Being here

 

Photo credit: Stafford County Government

Thinking about the history of race on Potomac Creek helps make sense of an odd slight that was directed my way nearly twenty years ago. 

I was in line to speak at a regular public hearing of the Stafford County Board of Supervisors. The room held the usual group of officials and perhaps a few dozen interested citizens. I’ve since forgotten everything I said in the three minutes allotted to each speaker, other than that I favored the use of County funds to conserve land – what eventually became Crow’s Nest Nature Preserve. I then sat down, and the next person in line (I’ll fictitiously call him “Mr. Smith”) stepped up to present his opposing view. Ignoring the norm that speakers in this venue should not address each other directly, Mr. Smith opened his remarks with “Well, I have lived here since 1984, and we don’t need any carpet-baggers coming in and telling us what to do.” The carpet-bagger he had in mind was the previous speaker – me.  

Reader, let’s ignore Smith’s attempt at logic. If being here first conveys decision making authority, then we should simply hand the keys to the County back to the Patawomeck Indians, the earliest extant people. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that’s what he wanted the Board to do.

And, to be fair, the been here/come here dichotomy, while commonly used, is always more a matter of perception than fact – like all politics. How long must a person be here to qualify as a been here? To the most clearly eligible, our family will never be “from” Stafford. I’m fine with that.

But does that mean we should take guff from just any come here? “Carpet-baggers?”

The etiquette that Mr. Smith flouted meant I never got to correct his error. For the record, my family and I have lived in Stafford longer than he has. In fact, my brother, an artist, drew the official County seal that was hanging on the boardroom wall before us. Listening from my seat, I could barely keep quiet. But I had to.

Afterwards, with more time, I considered why such facts were, evidently, unthinkable to Mr. Smith. We’d never met before, so his snap judgment of me could only have been informed by my looks or Asian name. I realized that Smith, who was White, was just playing the odds. He relied on the old “two lanes” rule that anyone who lived here for some time must be Black or White. My name and appearance fit neither lane, so he gambled – reasonably – that I was a newcomer. And he lost. (Playing my own little game, I googled “what’s the Whitest last name?” before picking his alias. According to the first site I hit, a person named “Smith” is 71 percent likely to be White. Good enough!).

But what Mr. Smith was really looking for was contrast. Standing before the Board, he so desired to be seen as a fellow been here that he arrogated a term from the Reconstruction Era (and one last used in argumentation by Yosemite Sam). Mr. Smith wanted allies, and no doubt believed that pointing out a carpet-bagger like me would add legitimacy and heft to his opposing voice, or at least shut down mine. Yet, whatever the facts at hand, to an actual County been here – a Chichester or a Newton, say – the “I have lived here since 1984” opener could only provoke snorts of laughter. Mr. Smith wasn’t just a poser, he was a cartoonishly bad one.

And there was another, more poignant aspect to the man’s public cluelessness. Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Even at the time Mr. Smith cast his insult, only a naïf still believed that been heres directed the future of County politics – and Mr. Smith was that, too.  Any observant Staffordian would have known those days were in the rear view mirror. To align culturally with vastly outnumbered been heres was bad strategy even then. 

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For the present, Stafford's harrowing racial history is keeping elbows sharp. I recently attended an official meeting where a White County Board member, whose online bio says she was “born and raised” in Stafford, said to her African American colleague, “Well, we just have differences on this matter.” To which her colleague responded, “Yes. I am several shades darker than you.”

N.B. You can find some of my now-Canadian brother's artwork (at least the tasty bits pertaining to Lewis Carroll) here. He, too, has drunk the waters of Potomac Creek.