LeighMcBain.com

Years ago when I had finished high school I really didn’t feel I was ready to continue my education. I decided instead to work and earn money before continuing on to college. I got a job as a guard with a private security company and found myself in the heart or should I say the bowels of Detroit. While I worked for the company I was bounced between several of the accounts that the company had in the same area of this dirty and down trodden section of the city. It seemed that every other building was either abandon or burned out or both and the sounds of gunfire would ring through the air on a nightly basis. One place I stood watch over was a small hospital that dealt with drug rehabilitation on one floor and terminal Aids patients on another. Most of the patients were from  the surrounding zone and their visitors or relatives would only need to walk across the street to the front doors of this medical oasis for visitation.

This one hundred year old hospital was flanked on one side by seemingly unkempt project housing that looked more like military barracks with bars on the windows. On the other side of this medical building were abandoned industrial buildings that loomed over the dilapidated water front of the Detroit River. I became aware early one that I was considered the outsider! I was the odd one, the light skinned freak. I was this skinny white boy from the west-side of Dearborn that had never really had contact or interaction with black people in Detroit or anywhere else for that matter and I was being treated differently, differently then I had ever been treated before.

I was brought up to respect others and the issue of race or color rarely if ever came up in conversation at home, not that it was taboo it was just that the color of ones skin wasn’t a major factor in how we were to treat people. Now here I was in this foreign land trying to do my job and I did my rounds of the hospital I would hear barely audible whispers of “cracker” and “go home whitey” as I passed the rooms of patients. At first I didn’t think much of it , either because I was so naive or I didn’t want to cause a problem, but after several weeks of these quiet attacks they started to gnaw at me and make me nervous about what might happen next. As I was contemplating my own safety and well being I was transferred from the hospital to a near by high rise apartment building. The neighborhood was still the same dark mix of dilapidated project housing and vacant, charred buildings but this was an upscale apartment on the edge of the abyss.

This new location, unlike the other gave me much less contact with the people of the surrounding area which I welcomed after the unease that I had developed at the hospital. I was in an office with one other guard watching monitors that surveyed the apartment grounds and hallways with rare excursions out to unlock a door or escort a resident in from the  parking structure. Terry, the other guard was a very laid back black man and nothing ever seemed to bother him very much. Terry and I would laugh and joke about the things we saw and heard around the building. One night as we sat watching the monitors Terry turned to me with a serious look on his face and said “McBain, sometimes do you feel like a snowball in a coal mine?”. I looked at him totally confused with no comprehension of what it was he was saying! I started to laugh at he imagery of the statement, then it hit me just what he meant. The ridiculous  contrast of  the snowball being cold, white and totally out of place in this pitch black and fiery coal mine mirrored me, a white boy from lily white west Dearborn being in the middle of the black Detroit inner-city. I was somewhat stunned and didn’t know how to reply at first but as his gaze upon me continued I replied with a yes. This single statement of his opened the door and allowed us to truly meet on a level playing field.

In our conversation I told him of the hate filled whispers I had heard at the hospital and how I had felt like an alien and an outsider. He told me stories of harassment by police when he would drive through Dearborn to his aunt’s home in Inkster and how he would have to plan to leave at least a hour before  he would need to normally to accommodate the time it took to be pulled over by police. He talked about how demeaning it was to stand by the side of the road in handcuffs and on display for gawkers as they drove by knowing that although he was innocent there was nothing that he could do to defend himself. This normally laid back and upbeat man was showing his dark fear and unease as he spoke. by the end of our shift we had covered a lot of ground about our experiences, our differences, and our similarities of values. I became aware that our emotions and views of family and life were not all that different from each other. The color of our skin may have made our view different but not our values of right and wrong.

Martin Luther King once wrote ” Anyone who lives in the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds”. This statement is true in that we are all Americans regardless of our skin color or origin of birth, yet both Terry and I, in our individual experiences were made to feel that we were the outsider, the other the inferior, the threat! I have long since lost track of the friend that I had made that night but the connection and understanding that we shared has continued in me.

Years later I worked in a hospital emergency room. There we dealt with many different and ethnically diverse people every day. I worked along side doctors, nurses and technicians that were black, white, Asian, and eastern Indian. The patient that would come into our E.R. were just as divers and from many different socioeconomic walks of life. These people regardless of their ethnicity or social stature were all treated with the respect and dignity that as members of the human race we all deserve. However from time to time patients would become frustrated and felt like they were ignored, or the wait for care by the doctor or nurse too long. Some of these patients were quick to cry racism and prejudice when nothing could have been further from the truth.

After seeing this a number of times I realized that people use racism as a crutch or leverage to get  wanted or needed result instead of seeing things as they truly are. by using this type of unneeded leverage as a chisel , pounding it to cause an effect it only causes the crack between races to widen and proliferates the problem of racism.

We need to stop finding the differences that divid us as human beings and celebrate the things that make us unique as humans. The values and the universal experiences that we all share can heal so many wounds that have been opened by people looking to exploit the distrust for selfish gain. This should be a corroboree, or celebration of life that we all share and embrace so that no one should ever have to feel like a “snowball in a coal mine”.