What does ‘law and order’ mean to you?

‘Law and order’ is as much a Rorschach test as a phrase. What ‘law and order’ means to a white person may be very different than what it means to a person of color. Race isn’t the only factor. Those living in more affluent areas may have different ideas about ‘law and order’ than people living in less affluent areas.

These sorts of phrases are very effective at sowing division because sometimes we don’t even realize we’re being manipulated.

No one wants their house to be broken into or vandalized. No one wants to be mugged when they’re walking home. No one wants their car to be stolen. No one wants to see their favorite restaurant burn down. If maintaining law and order protects the people and things you love, the phrase only means good things to you.

But what if your last interaction with the police wasn’t a positive one? Here’s another verbal Rorschach test: as a parent, when do you give your child ‘the talk’? If your child is white you’re probably thinking of the first conversation you have with your child about sex. If your child is not white, you might be thinking about the first conversation you have with your child about how to handle an interaction with the police.

For these parents, racism in policing is not an abstract problem. Racism is a real threat to their children’s lives. But families of color want the same thing that white families do. They want an authority to call on when their lives and property are threatened. They want to be treated fairly. I don’t want this post to focus on racial inequities about policing, though. There are plenty of good resources on that.

I want to talk about how we allow ourselves to be manipulated when we don’t realize how narrow our perspectives really are. I have lived my life as a heterosexual middle-class white woman. Unfortunately, with the way our society is structured, meeting someone who doesn’t have the same upbringing as you doesn’t happen automatically.

I grew up in a suburb near a large city. My school was overwhelmingly white, and mostly kids in families in the same economic class as mine. Nothing in my education or upbringing told me discrimination and poverty were modern-day problems.

A couple years ago I had a conversation with a high school friend, who is not white, about racism. She told me she was regularly called racial slurs in our school. She never told me this before because I was too ignorant to hear it. I’m sure there are other things friends haven’t shared with me because I was too ignorant to listen. There are still far too many things I am ignorant about.

But I have learned being well-educated doesn’t just mean knowing facts and figures. Being well-educated means understanding how those facts and figures affect real people’s lives. People who may not look like you, or have the same resources you do.

The good news is learning about the lives of others doesn’t have to be a boring academic exercise. You could watch a few episodes of Greenleaf. As I was watching, I noticed how odd it felt to watch a show where so few of the cast members shared my skin color. When the white woman on screen made a mistake I had a knee-jerk reaction: I wouldn’t do that, she doesn’t represent me. This is a little taste of what non-white people experience all the time watching shows with mostly white casts. There are so few characters to represent them, each character that does takes on added weight.

You could watch Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and learn how the homophobic comments she heard growing up led her to not go to the hospital after she was attacked. She thought she deserved it.

You could watch the very entertaining and sweet Kim’s Convenience, which follows a Korean family that immigrated to Canada. There’s a funny, sad, awkward scene where a professor assumes Janet’s parents came to Canada via a sob story involving daring escapes and a refugee camp. The exchange ends with Janet saying “No … they just flew. Air Canada, probably.”

You could watch Hasan Minaj’s Homecoming King and learn about the death threats his family received when he was a child right after 9/11.

The Queer Eye reboot is notable for its efforts to confront biases on multiple dimensions, including biases held by their own cast members. One of my favorite episodes is Tammye’s episode, where the cast members are forced to confront their conflicting ideas about religion. For one cast member, religion meant a comforting and supportive community. For others, the religious community was a destructive force, used to shame them for being gay.

Obviously, there are plenty of shows not on Netflix, but I think you get the point.

If watching TV isn’t your thing, you could read novels and memoirs from diverse voices. You could listen to someone’s podcast. You could follow someone on social media and just listen.

While listening to these voices doesn’t have to be academic, it can be uncomfortable. It’s easy to fall into being defensive, angry, and critical.

None of these communities are perfect. The gay community has been known to have issues accepting transgender and bisexual people. On Kim’s Convenience, Janet challenges her father on his prejudice against Japanese people, rooted in the Japanese/Korean war. The black community struggles with internalized racism and racial imposter syndrome.

In other words, these communities are made up of imperfect, individual human beings. We can acknowledge the racism Hasan Minaj’s family experienced was wrong and acknowledge problems on the set of Patriot Act.

I should note here white communities have plenty of problems, even if you exclude outright racism. The difference is white communities in the United States wield more power. The damage caused by our biases is amplified because of our place in society.

Reverse racism doesn’t meaningfully exist because harm from racism requires biased beliefs and power over that group. Affirmative action hasn’t harmed white people as a group.

Really listening to someone who doesn’t share your experiences can be hard work. The person talking may not get every minuscule detail right. One person can’t represent an entire community — you need to hear more than one voice. That voice may not be speaking with the same vocabulary or accent you’re used to hearing. They may stumble when describing an emotionally, harrowing moment. They may start a sentence with something like “White people …”

We shouldn’t stop listening.

As a cisgender heterosexual white woman, I have lived one set of experiences. When a transgender woman shares her experiences with the health care system, I can’t judge her credibility based on my own experience. When a black woman shares her experience with bad maternal care, I can’t judge her credibility based on my own experience. When a gay teen shares their experience with homelessness, I can’t judge their credibility based on my own experience. (Similarly, if you have always lived as a man, you can’t use your personal experience to judge my experiences with sexism.)

Don’t let politicians manipulate you. Learn more about the rest of the world and your place in it. I know I have so much more to learn.