Go Back to Africa

It was a particular non-descript day. I had decided to go get some breakfast at a local restuarant in Oakland. I had decided it was a perfect day to nap in the sun. I wanted to go get a book on chakra healing in Berkeley before I went on a quest to find a place to nap. I approached the bus stop. I notice two black women and three kids sharing a bench. They were sharing a bag of chips and fussing at each other as kids do. "Momma, he won't give me any more chips!" the little girl said to one of the women. She snaps, "Share those chips, Jamal." For the first time, I notice that she is wearing a bus driver uniform. She says to me, "I love that color on you." I was wearing a lime green. I thanked her and asked how they were doing. The little girl looks up at me with sprinkles of chips all over her face. I smile at her and say, "Wipe your face baby." She wipes her face and then looks at me. I nod.

As the bus approaches, we all begin to move towards the curb, where I notice an elderly white woman standing. She is almost clutching the post as we come close to her and she gets on the bus as the current bus driver emerges to swap places with the black woman. She sits in the front seat next to the window. The little kids continue to fight over the chips and I laugh at the little girl's brother who is obviously getting joy at tormenting the poor child. His eyes lock mine and I give him a half smile while I shake my finger at him. He laughs a mischievious laugh. He stops teasing her and gives her the bag of chips. He looks at her You can tell he loves her though as he asks her to sit next to him. He is loving. The second black woman approaches the front of the bus and he says, "Auntie, sit here with me!" She ignores him and sits up front next to the white woman. Mistaking them as sisters, I begin to wonder if they are together. My mind drifts and I find myself staring out the window.

All of the sudden there is a comotion in the front of the bus. The black woman jumps out of her seat with her fists clenched. "You need to learn some respect." The elderly white woman says, "I have always been good to black people. My son..." Her voice trails off. I hear the black woman say, "I don't give a damn about what your son has done, you have been having an attitude with us since you the bus stop. You are a damn racist." The white woman is speaking and I cannot hear her until she yells, "You can go back to Africa if you want to."

Stunned, I said, "Oh hell no, she did not even go there." I think of the irony of this event happening as we roll through Berkeley. Berkeley, the alleged haven for radicals and liberals. They call it the Berkeley nation for a reason. Every time, I go to Berkeley, I step in to a time lapse. There is always some long haired beautiful being walking down the street with some kind of book written by some philosopher or activist who was working to change the system. There is always somebody who took just a little bit too much acid back in the day and never quite came back. There is always some privileged white youth who choose to be homeless littering the streets with their signs requesting pot and sometimes food too. There is always somebody eating some sort of organic politically correct food out of a recycled bag. There is always somebody with too many tattoos, earings and layers of mismatched second hand clothing exploring the existential aspect of our mundane existence.

Yet, I have often wondered about free love. I have often wondered about the radical inclusiveness that Berkeley liberals and liberals in general work to practice. There always seemed to be a repression that comes with political correctness. I think they have a lot of unexpressed feelings and thoughts that get pushed in to corners and emerge in funny ways. I like to walk through Berkeley and one day, I walked in front of this person's property. Someone had trampled their garden. They had posted a sign, "We have you on camera. When you come back, we have a gun waiting to greet you." Berkeley? The home of non-violence and homeopathic medicine?

I snap back to the moment. It is etched in my mind. The black woman standing in a warrior pose with ther fist clenched, rocking from side to side like a boxer, preparing to strike her foe. The elderly white woman scrunched in the corner staring straight ahead rooted in her privilege. There is nothing apologetic about her. The bus is silent and I look around and people are mortified. Their liberal bubbles bursting. The black woman screams, "You need to show some respect!" The energy is escalating. I know that I will intervene if the black woman moves to strike her. As much as I understand and feel her, we just cannot strike 70 year old women. We just can't. I see her. I understand that she is a product of her time and her consciousness is limited. She probably doesn't even see herself as racist. Having that understanding does not mean that those comments hurt any less, so I understood the black woman as well.

As we approached the tipping point, a young white woman who is sitting across from me tells the elderly white woman to leave the bus. The bus driver asks her, "Is she wrong?" The young white woman says, "Yes. There is another bus behind us, you need to get off the bus." The bus driver pulls over the bus and tells her to get off the bus. The elderly white woman huffs and says, "Fine. I am going to tell your supervisor." The bus driver says, "Go ahead and tell him how you are racist too."

The bus pulls off. The black woman bursts in to tears. I was shocked. I was surprised, because of her appearance. She had her hair braided and pulled to the back with her white shirt tucked in to her jeans. A gold necklace complimented small gold earrings. She looked like she came from a whole bunch of hardness and I guess I did not expect that someone or really anything could touch her. I tell her, "Don't take it on, it is not yours." The young white woman echoes and pats her on the shoulder and says, "I am sorry. You should not have to take that. It is not yours, don't take it on." She tells the bus driver, "You know what she said to me? She said you fat black bitch, you can go back to Africa if you want to." She cannot stop crying. The elderly white woman had found the string and this black woman was becoming undone.

The bus pulls over and it is my stop. I pat her on her shoulder and tell her, "I am sorry that that happened. I hope you feel better." I felt the irony of being someone who does go back to Africa and loves it. Yet, I understood the underpinnings and historic context of the elderly white women's comment. Some wounds are old and ancestral. Raw just under the surface, if there has been any healing at all. I didn't know what else to say to the black woman. Is there anything else to say? How quickly we fall from our ideals. How quickly the unexpressed conversations emerge continuing to etch the legacies of those that came before. Some of the paths of our ancestors were meant to be followed and others were meant to be re-imagined and re-created in ways that mirror our humanity.