Twenty years have passed since the Los Angeles riots and Rodney King’s plea: “Can we all get along?” Since then, we’ve made progress in “getting along,” but the question, spotlighted by Trayvon Martin’s recent death, remains, how can we “get along?”
Since the lives of many whites and blacks rarely intersect, too many people know “others” only through television. Years ago, I regularly rode a MARTA bus, from Avondale to DeKalb College (now Georgia Perimeter College), after taking the train from Hamilton E. Holmes station. Usually I was the only white person, always one of a small minority. That situation was not new for me. I’ve taught in China where white skin, blue eyes and blond hair leave no doubt about my identity. The bus experience was different, though, because it happened where I am usually part of the majority. Since other passengers sometimes referred to me as “the white woman,” I often thought about what it means to be part of a minority group.
Choosing a seat could be fraught with racial implications. If I sat in one seat with my backpack on the seat next to me, would I be perceived as arrogant? If I bypassed two empty seats and sat by a black person, would I appear to be pretending camaraderie?
One morning I was the only white person on the bus when a man I knew got on. He yelled from the front to me, almost at the back, “Hey, are you slumming this morning?” My first, painful thought was that my fellow passengers would lump me with his behavior.
There was another side to this. The things that set me apart from others coexisted with the things we shared. The black passengers were ordinary working people or students who were doing what I was — riding a bus that we hoped would get us where we needed to be on time.
Regardless of race, we grumbled about late buses, broken heating/cooling systems and the occasional rude driver. We exchanged knowing smiles when a neophyte got on the wrong bus and shot angry looks at kids who wouldn’t turn down their boomboxes.
I haven’t ridden a bus in a long time — I left the college in 1994 to spend more time teaching in China, where my husband also worked — but I remember its lessons. I learned what it was like for skin color to be my most important characteristic and that blacks and whites still had much in common.
My final lesson from my MARTA days happened on the train. As I ran down the steps and into the last car, a young black man was exiting. The car was otherwise empty. When he saw me, he stopped and said, “I don’t like to be on one of these by myself.” Perhaps he dreaded a mechanical malfunction that would trap him all alone. Perhaps he thought some gang might get on at the next station. Whatever his fears, for that moment he and I — contrasts in age, gender, and race — were in it together.
The lives of many ordinary people don’t often intersect with those of different races and classes. But it’s at those intersections, contrived or natural, that we can see the commonalities that make it easier for us to “get along.”
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Sylvia Krebs is a freelance writer and teacher. She lives in Douglasville.
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