I am beyond the rope now.
I’ve used this a few times in the past year to describe the feeling of being beyond the place where I have guidance and surety, but I can’t feel not just the rope, but the path and the rocks.
I’m at sea now, wondering where I am. This chapter is where I am, right now, today: I have some tools, but the stubborn core of myself and my racism is exposed as the irreducible, ineradicable center of all that I am.
This chapter has me wondering what is next—it leaves me with no hint of what I will need to do after I finish this work today (or tonight).
Ms. Irving opens this up with a familiar text:
“The harder I tried, the worse it got.”
She is pursuing something—racial justice, racial parity, racial peace, racial integration—pulled, or even pushed, by something in her that wants the right thing. But she is finding that after clearing away some of the more obvious cruft in her life, she is left with the unsettling truth that it is not just removing that cruft, not just having good intentions. There is something, and she finally realizes she doesn’t have it.
I want to raise my own hand here and bear witness.
I am here, too.
I am really screwing up right now. The more I try the habits and the techniques, the less free I am, and the less authentic I am. I have found some temporary places of contentment, where I can do good things and feel good about it, but there is something nagging me that No, this is not it.
Sigh.
I’m going to continue—not just this book, but this journey—because I am called to do so.
But holy moly, I am in a place where there are no charts and no stars, no maps and no mountains.
“I wondered if I would ever be able to break the habit of surrounding myself with white people.”
The default is our comfort, which is natural, and perhaps harmless in many contexts. In the context of race and parity, however, the default is drilled into about how we white people are a separate class. Without constant vigilance and attention, we fall back to our comfort. And I think Ms. Irving is hinting at something that I don’t see yet: as long as we see this as vigilance, we are not yet in the place that is above this, the place that she—and I—dimly see.
“The school was a custom-made option created by and for upper-middle-class white parents.”
The school Ms. Irving choose for her first daughter was the easy choice for her, as a mother with the ability to volunteer during the day and pay quite a bit of money in tuition—both factors (among others) that would exclude those who were not upper middle class white people.
I think about this when I think about home-schooling. We home-schooled our kids, and they made it through high school, got scholarships to universities, and graduated magnum cum laude. “Anyone can do this, if they want to,” we were told and we told. But really, my having a solid job that paid well was a ginormous factor in us having the freedom to do this. My spouse didn’t have to work all those years, has a master’s degree, is highly educated, and knew how the education system works. It is simply rare to have that freedom and ability as a parent, and many people who might want to home school for the advertised benefit are not able to perform well because of time and money pressure. We saw it as a thing we could just “do,” and not as an exclusive thing that few would be able to “do,” even if they wanted to.
“What we really want is to use moments like these to make talking and teaching about race natural. Kids notice difference without judgment, if we let them.”
This isn’t a statement of great revelation for me, but I wanted to point out the entirely reasonable, rational thought this is bringing out. The situation that brought this up is the hypothetical posed about “what do you do when your kids notice race?” Rather than run away from curiosity, it’s perfectly fine to talk about appearance. “Some people have darker or lighter skin. It’s part of being human.” All very easy. But again, I’m thinking Ms. Irving is setting me up for something…
“It excited me to know that there were professionals in the world, ‘diversity trainers,’ who could help people like me navigate the complex world of cross-race relations. If this white guy could learn how to navigate multiracial groups, maybe I could too.”
The context here is this class that Ms. Irving is in, where diversity is being promoted (a class she helped initiate and promote). “At last I will find the answers,” she says.
This is me, right now, today. My employer is stressing diversity and inclusion training, and I am doing as much work as I can to drill into it as deeply as I can, for me. “Perhaps I will find the answer that will just connect me with goodness and righteousness.” (I’m being honest here about my thoughts, even though I am becoming aware of how unhelpful they are—they just seem so good to me.)
“Though I had made a shift from wanting to help and fix people of color to wanting to develop my own ‘diversity’ skills, I didn’t get how problematic my approach still was.”
Oh, Ms. Irving…
You are going to kill the curious cat here. I am, right, getting this message from my friends. “What you’re doing is still very, very white. What you’re saying is still very, very much about you. What you’re doing will not get you closer to your desired goal, but is instead getting you closer and closer into just another cul-de-sac but with better neighbors.” I hear the words. I almost get it. But it’s not graspable to me right now. I’m frustrated, like there is a fourth primary color I just can’t see that they can—and they say “if you could just see the meblantic color, you’d understand.”
But I can’t see it.
“Far from the important work of understanding systemic racism and its impact on my life outcomes and perspective, my new aim was to understand some magical set of cross-racial manners.”
The context here is Ms. Irving’s desired—echoed by my own!—of wanting the rules laid out. Bullet points, Q&As, case studies, b-tree queries and responses. “Tell me what to say. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to feel.”
I am so here right now!
“What drove my pursuit was a desire to learn how not to screw up and embarrass myself so I could preserve my good-person image.”
THIS RIGHT HERE. This is the core of the problem. The desire to preserve the “good-person image.”
Isn’t it good to be non-racial? Isn’t it good to be accommodating and helpful and empathetic? And aren’t I a good person for doing so?
So why do I still get the sighs and eyerolls and shaking heads?
Arrrgh!
“Still trapped in my white-dominated belief system, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Topping the list was the unknown truth about just how much humility would be required to become an effective agent of change.”
Well, I can say that I’m beginning to suspect just how much humility is required, and very aware of how much humility I do not possess.
“The more I became aware of the ways in which I might say the wrong thing and of how fed up many people of color were with white ignorance, the more I sought wisdom.”
Help me know the rules! Help me see the clearly laid-out path! Help me not make any mistakes!
I think I’m missing the point. I think I’ve landed in Hawaii when I meant to end up in St. Louis.
“I was stunned. I hadn’t caught either point on my own.”
The context here was a practice scene at a seminar where several people “played out” a typical racially fraught situation. Ms. Irving, along with others in the mixed race audience, watched a familiar scene that so affected a black mother that she intervened (with the express permission of the leaders), and Ms. Irving was stunned at how much she had missed a central point.
I get this all the time. I do not see the problematic stuff. It looks normal to me. I might see my friends bristling, but I don’t really understand, not until later if they decide to tell me. It’s like all my good intentions fail because there is yet one central thing missing.
“I had never been socialized to say what I thought or felt. Instead I’d been trained to say what I imagined the other person wanted to hear.”
If Ms. Irving is hinting at something central here, that saying what keeps the peace is central to being blocked from moving on—then I am right here for this. This is me, all the time. I am deeply bred to be polite and careful and empathetic and gracious and smooth. I am almost incapable of telling the truth, especially when the truth is hard and the people I’m telling it to being displaying signs of distress.
Is this it, Ms. Irving? Is this something to consider? You don’t seem to waste a word, and it seems that you’re guiding me to a conclusion.
“I still thought race was something that belonged only to people of color, and I wanted the rule book.”
This so much. I default to a pleasant “I’m just a happy person, not really racial or racially aware. I’m just free here in my neutral space, with the world around me comprising African Americans, Asians, Hispanics/Latinx, Indigenous, and sometimes European ethnics who are white the more they abandon their ethnicity and become neutral like me. No color.”
It takes all my strength and concentration to see myself as “white.” It’s a hypothetical to me, not a real thing that really does define me.
“I now understand that fear of doing or saying something offensive perpetuated my cultural incompetence.”
HELP ME MS. IRVING! I hear this, but I have no idea what you’re telling me!
Questions
Think about five rules from the “rule book” of social interaction that you grew up with.
- Don’t look at people’s differences.
- Don’t pay attention to race
- Men belong in charge and are trustworthy beyond all others
- Bullies are bad people; listeners are good people
- Only really bad people can be racist, certainly no one you know, and definitely not you
For each rule, can you imagine how it interferes with honest cross-cultural dialogue, given what you’ve learned in this book or from other sources?
One: Yes, this interferes, because I look at superficials (appearance) but am trained not to acknowledge them, and more deeply, not to inquire as to how that makes anything different. You are from Nigeria or Norway? Cool. And that’s that. Investigating more might bring up difficulties that I don’t know enough about to be expert and perfect. I might make a mistake. So avoid this
Two: Yes, this interferes, because race is central to the American story of colonization and empire-building. America is not some grand, noble experiment of wise and good white people who were somehow given the entire continent. We stole it from the Indigenous and stole the labor and lives of African Americans to build it and enrich us. This decision, this ethos, was entirely and totally race-aware and race-driven. Not being able to look at this has crippled dialog with those affected by this colonization and empire.
Three: Yes, this interferes, because males are far more strongly socialize in other cultures to be dominant, so that I get only a limited exposure to the wider world.
Four: Yes, because pretending these are the two divisions of people has made relationships with real people nearly impossible. Bullies are anyone who speaks up and demands justice. Sometimes bullies are mean and angry, but sometimes people who are angry and who demand recompense and satisfaction are righteously angry, and not people to be ignore because they’re angry. And my own training to “keep the peace” has meant I tiptoe around the rough patches and tough problems people want to talk about.
Five: Yes, because I end up being kind to racists and their racist words and actions because “I’m helping them and besides, they’re not really racist. They’re just tired or upset.”
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-23/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/