It’s still taking courage for me to sit in my quiet room and write about me and white supremacy. Layla F. Saad is a leader. She’ll help if I let her, if I’m honest as I write out my little answers to questions that make me feel like I’m in the principal’s office trying to explain what happened on the playground during recess. I want to say I didn’t start it. I want so badly to say that I was being good when all this happened around me.
This anti-racism thing is hard work, but there are lots of us who think it’s worth it. There are a lot of us in the world still working on this, right? I have a hard time being the one out front.
Did I ever tell you about the time I protested against a Seattle City Council ordinance? This was in the 1990s, before I was a mom, when I was still youngish, but definitely settling into middle age. When I read about the no-sitting ordinance, I realized its only purpose was to harass homeless people. No police officer was going to ticket me if I sat down on a sidewalk to organize my purse after tripping and spilling it. No one would say word one to me if I took a moment to slide down the wall and read my book if I were waiting for a friend outside the coffee shop too long. I hated this ordinance. It would do nothing but shuffle some poor person on to another place when a more comprehensive solution was needed for homelessness.
I read about a protest rally. I went and sort of joined in. I say sort of because I walked along awkwardly with a random group of young people who jaywalked and thought nothing of stopping in the middle of the streets. There were about forty people protesting, at most. A group of police officers watched them. Not one police officer looked in my direction. I crossed with the lights. I was a fat middle aged woman with a bag of books and I probably got caught up in the little storm the protest caused. I could see what the officers were thinking. I was no protester.
A tall skinny guy with blonde dreadlocks saw me for my support of the cause and smiled at me.
“It’s so wrong what they’re doing,” I said. “They’re only looking for an excuse to harass homeless people.”
I don’t remember what he said, but he was all enthusiasm and bounce. Just then, I heard a cry of “Sit down for justice! Sit down for justice!” It came from the front of the crowd of protesters. I was at the back, not quite keeping up either out of caution or their speed. I wasn’t quite able to keep up with their speed. I wasn’t much of a runner, not even a jogger. But the question, really, was whether or not I wanted to keep up.
I was always one of those people who was great at pep rallies as long as I sat in the middle and up front. If my friends convinced me to sit along the sidelines, which they often did, if I happened to sit among apathetic people, I’d repeat the cheers, but never build the energy to shout and get everyone else around me revved up.
That was what I did that day. I repeated the cheers, but I didn’t shout as loudly as those up front. We were in front of the University Bookstore by the UW campus when someone shouted, “Okay, everybody sit down! Sit down for justice.” All of them, including bouncy dreadlock guy sat down.
I leaned my back against a lamppost. Was I really willing to get arrested because of an ordinance I disagreed with? I thought the ordinance worked against some human right, but I’d never read the Bill of Rights. Was there really a connection between them? Was my anger over this justified? I didn’t even live in Seattle.
I thought about what handcuffs would feel like. I thought about how it would look at work if it got into the newspaper. I slid down into one of those yoga positions you were supposed to take that was supposed to look like a chair supported you but there was nothing there. You know the one I mean. It makes your muscles shiver and you’re supposed to look casual while the skinny people around you never break a sweat. My knees were bent a little past ninety degrees. One could say that I was sitting. A group of police officers conferred about fifty feet away from us, closer to the head of the protest, looking at them and not at me. Bouncy dreadlock guy jumped up ran toward them and sat back down on the curb in front of them not looking back at me. Abandoned. Isolated.
This was my gap. I saw it clearly. I stood up a little more, still leaning against the lamppost. With just a turn and five steps, I could blend into the usual foot traffic. I burned with shame. I couldn’t make myself sit. I straightened, made the turn, and took the five steps, trying to be invisible. At the crosswalk, I looked back at the small protesting crowd going in the other direction. They didn’t want someone like me in their midst, a white middle-aged middleclass woman. Bouncy dreadlock guy was up front with them now, sitting on the curb and glaring at the group of police officers. “Sit down for justice! Sit down for justice!”
“Sit down for justice,” I whispered under my breath.
In front of me, the outline of the white guy blinked and I crossed the street with four or five people heading back toward the bookstore.
Thank you for listening, jules