I sit here and I listen.

I listen to the news and I’m worried. Our country feels like it’s poised on some precipice; one that was supposed to have crumbled with Brown v. Board, and with the work of visionaries like Martin Luther King. But it never did go away, though the history books, (penned by white hands,) claim that it has.

I watch and I read and I listen…and I listen. And I can feel such profound and compounded anger and frustration; it feels like it has reached levels of pure desperation. These sentiments are so long-held that they span generations. They have only seethed and festered with time. Like an angry, swollen wound that no one is able to lance.

I listen and I read and I learn, and yet I know that I can never truly understand this monster. Because I implicitly wear it’s face, it’s skin.

I am white, and I am privileged. I am a good, hard working person, but my skin is glaringly, unforgivably, white.

It seems like every week I hear of another incident of police brutality, and like all of the other reports in the news lately it reeks of racism and classism. I know that I have had nothing to do with this violence, not directly. I too stand here, appalled and devastated. But I find myself at a loss, because I don’t know how to fit into this tableau.

My skin is white, and while I categorically do not believe that this makes me superior, I’ve also inadvertently, oftentimes unwittingly, benefitted from this imbalance, all my life. In all of the small ways that add up to something so huge that it confounds comprehension.

When I walk down a city street, women don’t grasp their purses more tightly as they pass me. If I go into a store, the salespeople don’t watch me more closely, waiting for me to steal something. My parents could afford a house in a good school district, and I never had to fight to receive a decent education.

I sit here and I write, because I don’t feel as if I can speak in this forum. There is no place for me at the table for this discussion. If black Americans are unwitting victims, white Americans like me are involuntary accomplices. None of us want these mantels that we wear.

Image Credit

I went to Boston last week to attend the Harvard Summer Institute on College Admissions. And the highlight of my entire week? Definitely my cab ride on the last day, when I was headed from Cambridge to South Station to catch my train home to Philly. Here’s what happened…

The cab pulled up to the entrance of the hotel, and my driver was an older man. He was probably in his late sixties, with a solid, stocky build, with more hair on his eyebrows than on his head. He looked like a big old bulldog, but in a cute, grandpa-type of way. His name was Joseph. He had a voice so gravelly, you could use it to sand wood.

I love taxis, I really do. Because I love talking to my drivers, hearing their stories. After we starting talking, I told him about a weird experience I had taking a black car from the hotel the other day. “It was strange, and the guy was really rude. He demanded a flat rate that was twice as much as it should have been."

At this, all of a sudden Joseph came alive. It was like I was talking to a whole different person. And he was pissed. Like, really incensed. In the rearview mirror I saw his eyes bug out, and he shook his finger at the windshield and exclaimed, “That guy is gypsy cab! That is no Uber, no real taxi, that gypsy cab! That is no taxi!”

I nodded in understanding and said, “You know that’s what I was wondering, because I hadn't called for an Uber or a cab, he was already sitting in front of the hotel when I came out. I thought it was odd.”

Joseph snorted in disgust. “These guys are gypsies, that is how you call them. They are no taxi.” He jammed his finger at his chest multiple times and said, “I am taxi, I follow regulations. I do not get out of car and wave down the people and make them get in my cab. No! Never! It is against the regulations! This is no good, no good.”

I just keep nodding, this explained so much. “You know, on my way into Boston last week I think I ran into one of these guys as I was leaving the train station. He actually came inside the station and followed me back through the exit door, telling me to get into his taxi. I kind of looked at him and was like, ‘Dude, back off. I have no idea who you are, leave me alone.’ He got angry but I ignored him and went and found a real taxi.” (I figured that Joseph would be on my side on this one.)

I was right; Joseph was extremely offended on my behalf. I was starting to get the sense that this was a significant ongoing frustration for him. He spat out, “That is no legal. No legal! If police see him, he get $500 fine.” He slapped his right hand across his left for emphasis, “Just like that." He caught my eye in the rearview mirror. "No talk, no nothing. He pay $500, just like that. But the police will no catch him. I know this, because if I see one person do this I call police, but they take forever to get here, and he is gone.”

He paused to bask in his indignation. Then he slapped his right hand across his left again. “Just like that.” It really did sound quite frustrating. Joseph continued, “But this America, and you can do nothing. If you say there is crime, police say, where is crime? And if the man gone, then the police say there is no crime!” He shook his head in disgust, muttering, “No proof, no crime.” He continued, “But anyway, the ticket no work. Even if police catch the guy and he have to pay ticket, it no work. He do the crime again the next day,” (slap, smack,) “just like that.”

At this, I couldn't help but stand up for our legal system, even just a little bit. “Yeah, America is pretty big on the whole ‘innocent until proven guilty’ thing.” Joseph eyed me in the rearview and I could tell he wasn't very impressed. I had a hunch so I followed it, asking him, “If this had happened in the Ukraine, would it go down any differently?”

Joseph nodded his head furiously, clearly very excited. “Yes, yes. In Ukraine, is VERY different.” I asked him how, and he smiled evilly. “In Ukraine, he get punch in face!”

I burst out laughing, like, I lost it. He just said it with such righteous indignation, and with absolute certainty. Just to clarify I asked him, “Do you mean that the police would punch him in the face or you would?”

Joseph smirked at me. “In Ukraine, police punch the face! Tickets no work, but that work.” And, well, I had to agree with him on that one.

A High-Tech Existence

According to a recent Quartz article, we now spend more than 8 hours every day consuming media. The article cites a recent study by ZenithOptimedia that found that people spend more than 490 minutes of their day engaged with some sort of media.

Though I initially balked at the number, when I thought about it, I realized that it sounds pretty accurate. Which is mind boggling, at least for yours truly. There has long been much talk and concern over the rapid technologizing of our daily lives. Some go so far as to say that it will mark the end of real humanity as we know it.

However, you could also argue that the death of humanity happened back in the 1700’s, with the industrial age and the advent of the machine. For the first time in human history, we no longer needed to rely on our hands and our backs to do all the hard work of daily living.

But why stop there? Let’s reach back even further, to 370 B.C., and good old Socrates. Basically, Socrates was incredibly put out by the advent of the written word. He was utterly convinced that humanity had lost its way. (Sound familiar?)

Luckily, Soc’s student Plato didn’t share in his teacher’s abhorrence of writing. In The Phaedrus, Plato recorded a dialogue between Socrates and (surprise) Phaedrus. In the text, Socrates argues that our reliance on writing will atrophy our memories. He said that we would mistake reading for knowledge, even though words themselves do not and cannot represent knowledge.

…[writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
– Socrates, The Phaedrus

Back to The Present

So what’s really going on here? Well, change is scary. It has always been scary. Change rocks the foundations of our lives, and we’re forced to adjust and adapt, lest we risk getting left behind. And as a general rule, Americans really hate being told what to do. It’s like petting a cat’s fur backwards. (We don’t like it.)

Even small changes cause uproar. In the 1920’s when talkies came onto the scene, filmmakers and critics around the world lamented that the added audio would over-focus on dialogue, which would corrupt the unique and subtle aesthetic experience of the silent film. I think most people today would vehemently disagree. Actually, wasn’t digitizing music supposed to mark the end of the recording industry? And some are saying that newspapers and post offices are on the chopping block next. I think you get my point.

Where we are with technological innovation today is scary, because it’s new and unknown. I think we are on the brink of a new era; one that will rival the industrial revolution in terms of its size, scope, and impact on the world. And I argue that this is a good thing! This is what we humans do. We adapt and improve upon ourselves. We evolve. If you think Darwin was at all worth his salt, then you already ascribe to this model. I honestly don’t see any difference in our reaction to change today, than from thousands of years ago. When have we ever progressed by holding ourselves back?

I’m immensely excited to see what our collective creative genius will bring about in the coming years. Today is an incredible time to be alive.

June, 2015
Cambridge, Massachusetts