Up on a Roof and Out on a Limb

So much of life is like an awkward blind date. When we meet people for the first time, we know nothing of their story. Generally, we want to make a good impression, but we don’t know their tastes or the scars that conceal their tender places. All we have for a point of reference is our own past, and yet, like it or not, we share the history of a country, a culture, and a world that was set spinning long before we were born. Even our smallest encounters carry the weight of that history.

During the COVID pandemic, I drove across town to pay my rent.  It was an early morning in June.  The city was showered with sunlight and gentle breezes.  Lavender and geraniums were abloom in landscaped yards and sidewalk planters, but it was not long into my journey before I noticed the boarded-up store fronts and the city work crews cleaning up debris from Black Lives Matter protests. 

When I arrived at the real estate office I noticed a worn ladder propped up against the side of the building.  It was blocking the path to the drop box. I stopped on the sidewalk and looked up.  A slender, graying man looked down: a black man in a vulnerable position looking down on a white woman. Instinctively, we both felt the weight of America’s history of race.

I looked back down to study the space around the ladder.  Could I safely squeeze past? 

I looked up.  “I just want to drop my rent payment into the box.”

He looked back, “Okay, then,” even as he kept his eyes on me.

For a moment we were both afraid.  His fear was that I would kick down the ladder and leave him stranded on a hot roof.  My fear was that I was causing him discomfort and that he would see me as someone dangerous—not a person I wanted to be. Each of us was just trying to do a normal activity:  he was trying to earn a living; I was trying to pay my rent on time.  I wanted to say, “You don’t need to fear me.” I wanted to offer to stay there and keep watch over the ladder so that he could work without the distraction of ensuring the ladder’s safety, but our words of reassurance can be shallow to people shaped by a different history, people who have lived their entire lives prepared for the worst in people.  And would that offer have embarrassed him? Reminded him of the very things he most feared? It seemed like an awkward, no-win situation.

The encounter affected me, and I worried about the man for the rest of the day.  Driving home, I was reminded of another situation many years earlier.  I was a graduate student in Pittsburgh working part-time in a treatment program for adolescents.  The teens came to our program every weekday after school and spent the afternoons and evenings attending groups, sharing meals, and participating in therapeutic activities.  Many of the youth were from inner-city neighborhoods.  Part of my job was to drive each of them home at night.

One night I headed out into the dark in an old station wagon filled with teenagers.  With the last two remaining passengers, I proceeded to the housing project where the young man lived.  As I started to slow down in front of his unit, a warning light began to glow on the car’s dashboard.  I could see from the rearview mirror that the young man had seen the light too.  He became alarmed and said to me, “DO NOT get out of the car!  They don’t like white people here.  I will get my dad.”  I and my last passenger waited in the car as instructed.  The young man’s father came and lifted the car’s hood.  He peered inside with a flashlight.  Slamming the lid, he said, “I think you will be all right.”  Thankfully, all went well, and I dropped off the last teen and returned to the treatment center and parked the company car.

All of these years later, I still wonder about that young man and the dissonance he had to live with daily growing up in an environment of hurt turned to hate.  He was a young black man, and I was a young white woman.  Clearly, he was filled with concern for my safety on that dark night even as he understood the anger and hatred that existed in his neighborhood.  I wondered, how do people go about developing normal relationships when we grow up with such different and frightening messages about groups of other people? How do we keep hurt from becoming hate from becoming revenge? I hope that sweet young man found a way to navigate his circumstances without being destroyed by them. 

I have not suffered the insults or the fears that either of these black men in our culture has endured, but I am a woman in this culture.  I have my own set of fears and my own flames of outrage.  In that, we have much in common amidst much that is different.  We each have known the pain of being vulnerable and the dangers of trying to defend ourselves.  We know that standing up for ourselves often means more labels and being dismissed as an “angry ____.”  You can fill in the blank with the stereotypes.

Going into the workforce right out of high school in 1974, I experienced the blatant sexual discrimination and harassment that was common then.  I went to work for a large, well-respected law firm.  All men.  It was common for them to make inappropriate sexual remarks or jokes that made the women who worked there uncomfortable, or to try to touch or kiss…When the first female law clerks were hired, they were told openly, “If you plan to have children, don’t even think about working here.”  It was a point of pride that no woman had ever sat in the boardroom.  To complain likely would have meant the end of employment for women during that time.  We endured, and we had each other.  And, eventually, things did change.  The women law clerks hung in there.  Years later, some became partners and had children too.

I worked at the law firm to finance my way through college.  After graduation, I went onto graduate school where I saw that white men benefitted from diversity and inclusion efforts too.  Social work is and has been a predominantly “female” occupation.  To attract more men to the program and to the profession, my graduate program offered many generous full scholarships to men while I and the women I knew did not receive the same substantial financial assistance.  We befriended our male colleagues and lived with it.  We understood that white males were not generally attracted to the jobs held by women and other minorities because the reality is those jobs just didn’t pay as well as the jobs more typically dominated by white men—at least back then.  And back then, men may not have had the same freedom to pursue careers in fields dominated by women because of the social scorn they might have received.

After graduate school, I went to work in a community mental health center.  While I was working there a professional position opened at a prestigious university’s Child Study Center.  I was very interested in the job, the university, and that part of the country, and so I applied.  I received a phone call from a woman at the university inviting me for an interview.  She ended the invitation by saying, “We are looking to hire a minority candidate; so if you are not a minority candidate, I wouldn’t invest the money in travel.”  I did not schedule an interview.  Though a woman, I was no longer a minority candidate in the professional community…much had changed since I left high school.  Even now, all of these years later, with so much anger about race and diversity, I cannot be angry about the lost interview opportunity. I felt it was someone else’s turn to have a chance.  I accepted that this was the road that led to change.  I always assumed the person hired would be both a minority candidate and a competent individual.

It would be lovely to think that after all of these years, it would be unnecessary to have quotas or to make such direct efforts to hire a more diverse work force, and yet…And maybe so much of the current anger about DEI efforts has to do with the opportunities technology has taken away from humans not what DEI has done.  We are fighting over the scraps of the remaining good jobs, and we blame each other…

In this time of rancor about DEI programs and efforts to further social equality, people quickly jump to conclusions, and so we can fear speaking at all because we might be accused of being some “ist” or “ism.” The only way to win this war of confusion is to go out on a limb and assume that most people are well-meaning even if naïve—good at heart but with different experiences.  Every person has a point of view and their own scrapes with culture and history.

No one wants to be belittled. All sides want to be heard and understood. We can choose interpretations that fuel anger and hostility widening the divides in our country, or we can choose interpretations that educate and lead to insight and understanding. We need to keep talking with compassion until we find the eloquence to express what is true.  Like blind dates, we can expect that the first encounters will be awkward, but good and lasting relationships can be built between hopeful strangers with good intentions.