America is Hard to See

Shortly after Emmett and I moved to New York in 2015, we snuck into the newly re-opened Whitney on a Friday night. We grabbed illicit glasses of champagne off the trays of circulating waiters, rode the museum’s industrial-sized elevator up to the rooftop, and stared out at the glistening Hudson while the arm of a Calder sculpture rotated gently in the breeze behind us.

The title of that exhibition, America Is Hard to See, stirred something inside me that night. I interpreted it through the lens of my life as a suburban Canadian who had long been striving to get some of the sparkly American magic on display at the Whitney for myself.

Many of the Canadians in my life have long been baffled by my attachment to America. Even when the US felt easy to love – when Obama was singing Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’ at the Apollo and LeBron was bringing championships home to Cleveland and double rainbows over Yosemite were going viral – my affection for this country struck so many as strange. But to me, America wasn’t synonymous with mass shootings, incarceration, militarism, or hysteria. America was New York. It was skyscrapers and grit and great food and the feeling that anything could be accomplished here with enough ambition and tenacity.

I’m ashamed to admit it’s only recently that I’ve begun to see this perspective as privilege.

To be able to choose my America – to avail myself of what makes this country wonderful without worrying about being touched by what makes it terrible – is a luxury not everyone has. Hell, even the ability to skip the ticket line at a museum and sip stolen drinks without fear of reprisal is a form of entitlement. And that entitlement is conferred not just by education or economic advantages, but, perhaps more than anything else, by the color of my skin.

So many millions of Black Americans don’t have the privilege I do. Their America isn’t beautiful or aspirational or limitless. Instead, it’s stop-and-frisks, police brutality, segregation, and centuries of violence. It’s the legacy of discrimination that keeps them from achieving the things that come so easily to others. It’s the disparity of opportunities that leads to disparity of outcomes. So it’s for them, rather than me, that Robert Frost really was right: America is hard to see.

I’ve spent much of the past two weeks thinking more deeply about my role in all of this. I’m a white person living in a largely Black Brooklyn neighborhood, and I benefit from its low rent without really contributing to its culture. I work in an extremely white industry where nepotism has historically been a huge driver of hiring practices. I’ve allowed myself to believe that engaging in black art, reading black writers, and having black friends means I’m not part of the problem. But of course I am.

 So I’m on a journey now that so many white people are on.

To examine the systems that have made me successful.

To use my money, time, and voice for good rather than evil.

To uplift and support the Black community.

And to try to make America a little easier for everyone to see.

Come along with me?