Confession of a suburban terrorist
It all starts when my father told me to get a job.
Even when I tell him going to college takes up all my time,
he claims I spend most of my time at home fiddling with the computer.
By a job, he means the kid of job the rednecks have down at
the trucking firm where he works.
Even though I’m white like they are, I’ve never fit in with
that crowd, part of the reason I never made many friends of my own until I got
to college.
I want something else in my life, even if I can’t say what
it is.
I tell my father I’ll find something; I know I don’t intend
to.
I suspect my father wants me to get the job so I will hang
out “with my own kind.”
I tend to avoid the white kids and gravitate to the black
crown. The more I hear about the hardships their ancestors suffered, the more I
admire them, and wonder why I can’t find some common experience that can connect
me with them.
I read about their culture, I listen to their music, I dress
like them, and even sometimes act like them – all of which drives my father
crazy.
He tells me to stop acting like something I am not.
The white guys where he works mock me.
But even the black guys at college don’t really take me
seriously.
I float between two worlds, neither of which wants to claim
me. I have serious doubts about who I am and why I exist.
I talked to a friend professor who sort of likes me, who has
been teaching about African American culture.
He tells me I’ll never feel whole until I totally reject
white culture – which has been guilty of so many atrocities.
So, I tell my black friends how guilty I feel about all the
bad things my white ancestors have done.
I even tell my father that he is a racist, and how much I
hate everything he believes in, and how everything he has came from enslaving
people of color, not hard work.
He throws me out of the house.
When I go to get help from my black friends, they laugh at
me and tell me to go ask help from my white friends – which I don’t have.
I’m more at a loss than ever, filled with rage that has
nowhere to go.
My professor has sympathy for me and informs me there is a
group of people just like me, people who intend to do more than just talk about
injustice. He tells me I need to do something dramatic to prove how I am
divorced himself from White Western culture.
When I sneak back home to get my things, I remember my
father’s gun, and I take it.
I don’t know why I bring it to the demonstration – maybe thinking
it can give me courage or make me feel strong; all we want as a group is to
prove our solidarity with the black community.
Maybe that’s why we decided to confront the conservative
group on campus.
But talk gets to shouting and eventually, I can’t contain
the rage I feel, and I pull out my father’s gun and shoot one of the white
kids.
My companions scatter when the police show up and I run,
too, asking the black radicals to help me. They tell me to get lost, tell me
they don’t care what one white kid does to another white.
I go to my father. He is surprisingly kind. But he tells me
a real man has to pay for his mistakes and turns me into the police.
My sentence isn’t as long as it might be had I killed
someone, but jail is still jail.
And yet, I’m strangely comforted here as if wearing prison
guard strips away white and black even though I fell the racial tensions here, too.
Maybe I’ve finally found that missing thing I’ve been
looking for, that sense of solidarity I cannot find in the black and white
world beyond the bars.
Who can say?
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