To the White Man Sitting at the Table by the Window….

My family and I have a regular routine of visiting this one restaurant. Recently, when we arrived and headed towards the entrance, I noticed a white man sitting at a table by the window. Before we crossed the street to enter, I had caught a glimpse of him. He didn’t seem familiar, and there wasn’t anything particularly striking about him except that he seemed fixated on us.

Photo by Taras Chuiko on Unsplash

As my family approached the door, he continued to watch us. I felt a bit uneasy that he was still keeping an eye on us after we entered. I started to question my initial assessment—could we know this guy from somewhere? Was he trying to figure out if he recognized us? When we were seated at the table next to him, and he looked irritated, I got even more curious.

He was with a white woman who seemed really focused on what she wanted to say. When I glanced over to see him still watching my family, I noticed her lecturing him on how to clean the cat litter box. She was in the middle of reminding him that she wants him to sweep the floor around the box. Why doesn’t he sweep around the box?

Later, when I caught a glimpse of him still staring, I heard her explaining the importance of having extra blankets and sheets. She said it means you don’t have to wait for clean ones to come out of the laundry when it’s time to wash them. But even though she was talking to him, he still kept looking at us. And I agreed with her—it’s a good idea.

Their food arrived and all the while he was dining with his date, he seemed distracted by our presence. Our tables were close together, and I tried to catch his eye a few times, wanting to see if he’d look away. Maybe he wasn’t especially interested in what she had to say and was just staring off into space. I could relate—I know I do that sometimes when I’m distracted or bored.

But he didn’t look away. His expression suggested something more than just curiosity or a distracted gaze. There was something specific about my mixed race family that seemed to bother him.

Having brown kids and a black partner as a white person has made me tuned in to how people treat us. It's like I have this built-in radar now. It's not about assuming everyone is racist, or thinking we'll face racism every where we go.

It's more about knowing these moments occur, and I feel this need to be on guard, just in case. These interactions carry weight—they tell me how accepted my family is. At its core, it's about my deep love and protectiveness for my kids and partner, and wanting their lives to be valued and safe. It’s also about noticing whiteness and taking it apart.

The truth is, I don’t want to be in this position—I wish I didn’t feel the need to think and write about these things. What I truly long for is a sense of security, to just know that my husband and children are valued and safe, without question. I wish I didn't have to untangle all the ways race has impacted my own identity and how I see things. It’s no fun realizing that I was living with blinders on and that this way of living caused real harm. And it's painful to see the white people I care about prioritize whiteness over the very real safety and lives of the people of color we love.

But I have to live in reality and acknowledge circumstances as they are, not as I wish they could be. I have to pay attention because I’m familiar with whiteness and its purpose. I keep talking and writing about race because it's part of my life as a white person too. I write here because I have hope that when we share our experiences and how we understand our everyday lives—and when others witness that—it connects us and changes us.

Sometimes, it feels like the change is widening the gap between us—a distance between the person sharing their story and the person listening, a disconnect in our shared humanity. It’s doubting that another’s struggles are real—a rejection of experiences that differ from our own or stray from how we perceive the world. It can feel like there's this need to create distance—to label someone who shares their experience with race and racism as attention-seeking, clueless, or woke—so the listener can distinguish themselves as rational, objective, or the truth-teller.

But, there are also instances where the change is a shift towards a greater understanding—a coming together around shared pain, healing, and commitment to creating something new and better. Sometimes, there’s the realization that when people are pointing out ways we’re hurting or dehumanizing each other, it's actually coming from a place of deep care—for ourselves, for others, and for our country. When we truly hear each other's stories, it can unlock new possibilities we never saw before. That’s the kind of change I'm hoping for.

Lately, the United States is feeling more and more unsafe for people that I dearly love. My partner, who’s a U.S. citizen, was born in Kenya. Even though he’s lived here legally for almost three decades, people still see him as a foreigner. Just like he wasn’t a foreigner before moving here, he wasn’t a black man until he got here. Despite having the same skin and gender his whole life, the specific identity of black man that being in the U.S. automatically gives him—and the things that come with it—is something he can’t just ignore or choose to opt out of.

And even though my kids are both black and white, the world just doesn't see them or treat them as white. Our mixed race family experiences firsthand how differently people are treated based on their skin color—it's been made clear to me over and over. Someone even once said to me, “Your kids think they’re white.”

They don’t think that they’re white—they are white. But in the U.S. their identities are defined by and reduced to their connection to blackness. The key is that this distinction, this need to define who’s white and who isn’t, was created for a reason. It’s a boundary that helps keep the meaning and history of what it is to be white in the U.S. alive.. and, let's be honest, it also keeps racism alive.

That night at the restaurant, the white man went there with the white lady for a reason, and I don’t think it was to be preoccupied with strangers. Although he may not have meant to, he seemed to spend most of his time there, disturbed by people he didn’t know who did nothing and said nothing to him. The sight of my multiracial family seemed to really disrupt his evening.

It doesn’t seem like this white man’s life is untouched by race—like many white people like to believe. His daily experiences and stories are wrapped up in whiteness just like mine are. I wish we white folks would notice and attend to how much race impacts our lives—that we would see the harm it inflicts on all of us.

Back to my message for the white man sitting by the window—though it’s likely you’ll never read this—please do your white lady friend a solid and sweep around the litter box. You may have been too distracted to notice, but from what I could tell, she really needs this from you.