white women, race & black rage

photo: Marina Sirtis, actress Star Trek the Next Generation

Marina Sirtis gave me the sense of the elegant that lurked outside my peripheral within white women in the years before now. I associated ugly, and fear and death around white women for many years of my life.  I was well into my thirties before I was comfortable to talk to white American women because I was old enough to remember black men being hung for the most trivial of things: looking at a white woman too long.  My father, a Civil Rights activist and leader, hung a black and white poster of two dark skinned men haning from a tree with one crudely tied rope.  The image and its meaning held me captive with its meaning as I read the lists of names of colored men hung across the United States from month to month. 

Fear can turn into ugly things within a man living in a country so prone to violence, and I didn't escape it.  But I needed, as I got older and able to see with more and more clarity, to be rid of animosity.  I needed to find the beauty within these people, and the best way was through their women.  I believed that white people were a cross of a cat, rat, and a dog.  It defied logic but younger readers need to understand that image is fundamentally important to programming masses of people to fear you.  And it comes through various guises.  Altering beauty was the key to maintaining fear within me.  I was one of those people who was going to alter my perception of the bane of my existence. 

My approach was simple.  I altered my Eastern altar slightly with images of white women, and began the slow process of unlearning a view, a perception.  The altar helped me overcome my revulsion, and in my practice of changing my words when I saw white people began as a laborious word for word change.  Some years passed before the fears subsided.  Do you want me to remember the first break through?  

Walking towards K St NW in Washington DC from 14th & I Street a white woman in a black dress was walking towards 14th & I.  Her white skin stood against the black of her dress, and the yellow of her hair with a force that slowed time around and above her.  I stumbled ever so slightly.  She caught it, cast a glance my direction and continued on.  Instead of interpreting her quick glance as a reflection of racism I decided I should speak to her.  I spun on my next step as she passed me, and she, sensing it, hastened her step.  The light stopped her. She clinched her purse under her left arm.  I could have sung the old adage: "Damn white girl thinks I'm gonna rob her 'cuss I'm black!"  But I decided not to. Instead I inhaled confidence, drank in the afternoon sunlight and said as gently as I felt, "You give new definition to a mini skirt."

She visibly melted, and smiled.  We walked and talked amicably for two or three blocks until she went one direction and I another. 

That is the best way I know to explain the process.

-Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories