content warning: violence, injury, racial slurs

Though I spend every morning listening to political podcasts that constantly discuss racial tensions and identity politics, I have never been faced with the truths of race in America the way I was on August 14, 2018. We go numb to so many of these issues as the news stories become commonplace and redundant- it took a violent, harsh, and tangible reckoning with reality to make me even begin to fully digest the status of racial relations in this country. And yet, my conclusion is quite simply that it is complicated. And it needs to change.

Let me explain.

I was walking home from the metro after work at about 6pm on a Tuesday. Minding my own business (admittedly paying attention to very little besides my iPhone), I was startled by commotion and yelling on the sidewalk in front of me. As I got closer and saw through the people gathered around, I was accosted by the sight of a small, white woman laying on the ground in a pool of her own blood. Never before had I seen such injury in real life.

I approached the people surrounding her and made sure that someone was calling the police and an ambulance; then, I began to investigate. As it turns out, this woman’s misfortune was the result of a racially-charged altercation on the public bus. She had started an argument with some black bus riders, asking them to turn down their loud music because she found it offensive and annoying. Apparently, this dispute escalated on the bus, and it resulted in her aggressively calling them all “n****rs” as she got off at the stop. A black man and woman also got off the bus, and the man proceeded to hit her in the back of the head. The woman then attacked her.

Both of the physical aggressors left, and the bus driver drove away without calling the police or checking on the woman.

By the time I was with her, the woman was laying on the sidewalk, screaming through a mouthful of blood that “she is so tired of being treated like trash simply because she is white,” that “white lives matter,” and that she “hates living in a black neighborhood.”

Upon hearing the story and observing the victim’s behavior, I selfishly followed my thoughts straight to the strain this put on my personal values. This woman treated her fellow bus riders with a level of disrespect that is absolutely unacceptable. She was then espousing racial beliefs that I registered as abhorrent. How could I continue to sympathize with her?

Yet I couldn’t leave. There was a woman in need of urgent medical attention. Despite her treatment of fellow Americans, she was treated as less than human in the physical attack. No name-calling or verbal slurs could possibly warrant such a response. I felt conflicted. The outspoken political activist inside me wanted to argue with her about her claims of white struggle. But this was not the time nor the place.

After being sure that she was in the hands of medical professionals, I continued my walk home and reflected upon the jarring experience. Two things occurred to me that will forever change my perspective:

(1) Her experiences are real. And her experiences are valid. A history of black oppression and mistreatment does not negate the horrendous treatment she received at the hands of black citizens. While her views on racial relations may be limited to her life and do not include the reality of racial inequalities on a larger scale, she has a real and true hatred brewing inside. This should be a concern for each and every political affiliation. Whether she is “wrong” or “right” is secondary. She feels threatened and mistreated by the black people in her community, just as many black citizens feel about their relationships with white community members. These tensions feed animosity, violence, and cultural divide. The adversarial nature of race relations in this country, the pitting of blacks against whites, is dangerous – for both groups.

Recognizing that my polar opposite political and racial views don’t negate the reality of her experience, her trauma, and the development of her ideology forced me to acknowledge the severity of the disrepair in the state of American race relations.

(2) The horrendous altercation resulted in a championing of black character. It wasn’t until I was removed from the adrenaline and terror of the situation that it dawned on me- the woman who was on the phone with the police and helping the victim clean her wounds was black; the man who chased down the bus to document the bus number and the driver who left the scene of the crime was black. The heroes were black. The heroes were black in a situation where a racist white woman was the victim of a crime at the hands of  two black people.

For me, this served as a reminder that no one race is good or evil. People are good and people are evil. There are gracious and kind citizens of every color. More importantly, people are not inherently compelled to side with the people who look like them- I felt sympathy for those who were aggressively called racial slurs, and the black woman helped the white woman in pain. Further, a victim can still be a victim and also not be innocent. The woman who was attacked behaved horribly and treated others in an unacceptable manner; however, she in no way justified a physical attack. These situations are so very complicated. Race relations are so very complicated.

If nothing else, it is a call to everyone, especially white people, to be the heroes, not the bystanders. No matter the color of the victim, mistreatment of people is unacceptable, and there is no excuse for standing idly by.

While this traumatizing experience did more to complicate my understanding of racial relations than clarify it, it made one thing clear as day: this country does not operate on a system of functional societal interactions. The behaviors we demonstrate and the hatred we fuel is not only counterproductive but unsustainable. We are in dire need of a drastic transformation of the way we interact, the way we speak, and the way we think about our neighbors.