Why do we need a white newscaster to confirm for us that racism and racial tension are alive and well?
I guess that’s what confuses me.
After seeing a family get verbally assaulted with the most loaded of racist epithets in downtown Portland, my friend Jackie Ward wrote on Facebook about her experience seeing this happen. The experience went viral and received a great deal of attention in Maine and in a handful of national outlets. Here in Maine, a largely white audience received the story with shock and heartache.
The subject of the attack, Shay Stewart-Bouley, has acknowledged that, while it came at an already depressing and frustrating time, the attention Ward’s story generated was positive. What speaks volumes about how layered the incident, though, is that for a decade before Ward’s report on her went viral, Stewart-Bouley herself — a columnist and Black Girl in Maine blogger — had been reporting her often rocky experience as a person of color here in Maine.
I also consider Stewart-Bouley a friend.
Her writing and activism have been spectacularly influential on my work and perspective, and earlier this year we participated in a conversation about race for the Maine Humanities Council.
She is a prolific writer and outspoken about her experience. I have several friends who are aware of her work who have pulled me aside and ask something to this effect: “Why can she be so negative? Why does she make everything about race?”
I explain she doesn’t make anything about race; she reports on her experiences, which are framed by constant racialization. She and her family are called the n-word while on their way to get gelato. Elsewhere in the country, another unarmed black man was shot in the back by a police officer.
But these experiences gain widespread credibility when white people share them. At the same time, almost no white person present in the Old Port when Stewart-Bouley and her family were attacked stepped up on their behalf in the moment.
Why is she so negative all the time, you ask?
A few weeks ago, a white person told me about an experience she and a family member had while visiting Jamaica. They were taken down a road by a couple who claimed they had won a prize. Finally, they had a bad feeling about the whole thing. The hair on the back of their necks stood up. They needed to get out, and they finally did.
I suggested it sounded as though, for a few minutes, she got a sense of what it can feel like to be a black or brown person in this country. Nervous laughter followed.
“I felt like I might be uncomfortable or in danger one time” stories are a popular genre among white people. I have several of my own. That the feeling is a novelty says a lot about the lens through which we perceive — or don’t perceive at all — the experiences of others. In fact, some white people are wholly incapable of believing in experiences dissimilar to their own.
There was no shortage of people online who, despite Ward’s eyewitness account, claimed Stewart-Bouley’s experience was inflated or fabricated.
It’s great the attention Ward brought to the incident opened some eyes, though the narrative many took away from it was not the most jarring one. I live in Maine and am very familiar with the racist attitudes that proliferate here. That some hooligans in a car yelled racial slurs is not surprising nor is it the first incident of the sort with which I am familiar. That nearly no one on the crowded street mobilized on the family’s behalf after it happened is the real story.
There are overtly racist people everywhere, but what do we do when we see people victimized by it? In this case, apparently the answer is “not much.” Stewart-Bouley has said that this is as upsetting a reality as the attack itself.
Awareness is great, but it’s not an end to this cancer afflicting white America. Now that you know Mainers are getting called the n-word in the street — including a little girl, by the way — are you also ready to acknowledge the stacks of dead, unarmed blacks getting killed the streets? Now that we know we are afflicted by sickness, how are you prepared to act?
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
