Our family is moving.
In two weeks, we will pack our car and drive east on I-90. Our destination is Philadelphia, where Patrick will start a new job this summer in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our cross-country trip will take us on a very similar route to the one I followed—albeit in the opposite direction—in 1993 when I moved to Seattle. Patrick also moved here that year after attending graduate school in California. We have lived here for twenty-seven years. A lifetime.
A couple of weeks ago, Patrick and I headed out after dinner to drive around downtown Seattle. We wanted to see the city in its current state, a warren of boarded stores and restaurants, shuttered against the virus.
To move cross-country in the middle of a global pandemic, after suffering from the virus, requires not a little bit of tenacity and perhaps a fair dose of stupidity. But it also includes a huge amount of privilege.
We drove down Pike, heading into the retail core peopled with one lone masked couple walking a dog and peeking into store windows stripped of fashion. Heading south on 5th Avenue, we passed dark hotels and cafes. The 5th Avenue theatre proudly advertised the musical Sister Act, a show that at the last minute had been cancelled. On 4th Ave, homeless people wrapped in sleeping bags occupied doorways on every block. The blocks surrounding Pike Place market felt to us like a ghost town.
I said to Patrick that it reminded me of a Seattle out of a dream. If you looked past the empty store windows and ignored the new glass skyscrapers, it had the whiff of the city in 1993. You could almost hear the Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
A few days after our drive, we watched on television as protestors lined those same streets following the murder of George Floyd by a member of the Minneapolis police. An afternoon of peaceful protests transformed into a nighttime of violence. Police cars were burned at an intersection we passed. Store windows we had seen boarded up had been stripped of plywood and smashed. Police used tear gas and flash bangs to chase protesters through block after block, hour after hour. Gone was a bucolic sleepy grunge-era Seattle, and in its place was the city of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests. It was Seattle of a nightmare, not a dream.
To move cross-country in the middle of a global pandemic, after suffering from the virus, requires not a little bit of tenacity and perhaps a fair dose of stupidity. But it also includes a huge amount of privilege. As white men, Patrick and I walk through the world with a great deal of it. That privilege has propelled us through life with economic stability, access to safe neighborhoods and good schools, trust that those who are supposed to keep us safe will see our whiteness first.
We sold our house in one week in a neighborhood that has changed significantly in the last five years we have lived here. We made a good deal of money on the sale. We got tested for Covid-19 almost immediately after exhibiting symptoms, able to rely on excellent health care provided by our employers.
It was also our privilege that allowed us to watch those early protests and wonder about the motives of the looters, willing to believe the narrative that they were from out of town. After all, who in Seattle would want to destroy their own city?
But we can easily turn away. Choose to focus on hotel reservations for our trip. Concern ourselves with packing. Move through our world with privilege that is baked into our bones, that shines through the color of our skin.
We have the ability to walk away. To turn a blind eye. To see what we want to see. The world works for us because of our privilege. We try our best to be aware of it, to interrogate it, to make changes. We work as educators to disrupt the system of institutionalized racism that leave black and brown students disproportionately under served, by design.
But we can easily turn away. Choose to focus on hotel reservations for our trip. Concern ourselves with packing. Move through our world with privilege that is baked into our bones, that shines through the color of our skin. It is, at this moment, an uncomfortable garment. And that’s okay. More white people need to feel uncomfortable.
About a year ago, Patrick and I were driving home through downtown, another trip through Seattle’s crowded, glimmering, city. It was late at night and Seattle Mariners fans were pouring out of the stadium after a baseball game. Police had blocked off several roads around the stadium to aid traffic flow. Our direct path was blocked. We would need to detour.
It was an inconvenience. Patrick rolled the window down and yelled his frustration at the police. He shook his fist. How dare we be so inconvenienced.
After telling the story to some friends, our friend, who is black, stared at us, mouth agape, and shook his head in disbelief. “You did what?”
That is privilege.
We don’t have to worry when we walk into a store that we will be followed and suspected of stealing. It is assumed that we are law-abiding citizens.
If we go for a run or a bike ride or a walk in the park, we don’t have to worry that someone will be threatened by our mere presence and call the cops.
One of our children, who is also white, was treated fairly and appropriately when he acted out during school and was not too severely punished because of the color of his skin.
When we watch television shows and movies, we see characters who look like us and share many of the experiences we have as white people.
We don’t have to pay the accumulated tax of systemic racism that compounds over time, building on itself in horrible dividends of challenge, frustration and anger.
We have walked through this world with the unearned advantage of a privilege that comes by virtue of the color of our skin. The insidious nature of that advantage propelled us for years to be unaware of the vastness of the benefits as well as the ability to retreat to its comfort when addressing it got too uncomfortable and difficult. Levers of power functioned very effectively to support the continuation of our privilege.
We don’t have to pay the accumulated tax of systemic racism that compounds over time, building on itself in horrible dividends of challenge, frustration and anger.
At this moment, our work to change the way we educate our students does not seem enough. The protests do not seem to be enough. It is not enough. The way things are—and the way we move in our world—is not okay.
What is enough? What is a place to start? Recognize the anger, sadness and fear. Listen. Recognize our privilege. Listen some more. Do work to educate ourselves. Challenge and interrogate the privilege. Move forward with empathy.
It’s what we are trying to do right now. It’s not enough. But it’s a start.
We will pack our car and drive away in two weeks’ time. We will drive through an America torn apart by a system of institutionalized racism that daily confers privilege on some and denies it to others. It is also a country that is still reeling from the impact of a deadly and unprecedented pandemic, a health crisis that has disproportionally impacted communities of color and is potentially only going to get worse in the wake of the crowded protests that are attempting to change the systems of power that exacerbate that devastation.
Our privilege allows us to look through the windows of the car and maintain a safe distance from that which may be too uncomfortable, too threatening, too bleak. But it will be there. And we will force ourselves to not turn away.
We will drive to a city where we will continue to work to challenge the systems of power that benefited us when we were students and continue to benefit those who look like us. We will listen, reflect, and do more. We will do better. Our conscience requires that we do better. Our humanity demands it.
Onward.