We talk about the things that are important to us, or we talk about the things that are completely unimportant to us in order to avoid talking about the important things that threaten us. Intimacy threatens us. Empathy scares us. Accountability scares us. Responsibility and connected-ness provoke us. In our heart of hearts, with our bosom friends, we may, if we are very, very fortunate, have a brush with intimacy or reality.
Race in America scares us white people. Scares the bejesus from us. I see things we do to ameliorate the pain and the fear. We talk over it. We deny it. We claim it’s not us. We say it’s over. We say anything but the truth that we see in front of us. Race exists, and race matters. Significantly.
Sometimes we don’t talk about it because we don’t observe it or feel it, and that is the wonderful thing about whiteness, that we can avoid seeing the reality we live in. A fish swimming in water does not see the water; we breathing in air do not see the air; but we both are consuming the very thing that is giving us life. (I’m not saying, of course, that racialized thinking is life-affirming; just the opposite.)
We mostly don’t talk about it because it isn’t normal to talk about it. For us white people, race doesn’t exist, and we think race doesn’t matter. Our very whiteness protects us from knowing our whiteness.
Irving has this section in this chapter, and I’m quoting it in full because I think it so good:
“In an early Wheelock class, we’d been asked to fill out a survey. One of the questions went something like this: How often do you talk about race with your family and friends?
a) daily
b) once a week
c) once a month
d) a couple times a year
e) neverI went back and forth between ‘once a month’ and ‘a couple times a year,’ thinking, Who talks about race daily?
All of the students of color answered ‘daily.’”
If space aliens ever visit and ask the question “What is the most significant symbol of the division between the thinking of whiteness and the thinking of those people who are of color,” this would be the answers that show it.
By contrast, here is a quote from the ancillary film White Privilege 101: Getting In on the Conversation:
“[A] young black woman explained, ‘I couldn’t believe it when I found out white people don’t talk about race every day. I thought everybody talked about race every day. Not talk about it? How can you not talk about it?’”
The need to talk about race is, I suppose from my ignorance, that to avoid talking about race when you are a person of color is to risk death in interactions with the law and destruction within society’s interactions. How could you not talk about the risks of the poison surrounding you if you knew that nearly everything you ate or drank contained poison unless you followed carefully worked-out cooking and eating techniques? To be around people of color and see them as “pleasant” and “nice” and “happy” is to ignore the possibility that they know that to be real and frank and human is to risk not just social ostracism, but personal injury and even death. I can lose my temper at customer service and be a disgruntled customer. My friend who is black cannot express the same frustration without being told to calm down and to stop acting like an angry black man. Do you think he is as free as I am in his life? No. And his constriction is due to nothing of his choosing. It is externally forced upon him.
And then this passage, which explains why the privilege of not seeing race because it doesn’t really matter to us white people is a privilege:
“Though it once felt polite to ignore a person of color’s race and just see all people as individuals, my former color-blind approach was actually allowing me to ignore my own part in the system of racism. Color-blindness, a philosophy that denies the way lives play out differently along racial lines, actually maintains the very cycle of silence, ignorance, and denial that needs to be broken for racism to be dismantled.”
I’m nowhere near to understanding my part in whiteness and racism. I have some hazy ideas. I’m tempted to make a checklist rather than do the hard work of investigation and destruction. But this I’m starting to see, that to avoid seeing and talking about racism does as little good in the destruction of racism as does not talking about cancer bring about healing in its victims.
It’s is okay to talk about racism, and in fact, it is required. We white people are very likely going to get it wrong, but ye gods unless we risk this conversation we are going die having lived in racism and, by our inaction and our ignorance, we are going to perpetuate and extend it. We will end up just as dead as our ancestors and we will have accomplished just as much in our lives for the cause of justice, and that is zero.
Questions
If both of your parents are white, imagine just one of them being a person of color. Rethink your life from birth to the present.
How would your race have influenced your experiences and your outcomes?
I share similar thoughts as to Ms. Irving.
I’ll use my father because my mother is of German heritage and was a war bride after WWII. There were complications that were real.
But the complications of my father being black, or myself being of mixed race, would affect nearly every part of my life.
My father was raised during the Depression, first on a farm in Illinois, and then on a chicken ranch in Arizona. Neither of these would have been possible were he black—the farm and community in Illinois was from a family homestead from the mid-1800s, and the chance to go to Arizona in the Depression occurred because his father, my grandfather, earned a PhD (in Agronomy, I think), and was a teacher at the university. So, no ease of movement and no underlying income during the Depression.
He went to war in WWII and was a supply sergeant in the European Theatre. I don’t think he would have a chance at that given the way the Army was run at the time—maybe he’d be a grunt, but not with the possibilities he had.
His service in WWII got him access to the GI bill, to housing at the university, and to a degree which led to his job in aerospace. His whiteness got him into the federal loan programs to buy a brand-new house in Los Angeles for our family in the 1950s, and then a brand new house for us in Orange County in the 1960s. Absolutely none of that would have happened were he to be black.
We lived in an all-white neighborhood, of course, and I went to a nearly all-white school. (I don’t remember a single black student in any of my education all the way through high school.) While theoretically a mixed race boy could have been in my school system, in reality there weren’t any. I most likely would have been the only person like me rather than being like 45% of the others. (There were some Asians and some Hispanics in our schools, but not a lot.)
I got jobs when I needed them, including jobs in management, and I would not have had any of them, I think, were I mixed race. My church was almost all white and most jobs were almost all white, so again, either I would never be in those positions, or I would have been the only one.
I was allowed to be stupid and make mistakes in high school without any fear whatsoever I’d be held more than minimally accountable. I can’t imagine that would be true were I mixed race, including the freedom from accountability to the white people around me who likely would have demanded my obeisance to their status as white people.
I moved around from job to job, and from college to college, as I saw fit, and in no instance was I ever denied a job or enrollment because I fit in and had the money to move and enroll.
My current job series (technical communications) is something that I got into 30 years ago by answering a want ad for a computer trainer. I was hired, and that developed into my career. I am certain that were my father black and had I exactly the same qualifications, that I would not have gotten that first job offer after my job interview.
I’m also fairly sure that even if my own children were of the same talents and drive as they have now, there would have been far fewer opportunities—my job enabled us to live on a single income so that my wife could help educate our children with extra programs, including sports and music, that led to amazing opportunities for them both, opportunities that came from having the money to do extra things and get extra resources, including tutors. Both my sons are incredibly gifted and smart, and there may have been similar expressions of their talent and intelligence—but some of the relationships that come only from being in a certain income level would have gotten them a foot in the door. Sure, both of them earned their degrees and even their acceptances into their universities—but absent the economic freedom to not work full- or part-time in school and the opportunities to experience so many things in high school would have meant that their acceptance into their schools might not have been as well-founded on their accomplishments.
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-18/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
This, this, THIS. It’s ridiculous the way white people treat “talking about race” as a scary thing. Monsters in the dark are scary. Name them, understand them, and you defang them. We need to lay this stuff out in the light, examine it, learn how to dismantle and defang it.