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I parked on Glen St. yesterday (Friday) afternoon just above the Civil War monument and walked around my Honda Fit to open the hatchback for my dog, Ringo.
Traffic was backed up from the light and a motorcyclist about my age pulled up on the road next to me and stopped.
“What about white lives?” he said, looking at me in an aggrieved manner.
I smiled at him in confusion. I understood the words but not why he was saying them.
“What about white lives?” he repeated.
His motorcycle was loud, but he was only a few feet from me. I could hear him.
“What about them?” I said.
“Don’t they matter? Don’t white lives matter?” he said.
It hit me. I was wearing a black T-shirt that said, in a mixture of white and rainbow-colored letters, “All Black Lives Matter.”
I like the shirt. I adopted it from a family member and wear it often. It’s an excellent comeback to the childish retort “All lives matter” that some people like Elise Stefanik came up with a few years ago to avoid having to admit that, yes, Black lives matter.
I shrugged and continued to give the old biker my dumb smile. The light changed and he began to creep away.
“Fucking creep,” he said. “Fucking liberal creep.”
Ten years ago, I might have shouted something at his back, but 10 years ago, I would have been surprised at a man in his 60s behaving that way to a stranger on a public street.
I have grown used to angry old white men taking offense at self-evident statements like “Black lives matter” and “trans people have rights” and “abusing helpless people is wrong, whether they have proper immigration paperwork or not.”
So I shrugged off my annoyance over his name-calling even as he could not shrug off his over my shirt.
The episode illuminated a dynamic that has been dominating our discourse and fueling its frequent descent into violence over the past decade.
Donald Trump and his followers are threatened by Black people, by their insistence on their civil rights and by the support of some white people for Black civil rights.
Trump and his followers are also scared of Black people, and their fear makes them angry. If I had been me, but Black, and wearing the same shirt, Mr. biker man would have kept his mouth shut.
This fear and anger is a part of why we are in the place we’re in, with a racist, incompetent president leading a racist, incompetent administration.
It’s still astonishing to me that the simplest statement—“Black Lives Matter”—drew such a powerful backlash.
“Black lives don’t matter?”—is that what the man on the motorcycle and Elise Stefanik and Donald Trump and every one else who put “Back the Blue” signs on their lawn after a cop murdered George Floyd yearns to say?
Is that why the man on Friday looked like he wanted to rip the shirt off my chest—to insist on his right to speak and act as if Black lives don’t matter?
Racism isn’t the only engine driving the Maga movement, but it’s one of them, the loudest and ugliest one.
I’d like to say we Americans are better than this, but that’s not true.
All I’m left with is hope a later generation, when I am long gone, outgrows the racist fear and hatred that has plagued us.
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