Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(59)

“Not really. The ham just reminded me of something Mom would have made at Christmas.”

“Do you feel sad?” I asked her, taking out my medical notebook again.

“No, just warm and fuzzy,” she repeated.

We lay in my bed, holding hands, looking out at the backyard lit by the lanterns hanging in the trees. I felt grateful in that moment that I was lying next to my sister, and for all the gifts life had given me, and for all the girls life had given me.

“I just want everything to go on forever,” I told Shana, and then stuck my finger in her butt.

“When are we going to be too old to act like this?” she asked me, giggling.

“We’ll never be too old to act like this,” I reassured her.

Shana yawned. “Just because I get colonics, doesn’t mean you can treat me like shit.” Then she rolled over and fell asleep.




* Needless to say, I am not a doctor, nor can I examine you as you read this. So please don’t follow these protocols as genuine medical advice that’s meant for you. Use your head and see a real doctor.





I’ve never woken up feeling in danger. I’ve never woken up feeling like I didn’t belong. I’ve woken up every day of my life thinking, I’ve got the upper hand—that I always had an avenue. I didn’t know that was called privilege. I was too consumed with the things I still didn’t have to think about what other people were missing.

Someone explained to me that for someone who’s lived with privilege their whole life, equality feels like a loss. That made sense.

What would I be willing to give away in the name of equality? My house? My car? My career? What is my contribution?

No one likes to lose anything they’ve gotten comfortable with. Some people are more gracious, and some people have more experience with loss—and those people are usually either poor, of color, or marginalized because of their sexual preference or gender identity. If you’re afraid of loss, you’ll do anything to identify a variant; you’ll seize on any reason to exclude an “other.”

    I was sitting in Dan’s office one October morning telling him about the documentary I had started filming for Netflix on the subject of white privilege. I told him how on the very first day of shooting, I had already managed to offend a black girl by tapping her on the ass.

“So now Netflix is making me take racial-sensitivity classes,” I said.

“Why did you tap a girl’s ass?” Dan asked, with a furrowed brow.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “As a sign of affection? That’s how I was intending it anyway. Like a girl thing. Like sisterhood.” I moved my shoulders to demonstrate a shoulder bump, except no one was there to bump with.

“Okay,” he said, sighing. “Isn’t that what this documentary is all about, though? Pointing out to white people what they’re doing wrong?”

“Or pointing out to me what I’m doing wrong. Jesus, do I feel stupid. Here I am, thinking I’m going to enlighten white people, and my lightbulb is out. Way out. I don’t even know if I have a lightbulb. I’ve been grabbing people’s asses for years. White and black. It’s total privilege. Why do I think I can touch other people’s bodies?”

“You’ve said yourself you have a lack of boundaries,” Dan reminded me, and then he added for good measure, “Personally, I don’t think it’s normal to touch other people’s bodies.”

“Yeah, I got it,” I said, throwing one hand up in the form of a stop sign. “I think that just because I’m a girl, I expect other girls to know I’m not a threat and that I’m not trying to sexually assault anyone—but I’ve never taken into account what it means if you don’t like to be touched, or you’ve been assaulted, or that many black women don’t want to be defined by their hair or their asses. I have to retrain my brain. Just this morning I grabbed my cleaning lady’s ass when she bent over to rub faces with Bert.”

    Dan was confused. “Who’s Bert?”

“Ugh, it’s not important,” I told him. I wasn’t going to sit there and talk to my therapist about the pangs of jealousy I had toward my cleaning lady and her relationship with my dog. Talk about privilege.

“It’s the same thing with the #MeToo movement. I had no idea that one in three women have been sexually assaulted. How is it that I didn’t know how rampant that was in the very industry I work in? How rampant it is in every industry. I feel like a member of the Catholic Church who just found out how prevalent child rape is among priests. Why did I assume my privileged experience was the typical experience and not the other way around?”

“I don’t think you should beat yourself up for asking these questions. You should be grateful that you’re now asking them.”

“In my world there is no such thing as an invasion of privacy. Nothing’s off-limits. I guess that speaks to my lack of empathy. Maybe I should think for a second about what other people’s limits might be instead of assuming they have the same limits I do.” I looked up. “This song is getting very old. Every time I feel like I’m getting a handle on this empathy thing, it keeps rearing its head.”

    “Well, before, you didn’t even know you were missing it. You’re thinking about it now, so that’s progress. Identification. Awareness. Modification.”