I grew up in a racially-mixed neighborhood of a rust belt "chocolate city." As in most Northern cities, no one in my town went out of their way to acknowledge, chat or bond with strangers--black or otherwise.
I experienced something different when I went away to university in Iowa, where I could spend all day and never see anyone who looked like me or shared my culture; where, in addition to all the fun of college, I experienced racial microaggressions by the ton. Something happens in that sort of situation, I've found. I began to thrill at encountering people who were black like me--or, heck, any people of color. There occurred this unspoken dance between black folks. Passing each other along a campus path or in the grocery store or laundromat, we would smile, nod and say hello--maybe strike up a conversation to get the low down about someone on campus who could do black hair or someone with a car who was looking for riders heading back Chicago way for Thanksgiving break. We would each part secure that we weren't alone--that there was a group to which we belonged. However small that group was, there was solidarity.
As comforting as this ritual was, it had its negative side. Black students who forgot the nod, smile and greet often enough were officially branded race traitors, particularly if they seemed too comfortable around white people. You would hear whispers: Such and such doesn't speak to black folks, accompanied by knowing looks and harumphs. I admit to being on the receiving end of that charge a few times, along with other variations of thinks she's white. And so, I am sensitive to it.
A few years past college, when I became the only black person on the account staff of a large Chicago PR agency, I remembered the lesson. In a city as large and diverse as the Windy City, there is no expectation that anyone will speak to every other black person they encounter on the CTA. But within the microcosm of a very non-diverse workplace, the racial bonding ritual was present.
In my years in corporate America, it was understood that the few black folks in a company would not just speak to one another, but get to know each other, regardless of titles or departments. Racial microaggressions certainly don't disappear in the work world. Indeed, they intensify under the stress of deadlines, budgets and objectives. Having colleagues who share the particular experience of being "of color" at work helps.
But the ritual can become fraught, as maintaining relationships with other people of color often requires reaching over corporate class divides. My peers and bosses in the agency did not look like me. The colleagues who did look like me were security, mail room and administrative staff. The two sides--professional and support--rarely interacted in our corporate culture, but I had to plant a foot in both camps and try to balance, facing judgement from both. I think this is an experience unique to marginalized groups--this need to juggle allegiances, to fit in with work peers without fracturing allegiances of race or gender, etc.
To not develop a collegial relationship with fellow black workers was to invite those whispers. I saw this happen to a woman who joined the first agency where I worked a few years after me. It was not that she disdained black colleagues (as far as I can tell); she simply made no extra effort to speak to or spend time with them. And, for that, she generated much suspicion and eye-rolling among black co-workers, even as she appeared to excel in her position.
My husband and I used to do the smile, nod and greet all the time when we first relocated to our small Central Indiana suburb. Not often--cause seven years ago, we rarely saw another brown face in our 'hood. Once the teenage check out girl at Meijer kept us talking for 20 minutes, so excited was she to see a black family other than her own in town. Since then, there has been an influx of black and Latino residents, enough so that no one feels obligated to speak just for solidarity's sake.
Yesterday, though, I walked past a black man without speaking. He passed me a few moments later and gave a pointed Hello. Hello, I responded. Then, he muttered: Black people have to speak to each other, y'know. I felt chastised. For a moment feeling as if I had betrayed the code...failed to honor a cultural ritual...that I was insufficiently black.
Photo Credit: Dreamer's Intuition
