leadership team to make sure their group’s graduating seniors didn’t lose one of the traditions they all look forward to: being presented a Kente cloth stole they would normally wear in their graduation ceremony.

It bears taking a moment to remember here that this is a season of loss on top of loss. The end of high school erased by one pandemic. The season to celebrate their accomplishments stolen by another.

Which is why she and her friends made sure they got their stoles, masking up and moving from house to house to present them as the symbol of success they are. It was a joyous event where those seniors were seen and celebrated and shown that their lives matter in the midst of it all.

This is exactly how community should respond to loss and I couldn’t be prouder of her for working so hard to give them that affirmation.

One day later, she spotted a young man standing near the back of the White Guys Matter crew in a video of the scene in the intersection posted on Twitter. A guy she went to middle school with. A guy who lives in our part of town. He was smiling and filming as a single protestor crossed the street to respond to the group’s loud provocations.

A side note on feeling safe: none of those men wore masks. What this means about their self-assuredness regarding viruses or being identified with racism I’ll leave up to you to interpret.

There’s not enough footage of the young man in the video to determine whether he agrees with the guys he’s filming or was just caught up in the moment. It doesn’t matter. He’s now unsafe for my daughter because if she can’t tell where someone stands, she can’t trust them.

Joy and pain and always at once. 

“Turned away from it all like a blind man. Sat on a fence but it don't work. Keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn. Why, why, why?” Or so the song goes…(8)

* 

Some will say what we experienced here, in our town, was a small issue, a mere aberration when compared to the unrest playing out on the streets of communities across the country. I can hear it now.

There really weren’t that many thin blue swastika types out there.

They were inappropriate, but it was just words.

They didn’t actually do anything violent.

They don’t represent the values of our community.

But this is exactly the problem. It is exactly the small thinking of “small” towns that stunts imagination to the point where White anger and fear are assumed as evidence of Truth and Logic while real suffering is dismissed out of hand and pushed out of sight because looking at it would disrupt that “truth” and “logic.” Our silence in the face of the racism perpetuated by people who look like us—more than the violence of those loudest voices—is what prevents the change we need.

One thing is sure. Pride in “our” community comes at a cost and the most vulnerable among us are so often the ones forced to pay that bill.     

“Last night I heard the screaming, then a silence that chilled my soul. I prayed that I was dreaming when I saw the ambulance in the road. And the policeman said, ‘I'm here to keep the peace. Will the crowd disperse? I think we all could use some sleep.’” Or so the song goes.(9)

1. “Devil Inside” INXS

2. “Small Town” by John Mellencamp

3.  “For What It’s Worth” Buffalo Springfield

4.  “Hell You Talmbout” Janelle Monae and Wondaland Records

5. “Silence” by PJ Harvey

6. “Biko” by Peter Gabriel

7. “Know Your Rights” by The Clash

8. “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie

9.  “Behind the Wall” by Tracy Chapman