I most definitely see color.
How do people say they don’t see color? That they don’t see race?
“I DON’T SEE COLOR!” we yell, hoping the words will bounce off of the listener and reverberate back to us, rattling our brains into submission.
In the train I see black people. I see white people. Indian people. Mexicans. Viewing them as disjointed entities, chemicals insoluble with each other. Hierarchies swirling amongst each other. Mingling. Existing next to one another. They don’t mesh but are content in their willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder in this moment — for the future.
Do you really not see color or are you just saying that? Hoping that the louder you say it the truer it will become?
The man with the caked shoes is a Mexican. The woman with a laundry cart is Chinese. There’s a Japanese man looking down his nose into his briefcase.
Stop Erinn. Stop.
My authenticity shifts from normative personal reflection to prescriptive diatribe. Are these my thoughts?
Where does my authenticity begin and end? A cathartic outpouring that starts with dusting off the illusions of the thought I’m already having, bubbling into a guttural scream of “THIS IS WHO I AM! WHO WE ARE!” to a tangential, but in the same passionate purge, “WHO THEY SHOULD BE”. They as in Me,as in “this is what I think”. Am I reaching, wanting to proliferate my reality? Do I really have these thoughts? Beating myself up with a who and a what and why when really — in the moment — is all that there is. The freudian trenches pale to the undiscovered topsoil of the Now.
I see a black woman and I compare her body with mine as a white woman. Her thighs. Her hips. Her ass. Her arms. How the shape of of her body would be worth so much more on a white frame. Shuddering, wondering if its actually true, or I’m just saying that. Using everything I’ve ever been exposed to as a rubric for my logical paradigm. Feeling the division I’m stirring within myself. Countering one wicked thought with a juxtaposing opposite. Not wanting to let this thought linger for fear of germination. Sympathetically, I meet, in the middle.
“It’s true to some, it isn’t to others.” I tell myself. While knowing that a white woman with this same black woman’s body is a supermodel. Could make money off of nothing but her looks. We would know her name. We would follow her on Instagram. A black woman with the same body is a nanny. I know because I’ve seen her. A stripper. I know because I’ve seen her. A lawyer. I know because I’ve seen her. A mother. Shopping in a grocery store, I’ve seen her. Sitting, tired on a train, I’m looking at her.
A dive into racial divisions all the while sexualizing this woman in the way that black women statistically are hyper-sexualized. Her form as a woman gaping the category of sex. Again, a shudder. Guided by my social indoctrination, while simultaneously revolting against it. Reprogramming yourself while working on the system programing. Empowering and denigrating — but — I tell myself, not empowerment in the way we aren’t allowed to say empowerment. The way of saying empowerment that assumes the other to be powerless and I in a position to imbue them with power.
But, if that were not the case, why would we be so sensitive to the word?
Shudder.
Working two steps ahead — rejecting our reality, denying our socially derived knee jerk — we create schisms. The deliberate tear of the present to make the dynamic future grow back together stronger. We won’t always be faking it, we revolt. The violent mangle of the two sides, a division. One reality on one side — the other parallel. Our hyper vigilance in one direction creates hyper-conservatism in the other. An unavoidable bi-product of equal and opposite force. A moment of back and forth chaos before the pendulum settles comfortably in the middle. Willingly, we exist through it.
I see a White man slumped in the seat next to me, head bobbing asleep from the night before. I see his whiteness and I think about his family, his support system. I wonder where they are. What went wrong. I look at different man across from him, this one is black but — sitting in his ilk — situationally the same.
I see his blackness and I think only of the homelessness in front of me. The sadness. The despair. I don’t toss a coin of thought to his family in the way I do with the white man. Never wonder about his support system, his past his future, what went wrong and where. Because, unknowingly, I assume I already know.
I know his history.
I see the white man, and I wonder. I wonder — why is he doing this to himself? I feel his cold fingers and his tired existence, but a moment of heat courses through my displeasure at the sight. I am not sympathetically piqued in the way I am with the black man. None of my dollars crumpling into his slack white palm.
Reverse racism I say. Millennial, I hear. You’re trying too hard. Apologizing for something you benefit from, but had no part in creating.
- No. Shudder.
My disdain for, and confusion towards the white man is a gift to him.A gift that the black man in the same garb doesn’t receive. Anger and confusion a catalyst for action. An assumption of an alternate timeline being reason enough to intervene. The black man, doesn’t receive the telling glance of wonderment, and instead, a heart-wrenching ache of hopelessness. Hopelessness breeds hopelessness. Hopelessness. Hopelessness. Surrender. I care but I don’t think. About the story, about where his family is, what went wrong.
Black bodies on train cars don’t get the same questioning respect of anger, confusion a potential of engendering change into their lives. I know the black man’s story so well I’ve become blind to it. Him bound by it. He is not free to be different on sight, a ruffian individual catalyzed by his own series of events. He’s not the black sheep, because he’s expected to be black. The slumped and tattered white man happened, the slumped and tattered black man was.
The successful black man in a rolled linen suit carrying his head high, his Kindle glow turning his ebony face a lighter shade. I think about how he was raised, how someone cared, how at some point he Became. I feel a stirring, a revolution. An indignant indifference to the glances, whether he’s receiving them or not. Successful white men gripping the rails parallel to their eyes tapping their phones with their headphones on occasionally glancing at the neon position of the Herald Square stop. I don’t feel a revolution within them the way I feel it within the black man.
The successful black man happened, the successful white man was.
The truth behind their individual story doesn’t matter, because the story my impression tells is as true a narrative all its own.
Surprised in failure, unsurprised in success. Unsurprised in failure, surprised in success.
Whether I admit I am seeing it or not, the piquing on the top of my scalp, and at the base of my neck tells a different story. The shoe switching from foot to foot, but we know who wore it best.
Shudder — again.
Revolting against the present.