Title : "I guess I understand the compulsion to find somewhere to engage this national conversation... The white people who do this..."
link : "I guess I understand the compulsion to find somewhere to engage this national conversation... The white people who do this..."
"I guess I understand the compulsion to find somewhere to engage this national conversation... The white people who do this..."
"... don’t realize (or maybe just don’t give a damn) that we’re on different timelines. You learned yesterday what white privilege means? Great! Welcome to 1962. This, however, doesn’t mean I need to engage you about it today. Or tomorrow. Or ever. And most important, maybe I’m out walking, shopping or playing with my children, or out just, I don’t know, staring at a fire hydrant because I want to give myself a break from writing about, from speaking about, from thinking about and from raging about racism, and you’re asking me to work for you for free. And that’s what it is: work. Free labor. An absolution device for your conscience, provided by me, shipped for free. There’s nothing inherently valuable for me out of that exchange. I don’t have a bucket list. But if I did, a 17-minute conversation about lynching, while in line for ice cream, wouldn’t be on it."From "You Want to Talk About Racism? Pay Me/And even then, maybe not" by Damon Young, author of "What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays" (NYT).
Conversation is not like money. Handing someone a conversation is not like handing them money, because money is neutrally useful and if it's given to you, doesn't take any of your time. But a conversation isn't just a giving. It's a taking of someone's time, and it's always about something specific. That person has some power over how the conversation goes and can trying to direct it somewhere other than what you had in mind, but that requires time and effort, and who are you to take that from them? Did you think about that? Or do you imagine yourself to be a wanted gift?
I looked up where Young lives, because I was trying to picture a place where people see a black man, recognize him as an author of a book about race, and think it's perfectly okay to make an effort to engage him in topic of race, and have a conversation right there on the street at that moment, because that's where they encountered him. He lives in Pittsburgh.
I'm giving this post my tag "etiquette." Don't people understand etiquette?!
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