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Trying to Walk Around in Another’s Skin

Many years ago, perhaps two decades, a wise mentor made an observation that has resonated with me ever since. He shared that he had just seen something that warmed his heart and gave him hope for a post-racial America – a white boy, about age 8, riding double on a bike with his black friend.

“It was wonderful,” he said.

After a pause came the wisdom: “But then I realized what will really be wonderful is when the day comes that I – and everyone else – simply see two boys riding double.”

That day, it was tragically hammered home yet again and again and again in recent days, has not yet arrived.

What is arriving, hopefully, is some education. Personally, among the things I learned from this string of senseless civilian and police deaths, is how naïve I am in understanding even to a small degree how rampant racism is – in small ways as well as headline ways – in 2016 America.

In the important novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus advises his young daughter, Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Heeding this wisdom, I reached out to a few of my black friends in an attempt to be less naïve about my understanding of their points of view. Inadequately, but sincerely, I wanted to climb into their skin and imagine walking – and driving – around in it.

To be honest, I was worried about seeming ignorant or having my words ring hollow. My trepidation proved ill-founded. My questions were appreciated. The silence from most of their white friends regarding these issues, it turns out, is more saddening than saying the wrong thing.

The friends I reached out to are very successful professionals, and so at first I asked: “Have you ever been pulled over by the police for no reason?”

I quickly became enlightened that the better question, even for a physician or professor who is a black male, is: “How many times have you been stopped for no reason?”

Also, the real question is not “if” but “how often” are you met with cold stares of objectification when you go for a morning jog in your own gentrified neighborhood? Or to your local Starbucks? Or to the library with your young son?

How often are you shadowed by an employee when you go into a store in the mall? How often this, that, so many things that I, as a white male, never experience.

Something else I have not experienced is worrying about my son if he is ever pulled over by a police officer. However, for a handful of years I have worried about Peter – my son’s dear college classmate who I have become so close with he calls me “Pops” – if he is ever pulled over.

Correction: every time he is pulled over, even for a broken taillight that magically works when he gets home, which I now less naively know is the reality.

“Pops, your concern and love is a gift,” Peter, a technology consultant and founder of a nonprofit organization helping at-risk youth, texted me a few days ago when I reminded him to be safe – as has become my habit after each headline police shooting of a black man.

“I am friends with a couple of great cops,” Peter, who lives in Dallas, continued. “I have had to deal with cops pulling me over since I moved to this country (from Ghana) and haven’t really had problems. Today, I am more worried about what the cops are thinking I may do and how that heightens their anxiety when they approach a man my size who could be deadly at 6-foot-4 & 250 lbs even without a gun.”

Back to those two boys riding double on a bike. Twenty years later, this is what they make me think: now grown, if they are together – on a bike, in a car, on foot – they will still be seen as different.

This is not wonderful.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

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