Micah 6:8 fails

Well, now I just don't know what to think.

We -- meaning me, and all the people producing Newsweek covers and clever Facebook memes on my behalf -- have come to excel at marketable, apolitical, existential kinds of tragedies. Remember how much we all loved each other after 9-11? Remember two Decembers ago, how the silver lining for those of us without actual dead children was the general sense that everyone we loved was so real and our differences and pettiness receded to make room for all our love for Sandy Hook and its families?

I'm only feeling a little ugly as I write that. Really, it does matter, in a good way, how certain kinds of tragedies bring helpers and  hope-ers out of the woodwork.

But I am just lost here. Because when other people's husbands and dads and sons are being slaughtered like they are not real - less like animals or "unborn children", each of whom we launch crazed campaigns to defend, than like abstractions, Goombas to stomp on our way to the real enemy -- my impulse to to grab at my husband, my son, my dad. I want to take my kid home and watch The Nightmare Before Christmas on a loop and ignore any coming moment in which I cannot encase his entire body in my own. I want to remember that life is short and precarious and to be grateful for what I have.

But that response seems wrong when the disaster that inspires it impacts me so much differently than it does other people. By "differently", I mean less; by "other people", I mean black people.

The reality is that while we all are at risk of losing those we love, what's actually going on in our country puts me in a much less vulnerably position than lots of other moms/daughters/wives, because the people I love most in the world are white people. Because my father's body just got done occupying the attention of a team of neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists and lasers and robots, bent on keeping him alive, and Eric Garner's body -- similar to my dad's in a lot of ways, different in one apparently game-changing one -- got crushed into the street by a kid I cannot think of in any term more generous than "punk". Because when my dad, never one for histrionics, allowed that he was in pain, my mom and I badgered his nurse for better drugs and the nurse pushed them into his vein and I hovered like a Snoopy vulture over the monitor tracking his breathing as it dipped and then rose. Because my dad never had to say "I can't breathe", much less gasp the words out while one public servant choked him to death and three more held him down.

So we're not all together in this. And I don't really know how to be a bad guy, but I can't stop feeling complicit because what's happened in Missouri and Ohio and now New York makes me feel shitty and stressed out on the one hand, and actively threatens to destroy and/or end people's lives, on the other.

I guess this is what white people are getting at when they #crimingwhilewhite . It's hard for me to get into that, partly because I did grow up afraid of cops; because white privilege looks radically different for different people and doesn't actually make cops your friends, especially not if your particular shade of "white" is most commonly a modifier for the word "trash".

I don't have any stories about breaking laws and getting away with it. I was twenty-five before I stopped crossing the street to avoid police. But that's the thing about individual good fortune versus institutionalized privilege: my experience doesn't have to be a stereotype of getting away with shit and free rides home for our criminal justice system to be unfair. The challenges that individual white people face does not speak to the reality or unreality of racism and injustice, and arguing over how hard or easy specific white lives are is most useful is you are trying to avoid the issue of how to un-fuck our system and its unchecked assault on black ones.

What actually matters is not how privilege functions in my life but how my privilege functions in the lives of the Garners and the Browns and the Rice's -- how things not being so bad for me (where by "so bad", I mean, my husband is on his way home and my dad's saturating well on room air and watching Fox News) perpetuates a system where this is the result we get.

That's what I have to remember -- not because "white guilt" is useful to anyone, but because maintaining the belief that this is affecting us all the same way turns an actual problem demanding correction into an emotional journey or existential crisis.

I am very sad and afraid and confused. And also, if I really want to love mercy or do justice, I have to be able to go past that to finding a way to resist this. Even though doing so is uncomfortable, and even though I don't really know how, and even though insofar as I benefit from this ugly paradigm in which the bodies of the people I love are ascribed a greater value than those of other people's loved ones, I am implicated in the system we are each called to take apart.

I'm don't know how, and I feel like it's presumptuous even to assume I can figure it out. But I do think it's encouraging that people -- including those of us whom racism may distort, but isn't actively in the business of killing -- are trying to think this through. It's irritating to me that my first step seems to be working out my own screwed upness and complicity in order to find a way to usefully move forward. Dragons are more fun to slay than darlings. But then, times are hard all over these days.