Like other couples, My fiancèe and I share everything. We share our time to listen to each other, we share our responsibilities around the house, and we share our plates at restaurants when we can not figure out what to order.
We hold hands when we walk and we both prefer I walk holding her street-side hand. We both enjoy greeting neighbors who greet us as we stroll.
We don’t mind the occasional stare. We ignore the rare lambasting by someone who strongly disapproves of us leaning on each other while riding the L.
But occasionally she will walk ahead of me when we get up the stairs to the platform. I will fumble with my Ventra card, or I will get stuck behind a crowd on the escalator, and by the time I reach the platform, she is on her own walking to a preferred position to board the next train.
I see it. It takes less than 30 seconds.
People who were standing as if a cohort of strangers willing to board together, begin to scatter, peering out of the corner of their eyes to judge any reaction. They glance if they should prepare to board a different car.
By then, I arrive and I place my arm comfortably around her side.
Instantly that subtle stress, that invisible anxiety, subsides and the group reforms around the expected car position.
It took me a while to notice this, maybe a full year before I saw the pattern for what it was, and I’m still not sure if she notices it, or maybe she’s just used to it.
Last year, I was happily recruited to help her family move. They were moving from a northern part of the Austin Neighborhood to a little bit further south of the same neighborhood. The west side has some of the most famed soul-food restaurants, so we looked forward to the celebratory dinner.
We hadn’t even finished transferring the furniture into the new home when a CPD patrol arrive. I heard the voices I did not recognize as I was placing down a microwave.
As the voice began to ask to see IDs, I appeared. What can we help you with, officers? I said. We’re almost done moving, I repeated, as the family had already enunciated that point.
Oh, you’re helping move. Okay. Well stay safe. Stay safe, I repeated: the officers drove away. No one said anything else. We just went back to moving. I felt like I was the only one stunned.
And thus my conclusion: people not of color often shout of the risk of a modern tyranny, of a state where people are randomly stopped, searched, restricted from their liberties, or asked for identification, all with the tangible threat of arrest or death, from either society or state.
We focus on the major news stories, which is better than being ignorant of them, but we tend to overlook the subtle examples of racism that occur in between those tragedies: the ones that accumulate, as if directly leading to and causing those final events.
The truth is, in this town, one of the most segregated cities in America, people of color are never not of color, and are constantly surviving in that context.
It can’t be denied: there is never a time when we’re out in the city when my Fiancée is not Chicago-ing while Black.
Embracing the discussion thereof does not exasperate race-relations:
Ignoring them does.