Reflecting on how this week’s nearly unrestrained White supremacist insurrection is landing differently, more heavily and yet more familiarly on my friends and colleagues of color, and a memory flashes back to me:

I’m in the back seat of the wood-paneled station wagon with my sister, maybe 10 years old. My father, Nurn, pulls the car into the parking lot of the hotel where the Kalikow family reunion is taking place. He spots beloved Great-Aunt Dottie walking ahead of us towards the door. She is always easy to recognize because she looks like a gumdrop, diminutive and generously rounded and sugary-sweet even from the back.

So Nurn idles the car quietly up behind her, rolls down the window, and says loudly, “Well, there goes the neighborhood!”

Aunt Dottie whips around like lightning, and she is wearing a mean-mug beyond anything I would have thought possible for a face that I have previously only seen full of love and dimples.

Her guard melts as soon as she recognizes us, but she is still furious: why would Nurn hurt her this way? He begins stammering out apologies that continue off and on throughout the weekend despite her forgiveness, and it is clear what happened.

He thought he said, “LOL, what an utterly ridiculous notion to suggest this lovable elderly lady is here to fuck shit up!” (modern translation)

She heard a man roll up on her and shout, “GET OUT JEW.”

Now, of course the analogy breaks down because this week’s events were not even remotely a joke. But again it feels useful to me to reprocess old memories as I seek to better understand the perspectives of people who have been marginalized and oppressed as I have not been.

And the reason I lacked Aunt Dottie’s bone-deep training that her Jewish identity made her a hated target of violence, is because she and the rest of my ancestors fought to give me a life in which I could unquestioningly grow up as part of Whiteness. Even my mother has memories of a public-school teacher who gave demerits every week to her and the only other Jewish child in class for failing to attend church. My obliviousness doesn’t change or disprove the truth that they know at a visceral, instinctual level of lived experience.

So, a couple of closing points here that I want to pin down for myself and also offer to you if useful, and particularly to my fellow White folx:

• Given the welcomed presence of White insurrectionists in the crowd bearing symbols like “Camp Auschwitz” and “6MWE”, I have no doubt that if that mob could come for me and my family, they would. If you would rather not see that happen, please join me in doing everything we can to shift our unjustly White-dominated lock on power to be fully and rightfully shared with historically marginalized people, especially Black people, before we worry about how to create more unity with the racists who proved mere days ago that they will literally fight to preserve White supremacy.

• I admit I was initially shocked and horrified to see video evidence of police cooperating with the insurrectionist mob. Like Nurn was shocked by Aunt Dottie’s reaction. If that’s you too, it’s on us to realize that Black and Indigenous people and people of color in general have been trying to tell us this for 400 years. Intent and impact can land very differently. Assuring BIPOC people of our shock — “OMG it’s unbelievable!” aka “I didn’t believe you before” — only adds to the weight of anger, sadness, fear and frustration that they have carried their entire lives. So let’s feel it and process it in our own hearts without adding it to the burdens of those who’ve always known. Let’s recognize that as we start to feel ready to move on from the paralysis many of us felt on Wed/Thurs, there are others carrying more who may not be as ready.

And let’s REMEMBER THESE LESSONS FOR NEXT TIME.

There will be a next time.

Onwards, friends. ❤