Shiny White Suburban

A white woman in a white Suburban with chrome rims is bumping “Still DRE.” The Suburban has just been through the car wash, leftover drips rubbed away with a microfiber cloth. The rims are blinging, bass thumping, and she’s cruising a smooth five over the speed limit. 

The white woman is on her way to pick up her daughter from a Catholic school, where she recently started. The woman transferred her daughter there after her kid got caught within the crosshairs of a seasoned bully at the public school. The bully was an 8th grader with enough cunning to torment her daughter without ever pulling the trigger - physical violence would get her expelled, and she needed lunch. The youngest of a notoriously violent family, the bully had seen things no kid should ever see. She was the kind of girl you’d feel sorry for until she knocked out a few teeth.

Hurt people hurt people. The white woman repeats this like a mantra when she finds herself fantasizing about grabbing this little bitch by the hair and digging her acrylics into the back of her neck. When friends ask how she’s coping, she laughs and talks about being “mama bear.” The laugh is to assure her friends that she’s upset, but not venomously so. Though the bully has quite a history of violence, she’s still only fifteen. The phrase “restorative justice” gets tossed around, and everyone feels better for saying it even if it never happens.

The public middle school is a modern gladiator pit, the white woman quickly learns, first round of elimination over Snapchat. Kids encourage kids they don’t like to commit suicide, circulate vicious rumors about classmates that harden like cement in fledgling hearts. Daily fights, failed policy, and broken communication are the norm. Well-meaning adults wring their hands with worry about the school-to-prison-pipeline while tweens get sent to the hospital, concussed, and teachers flee to other districts.

But the white woman knows she should not complain aloud about the failings of the public school. Instead, in every conversation about her daughter’s bully, she is careful to mention her family’s class and racial privilege, because without doing so, her story will fail harder than half of the kids at that middle school.

“I know, I know, blame systems not individuals,” the white woman said to the principal when meeting to discuss her daughter’s transfer to the new school. The principal narrowed her eyes when the white woman slipped and complained how unfair it was that a chronically-misbehaved student had made school unsafe for her child. Using the word “trauma” at least a dozen times in under ten minutes, the principal lectured her about the challenges faced by the district. When the white woman asked whether being threatened at school could be considered a form of trauma, the principal differentiated between big T and little t. What her daughter experienced was little t trauma. Bullies have been around forever, no? Her daughter was coming to school fed and washed? Her basic needs met?

The white woman blinked hard at this comparison and swallowed her anger. She was ticked, but making an effort to mind her manners. Noting this unusual showing of parental restraint, the principal offered an olive branch. “Listen,” she said, leaning forward, dropping into a whisper, “our hands are tied.” The principal was about to say more, but the conversation ended abruptly when the walkie talkie attached to her belt squawked with an emergency. A rapidly-escalating situation near the south stairwell sent her rushing out the door without a goodbye.

“You probably have a black pussy,” the 15-year-old bully said to the woman’s daughter, who had just turned 12. So many levels of complexity here, and the white lady did not know how to explain this one to her kid. When she tried, the conversation sputtered and her daughter begged her to stop. When she expressed her concern that the school was not safe, her daughter pleaded to stay put. “I’ll get my ass kicked eventually,” she said, “and then she’ll move on to someone else.”

“Welcome to the experience of being a poor woman of color,” a white friend said over a bottle of chardonnay. She suspected she knew what this friend was trying to get at, and a part of her always wanted to slap this friend, who was an avid enthusiast of the Trauma Olympics. Annoyed, she switched the subject and complimented her friend’s new hair color. “Gorgeous,” she said, applying some lip gloss that would take a little scrubbing to remove from the wine glass, “almost looks natural.”

Besides, for the past five years at work, the white woman had shared a lunch table with a small group of women, none of whom were white. Two of the women made at least double what she did, the other two, she suspected, much less. They’re a good cross section of their city, they joked, capable of solving any problem since they’re all moms. When she spilled her worries over lunch, the oldest of the group set her fork down and shook a finger in her face. 

“Get your baby out of there.” 

“Thank you,” the white lady sighed, relieved she’d been given official permission to make the obvious choice. 

“Ain’t nothing stopping you from teaching your baby girl how to throw a punch,” the woman added, dabbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “When I was a kid, my daddy gave me a switchblade, which was funny cause I wasn’t allowed to wear slacks, so I kept it in my bra.” 

The white lady went home that night and showed her daughter how to throw a right hook, which she learned from two years of Billy Blank’s Tae Bo. She held up a cushion from the couch and her daughter balked - she did not want to hurt anyone, ever. ‘C’mon!” the white woman hollered from behind the cushion. “Smash it!”

Her daughter said no. She would not.

“I’m so lucky to have the resources to consider an alternative,” the white lady whispered to a girlfriend while unrolling her yoga mat, since the alternative was accompanied by tuition. Though the strain of this experience had triggered migraines and the type of insomnia no visit to Sephora could hide from her collapsed face, her friend agreed. So lucky. 

In addition to dealing with toxic stress, the white woman was awfully disappointed. Since the majority of her friends were liberal, when her daughter was young, she too vowed to support public schools by sending her kid to them. Supporting local schools could be considered a basic civic duty, her left-leaning friends argued, though a few sent their kids to private schools, a fact underwhelmingly discussed.

But then her daughter came home from school one day and crumpled into her arms, recounting how the bully chased her down the hallway, barking like a dog. Her daughter ran into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall, tucking her feet onto the toilet seat to try to disappear. The worst of it, her daughter sobbed, was that she wouldn’t have been able to stomp the bully’s head if she’d tried to crawl under the door, and the thought of being trapped in the bathroom with this delulu caused a panic attack. She’d rather have her ass kicked in front of the entire school, she cried.

The white woman moved quickly and quietly. She got her baby out of there. 

The memory of that horrible week makes her heart skip a beat, so the white woman does three dragon breaths and tunes into Dre. Man, those lyrics are sweet, the white lady thinks, and cranks the volume.  

Still fuck with the beats, 

still not loving police, 

still rock my khakis 

with a cuff and a crease. 

To be clear. The white lady was never a fan of defunding the police! She imagines a world without police as a sickening orgy of rape and gunshot wounds and criminal speeding. Occasionally, a demented man, grinning and holding a knife over her throat while she sleeps. (Because she is white, she lacks a certain type of imagination, she’s been told.)

Snoop sticky-ickies, and man, oh man, does the white lady miss snapping her fingers to 90s hip hop and shaking her booty. And though she is vibing hard right now in her shiny Suburban, she is also devastated by how ugly the world can be, so she is feeling her feels. 

Feeling feels is something that’s totally okay to do, proved by the Millennials. Everyone should hold space at all times - for themselves, their friends, even perfect strangers - to feel everything. Right now, for the white woman, it’s certainty and sorrow, and they seem to be combining as pressure in her stomach, below her tits. The white woman suspects a fart would release the feeling, but withholds out of politeness even though she’s alone in her car. 

The repressed fart sends a cramp into her thigh before transforming into a surge of rage, and she grips the wheel and steps on the gas, hard. She’s so fucking sick of things! She suddenly recalls a school board meeting, which she attended on her phone since the meetings are public and smell like cigarettes. Though she’d already transferred her daughter to a new school, the white woman felt she should share her experience since personal stories, she once heard on NPR, can be effective agents of change. And her story was important.

But the first public comment was deeply unsettling! A twitchy, gray-faced man gripped by paranoia accused school board members of stalking him, haphazardly pulling papers out of a bag and shouting, instantly deflating the energy in the room. The board remained grimly silent until he clocked out of time, scooped up his papers, and left in a huff. If hope was scant to begin with, now it was gone.

“Heartbreaking” she reported back to her friends, though the more accurate word was galling. The thought of the twitchy man threatens to overpower her Dre vibes, and the white woman “yes, ands” with such commitment she almost swerves off the road. She rights the vehicle and adjusts her oversized sunglasses, cracks the window to temper a hot flash. Calm down, you dumb bitch, the white lady says to herself, since shame is practical.

But she cannot stop thinking about the school board meeting. The next public comment was even worse, almost causing her to smash a dinner plate against the countertop. A person with a patchy beard and black lipstick spoke into the mic as if they were making a TikTok, with so much vocal fry you could toss a piece of breaded cod in their direction and crisp it. 

“Y’all look like nice enough people,” they addressed the board, smiling weakly. “But it’s just not okay with me that you don’t resemble the students in this city.” Running a hand through oiled hair, they leaned closer to the mic and moaned, “Representation matters.”

The white woman raised the dinner plate into the air, threatening to bring it down over the marble countertop. “Is this person serious,” she spat in the direction of her husband, her left eye twitching. “Are they implying that it’s the job of these exhausted, undercompensated board members to find their replacements?! For positions they were elected for?!”

“I just want to know the obvious,” her husband said, amused and leaning back in his chair, “which is why does this person sound like they’re making a porn?”

Unable to waste another second of her time and concerned about a hypertensive incident, the white woman handed the dinner plate to her husband and beelined it for the master bath. After a hot shower, she decided, she’d exfoliate her feet with a strange but effective tool marketed to her on Facebook. Then a Valium. Then she’d hit the sack.

Recalling this meeting makes her grip the steering wheel, and she flies through a residential area well-over the speed limit. The hood of her newly washed Suburban reflects the sun, temporarily blinding her, and her anger is instantly replaced with satisfaction. Nothing pleases her more than clean lines and gleaming surfaces! She taps the breaks, slows the vehicle down, and exhales through her nose.

No stress, no seeds, no stems, no sticks!

Some of that real sticky-icky-icky

Ooh wee! Put it in the air!

Well, you's a fool, D-R, ha-ha

The song is on repeat, but she lets it play. 

Sadly, the white woman can’t smoke weed these days since it causes panic attacks. But she used to! The thought of puffing a fat joint causes the planet between her legs to spin, slow revolutions that radiate big heat. A memory swirls to the surface like smoke, the first time she kissed a woman, her mouth whiskey-warm, hair skunked by the blunt they’d just shared. Dre was playing in the background, she remembers. The other woman had been watching her crip walk before she pulled her close, by the belt.

The white woman brakes to turn into the new school, shifts into park, and texts her daughter that she’s arrived. She sits in a line of trucks and SUVs, half of them displaying red stickers on rear windows and back bumpers. She groans, but decides on optimism. Just last week, when picking up her daughter after her first day, she could see the relief on her face when she climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s weird,” her daughter said, looking out the window at students streaming out the front doors. “I’m not even a little scared.”

It was an offhand observation, but the white woman felt it like a stab to the heart. The faces of her daughter’s friends, stuck at the public school, spun like numbers on a roulette wheel. She prayed to God that none of them get hurt - because what else but pray could the white woman do? 

She switches to the next song on the playlist, Tha Shiznit, and lowers the volume since hard-hitting bass seems inappropriate for the parking lot of a Catholic school. Then she reconsiders, turns it back up. Not all the way, just a little. 

Waiting for the bell, the white woman thinks again of the twitchy man. The shitty beard. The bully. She realizes what it is she feels in her heart, and gives it ample space.

There are other things too. Self-righteousness. Defensiveness. All normal, she assures herself, and tips her head back to feel the sun on her chest. A thought worms its way to the surface, and she sits up, vexed. Ugh, she finds it annoying when other white people say ‘de nada’ in response to someone thanking them, as if they’re très cool.

She turns up Tha Shiznit, just enough to rattle the sunroof. Her daughter will be out any second.