1.

At first it’s probably not obvious that you are their only nonwhite friend. Maybe you can’t remember them hanging out with any people of color except for you, but you don’t know all the people they know. All those tiny thumbnails of white faces, commenting on their political status updates and praising their selfies on Facebook — that’s Facebook, what can it really tell you about someone’s life? Sure, you might go over to your friend’s place for a barbecue or a Super Bowl party and realize that everyone there is white, but that’s still a small sample, ten or twelve people, and at least no one seems visibly weirded out that you’re there, too.

Then, a few years later, you go to their wedding. You’re in a crowded reception hall with the two hundred and fifty people your friend is closest to in the world. You’re the only person of color who made the cut. Maybe this doesn’t actually bother you all that much; maybe you can guess all the reasons already, and some of them seem valid. But as you talk to the people around you, making friendly chitchat at the open bar (how did you meet the bride?), you can’t help but wonder if any of them have noticed what you’ve noticed. (It’s not as if you can ask. There is never a good way to ask white people why their party is so white.)

The funny thing is, you don’t spend a lot of time wondering what it is about your friend’s life that has led to you being, as you so often are, the only nonwhite person in the room. Instead, you ask what it is about you. How did you — of all the brown people in all the towns in all the world — slip past their usual defenses? What is it that made you acceptable?

1. You are terrified of the word “monkey.”

2. You are fluent in multiple languages, all of them English.

3. People like to ask you if you are upset about something.

“For an Asian girl, you sure are cool.”

“I know all about the 38th parallel.”

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’

“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”

Luke 18:1-4

In the days after Michael Brown’s death, we watched a sadly familiar story play out. The media ran pictures of him staring sullenly into the camera and making “gang” signs with his hands. They emphasized his weight and large frame, listened to his music and declared it “violent hip hop.” For their part, the police made certain to pair pertinent details about his death with seemingly irrelevant details about his life: releasing the long demanded name of the officer who shot him alongside surveillance footage of an unrelated shoplifting incident, leaking a toxicology report indicating that Brown had “marijuana in his system” at the same time they released an autopsy confirming that he’d been shot six times. Black people desperately tried to defend Michael Brown, pointing out that he was a child, that he was gentle, that he never got into any trouble, that he was going to college. If we fail to name the battleground being fought upon, this fight over what narrative to impose on the details of Brown’s life might seem oddly tangential to the argument over the circumstances of his death. So let’s be clear about the stakes of this conflict: we are trying to decide whether or not Michael Brown was a nigger. A dead human being is a tragedy that needs to be investigated and accounted for. A dead nigger doesn’t even need to be mourned, much less its death justified.