“One of the breakthroughs I had … was understanding the degree to which I tend to align what I see and hear with my underlying beliefs.”
You know, this is a great opener to help us understand how it all happened with us, the good people. I presume that most white people think they’re good people, and therefore just assume that they can’t be either racist or contributing to racism. “I don’t generally feel negative emotions about people of color, and generally don’t think negative thoughts about them.” How could anyone be contributing to racism or even be a racist themselves if they don’t have overt emotions and thoughts? We think we are what we presume we are. It’s not quite true and not that easy, of course, but that seems to work for most people. Most of us can say at the end of the day “I’m a good person” because in our minds, as we recall our actions about the day, we can explain our few incidents where we snapped or lost control or committed a social faux pas, but of course it’s always the exception and always understandable. I get that. We believe we’re good and well-intentioned, and as this quote from Ms. Irving says, our underlying beliefs control not just our interpretation of our experiences, but also of our vision and memory. I don’t think the point here is to rail on us for being “bad people” for doing this. This is just how we are created by our culture and our choices.
I mean, ever stop to think if you would literally exist as a personality if you did not exist in this culture? Would your self-identity be anywhere near the same had you been formed in a society that didn’t treat you the way they did? Both nature and nurture go into the process of our creation as individuals, not to mention our connection with our society and culture. None of us, in my opinion, are disconnected from the world that created us, and none of can escape that creator. Should we ever set up a colony on Mars, the first generation is going to be People of Earth no matter how hard they try to be People of Mars.
The iceberg, to use Ms. Irving’s chapter title, is that we think we see everything, when really what we see is just the surface. The wind doesn’t blow the iceberg along. The unseen currents do, and danger of the iceberg isn’t what we see, but what is hidden deeply under the water where the currents are.
“It’s one thing for … me, an individual, to hold distorted beliefs about the meaning of skin color; but an entire culture filtering what it sees and hears through a fractured belief system built on missing information is a setup for misunderstanding, mistrust, resentment, and violence.”
This is really key for me, because my traditions are that culture just doesn’t matter. Anyone as an individual can succeed or fail, almost entirely due to their drive and desire, with a slight nod to talent and intelligence. As I’ve said elsewhere, extraordinary people have a greater tendency to succeed than ordinary people.
But.
In our belief that it is our individuality that matters, we choose to be blind on how much our culture, our society, our world limit or even block the avenues to success. It is so obvious we don’t see it, much like the sun is so obvious in the sky we don’t see it except in our shadows.
“Whether as small in number as a street gang or church choir, or as large as a Fortune 500 company or a country, each group has its own code of acceptable behavior driven by underlying beliefs.”
A key point here is that if we want to get along in our group, we go along. Sometimes we see it. We sign an employment contract that says we, as employees, cannot reveal or speak about certain things. I’ve signed those contracts in my last three jobs. (I’ve been employed in my line of business for about 30 years, with three employers.) I understand the rules and they are amenable to me, in general, although there are times when I’m frustrated because I can’t speak about certain things. However, if I want the job, then I want the requirements.
We don’t see the exact same thing is true of us in our culture. If we want to remain white, for example, we have to act white. (If you are white and think you don’t act white because you just act “normal,” then I am afraid you are going to need to have a conversation with a trusted observer who is not also white. They will give you the run-down, and will not take them but a moment to begin that list of ways in which you act white.) I’ve made some astonishing errors of fact in order to show my agreement with my culture and my tribe. I can remember the shock in my office at the conclusion of the O.J. trial, for example. I was shocked because we all agreed upon the unfairness of the verdict—and yet my very, very few black co-workers were just as shocked that the trial didn’t go as predicted for a black man. “How can you have the same talents as I do in communications and have such wildly opposite opinions?” Yeah, I thought that thought. Whether the trial and verdict was fair and just isn’t the point here. The point is how easily we all agreed upon the outcome before the fact, without realizing that we had been shaping our choices in order to fit in with the accepted wisdom of the group.
“One of the basic beliefs I adopted was the idea that in America people failed or succeeded based on individual skill and effort. Therefore, logic told me, the people who succeeded most must have superior skill and have exerted extra effort.”
That horse has been dead and beaten for a long time, but it’s still true that the cult of individuality in America has meant that we are blind to the sociological forces that determine acceptable courses. The ending point might be determined by force of will, but the channel determines the options that are available. We might think that if we give a bump to the channel that the bumped person could achieve more, but there are far stronger forces that push them right back into the channel, much like dipping your hand in the water as your sailboat in the face of a gale flies across the water is not going to greatly affect its course or speed.
“Acts of charity for people I was taught to see as inferior fed right into my belief that the white race was not only better at achieving but an exceptionally generous and moral breed on whom others depended.”
Sometimes acts of charity are good in both intent and accomplishment, and sometimes they are not. Don’t disparage attempts because you might think them crass. If a rich society couple wants to donate some money to a charity in order to make themselves appear to be much better than their mendacity and their thievery would show them, I’m grateful for the contribution. But very often the act of public charity is a signal of good breeding (and a great PR team). And it’s often used as a way to say “see, you can’t criticize me because you took my largesse.” Ms. Irving’s point here is that people who struggle for their own survival because of our choices and systems imposed upon them will do things to survive that we think prove their inferiority, but that instead prove their intelligence and creativity in finding that way to survive. Given the options and the open channels that we have, anyone can achieve their full potential in the same way that we do.
Anyone.
Not just the exceptions, the “good” ones, the ones who “don’t act like their people.”
“Until I understood that present-day Native American culture reflects the ongoing effects of genocide and deculturalization (being stripped of one’s culture) at the hands of white Europeans, I attributed the Maliseet people’s [indigenous to the state of Maine where Ms. Irving lived] need to scavenge to a race-wide genetic flaw.”
There are always a few people who make bad choices. There are always a few people who can’t manage our systems. There are always a few people who have mind-issues that push them to disassociate themselves or do things that are isolating. Some (a very, very few) street people, for example, are there by choice, because the other choices are less desireable. Someone with PTSD, for example, might be living on the streets because living in charity housing is just too difficult–a sidewalk is just safer at times.
But in most cases, those who cannot thrive in society are actually doing as much as they possibly can. The problem isn’t them. The problem is the society that chooses their options. The systems that brought these people into their place of living on the edge helped to create them as desperate survivors.
“We create our culture, which in turn creates our identities, which create our cultures, and so on.”
Because it is a system, and we are seldom directly and obviously touched by the system (a fish swimming with the current thinks that there is no current), we don’t see that we have deliberately fitted ourselves into our culture, and in order to keep the peace we have made choices to continue that culture. We are not individuals. We are the logical outputs of our system. Individuals, sure, but individuals all alike.
Yeah, that is perhaps overstated, but the general point is that we think we are free rangers, when we are only responding to inputs with predictable outputs.
“Over time I internalized what I’d been taught as right, so that it didn’t just feel right—it felt normal, like the only legitimate way to think and act. Anyone who followed a different code of behavior was not only different but weird, or perhaps even rude.”
Ever see someone who is not of the favored tribe have a public fit about their treatment? Do you think it rude of them to be so pushy or abrasive or demanding?
Ever thought why you feel that way, when, if you could put yourself in the same set of circumstances, it’s not clear that you would act the same way?
No, not that immediate event. “I would never be so rude to a customer service agent.” You probably wouldn’t, because you probably would never be given that type of service. Your whiteness would generate a certain type of interaction from the get-go, and so any difficulties with customer service might involve questions about the product design, not questions about your character or suspicions about your motives. You would not be made to feel that you were at the disadvantage in the situation. You would be treated as a peer, and a trusted one at that.
“Surely, if I were internalizing a false sense of racial superiority, then indigenous children, black children, and Chinese American children were internalizing something, too.”
If we think that all that matters is The One Thing, then we think that One Thing will resolve all the other hard issues. “School kids need proper nutrition.” Yes, they do. “So all we need to do is to provide hot breakfasts and lunches, and we’ll solve the problem of disparate outcomes.”
No, we won’t. We’ll solve the problem of hungry kids, and we’ll start solving the problems of hungry kids not being able to manage a long-ass day in an environment designed to stifle their need for movement and play and creativity and hope, an environment designed for our benefit by tracking their behaviors by graded achievements and rigidly defined tests and curricula. There are enormous, stultifying systems in place to keep poor and minority kids poor. Fixing one thing is good. Feeding kids is good. But that one thing is not the system.
What Ms. Irving here is saying that the systems we have created for minority children guarantees their outcomes, and the outcomes are not just “bad grades.” The outcomes are obedience and despair and submission and fear and rage. There’s a great book with a provocative title Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, by Dr. Beverly Tatum. You’d need to read it to understand the argument, but given the fact that we’ve created a system to exclude unfavored children from favored outcomes, why wouldn’t they sit apart from their tormentors?
“If Americans of different races are processing contrasting life experiences through grossly different belief systems, no wonder racial conflict hasn’t dissipated. It gets refueled every day.”
Another key point, and one that I’m working on to grasp, every day: racism and racialized hierarchies and racialized castes and racialized channels don’t just happen by chance. They’re carefully shaped and curated, and we white people frankly work very hard to maintain, evangelize, and extend racism. We work assiduously to pass down our values to our children, and it’s working damned well. I didn’t see a lot of parents at Charlottesville two years ago walking with their kids. Instead I saw a lot of young white guys, children of their parents, who had absorbed the lessons of white supremacy and who now reveled in their hatred of minorities and celebrated their fears as their solitary identity, their solidarity of purpose. Hatred was mixed with absolute giddiness.
You think we’ll break racism if we just think nice thoughts about black people?
Boy howdy. You haven’t even started this journey.
“”When I put together Hoffman’s work [his 1896 publication Race, Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro] with the discriminatory housing and lending practices that shaped the GI Bill’s investment in America’s white families fifty years later, I begin to see how racialized ideas get handed along like a relay torch. Ideas create outcomes that, if unexamined, reinforce old ideas—America’s oldest idea being that the white race rules.”
I’ve mentioned before a brother in Christ whom I deeply admire and earnestly pray for near daily, Andre Henry. He has a tagline that resonates: “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.” Another brother in Christ whom I also deeply admire is Jemar Tisby, who has as a tagline “It Didn’t Have to Be This Way.” (Yeah, I pray for him, too. My list is long, almost as long as my blog posts. Sue me.)
I think about both of these statements, a lot. America did not have to be made this way. America does not have to be continued this way. The system that’s in place to create America, and the system that’s in place to continue this America, is a human system. It’s created by us, the “white” people.
My foolish and extraordinary belief is that we can break that system. My confidence is that while a ship is no match for an iceberg, an iceberg is no match for the sun.
Question:
Think of a time you grossly misinterpreted a person (of any race) or situation.
Memory is hard to capture, y’all. I am trying to think if I’ve grossly misinterpreted a person, and I think my memory is doing its best to hide that from me, both by blocking the memories and by shading the memories to ensure that I, as the star of my memories, doesn’t appear to be a cad. And I think if there were a way to get the people in my life to tell the story, I’m sure that there would be a lot of details and events I don’t remember.
So I plead honest forgetfulness and the psychological need to hide my past. Of course, sometimes the past comes unbidden. The death of my best friend at age 14 was so long suppressed that could not even remember the year that it happened, where it happened, nor even why it happened. Gone, all of it. It took writing a story about another thing entirely, and meditating on it during editing, to have the absolutely shocking flash that what I was writing about the life of another, fictional character also happened to me. So while I may have done abominable things, I am pleading failed memory, and if I have behaved so in my past, I am open to your revelation so that I might remember and repent.
[I’ve deleted the personal information]
What information was missing that allowed you to draw incorrect conclusions?
[I’ve deleted the personal information]
What in your belief system contributed to your misinterpretation?
[I’ve deleted the personal information]
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
To follow along with the others, see also:
Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter: https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-chapter-11/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
“people who struggle for their own survival because of our choices and systems imposed upon them will do things to survive that we think prove their inferiority, but that instead prove their intelligence and creativity in finding that way to survive”
For years, scientists studied dogs to try to determine their intelligence. Recently, a study upturned all their results. It compared the “intelligence” of dogs vs wolves. The wolves, it observed, were much more determined to try to find the solution to a challenging problem, whereas dogs would turn to the human and just give up.
Then someone made a game-changing observation. The dogs weren’t giving up.
Having assessed the task as something that would work better for someone with an opposable thumb, the dogs turned to their partner-animal (human). They weren’t saying “I can’t do this.” or giving up. They were saying “you wanna take this one? It looks like it’s in your lane.” Meanwhile, the wolf – not realizing there was another way, and not having a person-partner – kept trying to do it themselves
They had been mis-assessing the intelligence of both creatures, because they didn’t see how it intersected with social connections and possibilities…
Huh. I love this idea/insight.
Maybe we make it so hard for some just to survive that they have no more energy to create or expand or grow. It’s not that they’re not clever or resourceful about things that we admire. They’re clever and resourceful about simply surviving.