Thank You, Marley

"What do you think about classism?" she asked.

Marley and I were two perfect strangers. In a packed artists warehouse near the ninth ward we stood (standing room only) watching characters dance and shuffle around stage in blackface. Entitled "Uncle Tom: Deconstructed" the play was put on by a Virginia based theater group called The Concilliation Project. Traveling the country to put on plays about social justice and equality, the group had come to the New Orleans Fringe Festival to stage this harrowing work about white privilege and the legacy of slavery. Check em out: http://www.theconciliationproject.org . At the end of the play the cast lead a discussion about race in which they asked us, the audience members, to turn to a perfect stranger and share out thoughts.

Marley,a young woman about my age, blonde hair and blue pea coat, stood intently listening to me go on about how I enraged I get when white people talk about color blindness. "I totally agree," she responds. "It's kind of a privilege to even be able to pretend that you are color blind." I like her. She is honest about how she feels and when she is listening she looks like she is listening and not just preparing her next line.

"I often feel that class inequality has gotten as bad as racial inequality did in the 1960's" she comments, "but no one today wants to recognize what a big issue class is." I cringe immediately, recognizing this as the beginning of a conversation I have had so many times in which a white person attempts to use a discussion of class as a way to move away from an uncomfortable talk about race. I begin to launch my rehearsed counter-argument talking about how race was used to create the american class system. Somewhere in between a diatribe about the racialization of suburbs and the portrayal of black welfare mothers, I find out that she herself is on welfare.

"I had a baby, and we didn't have any health insurance." "So many people," she continues, "assume that my husband and I are lazy or something, but the truth is, we just didn't have insurance and now are on government assistance." As she spoke my image of her as this pea-coat-wearing-SUV-driving college girl dissolves and I found myself with very little to say in return.

For me, talking about race has become a sort of rehearsed battle - a chess game. With all possible moves anticipated, I have memorized a set of attacks and counter attacks. Staggering statistics, historical facts, carefully constructed analogies, and an ability to reference specific FHA policies - these, my weapons, I carry with me into cafes and dinners parties, bookshops and train stations as ready ammunition should I encounter a stranger passionately denouncing the evils of affirmative action or asking, "why can't those blacks get it together?"

But in this moment I found myself being forced to listen. For once.
Thank you, Marley. I am not used to having to interrogate my own assumptions. Nor am I used to having any conversation about race in which I am not intently focused on trying to "win."

It is a strange realization to discover that you yourself wear a mask.
My mask is that of radical black intellectual. I developed it in college when all it took to be "down for the struggle" was an ability to quote Fanon and talk about the problems of the nations public schools or prison industrial complex. By claiming this identity I escape having to interrogate my own class privilege. With this mask, I - Mr. elite Massachusetts boarding school, Mr. 30,000 dollars a year for middle school - can stand in an artists warehouse with a 24 year old white mother on welfare and tell her that class is just a diversion from a much larger, pressing issue.

Thats my mask. What is yours?