A White Girl on Privelege and Race #BLM

“We are each other's magnitude and bond.” – Gwendolyn Brooks

I’m white. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but it’s true. I mean, I’m white. Like ghostly.

That being said, I can never know what it means to be black. I know the hardships of a woman, of a Millennial, of a person living well below the poverty line. But I can’t pretend to understand the everyday struggle of lived, embodied blackness.

I can’t. I’m white.

But you know what I can do? I can empathize. I can share in the moral outrage of the black community each month, each day, when they turn on their TVs and see fresh news coverage of another black person’s death at the hands of police all across our country.

At this point, we’re no longer surprised. And I’m not speaking of just black folks here. I mean everyone. No one seems shocked that in 2016 – over fifty years after the March on Washington – that black men and women are still experiencing systematic racism. And I wish that were the worst part. I sincerely wish that not being phased by the death of innocent people was the worst part of the whole situation.

But it’s not. It’s not even remotely.

The most disgusting and dangerous aspect is people’s reactions – and let’s be real, mostly white people reactions – to the deaths of black men and women.

It’s not enough that black folks have died, that parents suffer and communities wonder if their men and women are safe undertaking ordinary tasks. Tasks like going to the store or picking up their kids from the bus station - the little things we do every day, the innocuous motions that weave together whole lives. Now, black communities have the added misery of fighting a wave of white nationalism which takes form in the #alllivesmatter and #bluelivesmatter counter-movements.

Well, OF COURSE all lives matter. OF COURSE police lives matter. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?

We’re talking about how media presents black men and women. How black men immediately get branded “thugs” for being armed, which Congress again and again tells us is a constitutionally-protected right. How black women are “resisting arrest” for asking completely lawful questions of arresting officers. How black youth are so scared of being arrested – or even killed – that social media movements have sprung up in the last several months in black communities to encourage #blackboyjoy and #carefreeblackkids. 

We’re talking about an east Tennessee man running for Congress who erected a sign reading “Make America White Again.” In 2016. As a platform for legislative office.

We’re talking about the 190 KKK groups, 95 white nationalistgroups, 94 racist skinhead groups in America in 2015 alone. Oh, and the fact that hate group participation is up 14% from 2014.

We’re talking about the slaughter of black folks – literally in the streets.

To change this conversation, to make this conversation about whiteness or police, is to silence black people. And to take this dialogue away from black folks is to reject the very real pain and anger of people who have every damn right to feel that way and express themselves.

If you are white, you don’t get it. And you never will. You can’t. But you aren’t expected to precisely because you can’t.

What you are expected to do is respect your fellow man, regardless of race or creed.

To ask people of color about their experiences – to make an effort to understand how their lives are different than yours, how they are treated by law enforcement, teachers, legislatures, etc.

To ask not only about people of color’s pain and suffering, but the things that bring their communities happiness and fulfillment.

To give those experiences prescience.

To use your position – whatever it may be – to express solidarity with people of color because the death of one innocent man endangers everyone’s liberties.

To treat those who are different from you not as thems, but as yous.

I’m sure people will push back on these notions. It's basically a guarantee. And perhaps that’s what confounds me most: that any person would be angered or scoff at the idea of treating people with dignity, of affording them human decency.

So sure, call me a social justice warrior if you want. But it’s not my liberal guilt talking. It’s not my bleeding heart. I speak out of a deep and profound sense of empathy and a sincere belief that oppressing one man’s ability to acquire liberty, to keep his life, to find happiness is to oppress everyone’s.

So let me say this again for the people in the back: that just won’t cut it.

All original content copyright Kimberly Turner, 2016-2016.

2016, You're the Worst

What does it feel like when all your heroes die?

It feels like 2016, that's what.

I thought maybe nothing could be worse than losing Robin Williams in 2014. It felt like my favorite uncle died and I thought surely - SURELY - nothing could be worse than losing Peter Pan.

And then 2016 came.

I'm sure you're all well aware of the hell scape that is this dump fire of a year. Donald Trump is a serious presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders isn't, and Will and Grace still isn't streaming online anywhere. I've worked out a theory that perhaps the Mayan calendar was off a few years. I guess we can cut them some slack. They were working with sundials and goat bladders.

But really, I know this year has been the world's worst, longest New Year's hangover for most people. It's hard to imagine feeling less stable or more unsure. For those of us who came off last year hoping for a fresh start, 2016 has been something of a gut punch. With a tire iron. But here we are, soldiering on.

And maybe its just me, but one of the things that's always made it easier to deal with a world that isn't always kind is my love of pop culture - movies and music and tv shows and a damn great book. Nothing makes me feel better after a hard day than coming home, changing into my sweats, and watching Friends reruns. It's like a hug from an old friend - full of memories of times gone by and the pleasure of reliving a love that never faded. Of course, an integral part of my love of pop culture is, and always will be, the celebrities that make pop culture what it is - the great comic legends, the geniuses of music, the writers who excite and move us.

So maybe this is why 2016 feels like a cosmic bitch slap. I grew up with Gene Wilder. Of the movies my dad would stop to watch anytime, regardless of what was going on, were Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. I'll always remember him cracking up as Gene Wilder and the Monster (oh god, Peter Boyle!) danced to "Puttin on the Ritz." It's a staple of my childhood memories. As is watching Gary Marshall's Laverne and Shirley with my sister and brother on Nick at Nite. Our parents' let us stay up late in the summer just to watch the show and sometimes we even got Nutty Buddies. And you know what? It was a damn good time.

It felt special. It felt happy.

So, for me - and I suspect a number of other Millennials whose parents let them sneak a late night to watch tv - 2016 has been the last nail in the coffin of our innocence. All of the faces we grew up with - Professor Snape, Ziggy Stardust, Marie Barone - disappeared. If our childhoods ended when Robin Williams died, our innocence officially took its swan dive after 2016.

BUT I think there might be a silver lining here: in a world where people are divided by generations and political parties and races, the deaths of our favorite pop culture icons has reminded us all the we're just humans. Humans who love laughing, who love listening to catchy tunes, who still get excited about the release of a new book. Maybe 2016 has thrown us back into the past, to the memories we love, to remind us that there's a future we have to nurture.

Maybe that's a reach? I hope not.

Instead, I hope one day my kids remember ice cream and late night tv as a sweet summertime treat. And I hope my parents one day show my kids Laverne and Shirley, and we all laugh at Gene Wilder tap dancing with Frankenstein's monster.

So, today, August 29, 2016, on the day we say goodbye to Gene Wilder, let's remember all of our heroes, the people we never thought about not having:

David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey, Ellie Wiesel, Pat Summit, Gary Shandling, Gordie Howe, Morley Safer, Paul Kantner, Doris Roberts, Merle Haggard, Pat Conroy, Maurice White, Abe Vigoda, Phife Dawg, Gary Marshall, and Prince. And on and on.

We miss you. We love you.


All original content copyright Kimberly Turner, 2016-2016.

Losing Robin Williams: It’s Okay to Mourn a Stranger

Unless you live under a rock (or the outer lying regions of the Pee Dee area, which are really one in the same place), you’ve heard the news about Robin Williams. You’ve heard that Robin Williams is dead by his own hand.

Last night, when I heard, I sat in the love seat in my parents’ living room, and I wept openly. My mother expressed her concern for me several times, like any good mother hen would, and I kept telling her I’d be fine. I apologized for crying over a stranger. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” I said. One, two, three times. I said it again and again, for as many times as I started to cry anew.

But this morning, when I woke up, I was still sad deep in my gut. And more than that, I was peevish. I thought to myself, “FUCK that.” Why should I feel ashamed for crying over Robin Williams? Why should that make me feel stupid or in any way like I’m weak?

True, Robin Williams was no friend of mine. I didn’t meet him at Disney World. I wasn’t his roommate at Julliard. I didn’t see him perform live anywhere. I never even shook his hand.

I never knew him as Mork or Garp or the Fisher King. But I knew him.

For me, and millions of Millennials like me, Robin Williams is inexorably bound up with memories of childhood. Robin Williams is, for me, the face of the 90s. Those fantastical years when I was a kid and the most pressing concerns in my life were if I would get home in time to watch Wishbone and if I could maybe read a little in my American Girl book after that. Those years when staying up late with my mom to watch Jay Leno and eat Nutty Butty ice cream cones were a little bit deviant but also really, really special. Those years when my sister and I still shared a bed because my parents didn’t have the money for an extra mattress, but neither of us cared because we fell asleep snuggled up like bugs in a rug every night.

I still remember the very first time I saw Robin Williams on film (kinda). My parents schleped all three of us – my brother, my sister and me – to see Aladdin in theaters. My sister was still an arm baby, my brother about two and half, and I was four. No easy feat for two mortal parents, especially since my M.O. was to ask as many questions about EVERY LITTLE THING as I possibly could. I’m sure the outing wasn’t an easy one. But we went, nonetheless. And it remains one of the earliest, strongest memories I have, not because I loved the movie so much but because my dad did. I remember my dad laughing hysterically at the Genie doing celebrity impressions, and I laughed too. It would be years before I understood the jokes, but the sheer, unadulterated amusement on my dad’s face was contagious. Four-year-old me peeled into giggles at the mere sight of my daddy laughing so hard. Something good must have been happening. I knew it then. And I know it now. To this day, I can picture vividly the way my dad’s face looked, his eyes closed, his head tilted back, his whole body given over to laughter and happiness.

Robin Williams did that for him. Robin Williams did that for me.

He recreated Peter Pan for a generation of Millennial viewers who may well have otherwise forgotten a Disney movie long ago shelved. He gave life to a cross-dressing nanny, a flamboyant cabaret owner, a man destined to finish a game before dinosaurs destroyed his town, a fifth-grader who looked older than most of his friends’ parents, and a professor who discovered the existence of flubber. Robin Williams didn’t just shape my childhood; he was my childhood. He was my innocence.

And he continued to be. For as long as I have been alive, Robin Williams has been a constant. He was always there, quietly, occupying space in the recesses of my mind, in the place where everything is normal and stable, and I don’t have to think or keep track or try to muddle through.

But yesterday, the last and possibly one of the best vestiges of my childhood died, not in contentment, but in sadness. Not with a whimper, not with a bang, but with a giving up.

And maybe that’s why I’ve had such a profound emotional response to the death of a man I’ve never met and will never meet. This is the end of the road for Millennials.

We are no longer children. Our Peter Pan is dead.

Yes, I know there are more pressing issues. I know Iraqi children die every day in ISIS’ hate-fueled genocide. I know millions of Americans live below the poverty line and can barely afford to eat. I know that ebola has entered our country and black men still can’t walk in the streets without fear of retaliation for little more than being black and women now have to face the added horror that their rapes might end up as internet memes.

But just for now, let us mourn. Let me mourn. Let me mourn the dying pieces of my childhood as I make my ever-quickening journey toward thirty, toward adulthood, and further and further away from the magic of simply being a silly little girl, in the theater with her family, laughing at a big blue genie. 

"Oh, no. To live... to live would be an awfully big adventure." - Peter Banning, Hook

Bangarang, Robin. 

All original content copyright Kimberly Turner, 2014-2014.