Dignity Through Defiance

The cul-de-sac abutting my childhood home has eight houses around its perimeter and a very wide variety of residents: one pastor, three interracial families, a single woman, two Jewish families, and a gay couple. The neighborhood, located near the center of Seattle, is among the more affluent in the city proper. Given the diversity, friendliness, and financial comfort, my darker skin tone never led to feelings of inferiority or subordination. However, these feelings and the subsequent urge to lash out against everything that caused them could be found just a few minutes away.

Madison Park is a neighborhood in which some of the world’s wealthiest people own homes. In the middle of the neighborhood on an enormous piece of lakeside property is the Seattle Tennis Club—a country club that was a summer hot spot for teenagers because we could lay poolside and charge drinks to friends parents’ accounts. I went there once when I was 17 and I refuse to ever go back.

Almost every employee at the Seattle Tennis Club is black. Every single member of the club is white. Noticing this immediately rubbed me the wrong way and I felt like I should trade in my swimsuit and towel for a uniform and platter of hors d'oeuvres. What really got to me, however, was the way that the members looked at me. You have to be friends with a current member in order to get a spot on the club’s extensive waiting list. This is a very effective way for the club to explain the complete lack of diversity, as well as a very effective way to maintain it. When I walked by tables of people eating nicoise salads in my shorts and a tank top, they would realize that I was there to enjoy the club and not to work there. While some didn’t seem very bothered, others displayed facial expressions ranging from confusion to disgust.

I wasn’t going to just stand back and take that treatment. Instead, realizing that 1) these people already saw me as a low-life and 2) I would never be a member of the club anyway, I glared back at these people with my very best non-verbal “fuck you.” Then I started to disrespect the club’s rules, taking a glass into the pool, “horseplaying,” and eventually being told that if I did anything else out of line I would be asked to leave. I removed myself from the club soon after.

I’ll never go back because I hate what that environment did to me. Not only did I reaffirm what these people expected from someone “like me,” but also I acted in a way of defiance and disrespect that is completely out of character. I generally respect rules and order, but feeling like a disrespected, worthless outsider who would never be welcomed into their ranks made me truly not give a damn about their rules and customs. It was a way for me to try to protect my dignity, but it backfired and I walked out feeling like I deserved to be mistreated. Luckily, I can simply avoid places like that. They belong to the very upper crust and elitist portion of society, which is a small (albeit powerful) group.

This experience made me realize that I have been very fortunate and extremely sheltered. While there had been times in which I had felt some level of race-related disrespect, I realized that there are many people in this country who feel this way every day. They feel like institutions like education and the legal system work against them. They push back in ways that others may see as defiance, but they are really just trying to maintain some pride while being forced to deal with systems that screwed them over from the start. The effects of this, like lower education and higher crime rates, are obviously harmful and perpetuate the problem, and the oppressive institutions are ubiquitous and powerful. While I could just get in my car and drive back to the safety of my cul-de-sac, many more people are stuck in a cycle that goes far beyond the confines of a waterfront country club.

And all this without anyone's even making an overtly anti-Black or otherwise hateful comment. Your story shows how powerful and far-reaching the social organization of prejudice is, and where the consequences for all parties lie. I still remember equally vividly the anti-Semitic outburst at a swimming and tennis club in the town where I went to high school, which was the last time I ever went back there. We remember the isolated instances because our lives are privileged, and we use privilege to escape, as you say, what we realize others are trapped in every day, throughout their lives.

You've also seen an example of the role of unconscious idea and behavior functioning in yourself, and you realize how much more sweeping the phenomenon is. Unconscious expression of racial bias, unconscious motivation to defiant behavior, and the cycle continues, trapping not only the powerful in their biases, but also the powerless in the hell made for them by those biases and the inefficacy and self-destructiveness of their rage at being mistreated.

The question in revision is whether the center of the essay, from your point of view, is your story, or what you learn from it. If the former, then you need only to rewrite the last paragraph, so that it's as tight and as powerful as you can make it. If the latter, then you need to rewrite the story with which you begin as a much smaller introductory image, placing it in the context of the larger lessons from the outset, devoting more of the essay, not just the concluding graf, to what you learned and where in turn that leads you.