Doin' My Time

Thursday night

I'd been busted for D.W.I., and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Some of my friends, including Eddie M., had heard about it, and I was embarrassed. Fortunately for me, I got to serve my sentence in a grocery store. My twin brother Andrew was there, too, along with all of the other orange-suited guys, but it's not clear whether he had his own run-in with the law, or if he was simply there for moral support. I had a pretty good setup in the back of the store: a mattress, a red bedspread, and a couple of pillows. My stufff was in the horizontal aisle, near the left corner, next to the meat and cheese. Andrew was carrying around a dingy black and white-striped mattress that had seen better days, and set it down on one of the vertical aisles. I told him that he could drop it and bunk with me. I'd noticed that a bunch of tough-looking black dudes were congregating at the end of the aisle on the far right, so I figured I'd make a point of walking down there to meet them. After all, we'd be neighbors for awhile.

*****

I've never been sent to jail, but if I am, it won't be for D.W.I.

That mattress that Andrew was carrying was the cot that used to be in Mom and Dad's basement playroom. Later, I took it with me to the townhouse on Hyson Lane in Falls Church.

Once upon a time I would have described myself as a person with some prejudice against blacks -- which I was fighting against. I grew up in an all-white neighborhood which gradually included some people of other races, but no blacks that I can recall. My elementary school was integrated by forced busing in the early 1970s, and I did befriend some of those kids from South Arlington, but never really knew them. Later, like many white suburbanites, I suppose that the crack wars between some young black men in the District of Columbia scared me to death, and made me want to stay where I was, in my "safety zone." But the thing you learn when you get older is that prejudice is rooted in stupid assumptions that people make about people or things that they don't know, or know little about. Luckily for me, I worked for 10 years at a foundation that introduced me to all sorts of wonderful people: blacks, whites, Asians, straights, gays, folks from other countries. And I learned that once you meet a person from a demographic and get to know them, it's no longer some bullshit concept, it's a person; an individual -- someone who, as Dr. King said, should be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. This seems so obvious that it shouldn't need to be stated, but I'm a living example that someone can grow and become smarter as he ages. I see my life now as a flawed attempt to reach toward some sort of progressive enlightenment. And I'm convinced that the only way people will get that enlightenment is to travel around the country and the world, meet new people, see how others do things, and then make up their own mind(s).

So, now I make a point of engaging folks who don't look like me, particularly at work. I try to make the extra effort to get to know them as individuals; it's really cool for both of us, as we become one more pair of people fighting for a truly colorblind society.

One more confession: at the foundation where I used to work, I realized that I still harbored a bias, but it wasn't one that I had previously discovered. I wasn't uncomfortable with any particular race (or sexual orientation). Instead, I found that I had then, and have now, a level of discomfort with those who are in a significantly lower economic bracket, and lower level of education. That's the real story. As I read in a magazine once, "People think that there's a racial divide in this country. In reality, there isn't -- there's an economic divide." I really think there's something to that. I'm not saying that it's right that I wince when I'm near folks who butcher the language -- it may not be entirely their fault -- but if I have any lingering prejudice these days, that's probably it. I've gotta work on that. One shouldn't make assumptions about those folks, either, and I suppose that I do that all the time.