Stay in my lane? No thanks. Today’s world needs lane changers, says Tacoma author

Recently the term “stay in your lane” has been used in identity politics and identity literature to mean something like “keep to your own culture, don’t usurp my territory.”

Since I have spent 40 years writing about white Americans living in other cultures, learning about other people and other languages, and therefore most emphatically not staying in my lane, I felt the criticism acutely.

I grew up as a privileged white kid in Tacoma. I didn’t know jack about anything until I got out of college and joined the Peace Corps.

I didn’t know African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, nor Native Americans, either, except for a group of Puyallup Indians who performed native dances at the Browns Point Salmon bake every other July.

I grew up believing my world was the only world, and worse, that all people everywhere thought just as I did.

At first, in the Peace Corps in Korea, I couldn’t tell where one Korean word ended and the next one began. I was lost in the language, lost in a wholly different way of acting and thinking, and drowning in soup and kimchi, morning, noon and night.

It stayed that way for about six months, but then I began to emerge from my cocoon, if not exactly a butterfly, at least a semi-decent human being.

And I never got over the metamorphosis, the knowing that we are not all the same, that we are as gloriously different as the spices in our cuisines and the grammar of our languages.

And so I wrote about it in novels set in Japan, Korea, Nigeria and Kenya. I inserted myself by constantly driving out of my lane.

Sometimes I did it well, and sometimes I made mistakes. But my holy grail was to write as well as I could about something I didn’t know well. I considered it an act of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

For a while, though, I’ve felt conflicted, told by others that maybe I ought to leave those shoes alone.

Yet now here is George Floyd’s unspeakably horrible death, with its concomitant and universal sadness; a death that burns like the brightest of beacons for us to follow and teaches me, once again, that getting out of our lanes is a part of the answer to it all, if not for us all.

I say “if not for us all” because that cop with his knee on George Floyd’s neck (his name will remain unsaid) is lost, as is Donald Trump, who, though he mightn’t put his knee on the neck of an individual man, wants very much to put it on the necks of us all, until we either agree to travel in his lane or our breathing stops.

All we have to do to know the truth of this is to contrast Trump with Drew Brees, the New Orleans Saints quarterback, who misunderstood the message of kneeling in protest by NFL athletes.

But then not only did Brees begin to understand it, he also stepped out of his lane to say so — to admit he was wrong —while all Trump knows how to say is, “Law and order, law and order, law and order!” like a Mariska Hargitay fan gone nuts.

If there is good news in any of this, it’s that we understand what we must do to wash our hands of Trump and his minions. We must go out in November, in droves, and vote them out of office!

But if we are ever going to remove the yoke of America’s original sin, or live by the words of our Declaration of Independence, then we have to do much more than that; we have to change our thinking.

And doesn’t that mean staying in our lanes is the worst thing we can do? We may make mistakes, like I did in my novels, but getting out of our lanes is the only way we can begin to erase the boundaries between them.

Drew Brees did it. I hope the rest of us can, too.

Richard Wiley is a PEN/Faulkner Award winning novelist whose most recent book, “Tacoma Stories,” was published in 2019.

This story was originally published June 12, 2020 at 12:00 PM.