The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, August 30th. It is the seventh of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Notre Dame, the Coronavirus, and Stewardship
The day after Philando Castile was killed, I was riding south through Chicago. My friend’s father had passed away days earlier from ALS, and I’d traveled from Florida—where I’d called timeout amidst three and a half months driving around the country following college graduation—to attend the wake and the funeral. The Mass was held down in Beverly, an Irish-Catholic enclave on the very southern end of the city, and as I was coming from O’Hare the day of the wake and Crystal Lake the day of the funeral, each day I rode a train into the Loop before switching vehicles and crossing the sprawling expanse—a third of the third-largest city in the country, over one hundred square miles holding close to a million people, dozens plus dozens of neighborhoods—known most simply as the South Side.
I grew up only 40 or 50 miles from the South Side, in the same metropolitan area but worlds apart. Beyond the occasional White Sox game or museum trip or the 2007 Little League State Tournament, I never visited the region. It was not a place in my life so much as a concept—something to be pilloried in Cubs vs. Sox debates in middle school and contemplated in the op-ed pages of the Tribune. I crossed it on trips through, though. Plenty of times. And as I got older, I noticed it more and more—houses upon houses stacked alongside one another, their doors facing the raised, separated train tracks and highways; church steeples, reaching but obscured rising scattered in the distance; plain signs denoting schools whose names I did not know and would not remember. It was not bustling, and the day after Philando Castile was killed, I believe it was gray. Humid. Heavy. The sky matching the air matching the broad, tired shoulders of the mighty city beneath.
The day after Philando Castile was killed, I was alone making the crossing, and having come from the first month-plus of seeing the contiguous 48, I was in a habit of thinking about the places I was seeing. The vastness of the South Side seen through the window that day was striking. All these people, all these men and women and children and elders, living lives, on average, so different from mine in outcomes concerning things like education, employment, safety, and—as I’d be reminded when I got to O’Hare that afternoon and saw the chyrons blaring the news of Castile’s killing—encounters with law enforcement. Worlds apart. 40 or 50 miles away.
I was reminded of that day this week when news broke that the Milwaukee Bucks might not play Wednesday’s game. I’d been following the events in Kenosha (30 or 35 miles from Crystal Lake, and not exactly worlds apart until this week), but from a distance, casually, meaning to follow up and learn more but not knowing if I’d really follow up or if I’d simply mark my newsletters as ‘read’ and carry on, considering my inbox is growing rather full these days. But here, coming through Twitter, and the ESPN App, and the Yahoo Sports App, was a reminder that the events in Kenosha happened, and were happening, and that a man being shot seven times in the back by police is so unsurprising that comfortable people like me could watch a video of it and move on with our days. I hardly follow the NBA. But the Bucks grabbed my attention. The Bucks made me look. And not just at the shooting of Jacob Blake, or the aftermath in Kenosha. The Bucks made me look at the reality of the situation—the reality of how unsurprising that video was.
Even so, of course, I was looking on it comfortably, set apart, like I watched the South Side at the age of 21. I wasn’t seeing it up close. I wasn’t seeing it anew. I wasn’t even seeing it, itself—the strike or the events in Kenosha or the whole reality of whatever this whole reality is. I was seeing my conception of it, just as I once saw a bunch of buildings spread out to the side of me and built some broad array of thoughts based on what little I knew and the many preconceptions I had and have. I wasn’t forced outside my comfort zone. I was merely reminded that things exist outside my comfort zone.
That’s the reality for a lot of us—us white people, us straight people, us men, us kids who were born in the upper middle class (which is to say we were born rich and don’t like to call it that). Our whole worlds are comfort zones, to the extent that we act as though running a marathon or traveling abroad constitutes discomfort (and it does constitute discomfort, for so many of us, but now think of how much easier that is than to really sit with the reality of all that Kenosha has showed). When we look on the uncomfortable places—when we look at Kenosha, or the South Side, or a flooded-out town after a hurricane—we don’t really look at them. We look through our little windows, see the broad gray shapes, and color it all in with our own notions. We tell ourselves we’re doing our part. We draw up a response to our own conceptions and make it fit in an Instagram story.
So what do we do? It’s a valid question, and it’s easy to answer, but it’s hard to answer, because the answer leaves us like the young, rich man looking at Jesus through the eye of a needle.
It’s obvious, really. We have to be uncomfortable. If we really want to learn something, to see something, to—could we really?—do something, we have to be uncomfortable. And once we’ve been uncomfortable, we need to make ourselves uncomfortable again, because that, again, is how comfort zones work. They swallow up discomfort, either twisting it into a comfortable shape or twisting ourselves into a comfortable shape to accommodate it. It’s a continuous process, not a one-time event. It’s iterations upon iterations, until we actually get somewhere.
Philando Castile and the South Side of Chicago and the events in Kenosha aren’t all the same, of course. But there’s a big, common thread—or a tapestry, rather, with threads of race, and threads of poverty, and threads of whatever it was that made Cain murder Abel. If we are to really recognize the whole of tapestry—the whole of that reality in which that video was not surprising—we’re going to have to do more than look at it through windows.
Next week’s essay: On the Midwest
