This was a fascinating chapter for me, in that I hadn’t really dived into this before: what is it that we thought about ourselves when we were young that has somehow determined who we are as adults, based upon the choices we made from youth to adulthood.
I was talking about this today on the bus with a friend. In high school the guidance counselors said “You can pretty much do whatever you want—you have no one specific passion.” And I’ve done that in life, settling on my current career of doing something interesting in tech while I wait for something to pique my interest elsewhere. I’ve done all sorts of things, and still try my hand at new things—the latest is perhaps screenwriting, which is an interesting new thing for me, a way to write stories using only what we see and hear to tell a story. I’m not good at it, but I practice a lot by trying again and again, because—I believe I can just learn how to do it and become somewhat successful. Same with my storywriting—I believed I could write interesting stories, and while I am not blazing new trails, I am learning better ways to write and become deeper and more engaging.
Because I can. I believe I can just do it.
There’s some things I can’t do, and while I might try, I am not able to enjoy them. Sports are mostly out. I can’t triangulate moving objects—can’t catch a ball, for example. Growing up my eyesight was so bad that I had to fake it through the astronomy exam in Boy Scouts because I could not see the stars. I could see the sun and the moon. The stars were imaginary. I memorized where they should be and faked the exam. It wasn’t until learning how to drive in high school that my parents found out that I could not see well enough to recognize words on billboard, much less on a road sign. Glasses fixed that, but they didn’t fix the issue with inability to figure out the trajectory and speed of a moving ball through space. Golf, football, frisbee tossing—I’m not your guy for the team.
However, to the point—pretty much I’ve tried a lot of things because not only were there opportunities, I believed I could take advantage of them. Just because.
I still am not sure I can get in to the idea of someone actually not believing they can do something if they just try.
Ms. Irving here tells the story of a child in her classroom as a second-grade teacher. Jared, she names him, and Jared is black—and Jared believes that the world has consigned him to erasure and oblivion and judgment. At seven years old, Jared sees his life as closed.
Who taught him this? Not his school—not officially. Not his family—not directly. Not his society—explicitly. He learned by his experiences, by watching the experiences of others, by doing what humans do—observing and concluding—and deciding that whatever else he might do, he was fated to be black in America. And that is all that matters in life. God has ordained misery for you, America is your bed of nails, and what waits for you is only your ending, not your beginnings.
At seven he is already grown up.
“‘Anyway, what’s the point?’ he said. ‘I’m going to jail when I grow up anyway.’”
Jared watched his family and his community experience the fate that the American justice system is created for: the conveyor belt that feeds the criminal courts and the prisons. Members of his own family had been caught and filleted and packaged for consumption, and that is all that was in store for him as well.
“I was no stranger to looking at patterns of behavior around me and imaging myself on a similar trajectory. I thought about how when I was Jared’s age, I already assumed I’d be going to college like my siblings and cousins, the same as my parents and their siblings had done. I never questioned whether I’d be able to be a good enough student.”
There is always a way up and out for white people. We believe this, and almost always it can become true in some way—if we try hard enough.
Now, the reality is that it is not true, and the reality today for many white adults is despair as they realize that the dream of white success is a nightmare, sold to them to keep them in whiteness, sold to them as a way to keep them united against “those” people, the browns, the blacks, the “others,” the people who would destroy the American dream. Keep white people united with the rich leaders, and the rich leaders stay leaders. At some point, some white people wake up, find out that they have gained nothing from their allegiance to whiteness—and their worlds crumble. Among the biggest causes of death among older white males right now is despair. Older white males realize that they will never achieve what they want because they’ve done nothing but coast on their whiteness. And they’ve chosen destructive behavior and political patterns because it was “for the team.” Now the team has moved on, and older white people, especially older white males, are seeing their folly.
That belief is naïveté itself. But it keeps us going for a long, long time.
“Who was I to console him or give him a little Suzy Creamcheese pep talk?”
This is an amazing revelation for Ms. Irving, and one which a lot of good-hearted white people experience in a shocking moment: my good intentions, my good thoughts, my passions and my compassions, really don’t matter. They really don’t fix anything. In fact, they are the salt poured upon the wounds of the injured.
There is nothing white people can tell our black brothers and sisters about white success that will work for them, because as long as we are a society and nation built upon whiteness, our black brothers and sisters are automatically excluded, always.
I’m one of the good-hearted people. It is something to constantly remind myself about: that my words and niceness and good intentions really don’t matter. Even when I attempt to walk with my brothers and sisters, I always go home.
Nice words are not enough to disrupt a racialized national culture.
“With my growing consciousness of the way Jared and I had each developed our sense of worth and place in the world, I felt discouraged by racism’s intractability.”
I think it’s a good thing to come to this realization, this hopelessness, this awareness that our efforts are going to be a dead end. It is vitally important to see the enormousness of the task, and to realize that it just might be impossible to change. We have got to be fully aware of the intractability, to use Ms. Irving’s words, so that we don’t have false hope and then give up when our work is not achieving the results we hope for.
We have to be absolute cynics so that we do not build pretense, so that we do not use hope as a synonym for success, we do not use habit as a substituted for systemic changes.
I do not know if the work against racism will ever work. I really don’t.
But there are still 20 or so more chapters. Maybe there is still more information to review.
Stay tuned.
Questions
Can you recall your childhood expectations of how you’d fare in school?
I don’t have a lot of crisp memories. I wasn’t really groomed for college and a career. I succeeded in school with little effort, and expected college to be the next step because that’s what was there.
How did you imagine your adult life would be?
I’d get a job, do something interesting for a long time, get paid, then retire. The actual data and facts about this were never really nailed down.
Where did you get these ideas?
From watching my own family, and the families in my neighborhood, and the families on TV. My father had one job, from graduation with his Masters to his retirement—a solid career in aerospace in systems administration. All the men in my neighborhood had jobs, all the time. I can’t recall anyone being unemployed, and they were always doing things that were useful. I can’t recall any mother having a job (this was the 50s, remember), and life was school, homework, weekends, summer, and vacation trips. You just got a job, and you did it.
Think about lifestyle, family, and work. How close is your life to those of your parents and other adults you knew?
Somewhat similar. I have had a job nearly my whole life, from sixth grade (cleaning and mopping up a restaurant) until now. I’ve had only one instance where I didn’t have a steady job, and that was due to me just leaving a job because it was giving me ulcers—and even then I did pick-up work in construction. Because I can always get a job.
How much do you think race influenced your life vision and outcome?
I don’t think I realize it except dimly. I was in a culture that said the world was open to me, and in almost every case, it has been completely open. I’ve always had optimism, and I don’t think I’ve ever thought that my optimism was misplaced or unfounded. Life is good, is my motto. And for me, it has been good.
How much do you think class influenced your life vision and outcome?
Class is also a determinate in my vision and outcome, because being middle class kept me protected and shaped for success. That I’ve been successful has been from my efforts, but nothing held me back—my education was good enough, my family life-style was generally stable, my neighborhood was unbelievable safe and protecting. Being middle class is the great achievement of my grandparents and my parents, and I’ve had nearly smooth sailing as a result, and that has been almost entirely invisible to me.
I remember the very first time when I had an inkling that not everyone who looked like me had the same fortunes as me. It was a conversation with someone in high school who described their years of growing up. It’s when I first heard the term “child abuse.” I thought child abuse was when my parents spanked me. (It took me a long time to realize that it is a form of abuse, but stay with me.) I wasn’t really thinking it was, but I was on a high horse that I got spanked. Then I discovered that child abuse existed, that it was horrendous and disfiguring of the body and the soul, that adults would take out their frustrations and despair upon their children, and I realized that even when I thought I had it bad, it was nothing like what I was hearing about. We just didn’t live like that. No one in my neighborhood did. No one in grade school did. High school gave me more exposure to kids from lower-ish classes, and I was just gob-smacked to hear about their lives.
As I think about, I think about the paths these kids took in life. I don’t think there were as many of them who thought that college was in their path. But my memory is uncertain. I do remember that it took me a while to react and think through what they were saying.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter (from 26-45): https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-the-final-chapters/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/