Black Lives Matter

We interrupt our highly-irregularly scheduled series on PhD switching to bring you: a rant.

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While driving home from work today, I heard this story on the radio about a Colorado Public Radio host, who is a black woman, who got stopped by a police officer (white), after a 911 call about a "black man wearing black carrying a rifle".   Thankfully, this story ended well.  As soon as the officer realized she was in fact carrying a bag of golf clubs, he immediately apologized and essentially nothing happened.  In all respects, I believe both parties handled the situation spectacularly well, and for that I commend them both.  I encourage you to read or listen to the story in full.

But what really got me about this story, is that it all took place in the neighborhood where I grew up.  In the story, they play the audio of the 911 call.  I know telling race from voice is definitely not a sure fire thing, but the woman on the call sounds white.  And I know the area of Denver where I grew up is pretty dang white.  I knew personally all of three black students at my high school, and two of them were half Asian*!

*Although they are by and large perceived as "black" by most people, the way things go.

And when I learned that the woman in the story is actually CPR's host of All Things Considered, Jo Ann Allen, I got this horrible sick feeling in my stomach.  I don't know this woman personally, but I hear her voice almost every day.  And I feel terrible that she had an experience in which the thought "I could die" crossed her mind - in my neighborhood, because of my people.  Because she is black.

I wasn't the one who made that call, but I still feel like I need to apologize, because the woman who did could easily have been someone I know, the mother of one of my friends growing up, someone I could run into a store while on the way to my parents' house.  I'd imagine she didn't make the call out of any blatantly racist intentions - she saw what she thought was a black man with a rifle, and she reported it.  The thing is, there are so few black people in my neighborhood that most of us almost never meet black people in our daily lives, we mostly only see black people on the news as criminals, or as poor people in inner city slums.  People, in short, to be afraid of.

And I'm not exempting myself from this.  I get the same dang gut reaction of fear and nervousness when I meet black people, unless they're one of the few I already know, because I have so little experience and so much implicit bias from everything I've seen and and not seen growing up, fighting with my progressive values, that I just can't act natural.  I am awkward, I probably give people weird looks, and I hate it.  I hate that I instinctively treat them differently.

But I'm not the one who has to worry about getting shot, because someone's gut classification of me was "threatening".  Jo Ann Allen is highly educated, and provides a valuable service for our community.  She's "made it", is arguably doing everything right, and still she has to face this risk.  Because of people like me.

It makes me so mad - people like Jo Ann Allen, people like my friends, people like the undergrad I ran into at AGU or the high school student at my church, they can work hard, they can smash stereotypes about what they're supposed to be "capable" of and more tangible barriers like poverty and single parents... and it can all end with one police interaction gone wrong, from one white person who just assumes a black person is a threat.  And it happens all too often.

I'm also angry that because of our segregated existence that there aren't more black people in my world of science.  Through science, I've met people from all over the world, but I can still only name a handful of black people I know personally.  And it makes me sad.  What is science missing because we're missing these people?  How many young black men and women have never had the chance to pursue a degree in geology because they got shot before they could make it to school?  Or, less dramatic but no less sinister, they were pushed off that path by barrier after barrier after barrier until it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I have all the markers of privilege in this world except gender.  I can easily just turn off the radio after a story like this and never give a second thought - because I can do that.  I'm not the one at risk in this scenario.  And that fact really sickens me.  Those of us with these markers of privilege - we can't do that anymore.  We are losing too many people because we just look the other way.

I'll be quite honest - I don't really know what the answer is.  I've tried to read up on this - read articles written by black authors giving advice to those such as me.  One thing that comes up time and time again is simply educating yourself.  Reading about incidents like the one that just happened to Jo Ann Allen.  Reading the stories and experiences of black people all over the world, coming to understand them as individual humans with often very different struggles from the ones I face.  I also try to donate to organizations that support black students in STEM, and reach out to the what few young black students I am so lucky to encounter in what I really hope is an encouraging and not creepy-white-savior kind of way.  I don't know if any of this helps much.  I feel like my demographic has a lot to answer for, we have a lot of work to do to fix this.  On behalf of myself and my race, I am sorry.

Black Lives Matter.

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