I imagine myself standing in a traffic intersection. I am a fragile woman, a person who menstruates. I am joined by my daughter, who does not yet menstruate, my mother who no longer menstruates, and an author whose fantastic books we have enjoyed reading in pointless lock-downs.
Four school buses are barreling towards us. Each bus has a driver with an angry, contorted, masked face. Each driver is young and white, sure of their pronouns and rectitude. Each bus had a different destination, but all are now aimed at a statue standing outside a closed school building. It is a statue nobody has noticed for years, an old white man, his body and face now black from the patina on the bronze from which he was cast a century ago. Somebody has sprayed ‘was a racist’ under his name.
On the first bus is an old friend, the best man at my wedding who was born a woman. She displays a sign that reads ‘Silence is Violence’. I have not seen her for a dozen years but we spoke occasionally and I realize now how much I miss her voice. She died recently of a condition that went undiagnosed for too long and then was untreated. Her death certificate did not mention Covid-19, so her extraordinary ordinary life was not celebrated on a news programme or in an obit in a newspaper of record.
On the second bus is my brother, his wife, and their biracial, bilingual daughter. They are holding signs that profess their ‘White Privilege’. They are checking the Twitter feed for the restaurant that they run, but which the bank owns. Tweets suggest they were slow to declare their commitment to dismantling racist hierarchies in their open kitchen. Their diverse clientele and young team are all repentant, confessing with hashtags that Social Justice matters more than their jobs, homes, and futures.
On the third bus are my colleagues at a non-profit organization. They are holding certificates from the ‘Anti-racism training’ we have recently attended virtually. Most do not know I write occasional articles to supplement my modest salary. Most would be appalled by the stubborn stains left on my writing clothes that even a vigorous ‘woke-washing’ cannot remove. I am indelibly marked by classical liberalism, a mature conservative sensibility that is no longer recognized as such.
The fourth bus is shorter than the others. It is empty. It used to take my daughter, who has profound learning needs, to school. Now, instead of five days of carefully planned lessons, she has a daily thirty-minute Google Meet. My daughter cannot speak, and her silence is violent to me. It tears me apart daily as I fight against it, striving to extract words from her. Still, the school district has assigned us some vital reading to address a more pressing concern: Antiracist Baby.
This is not an unhappy confession. It is not a provocation. More than one thing can matter, more than one opinion is valid, more than one plague kills. That is why I have chosen to publish some reflections here that would not work in other fora and some that would.