We had passed several days in Amsterdam on our first European trip, our first trip abroad together ever. At one point my wife remarked, out of the blue, “You know, for the first time in my 82 years, I don’t feel people are looking at me as a Black person but as a person.” Stunning, recalling W.E.B. Dubois’ double consciousness.
One evening we sat at a riverside outside bar when a group came in while I was ordering drinks. As I sat down I noticed a man of that group not just looking at my wife but staring at her. The look was not one of admiration but rather it was “that look”, the look of a White person toward a Black person that says, “What are YOU doing here?!”
Alone among his group, in his red shirt, he continued staring. Curious, thinking perhaps we had encountered a European fascist and realizing he seemed not to have connected me to the Black woman his gaze had targeted, I sidled over toward his table to see if I could identify their language. I could; it was American English. They were Americans! And he, at least, had brought his shit with him.
Later as all six of us, White except for my wife, walked back to the hotel, I asked my wife if she still had that feeling of being freed up from the “identity” America had laid on her. Yes, she said, except for one guy in that bar. Oh, the one in the red shirt? Yes, she replied in surprise.
“They’re Americans,” I clarified. “OMG” was her response.
My question to You, Red Shirt, is: can you explain yourself? Ordinarily, we do not ask people to explain themselves unless they have committed some sort of transgression; but isn’t the blind bigotry unleashed on our country by whatever you want to call these forces trying to dominate us: conservatives, MAGA, the Right, the Alt Right, the GOP, fascists…. just the sort of transgression against our progress since The Founding that demands explanation?