Privilege?

That friend said: I appreciate your views and their foundation. I disagree respectfully. I'd rather endure a Trump now if my vote can build legitimacy for a third party to break the status quo so my children can vote for the best candidate rather than feel media shamed into voting for a lesser evil.  They need to live in the real world like all of us and sometimes that means big compromises. I believe that a "democratic election" is or at least was intended to be one of the few venues in life where one need never compromise their values. I want to play the long game on this one. Maybe a Trump presidency will lead to the NEXT Bernie or Nader (or whoever) being electable.

And I can't help but think: Whereas my long game means I have to vote now for the best way to keep my kid alive until he is old enough to vote.

Black Lives Matter

We were in Mexico when police officers killed Alton Sterling.  We were still in Mexico when they killed Philando Castile.
It's a funny thing, Interracial Couple While Traveling.  We've had some wildly different experiences in the last five years, which had a different taste before and after the ring on my left hand.  There were times we left, fast, before actually putting the gas we'd paid for into my car.  (Looking at you, Alabama.)  There were times strangers enthusiastically shook our hands and thanked us for "bringing color to their state."  (Wisconsin.)  And then there were times where nobody looked twice at a tall, strikingly handsome black man holding the hand of a frizzy-haired white chick with ugly shoes.
Mexico was that.
I mean, I didn't see a lot of black folks in San Miguel de Allende.  It's mostly locals with caramel skin and a just-noticeable minority of sunburned Texans on vacation. In that sense, it's not dissimilar from the demographics I noticed when I lived in Indian Country in New Mexico.
Nobody looked twice at us when he took me out for margaritas in Santa Fe either.  And as unobservant as I am, I have gotten some new kind of sense as to when Those Looks are being leveled, believe me.
No Looks in Mexico.  Even when the shootings happened one country to the north.

B doesn't much like the Black Lives Matter movement.  Stopping traffic on major roads, or when the fracas happened at the Bernie Sanders rally...  I want to continue that sentence.  I want to offer delving opinions as to his own internalization of Blackness and maybe collisions with the Blackness of his brother.  This is a blog after all, and when is she going to start delving, Rosencrantz would ask.
But if there's one thing I've learned from this crash course in the S-O-C-I-A-L S-T-U-D-I-E-S that has been my consciousness as a privileged-as-shit white American in the couple years since they spilled Trayvon Martin's skittles all over the pavement and it suddenly occurred to me that my hypothetical son would look an awful lot like that kid if he had my taste in sweatshirts and his father's in empty calories... it's that I shut the fuck up when it comes to analyzing somebody else's Blackness.  White folks can be supportive in 100,000 ways, but we do Not try to take the mic on this point.

So, I haven't.

Anyway, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile didn't make headlines that I saw in Mexico.  Just like we didn't get Looks in Mexico.  We also didn't get much cell service, so I didn't really know what all was going on in the U.S.  In Dallas.
Then we flew through Texas on our way back home.
The televisions were broadcasting updates from the sniper attack in Dallas that killed several officers, and the CNN commentators were discussing the various reactions they'd picked up from protesters on both all sides of the debate.  The 200 odd people waiting to board the plane to Denver all had necks craned to look at those screens where a carefully concerned anchor told us about the deaths of those officers and the palpable tension across the country, while that weird news ticker slipped by on the bottom of the screen talking about how Scotland wanted a Brexit revote and somebody in Mote Carlo had won a car race.
And when I walked back to B, who was conscientiously keeping watch over the luggage in a fashion that would make the FAA beam, I felt the Looks.  People watched me walk up to him to the soundtrack of that careful concern from CNN.  I didn't have heels on or anything, but I did have on some makeup and I'd straightened my hair for once.  I was, to the world, a competent-looking young white professional, approaching her Black partner as the full impact of racial tension crashed down on the civilization around us.
Ok, Houston Intercontinental Airport.  I am walking up and craning my neck with the rest of the gawkers to hear about what happens next.  And I am taking my husband's hand because we are in this mess together.  I feel your Looks, and you can all take from that what you will.

And B squeezed my hand and said, "hmph.  Scotland's population is like, half of the total number of exit votes anyway."

... and that's when I decided that if we are procreating at any point, he and I are going to have to talk about Black Lives Matter.