For one minute, I’d just like to see myself how the casual, everyday white guy does.
2016 has been a year of exposing bias, resurfacing hate and igniting racial tension. America’s favorite issue took a rare backseat to gay rights and discrimination in 2015 only to come back even stronger this year. Social media reveals a stark contrast in how one group of Americans thinks about race and what the other thinks of those thoughts.
Americans, in general, are not known for their pursuit of empathy. We only halfway learn other languages and we only take what we think is cool out of other cultures to monetize it. We see things the way we see them and that’s it. Unfortunately, that lack of empathy is an intrapersonal issue for us as well. Whites, en masse, don’t attempt to see things the way Blacks see them and the result is #WhiteLivesMatter, Donald Trump’s legitimate candidacy, and Ryan Lochte sympathizers. (“He’s just a [32 year old] kid!”). Blacks, never experiencing ethnic privilege and not conditioned to view themselves as the norm, the standard, and the goal, find it hard to see things the way the casual White guy in Whole Foods sees them as well.
But I want to.
I just can’t believe the Whole foods guy hates me and doesn’t want me to flourish in my business and family life. I can’t imagine that he thinks too hard about how my rising stock may diminish his.
It seems to me, that white people are like iPhone users.
I can’t really reduce race relations to a facetious metaphor. But the thought has helped me frame why I always feel like an android around them.
iPhone user, you know that subtle tinge of uneasiness you get when the person you’re texting comes up green? Conversely, don’t you feel a weird comfort in seeing a blue bubble, even when you don’t know who it is? Their blue skin gives them an instant legitimacy on your phone. Your device is conditioned to draw a distinction and the iPhone user is conditioned to translate that distinction into an appraisal of quality.
For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, just know that when iPhone users text each other, it goes through their own exclusive iMessage system and comes up in a blue bubble on their phones. A message from any other phone—Samsung, LG, Nokia, etc.—registers as a normal text message and comes up in a green bubble on the iPhone.
I left iPhone 5 for the Samsung family and now when I come up unannounced on a friend’s screen with my green skin, they are undoubtedly shocked, and not like surprise-Christmas-gift shocked either. “Why, Jonathan? You’re such a good guy, with style and clout,” they joke. “How could you not have an iPhone?” They don’t hate my greeting. It’s just that they are a bit troubled by the color that greeting came packaged in.
I imagine that the little hesitance the iPhone user feels when a green skin comes out of nowhere is the same feeling that the white parent in the airport gets when I walk within eight feet of their kid. It’s not that they are literally scared for their kid’s safety when I appear. It’s just that all of a sudden they are intensely aware that there are other people not like them around.
Blacks (and I imagine Latinos, Asians and everyone else) can’t stand when a part of their culture and technology, after decades of use is randomly “discovered” by Whites, re-marketed and declared cool, necessary, and theirs. They’ve done it with most of our music, our hairstyles, our foods, and our inventions. As a Droid guy, I know that “we” got a watch a year before you iPhoners. I know we got Swype a year or two earlier as well. I know Samsung outpaces iPhone in several technological advances including processor speed, memory and camera quality. Check this out, I know Samsung MAKES iPhone’s parts! But none of those advances are deemed legitimate, beneficial, or “cool” by the mainstream until iPhones have it.
I’m not really emotional or completely serious about most of the debates I get in. I just like them. And after laying down all the historical data, most Apple friends I have will usually say something like “well, if iPhone doesn’t have it, it must not be that good.” Or they’ll say “I’ll just wait until iPhone gets it.” The camera like the Black invention and the new way to text like the Black slang is just not legitimate, not valuable, until iPhone or White America signs off on it, integrates it into their own ethos, and monetizes it for themselves.
It’s a new day now. The Samsung phones are starting to have the slick commercials, the celebrity endorsements. They are “on the rise,” “moving on up to the East Side.” Most reasonable folks might say “that’s nice that Samsung is getting a little shine. They deserve Obama.” Those commercials don’t truly affect iPhone’s place in power.
But could you imagine if iPhone, the brand you have sworn loyalty to, started losing space on the shelves for those Samsung phones? Those “Sungers!” Now those green skins have encroached on your territory. They are asking for a bit more than you were willing to give. You don’t hate them but there was always a comfortable sense of superiority that allowed you not to. You have a theoretical conviction that they deserve equality, but to see it practiced threatens your way of life. And you’ve probably never actually picked up a Samsung, breathed in that culture, and found out what is fact or fiction, so you don’t know how it truly is, how it compares and adds to your iPhone experience. So it makes you uncomfortable. You’re so used to being at the center of attention and glory, when you are no longer focused on, even for a season, and Droid’s market share begins to supersede yours, you get concerned. And then you tweet how #BlueBubblesMatter.
Of course, this isn’t true for every White guy and girl, and the complexity of race relations, even on this casual, non-political, middle class, Whole Foods level, is without a true, perfect metaphor. But since I’ll never be in a White guys shoes, this is my attempt at gaining a little perspective. We all are humans and though the consequences of racism versus “phone-ism” are incredibly different, our tendency toward elitism and the potential symptoms of it shouldn’t be too foreign to anyone.