My America
The Dumpster overflowed with an orange couch and beer bottles. A young black man in a sports jersey sat on the step of a boarded-up house listening to headphones. I was afraid to talk to him. Would he get up and walk away? Yell at me to get out of his face? Or worse?
I spoke to him. Afterwards though, I was still afraid.
“I don’t know about being a white girl walking into this poor black neighborhood and asking questions,” I said to my friend. “People are going to think I’m a cop.”
I chattered to him incessantly, cloaking my panic in a constant dialogue about it. Florida summer sun pounded down, making the first day on my new reporting beat more prickly.
“This place is so ghetto,” I said. “I do not know how this is going to work.”
My neighborhood did not look like this. Florida was different than Ferndale, Calif., sure, but this place was not my America.
My America was a small-town high school with 1,000 students and not a single black face in the crowd. My America was sometimes poor, often decaying, but rural and never quite like this.
Somehow I was in the States and I felt as though I were striding into a foreign country.
My home, Ferndale, is a dollhouse town, candy-colored Victorian houses and manicured lawns. It’s a pastoral town, with the Pacific Ocean, mountains, cows and long tracts of grass. It’s a white town. The only people of color are the Hispanics who usually work as farm hands.
I don’t think I saw a black person until I was 5.When I went to the city I would always stare at them, exotic creatures in my child’s eyes. In middle school, my only contact with black culture was through television. I watched hip-hop videos in riveted confusion; I thought many were frightening. The sounds were so foreign, the subject matter so raw, the rappers movements so unusual.
My mother told me that racism was horrible, but in my school, kids used “Mexican” as an insult, no matter if a person was actually Mexican. It was a general dirty word. Dirt rubs off.
I grew to hate Ferndale for its isolation and ignorance, not being aware of my own. The punk music I listened to was made by white people, and so was the country music I rebelled against. Name one prominent black country singer. Name one prominent black punk band. I can’t. I never thought to try until I walked the neighborhoods of my beat.
My default view of the world includes the stereotype that people of color are poor and, therefore, more prone to crime and other bad behaviors. Yes, I heard the truck engines rumble when white cowboys beat up my gay friends on the lawn of the Ferndale police station. No, I saw no police that night. Yes, I have been threatened by white boys. No, I have never been threatened by black men. But when I walk in Ferndale, I walk without fear.
When I try to point to one reason for my prejudice, my vision fractures and I see the broken glass of American society. Riots, conservative senators, suburbs, segregation, neo-Nazis, fearful families, cop shows, ignorance, economics, slavery and snide comments. It all leaks into my brain from many taps, streaming into prejudice. It may not be candy-colored or manicured, but it’s part of my America, too.
At night here, new Florida noises become part of my personal soundtrack. Air conditioners hum. Tiny gecko feet scamper across my bedroom floor. My beat, too, has changed my America, widening its border and loosening it laws. After two weeks walking the streets, the people became familiar. Skin color stopped overriding personalities. No one told me to get out of their face. I saw the woman watering her flowers and the bored teen-agers at the convenience store, and I saw my home.
I still can’t control it; the feelings emerge when I plead that they won’t. A month after that first day, a black man in a dirty T-shirt on the street at dusk still sends a little red flag shooting up the mast of my spine.
Fear again.
I look up and into his eyes. I smile. I say hello. His face perks up with a big smile and he says, “Hello, how are you doing?”
I say excellent. And I mean it.
