I can breathe

My senior year of high school I lived alone in a crummy apartment on Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans, funded by my dad who relocated to Denver. One day, as a tall skinny barefoot longhair wearing a t-shirt and cut-offs, I was stopped by a police car that raced up onto the sidewalk. The officers demanded to know what I carried in a brown paper sack. “Ice cream,” which I had just bought at the Piggly-Wiggly on St. Charles Avenue. (This was before I had sampled coffee, marijuana or liquor—ice cream was my recreational drug of choice.)

The cops let me walk home. Hippies were stigmatized in New Orleans; in the French Quarter, many carried copies of the underground newspaper NOLA Express, because a judge cited free press issues when police harassed the rag’s hawkers.

Eventually a truce was struck—no shirt, no shoes, no service signs came up in most businesses; there was even a “pigs vs. freaks” softball game in Audubon Park. Most of the freaks were white, and those who were not managed to integrate. White flight to the suburbs led to the deterioration of the public school system, rising crime rate, and increased conflicts between the old-style police department, the proud young Black Power, feminist, gay liberation movements.

I held many working class jobs, traveled much of the continental USA, but when I hit 30, I was ready to interpret my version of the American dream. I teamed up with a beautiful woman, who supported me through college. We bought a modest funky house, always careful with our money, raised three kids and a garden.

In my student teaching semester, I told my mostly Black classes, “There’s only two ways you get power in America: money and education. So if you ain’t got money, you’d better get an education!”

Although my childhood was relatively poor, I had good genes, role models, family support, white skin, blond hair, blue eyes. It was easy for me to get ahead, and over my teaching career, I told students, including African Americans, Navajos and other Natives, Hispanics, students with disabilities, and poor whites, about my advantages.

Through hard work and careful money management, my wife and grown kids and I lived comfortably. I can breathe.

The stigma I felt as a young longhair stayed with me. Students asked, “Were you at Woodstock?” and “Did you smoke pot in high school?” Adults prejudge as well: when we play music in Berryville Square during farmers’ market, tourists assume it’s a bunch of Ozark hillbillies, when actually few of the regulars are native—most are well-traveled, educated, people who ended up here somehow. When we played songs other than gospel bluegrass, one local said “Y’all must be from Eureka?”

Generally, I avoid talking about religion, politics, and social issues unless I know the other person accepts my right to my beliefs, even if they do not agree. I can breathe.

I don’t smoke cigarettes, and I have never knowingly passed counterfeit twenties. But if I had been in George Floyd’s car in Minneapolis last week, three cops would not have stood around watching while the fourth kneeled on my neck until I stopped breathing. I’m a white guy who wears shirts with collars, eyeglasses, speaks Standard American English with no accent. I have scraggly hair and whiskers, but do not appear threatening in most situations.

I can only imagine how my life would be if I were born Black, Brown, Asian, Native American, non-English speaker, female, gay. Most of white America would be suspicious of me. Why am I jogging in a white neighborhood? Why am I bird-watching in Central Park? Why am I eating ice cream in my own living room that a Dallas cop mistakenly thought was her apartment? Why would I expect access to medical care or workman’s compensation for my underpaid labor? Why would I expect millionaires in government to care about me, my relatives, my neighborhood, my children’s schools, my reservation, my dying rust belt town, my farm where I burn food that won’t sell?

Inhale, exhale—I can breathe. How many fellow Americans cannot?

Kirk Ashworth