by Shabrayle Setliff
I have a habit of imagining what it would be like to live somewhere other than where I sleep: I have never fully dwelled in mind where I reside in body.
To say that I grew up in a suburb of Oklahoma City would give, perhaps, the wrong impression. I grew up in a low-income suburb. We were car dependent, and that was one of the only cultural similarities we shared with other suburban communities. My first car was a complete clunker that a woman at our church was going to give away as a tax write-off, but then a charity walked into church on two legs, and so, because of her generosity, I had a rusted Nissan hatchback with one headlight. I was ecstatic. Not only did I need a car to get to my job as a cashier at Target, but it meant the freedom of long, aimless drives as long as I could keep it filled with gas and oil, which was a constant task because I could only afford to put in a few gallons at a time, a half tank at most, and it leaked a couple of quarts weekly. It was like feeding a child.
I had to drive nearly twenty minutes to my Target job. There were no Targets in my neighborhood. Within two miles of my home, there was a laundromat, a car wash, a Taco Bell, a Church’s Chicken, a payday loan agency, a 7-Eleven, a cemetery, a discount grocery store, and at least five Baptist churches. These establishments catered to a diverse clientele, not in terms of class, but in terms of race and ethnicity. Del City was and remains mostly white; however, currently, almost 20% of the population is Black, 6% is Hispanic, 6% is made up a racially diverse groups, and 2% is Native American. For a town in Oklahoma, this was diverse, and whether or not those numbers were the same when I grew up there in the 80’s and 90’s, they feel true. As a biracial kid, part “Indian”—my mom was born to Quechua parents near Cusco—and part Black, I fit in with many of the biracial military kids who were there because their fathers were stationed at Tinker Air Force Base, just as mine was.
Despite the diversity, there was no attempt by most of my white neighbors to conceal their belief in their supremacy. Memories of overt incidents abound, but looking back, the racial animus particularly congeals in a moment when I was in the 8th grade. There was a “race riot”—someone actually yelled, “Race riot!” as about thirty Black kids and fifty white kids lobbed racial slurs at each other over a chain-link fence at lunch one day. The white kids definitely had darker material to work with, while the Black kids were limited to variations of “Cracker!” and “White trash!” laced with expletives to lend them more potency, more sting.
I stood on the side with some of my friends, who could not or would not claim membership with either group of kids. I felt an obligation to leave my group of friends and back the Black kids; although, the previous year, when I tried to join a group of some of the same Black kids at lunch, thinking it was finally my time to join my own group of people after spending my childhood in a mostly white elementary school, I was ignored. Backs turned to me when I spoke. This lasted for about a week before I decided to go it alone. A couple of gregarious white girls on the pep squad ushered me into their fold, and from there we created an inclusive group of friends comprised of Native Americans, Filipinos, and white people. I was the only Black member.
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I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now. I live in a real suburb—economically, culturally, in terms of housing density and home ownership—in Fairfax County, located in northern Virginia, called NoVa by some locals. Fairfax is exurban sprawl. There are planned communities, such as the subdivisions near me with homes containing more bathrooms than bedrooms and as many bedrooms as a bed and breakfast. They have three-car garages, and every bit of labor is hired out—lawn, housecleaning, and maintenance. There are also more modest suburban homes, with two-car garages. There are three-story townhomes as well. A new townhome subdivision was just completed this summer. They start in the low $700,000s. There are some apartment complexes. A studio can be had for about $1300 monthly, which is unaffordable for many people, so there are often requests for basement dwellings, and there’s plenty of stock—mortgages are high.
I live in an accidental neighborhood, which is not quite a neighborhood, and more like a U-shaped street with about thirty dwellings. Our U doesn’t connect to any other neighborhood streets. It is fed by and feeds into a busy four-lane road that stretches even further into the exurbs and carries commuters into the nearer suburbs. Our neighbor is the longest living resident on our U. She grew up in the green, one-story, two-bedroom house next door to us, which she shares with her husband. She’s been here for over forty years, close to fifty. There are also a couple of mini mansions on this street—I define a mini mansion as a dwelling that my house could fit in three or four times—and a couple of micro mansions—my house could fit in one of those twice--but most of the homes are similar to my own: a few bedrooms, a few bathrooms, a couple of thousand square feet, take or leave a few hundred.
Racially and ethnically, my neighborhood is diverse. For the first time since we moved here seven years ago, I’m not the only Black person. A Black man moved into one of the rentals across the street this past spring. A little over half of my neighbors are white, but the rest are first-generation immigrants from around the world: Korea, India, Germany, China, and parts of the Middle East. There are language barriers, but we wave… sometimes. Mostly, the white people talk to each other and the women from countries in the Middle East talk to each other. Everybody else does their socializing completely outside of the U, my husband, our two boys, and me included. Suffice to say that I don’t exactly fit in, but I don’t know if anyone else does either, including my neighbor who’s been here for decades.
There is no “in,” and in the absence of a sturdy culture able to frame our interactions with one another, we here in the Fairfax County, one of the richest and most diverse counties in the nation, must rely on other cultural points of cohesion, namely class, and the middle and upper-middle class culture insists on order.
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The last weekend of this past May, George Floyd’s murder garnered increasing media coverage. I could see footage of protests erupting in major cities, but nothing was happening in Fairfax. Everyone went along as though everything was right because for the residents of Fairfax, everything was right. By Sunday of that weekend, I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place, so I made a sign with the faces of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd and set out to walk nearby Braddock Road. My husband, Nick, who is white, began getting his shoes on as soon as I got mine on. I was relieved. I hadn’t really talked to him about what I was doing. I just started doing it. I had married someone who understood the need to respond without me needing to ask, who was flawed—after all, he admitted that he never would have thought of doing anything if it weren’t for me—but teachable.
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Our little demonstration was uneventful; one honk of support but nothing more. However, this most recent racial eruption was still new, and as the days unfolded that first week of June, many segments of the country seemed to lift out of their collective pandemic torpor to engage with this most current incarnation of white supremacy. White supremacy being an idea that for many white people seemed consigned to the past. Nick joined a group called SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice. They had planned a demonstration at the Fairfax County Police Department Headquarters in the middle of that same week. When Wednesday arrived, we got on our face masks and headed over to the multi-level glass and brick complex.
A friend of ours, Dan, a plain-clothes detective, who works for the Fairfax County Police Department, texted Nick, telling him, “It’s a shit show!” He’s a part of a tactical unit, but for this event, he was “intel.” Fairfax had morphed into a place that was home to something other than planned residences and shopping mall complexes. Three miles away from our house, there could be unrest if Dan’s observations were correct.
We parked in the lot next to the headquarters and followed the stream of mostly white people onto the grounds. Most of the Black people who were present were from Grace Covenant Church. There were a few other Black families, but the majority were not Black. Before I understood that Grace Covenant was there at the behest of the Fairfax police chief, I thought that their presence had lent an air of credibility to the whole thing, and I felt more comfortable being there as a Black person. It felt like a coalition, not performative protest.
They had set up in a section of a nearby parking lot, unloading boxed lunches and bottles of water from church vans. We would later learn that the church had a relationship with Chief Rossler. This was an attempt, according to a statement put out by SURJ, to garner positive publicity for the police department. I believe that the church was handing out food and water out of a sense of goodwill and support for the demonstrators, but it did seem as though they were being deployed strategically, regardless of their intention. The police department’s use of the group, given that the police were armed and that there was one officer for every three protestors, was a part of a multipronged approach—and I was sure someone had probably used the word “multiprong” when coming up with it.
When we stepped onto the grounds, we saw socially-distanced demonstrators listening to the vice principal of a local school speaking about racial justice and the responsibility of white people to start getting active. She occasionally gestured to the news helicopters overhead and to the police officers lining the perimeter of the building and stationed on rooftops. There were about thirty officers. The crowd numbered about two hundred, but despite our friend’s account, we didn’t see a “shit show.” We saw friends and families huddled in their quarantined islands, straining to listen above the sound of the helicopters, trying to move closer to the speakers, but, understandably, not wanting to risk getting COVID. The demonstration was scheduled to last from 6 to 7 p.m. It promptly ended at 7 p.m., and we all flowed back to the parking lots nearby as though we were leaving a concert or a baseball game.
“That was the most sanitized demonstration that I’ve ever been to,” I told my husband. He agreed that it was odd. It was nothing like we’d experienced when we’d been to demonstrations in D.C. where crowds overtook streets, some protestors with expletive-laden signs and protest chants, others praying and singing familiar protest songs, and all were committed to a proper disruption. This demonstration was disruptive in that it existed at all. To police officers who had never heard a peep of protest from residents, it probably really did seem like a “shit show” at first.
Dan, whom we never spotted, revised his first assessment, texting that the whole thing was “underwhelming.” He was cut loose at the end of the event. Nick responded that they, “expected too much from rich, white folks.” Dan replied, “They spent so much money on overtime for that.” Nick noted that they’d get nice paychecks. I realized that our friend worked for the state, and I’d never conceived of “the state” before realizing how little it took to conjure its presence. His job was to observe and suppress any perceived upheaval, or what some might call a step towards necessary systemic change.
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But what the hell could I say? Nick works in the defense sector as a human geographer. We met in the military. We were just as much a part of these oppressive systems as our friend. Many people in Fairfax profit off of working for the government, suppressing disruption, maintaining order, and we all have our reasons for doing so. Nick and I grew up poor and went into the military. This is where we landed after that. It never seemed like an immoral thing to do. If we were going to continue to support our family here and provide marginal financial support to relatives back home as needed, Nick would have to continue working. Other jobs that paid a livable wage for his experience and education had not materialized.
A week after going to my first suburban protest, my friend, Sarah, who is white, invited me to join her and her oldest son, Wyatt, to another. The demonstration, located at another wealthy northern Virginian suburb, near the Whole Foods, was organized by an ad hoc group of white women. There were explicit instructions to stay socially distanced, remain in designated areas, and protest peacefully. When I arrived, I was shocked to see the number of people crowding along the sidewalks along two busy intersections in this high-traffic, commercial area. Passing cars honked approval and people rolled down their windows to yell, “Black Lives Matter!” I never imagined that I would see this swell of response in a suburban setting, and I felt supported in that moment, like the whole enterprise to overturn the basis of this country, its white supremacist foundations, might actually gain enough traction to make a difference.
Then I found my friend. She and her son were occupying a circle, drawn with white chalk, next to a tall bush, which we used for shade. The white circles lined the sidewalk at six-feet intervals. We were repeatedly reminded to stay in our circles to prevent COVID spread. Again, understandable. Everything in the suburbs has a purpose; everything is considered and planned out, but it was unlike any demonstration that I’d been to during the pandemic, where we more or less kept our distance from one another--although, not quite six feet. At the protests in D.C. we had relied on mutual trust that we would try to keep each other safe.
Sarah, Wyatt, and I read each other’s signs. Mine said, “We cannot build together until we dismantle together.” Sarah’s said, “The Power of Love is greater than The Love of Power.” Wyatt’s said, “Bigotry Is the Disease of Ignorance --Thomas Jefferson.” One sign seemed wishful to me, and out of touch; the other, given who the quote was attributed to, was offensive, but in neither case did I blame either of them. Wyatt was young, and still held Jefferson in high regard despite his history as a slaveholder. What mattered to me then was that they were trying. Perhaps, this level of allowance was social survival. I’m increasingly coming to understand the cost of survival.
Two other friends of ours joined us, Kristen and her daughter Dora. Like me, Kristen was in an interracial marriage. She is Filipina and her husband is white. He had been less receptive to the moment and was basically waiting for it to pass, so Kristen and Dora had started demonstrating on their own. We pushed our signs upwards and yelled, “Black Lives Matter!”, but gradually fell into various conversations. As Sarah and Kristen caught up with one another, I started talking with an older white woman who was in the circle next to ours. We both realized through the course of the conversation that we had been at the same protest at the Fairfax Police Department Headquarters the week before.
“I wish the officers had kneeled,” she said.
“I don’t,” I replied.
She was shocked, “Why not?” I explained that kneeling was an empty gesture at best, and a public relations strategy at worse, but most importantly, it didn’t change anything. I wanted to see a real investment in harm reduction and accountability for abuses of police power. She nodded in understanding, but our conversation quickly turned to other things after that. Middle-class, suburban conversation is agile, able to evade conflict before it becomes too uncomfortable, too disruptive to the moment of pleasant dialogue. She suggested doing a demonstration closer to where I lived since there weren’t many. “We should organize that,” she said, but then we departed without exchanging a single bit of contact information.
Before we left, a group of young people, older teens and people in their early 20s, hijacked the whole event in glorious fashion. They burst onto the streets, stopping cars and disrupting commerce. They chanted, “Black Lives Matter!” and “Fuck the Police!” Surprised and uneasy, many of the sidewalk demonstrators laughed uncomfortably and exchanged glances. “Finally,” I said, “This is amazing.” I was glad, but I did not stay to join them. I said goodbye and went to my car parked in front of the Panera Bread.
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Now, a few months removed from May, the moment of change and disruption in the suburbs has been smoothed over for the most part. My friends Sarah and Dan have one of the few Black Lives Matter signs in their neighborhood, but their neighborhood is fairly progressive, and most yards already display the catch-all sign that reads:
In this house, we believe:
Black Lives Matter
Women’s Rights are Human Rights
No Human is Illegal
Science is Real
Love is Love
Kindness is Everything
Sadly, this sign is ever current in this country, and, therefore, very practical. It allows households to perform culture with ease, signaling in and out groups and ideologies. It’s so common that it could hardly provoke anything in anyone, positive or negative.
The Black Lives Matter sign in my yard is the only one in the U of its kind. A couple of white neighbors stopped saying “hi” to me, and a couple started saying “hi.” I felt that while it didn’t necessarily plunge our tranquil U into a disruptive space, it did force a sort of acknowledgement that American flags and lawn ornaments are statements, too. Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it.
There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism. A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true.
I recently went to Wegmans to pick up a few things. It’s a grocery store the size of a warehouse. It doesn’t convey surplus; it conveys abundance. I was tired and did not want to go inside the store whose aisles expressed too much possibility for me to handle. Instead, I sat for a while and looked at the evening descend into blushed hues. When I finally found the will to get out of the car, I opened the door, looked down and realized that even the partitions in the parking lot were landscaped with annuals bursting profusely with late season blooms. When they become too overgrown, they’re torn out and replaced. It’s a way to mark the seasons here.
I grew up in one house for two decades, and I used to say that I’d take it with me wherever I ended up. I imagined uprooting it and dragging it along some highway. That little house was home, but the place where it was situated, Oklahoma, did not feel like home. I have a habit of imagining what it would be like to live somewhere other than where I sleep: I have never fully dwelled in mind where I reside in body. The sense of dwelling is a complex process where one feels as though they are fixed in a fixed space, at least for a time; and while I long for that state, I’ve never been satisfied with myself or with a place long enough to appreciably enjoy the illusion of dwelling.
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Shabrayle Setliff is a nonfiction MFA candidate in the George Mason creative writing program. She is the assistant nonfiction editor of the intersectional feminist journal, So to Speak. She currently teaches undergraduate writing and literature classes and homeschools her two sons.