I Had To Learn To Live.
I knew that many of my former friends wouldn’t “like” a political post on my page. I understood it when I posted previously and those posts went unliked until I finally took them down. I watched people I once loved and adored rail against me, stunned that I would find the U.S.’s new narcissistic leader to be … unappealing. And, stunned in return, I wondered how I could ever have loved or respected those people.
Yet this time, I couldn’t take down the post just because it went unliked. I recognized something this time that I hadn’t recognized before. I thought: this matters. This matters. This matters. This matters. This is not something that I can “take down.” It’s not going to go away. Renee Good is dead; she’s not coming back. Her dogs and her children will wonder forever why their family was shattered.
I use her name because I know there will be others, and my post is not dated. I know there will be others.
But tonight I have a new former friend. This time it’s a man with whom I felt a kindred connection, not in life but on Facebook. I’d believed he was a like-minded soul, who wanted peace above all else – who loved animals and nature, who loved people and wanted nothing more than to be loved himself as he gave and gave to the world around him.
I’m not sure where I got this impression. Perhaps I just misread all the posts where he talked about the glory of the natural world.
Tonight, I see for the first time what drives this man. Like those around him, he believes he hasn’t gotten enough because he hasn’t gotten enough. Tonight he said he’d like to “see” his supposed white privilege, the thing with which he was born and raised. He has seen “no freebies,” he said. He’d worked hard his entire life, he said, and even when he was on unemployment he wasn’t eligible for food stamps.
Huh?
So what he said was … he has worked hard and hasn’t made a lot of money. When he couldn’t work, for whatever reason, he didn’t get anything from the government. And because of that, he can’t imagine how or why he was seen as “privileged.”
In other words, he wanted more money than he got by being the manager of a grocery store and a bus driver. I’m pretty sure most people would be happy to have jobs like that, would be able to make do, and people who are NOT WHITE would be doubly thrilled. But the term “white privilege” has nothing to do with work. It has everything to do with perception, with the opportunities white people get that are not offered or even available, ever, to people who are not white.
But he has lived in Pittsburgh his entire life. He has lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, watched as the steel mills closed, and been confused as to why the only “opportunities” that came his way were the ones he got. He had a college degree, dammit, why didn’t he get more?
You know why he didn’t get more? Because he stayed in Pittsburgh. He stayed in a predominantly white neighborhood where the cost of living is low and his commensurate salary was disappointing. He didn’t get what he wanted because he didn’t want to leave his little cocoon.
I know because I had trouble finding a job there, too. When no one ever leaves, when no one is willing to go where the jobs are, then nothing changes there. There is no growth. There is no melting pot of people, ethnicities, races, nationalities in a place like that. There is no way for anyone who never leaves to understand what it’s like to step out of a comfort zone and dive right into the fire.
I didn’t want to go, either. I did it because I wanted more for myself. I left Pittsburgh and moved to Washington, D.C. where salaries loomed large and opportunities were abundant. They still are.
But I had to learn to live with people who didn’t look like me, who came from different cultural backgrounds, who had thick accents and dark hair and sometimes smelled strange to me. I had to get used to that, get to know people who were different, send my kids to schools where whites were the minority, learn to live in a place where the term “cutting edge” wasn’t just a pipe-dream.
White people here see what it’s like when racism takes a back seat to progress.
White people in Pittsburgh are sitting around waiting for justice, wondering what’s all this talk about “privilege” as they are living and breathing it every, single day.
Travel further west into Indiana and it gets even deeper.
Today I leave my friend behind in Pittsburgh, knowing that it doesn’t matter – will never matter – that we once cared about the same things. Today, I say goodbye to someone I trusted because I realize that he’s not open to new ideas, and that he’s just as blind as the rest of the whites in the midwest.
It’s just so fucking sad, watching them all go while watching the country burn, and knowing that they are all just too stupid to put out their tiny little ignorant fires.