WHITE PEOPLE’S WORDS REFLECTED BACK TO THEM

These seemingly benign words lay bare the luxury of safety wielded like a shield of white wokeness

The person who inspired the title and first piece of my show “Tell Me Three Things I Can Do/Return To Sender” announced himself casually. We were corresponding over text about Black Lives Matter: the movement and the astonishing actions it had inspired in the world.

“Tell me three things I can do other than the obvious,” he typed.

The letters blurred and reshaped themselves in front of me. I stared at the words again, forcing them to sharpen. I thought I had misread.

“I’m sorry, is that last part for me?” My eyes narrowed. I was livid.

“I’m asking earnestly,” he said. “Don’t make it into a thing.”

The words cemented. The person is a progressive and a lawyer. Someone I have known for more than 15 years. We shared (past tense) a fondness for each other. The exchange was upsetting on its own, but it was not an isolated incident. This summer brought a reverberating pattern of conversations and emails and texts from friends, collaborators and acquaintances, revealing a prescribed and selfaccepted way of communicating. A form letter of sameness of how white people in America discuss race, with us and themselves.

In the days, weeks and months after George Floyd’s murder at the knee of a St. Louis police officer, I received several dozen inquiries that raised my blood pressure. At the height of the insanity, I wrote an essay about my experience. This exchange came a week after that column was published, from a person who had read it, shared it with others and didn’t see himself in the telling. And that was telling. This cognitive detachment was something I recognized. I’d seen it in my personal and professional life. I’d witnessed it in the most casual and intimate settings

and in the corporate caste system. An echo chamber of fragility.

After I wrote the editorial, I thought I would feel better. A naive sentiment in retrospect. My community was in pain. Another one of us cut down, with no greater sense of when the change that we desperately demanded would come. I found that I was even more enraged, but now in a more resigned way. How to deal with more death, other than to hold the grief closer?

In staring at my mourning, I began to collect the phrases that had triggered me the most — variations on the same theme of a lack of accountability, a blithe uselessness and an emotional apathy. They communicated a silent expectation that the burden was mine to carry, that it was for me to orient and settle the speaker. My role was victim and teacher all at once. I was the antagonist, and they were the protagonist in their own narrative. “Race” was being done to them. This was the language of white America that I knew. Far away and up close. It sucked the air out of our exchanges. And I wanted to breathe.

The first thing I looked at was my response. I could have been unbothered, dis

missed my anger and moved on, as living in this country had taught me to do. But then I would have been without feeling — something less (or more) than human, as a coping mechanism. That felt like a failure to me, a protective cocoon from that sharp emotional pain. I rejected that option.

In a flash of Black anger, I wanted to act. My soul and sanity demanded it. I decided I was going to paint the phrases. Art as therapy. I wanted to create billboards as threedimensional totems and reflect them as far away as possible. I wanted to return them energetically to their origins. I wanted to take these seemingly benign words and show the garish truth. Reveal the context of their meaning, back to its source. Away from me.

“Here If You Ever Want To Talk” (Unsolicited kinship with no context.)

“For Your Selfcare” (Unsolicited money being offered to pacify the speaker.) “I’m Ashamed Of My Complicity” (Said by too many white women everywhere.)

“I’m Just Here To Listen” (For what, exactly?)

The comments revealed an insatiable need to end a conversation that had never started. In all of the cases, I thought I was having one kind of dialogue, and realized in a flash that we were having a completely different exchange. This jarring shift, a violent and unpredictable break, betrayed a lack of understanding of their own cultural dysmorphia.