Invisibility As Advocacy
Why I sometimes work to remain unseen.
I see two young Black boys cross the street and head toward us, running south down the alley my dogs and I are using to get to our back gate.
Backpacks bouncing, the boy in the lead is trying to keep his pants up as he runs, behind him his friend is working to catch up, arms pumping.
One of my dogs who is relatively new to the busyness of our neighborhood stops cold and crouches low. The other stands and stares.
I turn my head slightly downward to reassure the one who’s nervous.
According to recent census data, the diversity of the roughly 55,000 people who live in Rogers Park, my north side Chicago neighborhood, closely matches the breakdown of the entire city’s nearly 2.7 million residents.
In other words, in our 55,000 you can see the 2.7 million.
The breakdown still favors white residents, who make up roughly 44 percent of the neighborhood’s population, followed by Black, Latino and Asian residents at 27, 20 and 5 percent respectively.
But my little corner, the microcosm I step out into daily, feels more diverse than those numbers suggest. Migrants and refugees are my neighbors. I hear several languages every time I travel my block. A Krishna temple sits across the street from a Catholic church. Community fridges make food available to anyone in need.
There’s a middle school a block from my house. Data show the student body is primarily Black and Latino.
Sometimes when I’m late walking the dogs in the afternoon, we hit the final bell when kids are pouring out onto the sidewalk. Students walking home catch us in their current and we’re left navigating groups of two, three, four kids with end-of-the-day energy.
Playful slaps, loud, booming voices, shared phone screens and raucous laughter.
Often, I’ll head off into the parkway grass, coaxing the dogs to follow me to the curb.
Shomari is a friend from when my kid played baseball at our local park district.
We don’t see each other regularly or often, but in the years we spent our summers together, him running the park baseball league, me coaching or helping my kid’s team, we got to know one another pretty well.
When my child came out as trans, I emailed him prior to the season starting to let him know what had changed for my kid and asking for assurance that he wouldn’t be bullied.
Asking a Black man to assure me, a white woman—even when I was asking for my trans kid—felt … like I needed to overtly acknowledge that it was not lost on me that I was asking for safety from a person who navigated an unsafe world every day, and had to watch his own kids do the same.
Talking about our kids later, he recalled a time when he and his daughter went to the wrong door at her school. It was pouring rain outside, so they ran to the one that was nearest.
But, a white woman just inside wouldn’t let them in, gesturing instead to the door they were supposed to enter.
In the moment, wet and angry, he muttered: “God, I hate white people.” Now, he laughed, think about your child going into a school where they are one of the only Black kids and repeating that, which is what his daughter did, he told me, only instead of “I” she told her class that her dad hates white people.
If you’re white and reading this you might be shaking your head. You might think he shouldn’t be saying such things in front of his child. You might be wondering if saying you hate white people isn’t just as bad as the racism you’re constantly told to work against.
The short answer is: no.
I’ve heard my Black neighbors say they hate white people.
I’ve been summarily dismissed when casually greeting BIPOC neighbors, and I’ve noticed BIPOC people cross the street away from me (though, to be clear, I don’t mean to suggest my being white is the only reason they crossed).
I’ve been taken to task by the mother of a Black child who didn’t think I was being fair to him when I made him sit an inning out.
In all of these moments, and countless others, I could have leaned into my defensiveness. Many people do. (Maybe you are right now. Maybe you did above).
But instead, I leaned into my vulnerability. I leaned into admitting my ignorance, that I likely (most definitely) have very large blind spots around existing in America as a BIPOC person.
I leaned into listening without speaking.
I leaned into listening without looking for a reason why what they were telling me wasn’t racism.
Because I’ve seen BIPOC neighbors rolled up on by police.
I’ve stood with my phone as a witness as a Black man prayed in his car as two white police officers ran his license and then let him go.
I live in a city with a long history of police torture of Black men, false confessions, phony convictions, and $74 million paid by taxpayers to resolve lawsuits alleging police misconduct (and that figure is down in comparison to the year before).
Chicago is a city where police shoot young Black men 16 times and then lie to make themselves the victims, a city where I watched my own alderman try to help Chicago’s mayor cover up this paticular and particularly heinous crime.
I’ve sat in the backyard of my friend’s house enjoying a barbecue only to catch their white neighbors peering out over their half curtains every so often.
I know the history of my neighborhood’s chronically underfunded schools, schools that primarily serve BIPOC communities.
I know the conversations my BIPOC friends are having with their kids because I’ve had some of the same with my trans son, though it’s different, because until my son I didn’t have to (and often didn’t) worry.
So, when I consciously choose to lean into my vulnerability, what I find is compassion and empathy and a willingness to honor the experiences my BIPOC neighbors and friends are sharing with me—without question.
And just so we’re clear, it’s not just Chicago.
I grew up in a mid-sized Midwestern city that was nearly exclusively white and Catholic. Out of curiosity just now, I looked up 1980 census data for Dubuque, Iowa. I would have been nine years old that year.
What I found isn’t surprising, but still remarkable, nonetheless. Of the 93,745 total census of the county, 93,015 of the residents were white.
(Quickly browsing income data, median family income in the county that year was $22,484, with breakdowns showing that 1,265 white families had income of $50,000 or above. The number of Black families with income of $50,000 or above was zero.)
In the 90s, after a cross burning, then mayor James Brady put together what was named the “Constructive Integration Task Force.”
This group developed a nine-page plan that focused on enticing 100 Black families to move to the city. The plan dedicated public funds to the effort, most in the form of hiring incentives to private companies.
The effort, as you might assume, backfired spectacularly.
It’s hard to imagine anyone with any real and honest intention believed a plan so brief it could barely qualify as a book chapter could somehow roll back decades of openly racist policy and hateful local attitudes.
The truth, whether deliberate or just the effect of the arrogance and naiveté of unchecked white supremacy, is that the seriousness of the city’s issues was steamrolled by a classic but dangerous white conceit: I want it to be so, so it will be.
Dubuque officials weren’t really concerned with repairing inequity or dealing with a city history steeped in racism. They just didn’t want the reputation that comes with cross burnings happening in the 1990s (and in 2016, too).
So, they devised a program that would give the appearance of a city capable of a true reckoning and reparations that in reality required neither the reckoning nor the reparations.
In a last cruel twist that is almost if not entirely unforgivable, some of the families that moved to Dubuque as part of the plan reported years later they were left further traumatized.
At a Starbucks one morning near my kid’s school, I stand in line waiting for my coffee and notice just how few BIPOC people are in the shop. The whiteness is palpable.
Census data on the neighborhood where my child’s school is located show a full 85 percent of the residents are white, though the school demographics are better, split pretty evenly among white, Black and Latino populations.
In this Starbucks on this morning, I’m not sure anyone notices the casual privilege on display. The lack of any type of courtesy—a small smile, an “excuse me” when you bump me with your thousand dollar Bugaboo stroller as you reach for your mobile order, zero eye contact—suggests, at least to me, most of these folks are not accustomed to giving up space.
They wear their own right to navigate this world freely and unimpeded like a second skin, because they have what as a nation we’ve been duped into believing makes someone beyond reproach—whiteness and wealth.
I check in with myself, a habit I’ve developed in the years I’ve been untangling some of my own blind spots and casual and unconscious bias around race, gender and gender identity, and disability.
I realize that I miss what I’ve come to cherish about my neighborhood: a very real sense of community, an obligation to care for one another, stranger and friend alike, that is born not from pity but genuine affection.
I also realize I am no longer comfortable in spaces this white.
So, back to the boys and the students after school up top.
Why do you think I turned my head, and why do I leave the sidewalk? If you’re immediate reaction assumed I was nervous or annoyed—or if you were nervous for me and thought I’d be better off not taking the alley—the truth is much more simple.
The boys were laughing and running in joy. The kids after school are almost always shaking off their day with amused exuberance.
And when I can, when I’m self-aware and deliberate enough, I work to remove my whiteness from their immediate world as often as possible. I don’t want BIPOC young people to have to think about whiteness—subconsciously or directly—for one second when I’m around.
Because I know that whiteness is overwhelming and, most often, petty, unscrupulous, dangerous and … everywhere.
I understand how absolutely childish and even—what? weird? bizarre? stupid?—that might sound.
For activists who spend nearly all of their time working for equity on various fronts, some putting their lives on the line and many within the vulnerable communities they’re fighting for, a white cisgender female thinking that not facing kids running in an alley or yielding the sidewalk to BIPOC students has any immediate or lasting effect on inequity is farcical.
I get it. I do.
But this action isn’t the only way I try to show up, and though it’s likely not relevant or obvious to anyone but me, perhaps that’s the point? Perhaps that the gesture is personal and my leaning into my own growth is OK, necessary even?
Maybe having our own simple, quiet and singular ways of accounting for our communities—both local and global—is just as essential as the bigger, coordinated efforts?
I don’t know. But I’d like to think so.
And, I’ll keep stepping aside, listening to the laughter and joy, the sometimes anger, from the sidelines.
thoughtful and insightful as always my friend. Thanks for sharing!
This was so insightful, Shel, and I found myself nodding in agreement many times. As products of our upbringing in Dubuque, it feels vital to do this work. Constantly learning, growing and checking in with ourselves is key. Thanks for sharing!