Rear View Mirroring seems a good title for our first diablog. It looks back in order to move forward by processing a long ago terror we each experienced during one early sunny Sunday morning when we were stopped by the police. It was unexpected, as we were traveling on an isolated road in an unfamiliar state. We didn’t see it coming at the time.
It marked a tipping point in our relationship. For the first time in our newly formed friendship, we sensed the demarcation of the color line. We felt the indecent exposure of being subject to –and the object of – was it racial profiling? Not surprisingly, our DNA had programmed us to react … in very different ways.
Jan: It happened during a very long drive that we made together more than 15 years ago. I couldn’t travel due to an injury; you agreed to drive me halfway across the country. Your offer really surprised me; I didn’t know you that well. On the way home from that road trip, we experienced a five-minute incident, seemingly inconsequential. You were the driver; I was hidden, dozing, riding “shotgun.” Strange to think about how the term referred to the passenger who was armed to protect the driver in the stagecoach days of the Wild West.
We never discussed what happened at the time; it lasted only a few minutes. But years later, we wrote about it in a pairing of poems “Driving in Black & White.”
It was the first time we had encountered a situation that sensitized us to our skin color. It was as if the larger world’s eye was peering at us, profiling us based on our skin color.
Many years passed, and yet, we never discussed it until we wrote about it in those poems. We never spoke about it at the time and never brought it up afterward. In fact, we never discussed it for over a decade. It was tucked away as if a shameful memory. Why was that?
Why didn’t we use that weekend together and those two long drives as a time to have that crucial conversation? Why did we avoid talking about that moment until so many years later during a casual walk? Why did it take us so long to broach the subject?
Heather: I don’t know why we didn’t talk about that event. I felt embarrassed about being stopped, since I consider myself a responsible driver, and I recall feeling my blackness very acutely, but I didn’t have any words to describe my feelings at the time. Sometimes it’s challenging to explain or understand a moment that makes no sense to you. Except for being reminded of the vulnerability of the black body, I’m relieved that the stop was ultimately unremarkable and left me/us with no obvious scars. It was clearly an experience that stayed with us. I suspect that the current climate around law enforcement and encounters with the black body helped to unlock this memory even more so. The story remains relevant even now.
Jan: Even more relevant now than ever! I still think about how that moment marked us. If you had been white, this would have been a blip, a shrug of the shoulders, an “oh, well” moment on the road. How strange that a shade of difference could make all of the difference for driving Black in America. Just like when Aidsand Wright-Riggins reacted during our conversation with him. He recalled his experience of driving a white colleague to the airport and being stopped and asked where he was taking her? Presumed to be the hired driver, he showed up on the radar screen – because he was Black? We can’t know for sure what motivated these traffic stops, but the fact that they arouse such fear and second guessing is cause enough to at least acknowledge them. Maybe that’s what’s meant by the racial unconscious.
At The Color Line: Diablog 
I’m so glad to see this alive and well on the internet! Two women engaging in meaningful dialogue as a vehicle (ha! no pun intended) to engage in restorative practices does good things to my heart, especially with our current social context. I am reading this conversation as a Black woman married to my best friend, a White man. We’ve never experienced a police encounter together, but we have shared with one another our separate experiences. I think he was surprised by my (perceived) overreaction to his nonchalance about police and I was surprised that he wasn’t more vigilant, more critical of policing practices, and hadn’t considered that he was very lucky in a lot of the circumstances he found himself in in his younger days. Also, he never got the talk from his parents on what to do when stopped by an officer and he was taken aback that I had to experience that for the first time at the age of 8. As a Black woman deeply in love with a White man, talk about your cognitive dissonance! I didn’t want to be in a symbol of the Black experience, as we are not a monolith. I was frustrated by his shock and surprise. The folly of White Supremacy showed up right in the middle of our marriage.
Thankfully, this was not the first conversation I had with my now-husband about race and it certainly won’t be the last. As with a lot of aspects of marriage or any loving relationship, it’s an iterative process, it’s reciprocal, it’s mistakes and forgiveness, it’s growth. And it takes courage to speak truth to one another, especially when those truths can be very ugly.
Kudos to you and I look forward to reading more!
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So much wisdom and caring in your post, Leslie! Thank you for sharing how Black/White sensitivities can be so strikingly different when it comes to the police encounter. Because we often don’t bother to “go there,” such conversations don’t take place. But in a relationship that matters, as you so beautifully explain, there’s an “iterative process” where we practice how to become more courageous, honest, and above all, forgiving.
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I kept thinking about why this story struck me so much. I think the decision not to speak is one we face all the time, and it seems the fear of misperception/rejection/disappointment has only gotten worse since the incident you describe. The consequences for saying the wrong thing can be so high–no longer just personal rejection but one that is amplified by technology/social media. It seems to me that trust necessary for candor requires both taking risks and offering forgiveness for mistakes. How can we make more room for that? Thank you for making your own personal examples public to help us all gain glimpses of a path forward.
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You’re so right about the challenges involved in building trust. In answer to your question about “making more room,” we found it was mainly about “making time” for trust to take shape. As with any skill, results depend on the 3 P’s: patience, perseverance, and practice. This stick-to-it-ness and time commitment are both much harder to develop than the intellectual aspects of awareness and sensitivity to otherness. Thanks so much for your comment! It helps to know that our personal examples have some small role to play in imagining a path forward.
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This is an amazing project—honest, accessible, and for me, above all else, hopeful. It is a powerful statement about every person’s capacity for empathy and connection. Engaging in this sort of public dialogue requires making yourselves vulnerable, an act of courage and generosity. In an era in which social media has made it easy to talk “at” others rather than talk “with” them, your dialogue models a more meaningful approach to discussing race, one that relies on listening. The applications of this work are innumerable and I genuinely hope a publisher picks up the project and broadens the reach of the conversation you have begun. I look forward to your next post.
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Thanks for your thoughtful feedback, Meghan. You’re right to suggest that social media has made it quite easy to talk “at” rather than “with” others. We’ve all come to rely so much on instant replies and reacting in the moment that we’ve left no room for talking “with” others, which requires active listening, especially for interactions across the color line. Of course, active listening means asking questions, reflecting back what you hear, and being careful not to judge someone’s story. It requires a level of openness and attention to the other, something we often forget in conversation. While our mentoring relationship is what brought us together, we worked really hard to build our friendship and we were intentional about really listening to each other. We also returned again and again to certain topics, especially those that were really weighty and not always easy to discuss the first time around. This type of intentionality is what it will take to talk “with” rather than “at” someone who is different from you. We tried to always be active listeners and stay open to each other’s story.
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This is a brave, important dialog. As a white woman, Jan, I put myself in your place. All those years back, might I have been insensitive to the meaning and impact of such a traffic stop for a Black traveling companion? Or would I have been reluctant to talk to my friend about it, worried I would be treading too hard on tender ground? I would have been fearful of projecting, translating — from white to Black — what it meant…and getting it all wrong.
It is wonderful that you trusted one another enough to confront the discomfort and talk it through.
Keep the dialog — the diablog! — going!
I look forward to what is next.
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Thank you for sharing, Lois. You’re so right about the importance of becoming “sensitive” to how others process their reality. Your second point about how to talk about it is tricky. We had to build trust and a willingness to accept each other’s and our own discomfort. That can’t really happen right away. The expectation of “getting it right” from the start is unrealistic. It’s like learning to dance with a new partner: the more you both work at it, the more comfortable and coordinated you become as a team. If you strive to meet each other halfway and stumble along together, the effort can feel less strained and one-sided. Even the simple candor of admitting your discomfort saying something like, ”Boy, that made me feel uncomfortable. How did you feel?” might work for starters. But what really helped us was writing our way back to that shared moment. In the end, we offered each other a kind of rear-view mirroring.
And, rest assured, we are working on our next blog, so stay tuned!
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