A few weekends ago I was in a bookstore in Westerly, Rhode Island, just outside of Watch Hill — on the same day The New York Times happened to feature the town on the first page of the Style section.
A few weekends ago I was in a bookstore in Westerly, Rhode Island, just outside of Watch Hill — on the same day The New York Times happened to feature the town on the first page of the Style section. It’s known for its stature, privacy and wealth.
Although friends of mine are prominent members of the community, I have always felt somewhat out of place there as one of the few black people during any given weekend when I visit them during the summer.
The issue is not that the residents exclude. On the contrary, everyone is perhaps more welcoming and gregarious than one would expect. Rather the sense of unease is rooted in feeling like “the other” — the social identity one constructs based on who they think they are versus how others perceive them.
My friends and I were in town for a surprise 30th birthday party. We have been friends for nearly 15 years. Three of us (two of us black, one a longtime visitor to the town) went into a bookstore before driving back to the city. As we were browsing the stacks, an older white gentleman began speaking to us, casually at first.
He started discussing the racial tensions in America and how he did not understand what was happening in this country.
“We freed them,” he said.
He continued to explain the state of race relations during his youth.
“I remember when I was growing up my father had a black man who worked for him named Charlie,” he continued. “And he was a good worker! They had a special bond. One day my father yelled across the shop when he saw Charlie washing himself with ivory soap. ‘Hey Charlie! You trying to become a white man?’ my father asked him. They just laughed about it. Back then, they had a sense of a humor.”
I turned my back to him and instead faced a wall of poetry, leaving my one friend to contend with him alone. Our other friend had already chosen to remove herself from the situation.
My decision to turn my back on him wasn’t an easy one. I struggled with whether there were things to say to make him realize that the anger in this country stemmed from the systemic racism he was extolling right there in the bookstore.
I wondered if it was moments like this that separate the activists from the conformists. I grappled with whether I could make him see that it was a miracle the three of us, longtime friends of different races, could walk into a bookstore in what was once a 19th-century summer resort for white people, and freely browse and purchase books my ancestors wouldn’t have been able to read.
I turned my back because I couldn’t find the strength or fortitude to convey all of this to him in a way that would make it matter the way it mattered to me and to my friends and to my entire generation.
I don’t know if it was the right decision. Because while we hope this mindset will dissipate with younger generations, as long as this thinking still exists, there is the obvious risk that a seed will continue to be passed down within families and communities.
And that we cannot turn our back on.
Maura Cheeks is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania who works in New York. She wrote this for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
