Stop and Frisk, a controversial policing policy in New York City, becomes real when it enters your home. The neighborhood of Crown Heights, where I live with my boyfriend Elijah, has seen an increase in the amount of law enforcement on the street. In fact, the NYPD likes to stand on our roof to make sure no unwanted trespassers find their way up.
My boyfriend, an immigrant from Guyana, of Sudanese decent, is one of those trespassers. While I am away, he climbs the stairs to our roof to look out toward the Manhattan skyline, a luxury in our 115-year-old building with few actual amenities. Upon reaching the roof, he is greeted by two NYPD officers. They tell him he is trespassing. He gently explains that he lives in the building. They tell him not to move, flashing lights on his face. They ask for his ID. They give him a 50-dollar ticket and tell him to leave the premises. He tries not to become angry. It will only make things worse. He walks back downstairs to our apartment and slams the door behind him.
This feeling of being unwanted in one's own home is mentally and emotionally stressful. Elijah has lived in New York City since he was quite young; I have only been there three years -- I am greeted with open arms by developers, as a white outsider, while the natives of many Brooklyn neighborhoods are pushed out, for racial, cultural and economic reasons.
I want to get away. I want to take Elijah to a place of warmth, a place that offers me unconditional acceptance. The holiday season approaches and I want to share with him my family. Yet, after two years of dating, I already know that my home in Providence, Rhode Island, my family there, considers him a trespasser too.
Two winters ago my parents picked me up from the train station for a long weekend visit. I sat in the backseat, listening to them complain about traffic or notice a new building construction out the window.
"I met someone," I say.
They both look back at me through the rear view mirror. My father's eyebrow rises.
"His name is Elijah."
"Is he Jewish?"
"Well he's North African, actually, from Guyana."
I don't remember if the car stopped, the breaks slammed, or my father's heart exploded first. I sat back with a dull ache that would only grow in intensity from there.
My father is not alone. The exploding heart is, unfortunately, not uncommon, and not only reserved for the admittedly small-minded. Parents who grew up fighting for racial equality find themselves becoming social frauds as their beloved children fulfill the ideals that they fostered. This cognitive dissonance is confusing and painful. The progress that I would like to think we have made over the last 50 years as a country is ephemeral and fuzzy, punctuated by a silence that does not quite recognize the underbelly of Baby Boomers who hold onto racist ideals, disguised as tradition, whispering softly, or screaming loudly, behind white fences and closed doors.
These doors remain locked to outsiders, to cultural trespassers, not allowed in on this secret conversation meant to preserve and protect the purity of races over time, a chilling and terrifying echo that booms during the holidays toward unwanted visitors, and stops and frisks those who get too close.
In my family this threat, this trespasser, is Elijah, the man that I love. The root of the backlash against interracial couples by white families is the ugliest racism of all, I believe -- a racism where white people whisper from ear to ear that their privilege be preserved in their physicality -- that their white bodies never mix with brown bodies.
As long as their skin remains white, they remain powerful. And when non-white families stand against interracial couples it seems different to me -- perhaps more about remaining present in the landscape, stopping the white washing from pushing out further and in more damaging ways.
When I think about it, though, my parents never whispered or screamed. Perhaps what is most disturbing is that my father, especially, has always been the perfect picture of love to me. I grew up watching him clean up our neighborhood, run a non profit, and work 35 years as a public school teacher, he himself of a humble background.
He welcomed people; he taught me to welcome people.
Everything seems like a knife stabbing me backward, our strained conversations now dangling between “The world won't understand!” and “What if you have children?” and “Wasn't it understood?” My father wanted me to pick up on the hate that he never demonstrated, and wants to call it tradition or an unspoken rule now that it has surfaced. These questions he asks me seem like an apology, confused himself by how deeply the racial divides in our country have become.
This reality does escape me. I am often battling between the struggle for love and the struggle for racial equality, forging a war that could result in the loss of one family to pursue another.
This mental anguish we experience as a couple, this hatred toward Elijah and I, is also common. We are not just an Italian American woman who fell in love with a Sudanese man, but a canvas for others to throw their ignorance and hate and pain. It's always present. I watch the comments on YouTube concerning an
innocent Cheerios commercial pile up with scathing intensity. I hear my mother grow silent when I mention Elijah's name, wondering how he could possibly understand me or us. I watch old Italian men on the train stare at us with disdain that could break a heart.
I feel enraged when a young lady in the park walks over to me and makes a racist comment about the attire of a young man near her that neither of us knows. I shake as my older brother tells me Elijah better be perfect if we get married since all his faults will be placed under a racial magnifying glass, and scream when my younger brother says it's no big deal, he'd certainly think about dating someone outside his race, if it weren't for his parents. The sincerity in his eyes let's me know he's actually looking up to me.
I see Elijah become irate when his aunt mentions that our child would have good hair. I yell and throw the phone when my Nonna, who lives in Northern Italy, tells me that the white race is clearly superior, and I should know that. I silently cry in the coffee shop that just outside of two Caribbean women have stopped Elijah asking him how he could date such a ducky white girl.
nikka can you bold the important parts or give clifnotes or something
what does this have to do with st0rmfr0nt, breh? and would a st0rmfr0nt member really make the kind of posts i do on the booth? i'd have to be one hell of an actor to do that, wouldn't you think?
