We’re Gonna Get Through This Together
Photo by Rae Wallis on Unsplash “Okay, Senator, we’re gonna go again, and remember we’re aiming for speedy and breezy.” I shuffle my cards. “I’m going to throw in some tougher ones this time — you can handle them, I promise you can handle them — but I’m not going to stop the clock. Okay, here we go. Three, two…”
I start the timer and lift up the first card. It’s an easy one — a photo of an Igbo woman I got off the internet.
“Black!” he shouts in his Carolina accent, and swats his left hand at the air, his signal for next. I pull the next card.
“South Asian!” Right again. We’ve been working on that one for a while. When we first started our sessions, the Senator called anyone this color “Indian.” We had to spend some time with a map before going back to the exercise.
I pull the next card. It’s one of my new tricky ones. The image came from drunkenly Googling “half-Swedish, half-Thai.”
The Senator inhales and pauses, his left hand twitching in front of him, his eyes darting from the card, to me, back to the card.
“You got this, Senator, remember what we talked about.” He closes his eyes, and I imagine him searching for the rhyme that I taught him: Confusing, mixed, or in-between, give multiple options, but keep it clean. He seems to remember something and offers, with the whisper of a question mark at the end, “Presents as mixed, possibly Asian, could pass as white?”
I give him a smile and a thumbs up and he smiles back, a surprised-to-be-receiving-a-smile sort of smile, and we have a moment, or at least I have a moment, a moment that makes me think, Hey, maybe I’m really doing something here, before he claps his hands and snaps, “The clock is running, Kara, next next next!”
The Senator paid for what I call the Professional Package, my newest offering. Six, hour-long sessions for a total of $3000. It’s a little higher than the going rate for coaches like me, but I’m good at my job. Plus, anyone interested in the Professional Package can spare that kind of change.
It’s usually politicians on the Hill and corporate execs drowning in racial discrimination lawsuits who reach out about the ProPack. They’re looking to overcome or avoid a public shaming, mostly. We end up doing a couple sessions on unlearning color-blindness, practicing saying words like “Black” without everyone feeling like they’re saying the n-word, and some exercises around learning to laugh at their whiteness in party settings. Roleplaying apologies is always the worst part. For all of us.
I try to throw in some gender and sexuality stuff when I can, also concepts like racial capitalism and root cause, but if I get the sense that my thirty-something soft butch vibes are already straining our working relationship, I stick to the basics. I don’t like being preachy. Vero was the one with the high expectations, slipping in some popular education stuff no matter what Package a client had paid for. Alone, I’m just doing my fucking best.
After our session, I leave Capitol Hill and drive to Bethesda to meet Stacey, one of my Personal Package clients. Stacey’s not worried about a high stakes racialized fuck up, but her oldest daughter came back from her first year at Reed last summer talking about intersecting oppressions and the violence of microaggressions, and Stacey started to miss her best friend. That’s what she wrote on the first page of our Let’s Get to Workbook, right under WHAT’S MY STAKE IN ALL THIS: I miss my best friend.
Stacey can talk to her daughter now — sharing links to listicles like “Top Twenty White Women Who Simply Cannot”, but once we realize how bad things are , how racist we are , we end up at the Low Point. I tell them it’s not our fault, it’s in the air we breathe, but some people just want to be bad, I guess.
