“Hey buddy, can I help you?” It wasn’t really a helpful tone, more of a confrontational tone that accompanied the words from a man peering out from his house at me in my parked car on the street in front.
I had just dropped off someone at that same house less than a minute earlier, a gentleman from whom I had just purchased the car. He was going in to retrieve the spare car key he had forgotten. After I explained myself, the guy bellowing from the house suddenly got darker in tone, “You got the wrong house, man.” Would he call the police? Would he come out with a shotgun? Could I be gone in an instant, in a used PT Cruiser (a vehicle John Oliver once mocked as a “sporty hearse”)?
The seller then came back around and defused the situation. The would-be neighborhood greeter explained that he thought I was a drug dealer. I guess it was my Center for Diversity and Inclusion jacket that made me look shifty.
The small Mahoning County town where this happened is known for being pretty inhospitable to persons of color “in the wrong place.” When some among us think of Martin Luther King Jr. and his contemporaries in the civil rights movement, we often give them a sepia-toned veneer of historical distance, acting — perhaps for our own comfort —– as if the things they faced could no longer happen today. But in the social media age, a larger world audience has witnessed people threatened and indeed killed for being nothing other than a person of color in the “wrong place” at the “wrong time.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s transformational work reminds us how far we’ve come, but also how far we have to go. The incident I described happened to me just this week, after I already set out to write about MLK’s legacy in these pages. But because something racist happens to me at least every other day, I really could have picked any number of experiences to draw upon.
It has become popular to use the term “microaggressions” to describe comparatively minor incidents of racial bias, but in truth there is nothing “micro” about them. Each encounter shapes a life regularly punctuated by dehumanizing incidents and dignity-crushing explanations for breathing, living, existing while Black.
Martin Luther King Jr., himself a Baptist minister, understood the transgression of inhospitality — one for which the Bible tells us an entire city was destroyed. His legacy includes the understanding that, while our differences are beautiful, the inhospitality of privilege is not. When King spoke of white children joining hands with black children in his “I Have a Dream” speech, he chose a gentle way of broaching the topic of mutual respect and racial understanding. Many decades later we must continue to take that spirit to the next level. Those who possess privilege should “spend it” to support those who do not. And we must all speak out against instances of racism and racial aggression — as I have attempted to do here — until we as a nation finally understand the insidiousness of racism and how necessary it is to work to end it.
Rabbi Dario Hunter, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at DHunter@wooster.edu.