Black and White

About a week ago when we first arrived at our hostel in New Orleans, we found ourselves unpacking the car on the side of the road in a scuzzy part of town at about 10:30 at night. Though there were sidewalks on both sides, as we unloaded our suitcases, a group of 4-5 black young men came walking down the opposite side of the street, then crossed in the middle of the lane, so that they were walking towards us on the street. I felt nervous. They walked right past us and I gave a guilty sigh of relief.

 In an area where the vast majority of the population is black, I've never been so aware of race before in my life. I've been reflecting on the above situation, wondering if the colour of their skin made me more nervous than I would have been if they were white. I'm honestly not sure. Either way, a group of men crossing the street at night towards you and your car instead of using the sidewalks and intersections is disconcerting. Nevertheless, I was keenly aware of the colour of their skin versus the colour of mine.

 I don't want to be racist, but I know that I am living in a racist fishbowl. I know that I need to intentionally shed some ingrained unfair biases. I'm just not sure quite how to confront the evil in me that I'm largely unaware of.

 Part of the issue is that despite living in a fairly multicultural part of Canada, my interests don't usually get me in situations where I would naturally socialize with people from other cultural backgrounds (minus the occasional person here or there). Is the answer, then, to deliberately branch out and go to those places more frequented by people different than myself?

 Before we left for this trip, we made a list of things we wanted to do while in the USA. Attend a black gospel church was one of our items. We did that, and one of the announcements at that church was about a 50th Anniversary of ML King's Speech Celebration / Protest Against Mass Incarceration. Since another item on our list was to attend a protest, we decided to go. It was, after all, an issue that we believed in. We also felt that the presence of as many white faces in the protest as possible would be a positive thing, even if, politically as Canadians, we couldn't do much about it.

We attended the protest, which ended up being a kind of rally in a church. I was expecting something out on a street somewhere with signs. There were signs there, but they were printed on 8 1/2 X 11 sheets of printer paper and were only used inside the church. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, children and judges took the stage - talking about the problem of mass incarceration of African Americans in America, especially in Louisiana. The statistics we heard were very alarming. Did you know that America incarcerates more people per capita than any other country, and that Louisiana incarcerates more people per than any other state? Or that more African Americans are in prison today than all the slaves in America in 1850?

 The main, most concrete issue to be confronted was that the police wanted to expand the local prison so that it could house more inmates.  It is not just the voilent people being sent to prison - that, nobody is disputing - it is that going to prison is the band-aid solution to far too many crimes.  The reality is that far too many people are being sent to jail for possessing drugs or having a mental illness.They handed out lawmakers' phone numbers and told everyone to contact these people the next day telling them that they oppose the new prison expansion.

 I don't know what the laws are like in Canada pertaining to the same issues, but that's probably because I've never really gotten involved in politics before.   I think when we go back to Canada, this is something we would like to get more involved in. Canada's situation is different, but we have oppressed groups too. And we would like to be on the side of the liberators, not the perpetrators, and certainly not a part of the silent majority.