40: The freedom to be weird…

I believe one of the privileges conferred by my white skin, one which I value as an escape from the relentlessness of being a subject, is my sense of freedom to be weird. This is only in relation to my black family members- a partial view. We grew up in a predominantly white area and I looked up to them because they were a bit older and therefore to my mind better. I think about being shy and how much I hate being singled out.. and I think back to assembly.. singing ‘the ink is black, the page is white... now the world looks so clean and bright’. I think how exposed I would have felt to be the ‘ink’ in all that paper.. and of how much I won’t ever really compute.. especially because as we grow older, for some reason we keep all that back there. I think how much more they kept their heads down and got on. Less nonsense, less weirdness. Things I took for granted. And being kind to strangers- another thing that feels good- that it’s probably easier for me to find opportunities to be that person, with my face, so that something good gets mirrored. I have taken that for granted. There are the structural things yes, but the moment by moment, from the word go, judgements of others, the relentlessness of that, harder I see, for them than me. And my lovely friend who stood in a queue as a child, waiting to pay for some sweets, not knowing for a long long time why he wasn’t being served. I’ve grown up madly oblivious, busy being myself and not seeing what’s under my nose unless it was spelled out and even then not really seeing. I found myself in a party as a teenager, the only white person and there was something, some tiny ohhhh I seee, but a moment is just that.