September 7, 2015 - 21:25
My own first-hand experience of victimization or offending is limited. Until last Thursday I had never visited a jail or prison. I’ve never been inside a police station. I’ve never been arrested or stopped for questioning or pulled over. I’ve never been a victim of a crime or witnessed a crime or committed a crime. The entire criminal justice system – a term that does not feel right given the injustice of this system – remains an abstraction to me.
That said, I’m aware that my identity has many dimensions that insulate me from victimization and offending. No matter how I queer my ideas or lifestyle, I still appear to the world as straight, white, male, able, affluent, educated, and American. I may consider myself a dissident from what many of these categories mean – i.e. I’m married but not living with my partner; I see this as a refashioning of marriage in its own way, one that both of us take some pride in sustaining; or, alternatively, I have a father born in China and a mother only a generation removed from Norwegian and Swedish speaking immigrant parents; I thus feel myself as a different kind of American from the “born and bred” nationalist types who want to close the borders – but despite my own views, views that lead me toward solidarity with people quite different from myself, I still benefit from how I appear in the world. And my appearance is quite powerful.
My situation also leads me to pursue connections with others in different situations. I’m aware of the blindness that my privilege (using that as a basket term for all the vectors of identity that grant me unearned benefits or advantages over others) imparts. I could quite easily move through the world in the “dream” that Ta-Nehisi Coates questions in his Between the World and Me: living in an all-white wealthy suburb, ignoring the claims against an all-white and tradition-bound syllabus in the classroom, insulating myself from discussions of difference on campus – either by absenting myself or simply standing apart from it as “their” problem. Obviously, these are not things I do. But I also see how these are options, options that I’ve witnessed colleagues select without second thought or compunction.
I grew up in a city divided yet at least actively trying to engage its divisions: Seattle. I went to public schools and had friends whose parents had just arrived from places like Laos or the Philippines or Haiti or Ethiopia – as well as the sons and daughters of Scandinavian fishermen who spent summers in Alaska or African Americans whose parents worked for Boeing or the federal government. That said, while I bused to diverse schools, my neighborhood was monochromatic. And as Seattle’s fortunes have risen – first with companies like Microsoft and Starbucks and now with Amazon and a host of other technology companies – my neighborhood has become much less diverse (and thus much less interesting in my estimation) as house prices mount and those without wealth find themselves pushed to the edge of the city.
When I do work on issues of victimization and offending or the categorical exclusions that structure these in the United States, I have my high school often in mind. Garfield High School proudly describes itself as the most diverse high school in the city and counts Bruce Lee, Jimi Hendrix, and Macklemore as alumni. (I took the PSAT in the Quincy Jones auditorium.) But despite its diversity and illustrious past, Garfield was and is a highly segregated place. When I was a student, students of color hung out on the first floor around the student center and its vending machines while white students held the annex and the southern halls. Because Garfield was in the central district of Seattle, local students were usually African American and south Asian; students like me rode yellow buses from the northern part of the city. This arrangement meant we had far less of a connection with the neighborhood and rarely stuck around when class or sports or music didn’t keep us.
I think of Garfield because I consider it a lost opportunity. We took pride in our diversity but we never really engaged it. I never learned what it was like to live in “the CD” and to attend Garfield as a neighborhood student. I didn’t know how others felt about our valedictorians being from the north side of town and our basketball players from the central and south. There was a shooting in my school the year before I arrived and while we didn’t have metal detectors we did have security guards. I didn’t know – and didn’t ask – if their presence made everyone feel safer. When I engage this work I hope most of all that I can learn about what it means to grow up and live in a city without the identity markers that made my city life relatively easy. I hope I can set aside assumptions about race and privilege that my particular experience at Garfield as well as living in charged places such as New York City and Durham, North Carolina may have reinforced. I hope I can listen to the stories of others and hear where people are coming from.
Philadelphia, PA