The story I have of my first memory of race happened when I was 4 years old. It was Easter and the day gave me 3 of my favorite things – candy, a new dress, and time with my best friend, I’ll call him R. We played outside alongside a smattering of other kids. Then it happened.
“Go down.” The boy said it with a grin on his face. His tone told us the words were a command and not an invitation. I looked at my friend in his blue Easter suit at the top of the playground slide. He was crying. The kids had smeared dog poo all over the slide. I don’t recall how but they’d gotten R up the ladder and were now trying to force him down. My scream startled them. “I’m telling!” I yelled and ran towards a door that stood between us and the adults. The kids quickly scattered. R climbed down.
I didn’t know the other kids well but even in my not knowing them, there was something about whiteness that tied us to one another. Those kids chose to be cruel and they chose R – the only black person among us – as recipient of their cruelty. I’m sure it was the white skin we shared that saved me from their wrath. I was one of them. Even so, I was frightened, confused, and searching. How do I make sense of the way skin color protected me and also tied me to the terror my friend knew?
Confusion and fear about race happen today too. This memory and others like it unsettle me because they point to how powerfully whiteness affects me – and how it does so even when I don’t want it to. I didn’t then and don’t know now, how to maintain close connections to my white loved ones while also preserving my interracial family and showing love and care to the people of color in my life. It feels impossible to hold these things together and do both well. The social context we live in doesn’t support interracial love and care.
Whiteness requires of me that I not talk about, think about, or critique it – I feel pressure all around to maintain the norms of whiteness. The lessons of race learned in my childhood remain true today; I have belonging in whiteness, my white skin can keep me safe, and questioning the ways whiteness is oppressive and harmful, puts this in jeopardy.
I’m outing myself as a discomposed white person. I’m writing from within whiteness while also feeling like I don’t fully grasp it or know what to do with my racial identity. I want safety and belonging. I want to feel I have worth and value. I long for closeness and relatedness with the white people in my life.
But I’m unhappy with whiteness and the inequity it stands for. I also don’t know how to go about a project of examining race. I struggle to imagine myself performing a different racial role outside of the one written for those of us with white skin. I feel the white people around me don’t want me to rock the racial boat. I hear them saying and sense the sentiment that I bring too much discomfort. I feel distance between us. I fear they will cut me out of their lives – I’m not one who easily cuts people out of my life and I know this solution won’t nourish healing or wholeness in us.
I’m afraid too of getting it wrong, of missteps, and creating harm. I keep finding myself tripped up by the idea that once I understand the problem of racial inequity, from my particular position within this shared problem, then I’ll know what to do to fix it. That I’ll plainly see the next move to make. But the process isn’t clear cut and upending our inequitable racial structure seems an unending project. I often don’t know what to do and the not-knowing scares me.
It’s perplexing and complicated. For one thing, whiteness seems to be about two things at the same time – interconnection and separateness. In the larger narrative of race, whiteness is our role, it’s how we white people fit in. Whiteness connects white people to one another, with shared history, culture, and way of being in the world. Whiteness joins white people together with the way it provides psychological benefit and ease of life. It tells us that, as a white person, no matter how much we mess up, we will never be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
At the same time, whiteness is about individualism and being independent. We celebrate our white heroes, admiring their accomplishments. All the while we pay little mind to the fact that their greatness isn’t possible without other people – people whose backs were climbed on in order to reach the top. The worst blunders or most horrifying acts of white people do not speak to the goodness or badness of all white people. One of us doesn’t represent the whole lot of us. Whiteness tells us that the problem of racism is about individual racists not about systems or shared responsibility and to ignore the truths of our world that do not fit with our story of white, rugged, individuality.
It isn’t our choosing to be part of an unbalanced, oppressive, racialized system. But we are indeed caught up in it and are responsible to take action in dismantling it. I do not wish for my story of race to be tangled up with a false narrative about my skin color representing the best of humanity. I may not have written a narrative of white supremacy, but I can change how the story will go on.
I was recently talking with some friends about being “whit-i-fied” – our attempt to give language to the experience of being seen as white in the world and the effects this has on us. We discussed how the stories of race we learned are limiting of who we and others can be. How we struggle to imagine whiteness as other than the sum of horrible things white people have done in its name. That being racialized and having value assigned according to race seem inevitable consequences of existing in a social structure organized around ideas that race is tied to intrinsic human qualities. We talked about how whiteness is not the whole of or most important piece of who we are.
Yes, there is definitely privilege that comes with white skin. White skin also locates us within whiteness – the culture of being white and the part of our racialized system that helps sustain racial inequity. As white people receive social benefit, we are simultaneously tethered to how whiteness harms ourselves and others. Our cheap privilege comes with a hefty cost.
White is a part of our social story. Similar to other parts of us – gender, sexuality, and physical or mental ability – stories about our social identity can become a part of our story, even without us intending them to be. But what we do with that, how we choose to relate to race and what we do with the story of race we’re told, that is ours to work out. What other stories are available to us? We are not powerless and we are responsible.
I try not to simplify complex things and systematized injustice in the US is fairly complex. But if I were to explain how I see the problem of racial inequity in simple terms I’d say: it is a problem for all of us, I witness people of color working to survive and thrive in it, as a white person I work to untangle myself from and remedy it, and, with practices of responsibility and accountability, we all find healing together. Seeing the terrible things about our world and choosing to do nothing, is a response of inaction. As we witness racial inequity – a terrible thing – I hope we will work to examine and amend the ways that we allow it to exist.
Here’s a few links if you’d like to learn more about racial inequity in the US:
America’s Struggle to Overcome Racial Inequities
The Demographics of Racial Inequality in the United States
‘Sum Of Us’ Examines the Hidden Cost Of Racism — For Everyone
Leave a Reply