In Burlington, Vermont, 242 Main Street was originally the location of the city's water department. A nondescript building situated near the campus of the University of Vermont and across from a jewelry store, it would look more like an old middle school if not for the graffiti covering the front door and the sign next to it that reads, "Celebrating 25 Years of Art & Music."

It isn't a household name like the now-defunct CBGB in New York City, and it doesn't get the same recognition in the punk rock history books as a spot like 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley. But 242 Main Street is special in its own way: Nearly 30 years after opening its doors, it is now one of the longest running all-ages music venue in the country, beginning as an offbeat government-funded effort to overturn a draconian city ban on live music that resulted in the transformation of an old administrative building into the municipal youth center that exists to this day.

242 Main started out as an all-encompassing youth center, but by the end of Sanders's tenure as mayor in 1989, it had become renowned for its punk scene—a transformation that is all the more remarkable given that local police forces and large rock clubs in other cities at the time were doing anything they could to stop punk from happening. Not to mention that, in the Reagan era, with the federal government rapidly pulling funding from local governments, paying for a teen center with city dollars was no small feat.

One of the pleasures of getting older and making a living the way you want to is that your social circle becomes rarified and the people who enter have been vetted. When I was in my twenties, shady-ass characters routinely found their way into my life and my apartment. With some regularity, friends revealed themselves as liars, or misogynists, or big Master P fans, and I stopped seeing them.

This is a miniscule cohort, invisible on the national radar, but for all intents and purposes it’s the sum total of my white community. I don’t know any of the white people who keep showing up in all those incredibly depressing studies and statistics—the ones that reveal a typical white person’s “real life social network” is 1% black, or that a majority of whites in this country believe “anti-white bias” is a bigger problem than racism, or that less than half of whites believe the grand juries should have indicted the killer cops in Ferguson or Staten Island, or that Barack Obama lost the white vote in both 2008 and 2012.

I didn’t look any of that up just now; I keep facts like this handy because I’m a dude who speaks about race and whiteness and politics in public sometimes and I like to stay strapped. But I’ve constructed a life and a career that keeps me completely isolated from those white people—“real” white people. I don’t even have awkward Thanksgiving conversations with some crotchety old-fuck uncle who thinks the president is a secret Muslim.

I told Jessie she was ignoring the empirical in favor of the anecdotal, and what a fraught and dangerous path that was. I tried to get her to understand how intensely personal this was for me, how unjust policing and trials and sentencing had destroyed friends’ lives and compromised our entire generation.  We did history and anthropology and philosophy.  It was heated and intense and the angrier I get the better I argue. Eventually I felt good enough about where we’d gotten, the progress we’d made, to go upstairs and sleep with her.

But it wasn't really okay. ...

It was a summer of fucking and civic unrest, and of thinking about 1981. I was researching Obama’s time at Columbia University for a screenplay I’d been hired to write, reading everything I could get my hands on about that relatively opaque and unsettled period of his life. One of the jewels— the kind of line you can’t even use, because it’s too on-the-nose—was that his white girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, had broken up with young Barry by telling him that what he needed was a “strong black woman.” There was a strange duality for me, in watching the strained, embattled man calling for calm on my television screen—the soon-to-be lame duck president whose tenure, whose very being, had kicked the hornets’ nest of American racism far harder than any of us had come close to anticipating—and trying to project myself backward in time and understand who Obama had been when he was only slightly older than Mike Brown.

I mumbled something like yeah, you’ve been silenced, it’s a real fucking injustice. I probably could have done better; I could have acknowledged that sometimes being white and not an asshole is tricky and will challenge your intuitive sense of fairness or equality or the value or your own opinion and that on the grand scale of problems all of that is ultimately fucking hilarious. That sometimes your opinion and perspective truly are less important, and asserting otherwise is an #AllLivesMatter-esque form of trolling, an attempt to level a playing field that’s already tilted in your direction, and such behavior could get you punched in the face if anybody had any energy for that shit, which they don’t because it’s so low on the list of things worth being irate about, such as the fact that black college graduates are less likely to be granted job interviews that white felons, or the fact that a police officer’s surest way to reap a six-figure financial windfall is to murder a black kid.