SHATTERED

When I tell people that, for six years in the eighties, I taught psychology at an historically black college near Jackson, Mississippi, they often say, “So you got to feel what it’s like to be a minority?”

As one of the few white teachers at Tougaloo College, I did feel “different”, always aware, if only slightly, of the contrast between my skin and the skin of my students and colleagues. I was mostly accepted, but something of an outsider. “I suppose I did get to feel that,” I’ve answered.

Recently, though, I remembered something that makes me question my response.

One stifling hot September day, at lunchtime, I was driving the blacktop road that exited the college grounds. My air conditioner was on High, battling the breath-sucking heat. The road was lined with elm trees, Spanish moss streaming from them like long grey beards. The radio was on. Aretha Franklin.

I was almost to the main road, where I’d turn and head to town, when, with a loud Crr—rack!!, my driver’s side window shattered. Glass flew all over me and the dashboard and the seats. I was stunned. My head prickled in a hundred hot places. A rock? A gunshot? But I saw nothing in or around the car to support that. I tried to breathe for a minute, then turned and drove back to campus.

Shaky and teary, I climbed the stairs in Magruder Hall. At the top, I saw Angie, the tall, thirtiesh Social Sciences Secretary. “What in the world?” she said. She listened, shaking her head, while I told her what had happened.

She walked me to the campus clinic where the nurse picked glass from my head with tweezers. Dr. Mehti, a middle aged East Indian man, squinted at me, and, with his precise English, said, “I saw this happen a month ago to a young man driving on the highway. The outside heat collides with the inside cool and the shattering is intense.”

“Ah,” I said. I saw Angie’s eyes close, just for a moment.

We returned to Magruder, and when we reached the front door, Angie stopped. Her face was troubled.

“Oh, Carol,” she said, “I’m so glad I wasn’t with you in that car. I’da thought it was somebody shooting–somebody who didn’t want black people and white people riding in the car together.”

I was too dazed to do much but nod. But, reflecting on it now, though I’d briefly thought “rock” and “gunshot”, I had not, for a second, thought my shattered window had anything to do with race. But that was the first thing that came to Angie’s mind.

Because she was black. She was a minority. And I, I see now, was not. I was a privileged, white teacher with only a sterile, intellectualized idea of what it was like to be black and afraid in the racist South. I didn’t know jack.

I still don’t. But as I watch and listen to and read about how minorities see the world, my view of myself as a good little liberal with a clue is being shattered, albeit less dramatically than my window that day in the car. It’s time to wake up. Past time, really.

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