Am I Getting Into Good Trouble Or Bad Trouble? Who Decides?

It's Tuesday October 18. I'm at an independent school outside of Los Angeles where I'm about to do an assembly with the 7-12 graders on living your best life, followed by a parent keynote tonight on how not to micromanage your kids.

I’m in the office of the middle school principal: Ms. Nowak. On her wall are two huge sticky notes announcing "Communication Guidelines for a BRAVE Space":

I've been in the thick of conversations lately: brave and cowardly, kind and mean, surprising in good ways and in bad. I've been doing a lot of thinking about my role in these conversations and whether I'm part of the solution or part of the problem. I'm willing to be curious about all of this.

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A few weeks back, I was doing a talk at Parent and Family Weekend at a college in upstate New York. I was being driven from the airport to the school, which would take about an hour. I love humans and you never know what you’re going to learn from one. So, I initiated chitchat with the driver, as I almost always do.

The driver mentions that his sister’s home was ravaged by Hurricane Ian which had just torn through the Florida coast. I ask how she's holding up. I learn she's fine, but that her house is gone and she's staying with family whose home has been spared.

“I’m so sorry, man,” I reply. “Glad she’s okay." I pause and continue. "Climate change is rough. I live in California which is routinely on fire and we’re going through a massive drought. It's nuts that Florida suffers from way too much water and we don’t have enough.” Then I tell him I'm running for city council and one of my greatest concerns is the need for every single one of us to take urgent climate action at the level of the appliances in our homes and our transportation choices.

I look out the window then turn my eyes back toward the driver. The driver looks at me in his rearview mirror and shakes his head. “I know I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but I disagree with pretty much everything you just said.”

“That’s okay,” I tell him. “As long as we can be cordial and not call each other names I think we’ll be fine.”

Over the course of an hour, I learn that my driver does not believe climate change is the result of human behavior. That electric cars are idiotic. That no one wants to drive one, and even if you did, how would you escape a hurricane in a car with a dying battery and nowhere to charge it? That all of this green energy stuff just gives China more power. That Trump is an incredible businessman who made something out of nothing. That Putin has nothing on Trump and that it's China that's the problem.

When my driver brings up Trump, I ask about white supremacy. He quickly says Trump is not a white supremacist and does not condone it. At last I’ve found common ground beneath our rhetoric. (If my driver is quick to say that Trump is not a white supremacist, I'm assuming my driver believes white supremacy is problematic.)

Then my driver offers, “I care about the Blacks. But why is it all about them? You can’t say anything anymore. You know what was worse? The Holocaust.”

I tell him I agree that the Holocaust was awful. And also that I don’t think it's useful to try to tally and rank human suffering from worst to least bad. I tell him I'm Black and biracial and wrote a book Real American, which is about my experiences with microaggressions and racism. I tell him I attended an almost entirely white high school where there were a handful of Jewish kids who weren't faring any better than I was. I say this to show that I have a personal familiarity with the allegiance that Blacks and Jews have historically felt toward one another. I tell him that in high school, someone wrote the N-word on my locker.

He says he grew up in a traditional American family where everyone was accepting, and nothing like what I experienced ever happened in his town. I note that he offers me no words of compassion, as I had tried to model with my opening comment about his sister.

There's silence. I speak again.

"You know, if I may, and I'm not trying to criticize but just to offer a different perspective, I'd like to ask what you mean by 'Traditional American family?'" "Oh," he says. "Italian, Catholic."

"Ok cool," I say. "All of us who grew up here feel like our upbringings were 'traditional' and 'normal' too, and we don't want to be made to feel like we're not because our skin color or religion is different. You know?"

More silence. Then he says he had one Black friend in high school but "None of the kind of stuff you describe happened to him."

"How do you know?" I ask.

"He would have told me."

"I never told anyone." I say, looking out the window. Remembering.

"Well nothing like that happened to my friend."

More silence. We're nearing my hotel now, so the conversation is about to draw to a natural close. I'm feeling proud of us both for being in this conversation for more than hour, across massive ideological differences and life experiences.

As he pulls up to the hotel he says, "I was bullied and didn't tell anyone for years. Finally I told my dad and he went and roughed up the kid and it never happened again." I unbuckle my seatbelt, lean into the space between the driver and passenger side seats, reach forward and pat his shoulder.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," I say.

"I got over it."

"I get that. But I'm still really sorry you went through that."

And now he's looking down at his lap and I'm patting his shoulder some more. "The kid in me is here for the kid in you. That wasn't right. I'm so sorry."

I sit back in my seat. He's silent for a beat.

Then my driver looks up at me in the rearview mirror. With a voice like an announcer he declares: "I accept you, Julie." He's smiling. I smile and tell him I accept him, too. He gets out of the car to take my bags to the curb. I join him there. We come in for a nice long hug. Probably not an outcome either of us expected.

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I'm running for city council because, to my mind, our city is experiencing a crisis of lack of affordable housing, which, if not addressed soon will mean that our city's ecosystem of children, young adults, middle-aged adults, and seniors will deteriorate. I want us to be a place where not only a diversity of age groups co-exist, but where our city workers such as teachers, firefighters, and utilities workers can live as well. But many residents in our single family neighborhoods, while espousing that affordable housing is important, do not want to see it go up near them.

My heart yearns to ask such folk, So then where DO we put it? If your neighborhood is not willing to make such sacrifices, whose neighborhood SHOULD bear the burden? How do we solve a collective systemic problem if not all groups are willing to do their fair share? What does fair share mean in this context? What WOULD you be okay with?

I've chosen to bring race into the dialogue about affordable housing in my city. I'm not the first to do so, just the latest. You see, most of the housing units in our city are in single-family neighborhoods – a zoning idea that was developed for the very purpose of creating and safeguarding white enclaves. (Ironically, single family zoning started here in the very liberal state of California, and in Berkeley of all places! Then the concept spread nationwide. You can learn more about this by reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, Color of Law by Richard Rothstein or Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty.)

No one today is responsible for the decisions of the past, but those of us who own homes in single family neighborhoods and are trying to keep others out (by refusing to allow granny units, duplexes or small apartment buildings in our residential neighborhoods) are inadvertently perpetuating the vestiges of that discriminatory past. And that past is the single greatest factor responsible for the disparity in wealth between white families and Black families. Inclusionary zoning is a social justice issue. To my mind, a moral imperative.

I say this, but not everyone likes it. In fact, my words are upsetting to some people. A local newspaper even went so far as to say DON'T VOTE FOR JULIE.

I get the concerns. It's partly on them - due to where they are in their understanding of these issues and their lack of willingness or ability to learn more and to talk about it. But it's partly on me. Sometimes I go too far and regret it, or I fall into the trap of labeling people or making assumptions that are not helpful. Assumptions I wouldn't want made about me. Sometimes I feel ambushed, and reply, but then am accused of attacking others, and I wonder why isn't anyone standing up for me when I get ambushed? I have to ask, am I getting ambushed, or am I just over-sensitive? Am I doing good by standing up for what's right? Or am I the problem itself? I think we should all be willing to ask ourselves these questions.

At a neighborhood happy hour late one afternoon, a kind gentleman comes up to me in the first few minutes and says he was supporting me until he read some of my comments, and now he wants to talk further because he has concerns. We go there. He speaks, I listen. I speak, he listens. I feel discomfort. But I also feel good to be having this conversation rather than avoiding it. He sticks around for the entire event. At the end he says, "I wasn't going to tell you this but I have your yard sign and I took it down but now I'm putting it back up." I feel like I'm in that car in upstate New York again. Not sure if I'm the driver or the passenger. Not sure it matters.

It's hard to talk about tough things, but we must. I, too, continue to get better at having brave conversations more effectively. A healthy dose of humility and curiosity and a willingness to learn and grow helps. If I win a seat on the council I just might have to take Ms. Nowak's instructions for middle schoolers with me.

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How about you? What's the bravest conversation you've had lately, and how did it go? I'm rooting for all of us to be better at it!

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