Skating on Thin Ice

On the Tuesday afternoon before the verdict in the Rodney King assault was announced, I absent-mindedly changed lanes to make a turn, forcing the car behind me to hit mine. My car was badly smashed on the driver's side, and both doors on that side were jammed so that they would not open.

My boys, 6 and 11, were in the back seat. We sat, stunned at what had happened, as people passed us without stopping. Finally a Jeep Cherokee pulled up in front of us. A white woman got out and walked toward us, then past us, without making eye contact. A man followed her from the Jeep; he didn't look at us either.

They spoke to the woman who had collided with us and helped her and her children get out of their car. After the other driver left to call someone, this couple moved nearer to our car, but still did not ask us if we were OK.

I was stunned by their behavior. So I asked them if they knew the other woman. "No," the woman said, "we just saw her there with those two little children and we had to stop to see about them."

How ironic. I sat there with my two little children, in a car that we could not get out of without exiting into rush-hour traffic, and they never thought to think of us. Why? Because we are black and the woman who hit me is white? We were invisible and she was visible. She and her children were important. We were not.

THAT NIGHT I STOOD in the middle of my kitchen and wept, because my little children are not seen as being as important as two little white children, and I know that this is not an isolated thing. This incident, along with the verdict in the Rodney King assault, are indicative of the very fabric of American life.

Andrew Young said in an interview on the Thursday night after the verdict that "such a verdict was handed down because Rodney King did not matter." The riots in Los Angeles formed on the foundation laid by the white male power structure that erases the poor, the uneducated, the black, the brown, and the yellow who populate South Central Los Angeles and all of the other urban areas of this country.

On Thursday morning I called my sister, who lives at 64th and Normandie in Los Angeles, the heart of the riot zone. She had been up most of the night, with helicopters buzzing over her house. She was frightened, tired, in shock, and wondering about whether she could get to work or not. She had no electricity, her neighbors were coming home with looted goods, and she was having trouble breathing because of the smoke from the fires.

My sister and I talked about alternatives for her and whether or not she should try to leave the area. But we decided, finally, that staying at home was safer than leaving.

I have to conclude that there is no better or worse place to live in racist America. I need to live where I have some buffers from the racism, where I have a community of people who love me and who see me clearly as a person. So I stay in Macon, Georgia, because it is safer than running to a new place and confronting the racism without my community.

But my sister and I are fortunate; we have a "home place," unlike those invisible masses who took to the Los Angeles streets, who used their violence in an effort to make space for themselves, to make themselves visible. And the sad thing, which is equal to the sadness of their plight, is that they succeeded.

Just as that couple at the scene of my accident that were blinded by their racism to the point of not seeing me until I spoke, America's white male power brokers are blinded by their mistaken belief that the world belongs to them and thus they control it. So they can't, or won't, hear or see until they have been blasted by the outrage that was expressed in the acts of violence by sisters and brothers who mistake one another for the enemy.

My family gathered around the television a few months ago to view Roots. As my 6-year-old watched Africans being taken into slavery, he said passionately, "Those white people are skating on thin ice, Mama, because they know better than to make people slaves." Yes, William Sengarn, you are correct--and last week the ice broke.

Catherine Meeks, a Sojourners contributing editor, was an assistant professor and the director of the African-American studies program at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when this article appeared.