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Bridges revealed the horror she encountered years later when her older son was killed by gunfire and gang violence ― all because he was looking for the people who earlier had shot his younger brother.
“It’s extremely dangerous to teach our children to only love those who look like themselves,” Bridges said. “My son was murdered ― shot 11 times ― by someone who looked just like him. Racism makes you think you can look at someone and tell if they’re good or evil, and that isn’t the case. If you’re about what’s good, I want you on my team. I don’t care what you look like.”
Since hearing these words and seeing the Norman Rockwell exhibit, I find myself ruminating on a few of my own experiences with race, some of which also have been surprising or complicated or even just silly.
***
Christmas Eve in Bethlehem depicts an American family as tourists in a conflict-riddled land.
When I was a teenager living in Cairo, Egypt, I dated a boy whose father was the Tanzanian ambassador to Egypt. This boy lived in a villa with animal skin rugs with the preserved heads preserved intact and life-sized carved wooden statues. My mom grew up in eastern Kentucky and ― even though at that point she had lived in and traveled throughout the world ― I think bona fide, up-close black people were almost as exotic to her as those rugs were to me. So I kept the black boyfriend a secret for weeks, maybe months.
I was your garden variety rebellious, hating-my-parents youth clad in black, and my getups often incited the kind of fights in which ribs were broken. So I was a little taken aback one day when my mom, who must have been feeling rather conciliatory, perched on the side of my bed and purred to me, “I’ve decided I don’t care if you wear those black pointy-toed boots and that black trench coat and all those black clothes. I love you for who you are.”
“Good,” I replied in the indignant, sassy attitude required of all misguided youth. “Then you won’t care if I have a black boyfriend.”
Turned out, my mom ended up liking the black boyfriend better than me, at least at times. He was good at chemistry, always very polite and went googly over her cooking. I still like to think I helped my mom scour away some of her racist upbringing by being so bad compared to the boyfriend’s so good.
***
The Whie Swan, Gay Pride Swan and Black Swan yuk it up on Halloween.
A girlfriend and I left The Neon after seeing Black Swan in a lumbering ballet, flailing our arms and cawking, “Black swan! White swan!” This ungainly dance eventually became a Halloween costume. Naturally, I was the black swan and she was the white. We savored the irony of it like chocolate bon bons.
We weren’t sure people would get the black-white-swan and the white-black-swan, but they did. We even added a third character, the multicolored gay pride swan. Black, white and every color in between. Equal swanpportunity. United Colors of BeneSwan. We took that costume for every single feather and speck of glitter it was worth.
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