Courtney E. Martin - Learning in public lessons for a racially divided America from my daughters school

W HEN I WAS A little girl, I went around and asked my neighbors for donations for the homeless. They handed me their loose change, and I listened as the metal hit the glass bottom of the jar satisfyingly.

I didnt actually know anyone who was experiencing homelessness. Or even anybody who was serving those who were. Where I live now, in Oakland, people who are unhoused are everywhereunder the highway a block away and even closer, under the stoop at the Glorious Kingdom Primitive Baptist Church across the street from our house. Once even in our black cherry Prius in our driveway, as happened when my husband, John, left it unlocked overnight.

John found an elderly Black man sleeping in the passenger seat, my daughters favorite book on CDMan on the Moonin his hand. John tried to wake him gently and asked him to get out. The guy looked up, clearly disoriented, and said, Ah, sorry, man. Is this mine or yours?

Ours, John said. Its ours, man.

Even at seven and eight and nine, I was confused about why some things were oursmy familys, my friends, my neighborhoodsand some werent. Even in that far less unequal time, there were dramatic differences between what Id heard called the haves and the have-nots. I was a have. I was born into a have familynot a trust-fund family, but a have family nonetheless.

I had a hunch that being a have had something to do with being White. And no one made much of an effort to explain it to me. We werent supposed to notice racenot others race, for sure, but not even our own. That would be racist.

I look back at that little White girlfrizzy hair, pile of friendship bracelets on her wrist, magenta high-top Chucks on her feetand I feel love and outrage. She was overcoming her shyness, circling the block in a misguided attempt at redistribution. From whom and to whom, she wasnt exactly sure. But she sensed something.

She needed truth. But she got loose change.

Unsure of what to do with the money, racked by guilt that she had asked for it but had no idea where to take it, she buried that jar of change in the dirt near her playhouse in the backyard.

This book is about the jar of good intentions that so many of us carry around these days. We set it on our bookshelves next to our copies of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Isabel Wilkerson. We put it by our tasteful succulent gardens next to our BLACK LIVES MATTER signs or on our nightstands. We stare at the ceiling in the dark, genuinely wondering why it feels so hard to be on the right side of history.

I left that sweet neighborhood in Colorado Springs when I was eighteen and went to Barnard College, in New York City. In new forms, I did lots of circling the block. I went to protest marches. I read slam poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I made a short film about gentrification in Harlem. I joined the campus hip-hop club. I studied abroad in South Africa and lived in a township with a Black family. I graduated and moved to Brooklyn, as one does, and lived there for a decade. I wrote a book about activism.

The White moral life remained elusive. I was almost getting used to the idea that I would never have it, that it was a definitional impossibility. To have White skin and economic security in America was to be tangled up in the sin of what historian Aristotle Kallis calls the hierarchy of human life.

And then I became a mother.

And it was as if the universe dared me both to give up altogether on this quest for the White moral life, which felt like frivolous intellectual bullshit in the face of my kids real needs, and simultaneously to double down. The gift of adulthood is not a mortgage, I realized, but the freedom to pursue a moral life on your own terms, even if you are White, especially if you are White, and to let your children witness you trying.

This is the story of that trying.

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