Incredible whiteness of being
It was the first time I heard someone say “white” as if it was a dirty word.
I was talking to witnesses from the Kelton Trice shooting in East Moline last week when I was ordered to get out of the neighborhood. The orders didn’t come from police.
“You white people don’t know nothing about nothing, and you ain’t got no respect f-or our boy,” one young man said. “You white people need to dip on down the street with the cops where you belong. You need to get the (expletive) out of here.”
The anger was displaced, of course. I hadn’t wronged anyone. I was doing my job, and a couple of people who were still reeling from the shooting the night before needed somebody to hiss at. And there I was.
Nobody likes being treated like an enemy, and I most certainly didn’t care for being told to leave a public place. In the eyes of at least two people in Watertown that day, it was OK to distrust and verbally abuse me because I’m not black. My whiteness meant that I had it coming.
The experience was unpleasant, of course, but it did no long-term damage. I’m not saying that to discredit the damage racism can do. It’s just that I didn’t take it personally. The rants clearly were rooted as much in emotion as in intolerance.
When I returned to the office and read some of the online comments about the shooting, it became instantly clear who was taking the brunt of the racism. And it wasn’t me.
The color-specific anger was staggering — much worse than at the scene.
I confess: I would have felt differently in Watertown that day if the police hadn’t been there. If not for the half-dozen cops that were within a block of where I stood, it would have been harder to ignore the angry shouts.
I wouldn’t have been so sure that the girl on the stoop who yelled at us to leave wasn’t going to get up from the stoop and come our way.
I felt safer doing my job because of the police. That’s a fact.
So, I continued to interview people who said they were there when Trice was shot, and I told their story, along with reporting everything the police were telling us at that point. When some people didn’t like what they read, they took aim at the messenger.
Many readers were outraged that a reporter would listen to “a thug.” There was room for only one side of this particular story, no matter how dangerous one-sided stories are.
The same intolerance that compelled the angry young man to shout at me and that compelled commenters to say hateful things about Trice is also what inspired the crime-weary to lash out online. Intolerance helped them assert “anti-law enforcement” against anyone who dared to paint the broadness of the picture that day.
I’m no more ashamed of having done that than I am of being white.
Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.