I was recently reminded that I am not an edgy black woman living in Brooklyn, leading bicycle tours around the city and writing novels. That is a partial, mostly incomplete description of a friend of mine, and I’m not sure she’d even agree with any of it. We are not close, but I follow her on Facebook.
She recently posted about an incident in which a TSA agent at Miami International Airport subjected her to multiple inspections because she “couldn’t tell if (you) are male or female, ma’am.”
Outrage boiled inside me; I was angry on her behalf. I reached out to her to express my concern, and to request permission to use her story as a basis for a column. While she hesitantly agreed, it was with reservations, mostly founded, I think, on the fact that I am not an edgy black woman living in Brooklyn.
I mostly dismissed her hesitancy. I felt driven to speak up for her, largely ignoring the fact that she is more than capable of speaking for herself. I was certain she would see that I could do justice to the topic once she read what I had written.
I sent her a first draft of my column, looking forward to her response. What ensued, however, was far from what I had imagined.
With rigor, she replied that I had pretty much missed the point because, and I hope this is beginning to sound familiar, I am not an edgy black woman living in Brooklyn. In the following emails we engaged in an intense discussion about the “issue” of her run-in with the TSA agents. She insisted that if I couldn’t make a larger, deeper and more personal connection to the issue, she wasn’t comfortable with my use of her story.
I tried a few re-writes, striving for a connection but not really feeling it. I finally decided that the column shouldn’t be published.
But I couldn’t leave it alone.
It’s taken me many days and some sleepless nights, but I think I’ve figured it out. I am not an edgy black woman living in Brooklyn; therefore, the story I tell about an incident that happened to such a person cannot be about how that person felt, because I really don’t know. Only she does. And, that isn’t the story anyway.
I am a white woman; a grandmother, if not grandmotherly, living in the West and writing opinion columns for a local publication. While I am entitled to the outrage I felt because I care about my friend, it does not stop there. Drilling down further, I recognized that if it could happen to her, it could happen to one of my grandkids, or another of my friends.
Closer, but still no cigar. To drop the line of thought there is to still miss the point, and I did.
I recently attended a fundraising dinner for Equality Utah at the Dixie Center. The guest speaker was Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States. At one point in his talk, he said, “Oppression looks the same regardless of its target.” That sentence kept rolling around in my head as I wrestled with my quest for the larger connection.
Oppression looks the same regardless of its target.
While it matters to me that the incident in Miami happened to someone I know, it matters more that it happened at all. It isn’t about my friend, and it isn’t about me. It is about the continued existence of oppression.
We only need to read any newspaper or website to find multiple examples of oppression, incidents in which the exercise of authority or power is delivered with cruelty and injustice. Think of the young women who were kidnapped at gunpoint in Nigeria.
I entered into this story because of a connection to the person who experienced the incident. I emerged from this story with a renewed commitment to what is required of each of us if we are to be worthy stewards of the human race.
I may be a white woman, a grandmother, living in the West writing opinion columns, but my heart and my head tell me oppression in any form cannot be ignored. In fact, not only can it not be ignored, it must be challenged at every juncture, using every resource we have available.
For me, that is this column, and so I say this: Oppression, manifesting itself in any form, has no place here. Not in this world, not in this lifetime.
