If you don't like the answer, then don't ask the question...???
A few years ago, I ransacked my social network to locate every Black person I knew, or had ever known, and asked this question: How bad is it? Is it really as bad as the blizzard of horror stories piling up in six-foot drifts around my television makes it out to be? Or is CNN just inflating its ratings by blowing isolated incidents out of proportion? Are things getting better? Worse? Staying about the same?
To a person - and I mean, to a person - the answer was, "Keith, it's not as bad as the media makes it out; it's worse - worse than you can imagine." Then, in anticipation of my next question, each volunteered blood-boiling episodes of unprovoked threats, inexplicable detentions, gratuitous intimidation, appalling vignettes of belittlement and harassment more apropos to 1874 Mississippi than yesterday in New York, except that it was yesterday in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Des Moines, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Dallas, Philadelphia, Miami - throw a dart at a map - that they occurred. Many of my correspondents perch several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from me: we're talking doctors, dentists, lawyers, academics, financiers, executives, entrepreneurs, journalists, artists, military careerists. Their slacks are crisp, blouses starched, shoes shined, hair coiffed, gutters cleaned, lawns clipped, Lexuses and Benzes polished miles deep. Yet these solid citizens fear for their lives, and especially, the lives of their children and grandchildren, every time they set foot out of their magazine-cover homes. And the fear isn't inspired by gangs or thugs - who don't inhabit their manicured neighborhoods, anyway - it's inspired by the very people deputized to protect us from gangs and thugs: the cops.
Even more depressingly, they all thanked me for asking: I was the first white person to do so. That was more of a knife in the heart than a compliment, because I'd known some of these folks since grade school. Even during the racial eruptions of the 1960s, with elements of our old Chicago neighborhood in flames, it never occurred to me to ask. I thought I knew. I didn't; I didn't have a clue. Sure, I can invoke the "I was just a kid" defense, but kids are curious, and asking discomfiting questions was my peculiar joy and avocation. But about race, I was eerily uncurious. I thought reading James Baldwin, listening to Dick Gregory, and quoting Malcolm X would tell me everything I needed to know. It didn't, of course, and moreover, I knew it. Perhaps such willful insouciance is biological, an inverse function of melanin levels. Probably untrue, but it sure seems that way sometimes, doesn't it?