Race, class, sex, and me

The Trayvon Martin decision has made anyone with a brain think, at the very least.  Last weekend I was at a going away party for a friend and the topic came up, and there were those at the table who made the point that, under Florida law, the decision was correct because -- however much of an ass Zimmerman was in provoking Martin, by the time Martin came at him (if indeed that's what happened), Florida law gave Zimmerman the right to stand his ground and shoot him.

I hadn't been paying that much attention to the fine points of law. Fact is, it's ridiculous for the whole thing to have happened at all, and if the law protects Zimmerman, then the law is wrong, and hopefully will be challenged and struck down.

But, beyond that, it took me back to the basic issue of race and how we live. The vast majority of my friends are white. There are some outliers, people I love deeply because I have known them for many years, but they are outliers.  And my kids are growing up pretty much amongst white people. There's a family moving in two houses down where the dad at least has more recent African blood than most of us (I still buy that we all go back to Olduvai Gorge), and I'm psyched for that.  I met him out on the lake on one of the floats a few weeks back with his kids, and I told him the house was available.  Good guy.

And then there's sex.  I was thinking about it this morning during an AA meeting.  The only women of color I've ever even made out with were Ivy League women, and one of them was the daughter of a literary celebrity.  My point is that I'm an utter snob, that I only would cross lines when it was really safe, that, really, I'm extremely narrowminded and narrowcasted.

There was a time in 8th or 9th grade when I was squished into the aisle of a bus coming back from a track meet, body pressed against this African American girl, faces inches apart.  We just lay there, pretended like it had happened somehow.  I didn't kiss her, because I didn't think she was "pretty" enough, though her body was plenty nice, and I may well have had another girlfriend at the time, meaning it could have been trouble. But at some level I also knew that I wasn't ready to have a black girlfriend. I was insecure as hell, I wasn't ready to break out like that. I needed a girlfriend who was validated by the social circles I was in/aspired to.

And, in the end, my big girlfriends in life were all white, one of them Scandinavian, but my wife and my other longest running girlfriend are both Episcopalians, members of the same tribe as me. In some ways, not a good role model for my children. But I ain't changin the basic facts now.