(With apologies to 2001: A Space Odyssey). OK, Real Talk time: The McDonalds that I go to for breakfast in the morning - yes, I go to McDonalds for breakfast - is full of black people and, yes, sometimes it wigs me out just a little bit. As a card carrying hippie liberal anti-fascist post-modern yoga instructor, I find this highly embarrassing, as if I just discovered that I had food between my teeth. Sometimes I hear conversations around me that make me clutch my bag with my laptop in it just a little bit tighter, like the time the guy behind me went on for 10 minutes about how he just wanted to not have to have a "necro funeral", and I had no idea what that was. There's a lady in a wheelchair who talks loudly about her dialysis appointments. One time I walked in to find one of the tables covered in half-empty bottles of expensive-looking liquor and two guys standing next to it getting really drunk quickly. Sometimes I feel like things are happening around me that I don't quite understand. Not directed at me, mind you; like in Black Panther, I'm the token white guy and nobody seems to give a rat's ass that I'm there. But they speak a language I'm not sure I totally understand.
Here's the thing, though: I'm gonna keep going. There's another, whiter McDonalds up the street, but I'm gonna keep going to this one, because I have work to do. As the famous song from Avenue Q says, "If we all could just admit / That we are racist a little bit". Obviously I need to grow, as a person, and I'm not going to get there by hiding from it, or by being in denial about it.
Many years ago, when I was in high school, me and three of my fellow classmates on a class trip got mugged in the Paris subway by 4 black guys. And for a year or so afterwards, every time I saw a black person on the street, I crossed to the other side. I was afraid. I didn't know what to do with those feelings. I couldn't admit I had them because that would be racist, and I knew I didn't want to be that. But I still felt scared, and ashamed that I felt scared, and terrified that someone would find out that I had those feelings.
I don't think that I *intend* to be a racist but, much like the whole country, it does no good to pretend that I'm some sort of post-racist post-modern angel of virtue. I have the right ideas in my heart but truly expressing those ideas, really understanding people different than me, is not so easy. It takes constant practice.