"Please don't look like me. Please don't look like me."

What happens when someone in your same identity group commits an atrocious act? Depending on who you are and what they look like, the experience could be vastly different.

In the summer of 2018 a 20 year old University of Iowa undergrad went missing. Her name was Mollie Tibbetts¹. By the seasons end we all recognized her face as it flashed across our devices that summer. While search parties combed for any evidence of her whereabouts news outlets speckled our feeds with hundreds of articles on Mollie. The weeks turned to months. The long, lazy days began to fade. The new school year started, with little in the way of developments but more and more in news coverage of the disappearance of this young woman. A student who went out on a run, never to come back home.

By this time we were all invested in the story. The way that many of us the nation over get invested in the missing cases of the girl next door. I do not say this lightly or pithily. It was significant that Mollie was a pretty white girl. It was significant because it has been well established that there is more news coverage for missing persons cases of certain identities. In this circumstance it’s dubbed Missing White Woman Syndrome. I remember, even then, feeling a dissonance. As in the winter of that very same year the body of a woman the same age as Molly was discovered in Muscatine, IA with much smaller coverage. It was actually tough to Google and find, as all my searches came up with the Tibbetts Case. Do you really think that the victim’s name was “Sadie Alvarado” wasn’t a contributing factor to the amount of coverage?

But I digress, if only slightly so. Because it is important to note the layers in the identity of the victims in these atrocious acts…but that’s not my main focus here. No I’m thinking about those that commit those acts and the repercussions it has on us that “have to account” for them, whether we want to or not. It can be looked at as an inverse of White Woman Syndrome. What happens when it’s a Brown Man that commits an act of violence in America?

I remember exactly where I was standing when I first saw his face. When I scrolled onto an article stating authorities had found a suspect. At the time I was on staff at the University of Iowa’s Dance Department as an adjunct faculty. I was walking into ‘The Loft’ a big airy studio in the buildings second floor. I remember because as I was walking into the threshold of the room I clicked the article link and had one thought racing through my mind: Please don’t be Mexican. Please don’t be Mexican. Only to have my heart sink into my stomach as the link fully loaded and I saw the man’s mugshot looking right back at me. I forced myself to curb the impending whirlwind of emotions as I prepped for my class. Put my phone away as I tried, in vain, to remember the steps of the ‘across the floor’ routine I had created for my students.

Some of you may be thinking that I was overreacting. That this was an unnecessary connection that I was putting upon myself. But I knew that the political wheels were already turning. The machinations primed by people like our state governor and then current president. In fact, the day the news broke Donald Trump released a video statement on the death of Mollie Tibbetts. The headline takeaway? “We need a wall.” When I got home I braced myself for the news coverage. For every channel and feed to have picked up the grotesque political football that 45 spat onto their feet. Only they didn’t. It was surreal. You see that very day a (we thought at the time) big big breakthrough hit related to the ongoing and unprecedented criminal investigations on our standing U.S. president. Trump’s hasty video on Tibbetts was no doubt trying to distract from the bigger breaking story. It didn’t work. As I flipped through news channel after news channel they were all covering Michael Cohen’s plea deal. Well…except one channel. I shook my goddamn head as I landed on the only channel parroting the points Trump laid out as Mollie’s face stood atop the news ticker crawling through the lower third. This solitary channel? Fox News.

Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash

It wasn’t just the news cycle that was surreal. I remember my reaction to my reaction. After the adrenaline came down from teaching my class. I couldn’t shake this feeling that it was so bizarre that my very first inclination, the hope pulsating through my psyche when I clicked on the ‘suspect found’ link was “Please don’t be Mexican.” What was that about? I knew then, like I know now, that no group is a monolith. I understand that what one person does has no reflection on the content of my character. But that’s what I was thinking and that’s what I was battling when I saw Cristhian Bahena Rivera looking back at me.

It ate at me. So much so that I brought it up when I visited my family in West Liberty the following Sunday. I relayed what I thought was my own personal experience in opening the link. But one by one the people in my family shared the similarities in our reactions. “Oh I know! I had the exact same fuckin’ thought,” declared my sister Nancy. “I about yelled when I saw that dumb-ass. Looking stupid as hell. I was pissed.”

My mom had a slightly different, yet utterly significant take on it. She relayed that she saw the photo of the suspect and was still reciting out a hope. The same way my sister and I pleaded out, Please don’t be Mexican she begged; “Please be Honduran. Please be Guatemalan. Please be anything other than Mexican.”

At recounting this my sister interrupted, “Ama! These white people don’t give a shit if he was Honduran or Guatemalan. To them its all the same. As long as he looks Mexican. You think that pinche Trump cares if he’s Mexican or not? Either way we’re fucked.”

Apologies for all the cursing. But if I am to accurately quote my sister² in the company of her family, then the f bombs are necessary to convey said accuracy. But the thing that took me out wasn’t the anger in her voice or her swearing. It was the “we’re” that she threw out at the end there. We all saw the brown face that looked like our brown faces and ultimately we came to that same conclusion, we’re fucked.

How This Followed Me in My Writing Journey

From the final outline of my memoir for We Heard it When We Were Young

Flash forward to the following summer. If you are connected enough to me to calibrate the timelines, you’d know that the following year is when I pursued the contract for my memoir. Fun fact about the negotiations before signing that contract, they were a bear. There were multiple maybe-not-so-fun conversations with an Editor³ on what this thing would look like. It was during one of these meetings that the Editor, with an almost lackadaisical aside, said, “And well you know for the prologue we have to mention Mollie Tibbetts.” I’m guessing that the Editor sensed some apprehension on my face. “Not have-to-mention in the sense of being defensive about it. But have to mention how it’s so absurd that we have to mention it. When talking about the conversation, you know?”

I knew. That’s the thing, I knew exactly where he was coming from, but it still felt off to me. I bristled at that line on how I have to mention it. That there was no other choice. Eventually I came up with an almost ‘UNO reverse’ like approach to the prologue. Maybe it would be too meta but I wanted to detail that conversation with said Editor. Kind of like I’m doing now. Show how the sausage is made with the complicated layers of discrimination. Because at the end of the day, it didn’t matter that this was an academic type that knew all those layers and complications, he was still asking me to respond to this perceived connection. To defend and postulate on my self worth in relation to this other brown body that destroyed a white body.

A conversation with another writer sheds so much light…

I was grappling with this prologue dilemma for a few months, while at the same time working my full time gig at Hancher Auditorium. One of the last artists I worked with before COVID shut everything down was the amazing poet and writer Amal Kassir. I had the absolute privilege of taking Amal to classroom visits, writing workshops, and back to her hotel at the end of long days of residency work. In between all of her events Amal was affable and we struck a friendship. It was only a matter of time before she learned I was a writer as well. We connected over our stories. We talked about the books we were working on. Actual fun fact: In research for this piece I was so delighted to see that the book she mentioned she was working on came out last month!

I remember how we both geeked out over the titles of the others book. Scud Missile Blues is such a *chefs kiss of a title.

I told her about my dilemma with the Editor and the prologue situation.

As I talked I recognized something in her reaction. She waited for me to finish before quietly saying, “We do that. It’s so wild to me that others have to do it too. Of course you do.” And it clicked. Amal is Muslim. It was a big reason why we were working with her at Hancher, as part of a series bringing artists who identify as Muslim to our stage. “I can’t count how many times I turned on the news to have them talk about a terror attack and thinking to myself: please don’t be Muslim. Please don’t be Muslim."

There was a pause as we both thought of the ramifications of this connection between us. I forget who said it first, we might have been talking over each other at this point. “But you know straight white men aren’t thinking about this right? When they open the link to how another straight white man has shot up some place? You know they are able to completely disassociate from the monsters they see on TV.” Absolutely mind numbing fact: white male shooters account for the vast majority of mass shootings in the United States, accounting for more shootings than all other races combined. But show me the white man who fears the ramifications of another white man committing atrocities. Show me the white man whose day is affected by seeing a mug shot of someone that others will connect them to. I’ll wait.

It’s a conversation that has stayed with me for the years it’s been since we talked about our fledgling books. It’s a conversation that will stay with me and pop up whenever the next horrible act is plastered all over our feeds. The conversation on who gets to be separate from evil and who is beholden to it. Who is beholden from all sides, from the right wing extremists to the liberal academics, all of them, though through their own means, coming to the same conclusion. That we have to talk about or talk against. Defend or detract. Make space or carve out boundaries. Either way the toll is the same. I think of my sister at our kitchen table. Who has this ability to round up all of these complex things that I feel and say them in much more blunt ways, but perfectly encapsulate my musings nonetheless. No matter how much I try to parse it out I come to her same conclusion. Maybe someday we’ll be able to separate the “we’re” from her declaration.

-C

1. I had lots of back and forths with myself on whether I would explicitly use her name in this piece. It is not lost on me that others, maybe rightfully so, will be able to say that I too, am using Mollie’s name for this political back and forth. At the same time, I’m thinking of those Marjorie Taylor Green types that beat their chest declaring us to “Say her name” if we don’t. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

2. For those familiar with my published work. You already very much get my sister’s vibe. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. She is one of the few people I know worthy of becoming a great literary character. Potty mouth and all.

3. But I’ll withhold this Editor’s name. This whole business with the prologue was averted as they ended up leaving the industry. After the fact I heard through the grapevine that there was no love lost on their departure. For what it’s worth everyone else I met in formation of the book was a pleasure to work with.