This chapter is unbelievably relevant, especially in light of the post I put up not six hours ago about my past (“News and Updates”) as well as my essay on Medium (“My Journey into Blackness”). While I was in process of rethinking my thoughts and recalibrating my actions according to my values, I was using the online persona “Between Two Worlds.” My own feelings were much like what Ms. Irving relates in this chapter, and I can say I experienced many of the same things she did in the struggle to find who I was and where I belong.
“Having my new friends ridicule my old world confused me. I felt that my family, and people like them, worked hard and deserved respect.”
I find this fascinating because this is my experience as well. My newer friends had their own entire lives that they lived with their own set of behaviors, and the behaviors and philosophies of my older world weren’t just foolish to them—they were uninteresting. How could anyone live in a world where not talking about anything be either interesting or valuable, and how was it that I was continuing to stay “neutral”?
“I couldn’t figure out where I belonged…”
I’m not sure how open and honest Ms. Irving is here, except to say that I think I understand part of this—the self has already made the decision to move and adjust, but the mind has not yet accepted it. It is a dilemma I faced, and that I brought out in my novel—the confusion of the protagonist, Henry Valentine, to make the decision as to which world he belonged in—and the sureness of the understanding that even in asking the question he had already decided. Henry reflected my own confusion, but the issue wasn’t the decision—the issue was my unwillingness to see my decision had been made.
“I would never reject my family. I loved them and needed them. But I also couldn’t reject my new friends. I craved the fire they lit in me.”
There is a value in family. As Frost puts it, “Home is where when you have to go there, they have to let you in.” Home and family can be comforting, but they can be smothering as well. They can erase our adult identities as we revert to our lost child-based relationships and values. To say we “need” our family is sometimes to say that we need the definition they give us, even when that definition chafes and restrains—it’s doing its job by saying “You are this, and you are not that.”
“I never dared speak to either group about my feelings.”
This was not quite true for me in that my new friends (well, some) would let me talk a little, but then would provoke me with questions such as “Why are you waiting? What’s keeping you in the middle? When will you admit where your heart is?” My new friends were helping me, but they also would not coddle me. And that has been true all along the way. There is something very safe about stasis. But it can be unsatisfying.
“For Bruce [Ms. Irving’s husband], getting to the heart of the matter was what counted, no matter how messy it got along the way. When a conversation got tense, Bruce would dig deeper. My training told me tension was my cue to change topics.”
This is so, so spot on that I can’t underline it enough. One of the most signifying attributes of whiteness is the genuine inability to dig deeper and investigate the question. I’ll let you read my previous post and my related Medium essay, but the key to breaking my own white thinking was to dig in to my own self and my own whiteness. It was Socrates who said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and for 2500 years we’ve tried to avoid the implications of his statement.
“I wanted to be seen as a good person. I wanted my good intentions lifted up and applauded.”
The temptation is real: to re-present ourselves as “fixed” or “better,” because our view of ourselves is that we are already “good.” Good people can’t be racist. Good people can’t participate in white supremacy. Good people can’t make bad choices that can destroy generations of lives and tear down the worth and rob the wealth of people who have done nothing wrong. Good people can get better, but good people start from a very high position to begin with. And our good intentions have the added benefit of making us feel good. Other people like us understand these good intentions and good feelings, and we all support each other.
The hard work of digging in and the harder work of confronting our choices and the hardest work of changing our actions and behaviors is still before us when want want to stop being “good” and want to be changed, all the way down changed.
Questions
Think of different groups of people in your life—your family, your friends, your coworkers, and so on. For each of these groups or contexts, think about whether you feel like an insider or outsider and how that status affects your desire to spend time with the group.
Family
Mixed. I love my family (which is something I thought everyone did until I met other people!), and I enjoy being around them. For a time. But then there are times when I want to escape my defined role. I feel like the insider in that it’s given that I belong. My feelings have not yet been that I feel like the outsider. Just sometimes I need to go outside.
Friends
I’ve cleared my life of all the people who do not validate me and do not let me “be.” My former group of white friends had rigid expectations of behavior and attitude. I remember sharing with a white friend a struggle I was having at work—I can’t even remember the issue—but the response was astonishment and judgment. “How could you do this?” It wasn’t anything like the Big Sins of Adultery or Smoking or even Liberalism. It was something that seemed trivial to me, but it puzzled me that I was not able to figure out the problem, and I was sharing sincerely my puzzlement. The astonishment of my friend was not only in my struggle but in my having the nerve to want to talk about it. It was perhaps not the first time I experienced that shock of awareness that “these people really don’t see me.” But it is something that came to mind just now. Essentially, though, with my white friends I was the insider only as long as I behaved according to the rules, and we all knew those rules. When I worked through my struggles I realized I was always the outsider.
Co-workers
In my current process, I’m in the mix of a few people, and I feel perfectly accepted as an insider. In previous situations and employment, I was always, always uncertain about my integration as one of the “in” people.
Congregants
This is where it gets more interesting. I have served in several positions in congregations over the years, and I remember getting some good loving when I was seen as one of the respected leaders. It was heady at the time, and I can understand how the experience of being trusted for leadership can be addictive. You’re “in” because you are the definition of “in.” However, when I displayed the slightest doubt about my current positions of orthodoxy (orthodoxy by the standards of the local churches, not what we think of as “Classical Orthodoxy of the Creeds”), the turning away was instant. And when I made the decision to say on my Facebook page that I could no longer support the animus of the Church against those in the gay community, the response was fierce. I had left any positions of leadership way before this, so it was simply (to my mind) people in the congregation who could not stomach my positions or presence. I truly felt like an outsider in my own church, as people would turn away when I entered or avoid me in the stores.
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-21/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
Your post hits two of the biggest things I am learning from this book.
One thing Irving’s book has offered me that I didn’t have before was an understanding of some cultural assumptions that I never really got exposed to. The “never talking about anything that matters” thing is a lesson I never learned (lol as you well know). At school, of course, we are taught to examine and inquire, and told that’s a good thing – so that’s what I believed. And still do. It seems like an awful lot of the issues in white culture come down to the easy hypocrisy of fiddling while Rome burns… (Including the inner conversation where you discuss whether you should put down the violin and grab a water bucket, even as you turn the page on your sheet music).
I’m also learning a different view on how white Americans think of themselves. There is the adage that “we are all the hero of our own story.” To me, that has always meant we are at the center, and comes with the implication that our motives are rooted in the assumption that we are in the right. I don’t actually have a very high opinion of humans as a species, and I rarely start from the assumption that they are “good.” (Yes, that includes me. I’m flawed and messed up and the best I can say is that I try to be on the better side of the scale, and I generally act based on what I believe is right or good – which doesn’t make me right, just sincere). The idea that people think they are “good” was reserved for self-righteous religious extremists. The more I learn on this one, the more I realize that most people seem to have an almost pathological need to see themselves as “good” as well as “right.” (No conclusions on that one – I think it’s gonna take a while)
It must have been *incredibly disorienting for you to step out of the place where those two things meet, and then try to view it from a distance. Small wonder it was a difficult choice to admit, when you consider what you were saying about not just the people around you, but yourself by stepping away. It must have been dizzying, to have the foundation of your belief turn into a jigsaw with missing and mismatched pieces like that…
And even worse to see the people you relied on for support turn their backs on your for telling them that the Emperor had no clothes.
Yeah, it was dizzying. And the turning of the backs–very hard to take at first. Then I got used to it, and realized that I had been fearing that my entire life. Once that Rubicon was crossed, I had no further fear of social disapproval. I had already experienced the worst: public shunning.
Finding my moorings took time because up to that point I had simply assumed the berth was mine by right and privilege. But “do for yourself” (and Socrates’ “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living”) turned out to be good ways to figure out what my values would look like as expressed by my behaviors.
I’m glad I’m in this stage of the journey. I can say that I have never been so engaged and alive with life until I shook off the clothes others made me wear and I designed and created my own raiment.
Don’t be fooled by my black jeans and black shirts. Inside I’m all about color.
“A new theory of how the brain constructs emotions that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind.”
“Emotions feel automatic, like uncontrollable reactions to things we think and experience…”
Headlines above are from my current read, “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain”
by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Churches are burning. Notre Dame Cathedral made headlines. Should we not pray for the workers who slaved for 800 years? One of my favorite Lutheran pastors prayed online in his weekly sermon notes.
The author, Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Jew who does not believe in God, she says. I did not stop reading on that account. As a Baha’i, I know therefore her scholarship is flawed. Mention Socrates in your blog, and your logic is flawed, says she.
Not only does she insist on the highest level scholarship. To be recognized as one who has the credentials to challenge her, you must be published in the right journals, and support your challenge with a prescribed format.
In the past week, my decision to become a Baha’i 47 years ago was validated by Brazilian teachers who knew the teachers who traveled to the Azores to teach my wife and me. They now live in Naples, Florida. Among those in the room last Sunday was a Black Muslem community leader from Ft. Myers. He’s all about social action, especially raising the next generation leadership in South Florida.