In 1999, I was working at an American Express data center in north west phoenix. This was not just some random regional data center, this was THE American Express datacenter, responsible for ALL the card transactions and various other critical information systems. There were backup systems, of course, in the various regions... so that if communication lines went down things could limp along to various degrees. But this place (simply referred to at the time as the "PDC" or phoenix data center) was the main event.
I was part of the "Mid range operations" or MRO group, repsonsible for all the computers which were neither huge IBM mainframes, nor desktop computers. It was the middle sized things we took care of, mostly servers running either IBM's or Sun Microsystems versions of Unix.
The MRO group was organized into four teams of about 13 or 14 people each, and each team worked a schedule of 12 hours on, 12 hours off for 3 or 4 days out of each week (the schedule would flip every few months so that nobody would permanently be stuck on the night shift, although I question in retrospect the wisdom of reversing your sleep schedule ever quarter).
In my team, we had a man named Ron who was awesome, and black. Actually of course my whole team was awesome, but at this point you still think the story is about Ron. We were all very close knit, having been through the fire together. You don't know what kind of pressure exists in the belly of capitalist america when the dollars stop flowing, even for a couple minutes, even for a simple software upgrade, until you have been on the team responsible for that upgrade.
And one night at around 9 or 10pm, several of us decided to order delivery from a local place for lunch. When walking around collecting orders, I skipped Ron because I could see he had brought his lunch as he often did.
When the food arrived, Ron noticed and started giving me a good natured ribbing about not asking him if he wanted anything. He hadn't wanted anything, so my assessment had been correct, but Ron's completely valid point was that for all I knew, he could have wanted something in addition to the lunch he had brought, and it would have been more considerate for me to ask everyone. Fair.
The way he delivered the criticism, however, was mock-anger. And so, at some point near the end of his pseudo-diatribe, in an attempt to "play along", I loudly deadpanned "Actually, Ron, it's because you're black."
The datacenter control room, a huge open room containing roughly a hundred people, normally alive with a constant low murmur of many separate conversations, went silent. You could hear a pin drop (and the floor had that typical corporate carpet stuff.... you would hear the pin anyway.)
Until Ron burst out laughing. What he knew in his heart was that I loved him as an individual and that this whole "because you're black" thing was the farthest possible thing from the truth. He understood my counter-point that I did, indeed, love him and want to be considerate towards him, and this had been a simple mistake not some kind of micro-aggression or him holding a lower place in my mind than the people who I ordered lunch for.
And of course once Ron laughed, the other 99 people in the room all started laughing as well, with relief that there wasn't going to be some kind of actual racial confrontation in the datacenter.
And for many years I was kind of fond of that story; to me it felt as if it was a bonding moment between Ron and myself.
Today, with the long overdue protests about systematic, structural, violent racism in america and elsewhere, I have returned to reflect upon that moment.
And I am thinking, more and more, about that awkward silence before Ron laughed. And I think that that's what this moment in america and around the world is about. Because most of those 99 people did not know me, did not know Ron. Not very well, the different teams in that environment had separate duties. We were all in the same room because the machines we were responsible for were all in that building, not because we needed to work together all that much across teams.
My "joke" of being fake-racist with Ron depended on that awkward silence. It depended on people in the surrounding environment thinking that my racism was real, doing nothing, waiting and watching for what would happen next.
And to the best of my recollection Ron was one of only about four black people in the room. That alone is of course evidence of the structural racism that kept that American Express datacenter majority-white. Because let me tell you, in Phoenix, Arizona, that datacenter control room also had a shameful shortage of Latin faces.
I knew, when I made the joke, that none of those people would interrupt it with a "That's fucked up" in response to my "because you're black". I didn't /think/ about what everyone else would do when I said it, I just said it with the confidence that nobody other than Ron would react.
And the fact that I was right, was a signal I ignored. Every white person in that room, including me, including those I loved on my team, were all racist. It was a comedic lie that I had tried to deny Ron lunch because of his race, but it was absolutely true that Ron was there DESPITE his skin color, that somehow he had prevailed over the racist trials and obstacles that prevented so many others from getting into the lucrative datacenter jobs. And that none of the white people in the room knew what that was like to live through, but had reason to know that it was true. Ron even being in that room was not a testament to how much progress had been made against racism since the civil rights movement in the '60s, but a reminder of how racist our society still is.
And despite that institutional racism, when I said "because you're black" to Ron, nobody intervened. Nobody looked at me funny. Nobody in that room felt responsible for standing up to that racism, because the response to it was completely in Ron's hands.
I shouldn't have made a joke out of racism. Because that joke depended on the fact that I wasn't being racist at that moment, it gave me the impression, and sadly may have given some people in the room the impression, that Ron wasn't subject to racist attacks all the time. It gave the impression, for people who did not know the specific dynamic between Ron and myself, that Ron laughed not because he understood my specific motivation at the moment, but because racism isn't a thing that happens much any more, which is of course a false narrative.
I should have looked at myself, and the people in that datacenter, and thought about things. Somebody white should have reacted, during that long silence, and intervened. Sure, it would have ruined my joke, and Ron would have likely had to explain that in this case, it was maybe more forgiveable than it seemed. But I was still (in a small way, much like the original lunch error) in the wrong. And I should have been upset, upon reflection, that nobody intervened on Ron's behalf. Because while in general we think "The person who is insulted is the person who should respond" and that seems logical, it's just not applicable in a situation where racism is involved. The white people in that room had the privilege and the power, and Ron was there because various white people liked him personally, not because black people were generally considered appropriate for those jobs. It's disgusting. Even if I had been being genuinely racist and attacking him at that moment, he would not have been safe to respond. Because I could always claim it was a joke. Because I could always minimize it a hundred other ways. And if an actual confrontation had occurred, with some kind of heated words being exchanged, Ron's job would have been far more at risk than mine. Laughing at my joke was the only safe response he could take. He wasn't laughing freely, I now realize. In his place I probably would have had a moment of "Should I tell this person how true what they just said was?" before thinking about the possible fallout of accusing a white co-worker of racism, and deciding laughter was the safer option.
And the fact is, I was being genuinely racist at that moment. I didn't know that I was, and I was being racist in the service of a joke with one of my close friends, who was black. Didn't know I was racist? Get out of jail free. Racist as a joke? Get out of jail free. Racist just among my friends? Get out of jail free. Racist while near a smiling black friend? Get out of jail free. Everyone in that datacenter had an opportunity to walk up to me after and criticize what I did, but nobody did so.
Sure, in this case it might have been a thing seemingly without consequences. But that's failing to consider the mental consequences, both in terms of hurt it can cause and the reinforcement that happens for bad behavior.
I've been racist my whole life because nobody told me I was racist. And sometimes, yes, I have been cognizant of it and acted better. But other times I fail. And I need other white people to tell me when I fail, to criticize me, to chastize me for mis-steps. Because we can't keep handing each other get-out-of-jail-free cards (an idiom, remember, that comes from a hyper-capitalist board game) and expect anything to improve. We need to hold each other accountable.
Addendum: I've been racist in worse ways than this, obviously. Far worse. This particular story was chosen to illustrate how invisible it can be.
