#RSRSeesTheUSA Day 4: NC-SC-GA-AL
We see a lot of faux-perfect social media photoshopped advertised and filtered perfection these days, and I have no intention of artificially making my road trip reflections into something that only shares the Airbnb wins and beautiful scenery. Case in point: today was just a lot of highway driving, and it kind of sucked.
Driving along interstate highways is never really my idea of the best time, and there were enough “Let’s go Brandon” signs and Confederate flags and thin blue line flag bumper stickers today that I was feeling very conspicuous and uncomfortable in my Massachusetts-plated Subaru with the Wellesley College sticker and my KF94 mask on in spaces where hardly anyone else was masked.
I’m ending the day in Montgomery, AL in a chain hotel that’s totally adequate but utterly void of personality (except for the lovely staff who helped me get what was literally the last room available in the place and gave me a discount and cookies after waiting because their booking system went down just as I walked in).
Frankly, discomfort is part of what I’m curious about for this trip. I’m intentionally visiting parts of the country that I’ve never seen and where I know there are very different priorities from my own when it comes to politics and public health and the inevitable ways those two things have become conflated.
I’m here to see the Lynching Memorial and Museum, and there should be no comfort in that, especially not for a white woman still working on how I can best use my skills and influence in anti-racist ways that—outside the formal institutional settings where I’ve tried to change the system from within for years—I’m discovering and rediscovering over and over.
I’m taking heart from Linda, the kind lady at the rest stop who wasn’t wearing a mask and who told me the Memorial and Museum were the things I absolutely could not miss in Montgomery.
I’m taking heart from Shawn, the self-described Norse pagan who troubleshot the hotel check-in system and gave me a cookie while I waited.
I’m taking heart from productive discomfort, which is something more of us white folks could use more of the time.
I’m taking heart from the gorgeous weather that meant there is no cloud of the day today, because instead it was sunny and 75 degrees and blue skies and it feels like actual springtime.
And I’m taking heart from the fact that I’m in this hotel for two nights in a row, which means the only driving I have to do tomorrow is visit Montgomery and not make my way anywhere else.
