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. She chose the most expensive option, then rubbed away drips with a microfiber cloth. The rims are blinging, bass bumping, 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 new school. After her daughter found herself within the crosshairs of a seasoned bully, she was transferred quickly and quietly to a private Catholic school. Her daughter’s bully stayed at the old school, of course. The youngest of a large and notoriously violent family, she’d seen things no kid should ever see. She’s the kind of gal you’d feel sorry for until she knocked out your front 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 inquire how she’s coping, she just laughs and says she’s in mama bear mode. The laugh is to assure her friends that she’s upset, but not venomously so. Though this girl has a significant history of violent aggression, the white woman explains, she is still just a teen deserving of help. The phrase “restorative justice” gets tossed around, and everyone feels better for saying it, even if it doesn’t happen.

In every conversation about her daughter’s bully, the white lady is careful to mention her family’s class and racial privilege, because without doing so, her story would fail harder than half of the kids at the public school, where trauma trudges through the hallways with clenched fists looking for an excuse to use them.

Violent fights are the norm, as well as poor communication, teacher burnout, and failed policy, longstanding problems that have transformed the school into a gladiator pit, 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. Then, an ass-beating between classes, or better yet, just beyond the edge of school property, so the aggressor can avoid suspension and keep coming to school to eat. 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.

“I know, I know, the system, not the individual,” she assures an administrator, who narrows her eyes when the white woman slips and says it’s unfair this student is making school an unsafe place for her kid. The administrator uses the word “trauma” a dozen times when explaining the challenges faced by the district, and when the white woman asks whether being threatened at school is a form of trauma, the administrator differentiates between big T and little t trauma. What her daughter has experienced is little t. Bullies have been around forever, no? Her daughter is not coming to school hungry and unwashed, is she? Basic needs met?

The white woman blinks hard at this comparison. Swallows a hot lump. She’s ticked, but minding her manners. The administrator notes this rare showing of parental restraint and offers an olive branch. “Listen,” she says, and leans forward, lowering her voice. “Our hands are tied.”

The administrator opens her mouth to say more, but the conversation ends abruptly when the walkie talkie attached to her belt squawks with an emergency. There’s a rapidly-escalating situation near the south stairwell, and she rushes out the door without a goodbye.

“You probably have a black pussy,” the bully said to the woman’s daughter, who just turned twelve. So many levels of complexity here, and the white lady does not know how to explain this one to her kid. She tries, but the conversation sputters before it’s shut down by her daughter, who already knows more than she does. “Mom,” she says, “please stop.” When she suggests that its no longer safe to stay at this school, her daughter pleads with her. She loves her friends and does not want to leave them. “I’ll get jumped one time,” she says, “and then she’ll move on to someone else.”

Welcome to the experience of being a poor woman of color, a friend says when she shares her concerns, and it confuses her, this response, but she does not ask for clarification. She thinks she might know what this friend is getting at, and a tiny part of her always wants to slap this friend, who is always saying things that sound like koans concocted by the radical chic. Instead, she compliments her new hair color. “Gorgeous,” she says, applying lip gloss. “It looks almost natural.”

Besides, for the past five years at work, the white woman has shared a lunch table with a small group of women, none of whom are white. Two of the women make at least double what she does, the other three, she suspects, much less. They’re a good cross section of their city, they joke, capable of solving any problem since they’re all moms. When she spills her worries about her daughter over lunch, the oldest of the group sets her fork down and shakes a finger in her face. 

“Get your baby out of there.” 

“Thank you,” the white lady sighs, 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 adds, 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 goes home that night and shows her daughter how to throw a right hook, which she learned from two years of Billy Blank’s Tae Bo. She holds up a cushion from the couch, and her daughter balks - she doesn’t want to hurt anyone, ever. ‘C’mon!” the white woman hollers from behind the cushion. “Smash it!”

Her daughter says no. She won’t.

“I’m so lucky to have the resources to consider an alternative,” the white lady whispers to a girlfriend while unrolling her yoga mat, since the alternative is accompanied by tuition. Though the strain of this has triggered migraines and the type of insomnia no visit to Sephora can hide from her collapsed face, her friend agrees with her. So lucky. 

In addition to dealing with all this stress, the white woman is sad! Years ago, when her daughter was young, she had sworn to support public schools after listening to a podcast series sent to her from another white woman, whose political mission was to inform others about the drawbacks of charter schools. The conclusion was simple. Show up for public schools by sending your kids to them. Resist white flight. Keep the tax base healthy. Supporting public schools was her duty, according to her left-leaning friends, a few whose children went 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 had run into the girl’s bathroom and locked herself in a stall, tucking her feet on the toilet seat to hide. The worst part of it, she sobbed, was that she knew she couldn’t bear to stomp the bully’s head had she tried to crawl under the door, and the thought of being trapped in a small space with her caused a panic attack. She’d rather have her ass whooped in front of the entire school.

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

The memory of that horrible day makes her heart skip, so the white woman does three dragon breaths and tunes into Dr. Dre. Damn, 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 car crashes. Occasionally, a demented man, grinning and holding a knife over her neck while she sleeps. (This is because the white lady is histrionic, at times. And because she is white, lacks a certain type of imagination, or so 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 ass. And though she is vibeing hard right now in her shiny white 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 is so fucking sick of things! The white woman recalls the most recent public school board meeting, which she watched on her phone rather than attended in person. (The truth is, meetings involving the public often smell like cigarette smoke, and her nose is sensitive.) 

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 wildly. The energy in the room deflated within seconds. There were so many vital things to discuss, but instead, those in attendance were forced to ride the rollercoaster of a mental health crisis. If hope was scant to begin with, now it was gone.

“That poor, poor man,” she reported back to her friends. “Absolutely heartbreaking.”

(The better word was galling, but she’s no idiot.)

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, cracking the window to temper a hot flash. Calm down, you dumb bitch, the white lady says to herself, since shame is practical.

She does another set of dragon breaths but can’t seem to stop perseverating on the school board meeting. The next public comment was even worse, and almost caused 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 haddock their way and crisp it up. 

“Y’all look like nice enough people,” they addressed the board, before scolding them for not resembling the students in their district. (The school board is mostly white.) “Representation,” they breathed into the mic, almost pornographically, “matters.”

The white woman almost lost her shit. Are you fucking serious, she spat in the direction of her husband, her eye twitching. Is this person implying that it’s the job of these exhausted, underpaid board members to find their replacements?! For positions they were elected for?!

Unable to waste another second of her time, the white woman shut off the video, took a shower, and exfoliated her feet with some strange but effective tool that had been marketed to her on Facebook.

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. 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 smoking indo causes the red planet between her legs to spin - slow revolutions that radiate big heat. A memory from long ago swirls to the surface. The first time she kissed a woman, mouths 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 slows down to turn into the 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 bumpers. The white woman groans, but decides on optimism. Just a few weeks ago, when picking up her daughter after her first day, she could see the relief on her face as she climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s weird,” her daughter said, looking out the window at the stream of students pouring through the front doors. “I’m not even scared.”

It came out as an offhanded comment, but the white woman felt it like a stab to the heart. The sweet faces of her daughter’s friends, stuck at the public school, spin like a roulette wheel in her mind, and she prays to God that none of them get hurt.

Because what else but pray can 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. 

She stares at the front doors, waiting for them to burst forth with tittering students, and thinks again of the twitchy man. The asshole with the patchy beard. Her daughter’s 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, everything’s okay, and takes a big breath, proud of how well she’s dealing. 

A thought worms its way to the surface, and she sighs with annoyance. Man, does the white woman hate it 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.