Our Forgotten Debt

Debt. Forgotten debt.

This is the way Eula Biss describes the state of whiteness in America in her 2015 article for the New York Times.

“When he was 4, my son brought home a library book about the slaves who built the White House. I didn’t tell him that slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined, or that slaves were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, ‘‘the down payment’’ on this country’s independence, or that freed slaves became, after the Civil War, ‘‘this country’s second mortgage.’’ Nonetheless, my overview of slavery and Jim Crow left my son worried about what it meant to be white, what legacy he had inherited.

‘‘I don’t want to be on this team,’’ he said, with his head in his hands.

‘‘You might be stuck on this team,’’ I told him, ‘‘but you don’t have to play by its rules.’’

Even as I said this, I knew that he would be encouraged, at every juncture in his life, to believe wholeheartedly in the power of his own hard work and deservedness, to ignore inequity, to accept that his sense of security mattered more than other people’s freedom and to agree, against all evidence, that a system that afforded him better housing, better education, better work and better pay than other people was inherently fair.”

Biss was struck by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ metaphor of mortgage debt, because at the time she had just bought a house herself, and was surprised at the level of comfort she felt, how much ownership she felt, of this house that the bank owned. Just like the level of comfort she knew would be taught to her son, a white boy, in a land paid for by the very bodies of black slaves.

White comfort, white ownership, in this land of mass incarceration, police brutality, and redlining, I feel compelled to remind you, is an illusion. White ownership in this land of the Dakota Access Pipeline is an absurd illusion. White ownership, here, where we spend our money on walls to block immigrants, where our leaders threaten to remove Muslims and refugees, is a big fat lie, and we’ve all been duped.

We don’t own this place.

We don’t own these “rights.”

I feel compelled to remind you today, my friends who are mostly white, of the debt we owe for the places and spaces we call home.

About a year ago, my husband and I moved into an apartment in Kirkwood. When we moved into this neighborhood, we unwittingly put ourselves in a new space we hadn’t occupied before, literally and metaphorically. I had been living for a month or two in East Lake, right down the street, but prior to that, neither of us had ever lived in a place where we were racial minorities. And to be honest with you, I never noticed.

The first neighbor we met here was Jimmy, who lives below us. The first thing I remember him saying was, as he delicately watered his fern with a spray bottle, “Don’t you worry, back here we look out for each other. Back here, it’s all good.” He got upset the first time we went out of town, because we didn’t tell him, so he didn’t know to be watching out. Not that Jimmy, in his 60s with a terrible cough and back problems, could do much to stop intruders, but I’ve never doubted his ability to look out for us.

Over the last year, we’ve talked to Jimmy about everything from politics to the best fish sandwich in Atlanta, and we disagree on plenty, but it never matters. He gives us the low-down on our neighborhood, this place he has lived for 10 years, watching his rent slowly grow to double its original price. He knows all the apartment complex gossip, but also the real things, like who is moving out because they can’t afford rent, and the reason our landlords haven’t opened the newly finished gym and pool. “They’re waiting until we’re all out, baby,” he said. “That’s what I was afraid of,” I told him.

And it’s not just Jimmy. There’s James, with the old blue Buick LeSabre, and John, with his mellow dog Rot-Rot (“because he’s rotten”), and Bea, who somehow got plants to survive on her porch this summer, and Ernie, who constantly tinkers with his car. Everyone is leaving. And as they leave, I see the demographics rapidly change, and one day I notice there are white kids in school uniforms playing outside, where we used to be the only white people in the whole place.

I wonder, am I responsible?

Are we the gentrifiers?

One thing I’ve learned about myself, and I think my white community as a whole, is that we don’t believe in culpability by complicity. We tend to have the idea that in order to be guilty of something, we have to have willingly committed a wrongful act. We so easily remove ourselves from the systems and forces at work in our lives, because we are individualists, and think only the wrong we intentionally do makes us guilty.

I never owned slaves, so I’m not at fault. I wasn’t the one who took Jimmy’s ancestors from Africa and shipped them like cargo to the “land of freedom,” so I don’t have to feel bad. I work hard; I’m a good person; I’m not racist; it’s not my fault. I just wanted to move to Kirkwood.

But I am the beneficiary of the systems that marginalize people of color.

I am the beneficiary of the system that marginalizes my neighbors.

I’m “stuck on this team.” And what will free me from its blindness and shackles is not denial, not “I’m a good person,” but repentance. I am culpable because I am complicit. Because I benefit, with education and economic privilege and police that leave me alone and all the other trillions of invisible forces upholding my life, and I do not even notice.

Gentrification in Kirkwood started before we got here, and it would not end if we left. And the injustices go way farther back than gentrification. But as a cog in that machine, I understand my responsibility.

Eula Biss says one thing she thinks we owe each other now is trust. I’m not naïve enough to think that everyone is safe, or that everyone has my best interests at heart, or that dangerous and awful things don’t happen in my neighborhood. I monitor my surroundings and I lock my doors, because I live in Kirkwood. But when I see my black neighbors walking down the street, I no longer cross to the other side or avoid eye contact. I no longer accept the feeling of danger without questioning it. Eye contact, with a verbal hello, has become my regular practice of repentance. Trust, until it is broken, has become my practice of repentance.

It is not the only thing to be done, but it is a start. And the result is that I’ve gotten to know my neighbors, enough that they ask me how many miles I’m running today, or tell me about how it feels to not know which country they came from in Africa, or open the door for me in our apartment Laundromat, or ask how my fellowship applications are going.

Jimmy’s fern that he waters with a spray bottle is named Ella, and he loves her so much that he keeps her inside on cold days and puts her outside when it’s sunny. A few days ago I noticed Ella was outside on the porch, and on the ground next to her was a tiny pot with a tiny fern. I didn’t think much about it, but when Taylor got home that day, Jimmy handed him the small pot. Our own new plant, cut off from Ella, to remind us of the best neighbor we’ve ever gotten to know.