The Allegory of the Door

Not Even Once

The brown-skinned woman has spent her lifetime trying to enter a particular dining room that’s on the other side of a particular locked door. Well-meaning, white moderates have, for decades, sat in that dining room indulging in the fruits of the United States’ white supremacist culture. Often unwittingly. And even as they’ve denounced it.

The social value of whiteness is like the manicured array of delicate hors d’oeuvres that are so carefully arranged in that gilded dining room. White moderates are free to nosh at any time. At any time without thinking much about how the hors d’oeuvres were made. At any time without realizing that they’re eating hors d’oeuvres at all.

The white moderates’ talk is small.

He bullshits with a table mate about the New York Giants’ recent loss to the Dallas Cowboys. Neither of them mentions - or even registers - that the NFL players’ caucus is overwhelmingly black while the NFL owners club is almost exclusively white.

She, meanwhile, chit-chats with another table mate about the table mate’s hair. The hair is absurdly luxurious. It retains body and color as if it were an illegal collaboration among genetic engineers and a team of Hollywood stylists.

Pangs of jealousy flash through her chest. Unpredictably. Like a lightning storm. The jolts remind her just how fully her sophomore year of high school had been subsumed by her envy of the popular girls. The pretty girls. And their wonderful fucking hair.

The searing clarity with which she relives those memories surprises her. It’s all so visceral. Even all these years later, and even in the midst of an admittedly engaging conversation. She’s upset with herself for being so petty. And she’s upset that the table mate has great hair and is apparently some sort of small talk ninja. “For fuck’s sake,” she says to herself behind her just-a-bit-too-eager smile.

She doesn’t recall, even once, that she’d dedicated part of every gym class during her sophomore year of high school to asking the one black girl why her hair “feels like a rug.”

Not even once.

Falling Through

Everyone in the dining room ignores the frantic thumps coming from the foyer. The fists and the feet are noisy, they’re pounding, they’re desperate. And they’re ineffective against the door.

The louder the cacophony from the entryway becomes, the more resolute the diners become in their determination to ignore it. Without that practiced, deliberate ignorance, how would the color-blind party-goers enjoy their meal? Given that, at that very same instant, thousands of their countrymen, are suffering from starvation? Their shared lie is almost impregnable.

But one white moderate in the room just can’t ignore the din. Her family and her friends have always worried to themselves about her. She’s an odd duck. A black sheep. An anomaly. She’s one of those rare weirdos who, inexplicably, view humans with less access to resources and power as their genuine equals.

An anomaly, indeed.

She, the anomaly, gets up from her seat at the dinner table. Unceremoniously. She walks toward the swinging double doors. She works the latch lock into the open position. And the brown-skinned woman, who’s spent her lifetime with her shoulder leaning hard against the door, cuts her knee as she falls through the suddenly unobscured entryway.

She sits there on the floor for a moment, rather pathetically, poking at her bruised and lacerated knee cap with her slender, brown finger.

And she looks around the room. First at the Sterno-heated refreshments, and then toward the white moderates’ astonished faces. It’s obvious to her that most of them hadn’t noticed that the door was locked in the first place.

She’s not really sure what to do next. No one is.

But her knee hurts.