Ex Concessis

Evenings have been beautiful lately, so I’ve been riding my bike at dusk when the temperature is dropping quickly and there aren’t many people out and about. Earlier this week I coasted onto my street to find my neighbors, a married couple, out walking.

I see them often, walking down to our community mailboxes every day to get their mail, chatting amiably with each other, always holding hands. She had hip replacement surgery a while back, and he told me at the time how hard it was for him to be separated from her while she was hospitalized. They were cordial to me three years ago when I moved in, showing me their home (same model as mine) and welcoming me.

When I saw them the other night, they were just heading out, and I was returning home. I was masked. They were not. I stopped about ten feet from them and said hello.

“Kay? Is that you? We don’t recognize people with their masks on.”

“Yep, it’s Kay. How are you two tonight?”

We chatted about the gorgeous sunset, the weather, then the virus. They said they’d be going on vacation in July, flying to Minnesota to visit family.

“We ordered face shields off the internet,” he said. “I hope Southwest lets us wear them.”

I commented that the face shields would be a great extra precaution, but He explained that they wanted to wear them instead of masks. Because masks are “uncomfortable,” and they didn’t want to wear them for the entire six-hour flight.

“So we’re hoping Southwest will allow it,” he went on. “I talked to my son about it today, and he said, Well, if they insist on you wearing the masks, just tell them ‘I can’t breathe.’”

He laughed.

She laughed.

…

…

…

“I’ll let you two get on with your walk,” I said. I pulled my bike up onto the porch and slipped quietly into the house.

This is what I want to stop doing.

Because, make no mistake, my dear white friends, when we are faced with racial discrimination on any level and we choose to say nothing, we are complicit.

When we say nothing, we are complicit.

Many of my white friends are earnestly, sincerely, genuinely wanting to “do things differently,” wanting to “be an ally,” and I am deeply grateful for that. If that’s you, then okay, here’s the deal:

Let’s agree to stop being complicit.

As the privileged majority in this country, this is what we know: That white folks will say things to other white folks with this assumption: ‘We all agree on this, right?’

No. No, we certainly do not.

Look, I’m not trying to say my sweet neighbors are racists. I am saying that, at the very least, his remark—which mocks a dying man’s last words—was racially insensitive, and my point is, I should have said something. Not to be confrontational or combative or an angry ass about it, but just to gently make them aware that making a joke out of a man’s tragic death says something about them and that something is not flattering.

In my younger years, I was angry and abrasive all the time, and I had zero tolerance for racist chatter. Back then, I thought nothing of getting in someone’s face and expressing exactly what I thought. But I’ve softened in my older years as I try harder to be a kinder, gentler version of my early self. And that has caused me to silence myself in situations such as the one described above.

I don’t want to do that anymore. My friends, we can’t do that anymore. Giving others a free pass to mock or demean persons of color makes us complicit in their racism. Those who do so have been emboldened by our silence—because we didn’t want to make a conversation tense or awkward or uncomfortable.

Let’s not allow those folks to be comfortable anymore. We do not all have to carry signs and march in protest (although if you’ve never done it, I highly recommend it, as it is an excellent curative for the soul, to say nothing of its power to spark a fire). Our voices have power. The more we speak up and speak out, the more uncomfortable certain folks will become. Maybe it won’t change them, but it will certainly put them on notice that such talk will be tolerated no longer.