This chapter starts a new section, and Ms. Irving opens the section (“Leaving My Comfort Zone”) with a quote from Dr. King:
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
I find this intriguing. For the first sections of this book, the discussion has been about what wasn’t seen, and then what was seen. This is a turn to the next thing—what does it mean when we do things that are intended for the best purposes but are actually hurtful, cruel, or destructive?
There’s a common saying in the communities that are affected by the white gaze: Impact always outweighs intent. Always. It does not matter what you meant or felt or thought. What matters is what you did. (And as an aside, it is parallel withy my own Christian beliefs that say “faith without works is dead” – the only way others can see if I’m a believer who follows Christ is by what I actually do: the thoughts in my head are invisible, and the words of my mouth are powerless. What matters is the action.)
“Leaving the comfort of my white world of clear-cut rules so I could learn to navigate multicultural waters was something of a sink-or-swim endeavor.”
This is such a good precis of what I’m learning myself. I find that when I leave the safety and security of whiteness (I am not saying I’ve done it successfully, or even much at all; I’m just trying to get there) that I am in exhilarating freedom of release and newness. But unlike whiteness which envelops and protects and provides nearly invisible guardrails, leaving whiteness means there are so many things we will do wrong because we’re guessing. We’re making it up as we go along. We’re trying to figure out how to apply principles and not just obey rules. And like all learning, we don’t have all the information yet, so our first conclusions are preliminary, raw, and flawed. Shorter: we make stupid mistakes, and we end up hurting people—and that’s entirely not our intent!
“The choice to me felt like cop out or dive in.”
Yeah, I hear this. I suppose when you first make the tentative steps to leave whiteness that you are still able to turn back when it gets tough. And a lot of white people do this. I did this for a long time: stayed in the “safe zone” of niceness and pleasantries. Not overtly whitely racist. Just ordinary well-meaning ignorant racist.
There comes a point where you realize, though, that the bridge has a centerpoint that must be crossed, and once you cross it, you have made that unalterable decision. I can point to a period in my own experience in the summer of 2009. I had been lurking in a group of commenters on a blog hosted by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was still in the conservative camp, but my arguments were becoming pro forma. I didn’t really hold them with any surety.
Then, I had that moment where I realized If I go forward with these thoughts, then I have to abandon nearly the entirety of my existence, my accomplishments, my relationships, my alignments, my loyalties, my identity. To go forward is to say “All is undone and all must be re-done”; to stay behind is to know that I have decided to let go of my integrity to seek truth and obey it. To my friends in the group, I posted “I need to go away for a while and rethink things.” That was all. For two or three months I stayed silent, stayed away, and just thought and wrote and argued with myself and felt completely lost. What did I even believe? How did my “firmly held principles” hold up to the truths I was learning? I would lose all that I had built if I continued. I had built my creds in the Republican Party, in my church, with my friends and my family. All of them knew me as conservative and firm in my convictions. To let go of even a single conviction would be to unloosen everything, and everything would collapse.
It’s been ten years, and I don’t remember much of the emotional and mental pain, but I remember that for the entire summer I was just unable to speak much. I had lived a lie. I had believed stupid, hurtful things. I had been successful not because I was smart or good; I had been successful because I had had a series of lucky breaks that white people get as their due. I had remained uneducated about people, unconcerned about the oppressed, uncaring about the people around me who differed from me. All my vaunted “Christianity” and conservatism was just lies.
But I couldn’t go back. I knew too much. I had examined too much. I had done my own hard work, damned hard work, to read and research and study and discuss and listen, and I could not go back.
I can almost remember the day I made the decision to throw in the towel and proceed with going forward as a bloody “liberal.” This is it. Once I do this, I have burned the ship that brought me here.
I blinked, I sighed, and I realized I’ve already made the decision.
(Side note: I use this very example in my novel, which is thinly autobiographical. The protagonist has the moment of realization that he can’t go back and must go forward—and then realizes that in that moment he’s already decided to go forward.)
The process of “waking up white” isn’t just to be aware of whiteness. It is to wake up, and then to leave it. To go to something that’s better and more life-affirming and full of health. And to not even be sure where the destination is, but with the calm assurance that it’s out there.
“I felt an unsettling combination of sticking out like a sore thumb and being invisible.”
I loved this line. Ms. Irving is talking about going to a conference for and by professional men and women of color. And when she arrived, she was in the minority—and all the crazy thoughts of alienation and attention grabbed her—and how she had to deal with emotions and thoughts that arose unbidden about her place (“this is the modern downtown and yet it is full of well-dressed, successful brown and black people”) and her credentials (“I’m a faker—I have no accomplishments that would affirm my presence here”). And of course, fear (“is this the future, where I’m the resented, ignored minority?”).
“Her frustration moved me.”
Oh the context here and the subtext!
Ms. Irving is at the conference watching a film about racial discrimination and the discomfort people of color felt around white people. A black woman stood up to vent, a little: “Why the same story again and again?”
And then Ms. Irving stood to offer her perspective and advice…and got the response from another black woman: “What details do you need to know about our stories?”
Ms. Irving had slipped into her role of helper and explainer as the wise white woman with good intentions. She was hurt, offended, and wanted to explain and defend herself. Luckily for her, her seatmate just said “Just don’t.”
“Why on earth did I think I had the answers—or even the questions? I robbed from the workshop organizers and attendees a chance to do their own important work.”
I thought this was a tremendously good answer. A little bit of understanding crept in. “This is not my place, not my history, not my teaching moment, and not my center.” She realized that in her work to “help,” she was taking away the power of learning and discovery from others.
“They helped me to see that just by standing and speaking, I’d reminded some people in the room just how sick and tired they were of white people thinking they have the answers.”
After her interruption and at the conclusion of the event, several people—white and black—approached her to provide both empathy and clarity. The intent was good—really!—but the impact was horrendously negative. Black and brown people have been, and still are, the subjects of unwanted and uninformed advice and direction from white people. She had unintentionally but perfectly responded in the situation as a white person. Sure, her mind said “this is a good thing to do,” but her basal whiteness had done the prompting to make her feel she should do this, and then her mind took over to give her plausible reasons for doing so. The people who came to her to help her walk through this distress stayed around for an hour to just debrief her. An unwarranted favor. Unrecompensed labor. But they did, and it was a gift that can never be fully valued.
“Even though for me it felt like a personal attack, I now understand that for most if not all of the people of color in the room that day, I triggered an unleashing of years of stored and recycled pain, whether they stood to tell me about it or not.”
Another great insight, albeit one that is hard to process at first: acting like a white person of innocence is not innocuous. It is a common, repeated experience of our black and brown brothers and sisters that white people will come alongside and just take over or be in charge or represent themselves as an expert.
I do this, too.
Like Ms. Irving, I regret my miserable, selfish behavior, and when I realize what I’m doing, or what I’ve done, I am deeply sorrowed. I can’t let my good thoughts about myself be the reason I do things, because it doesn’t obviate the tremendously hurtful impact.
“Of the many feelings I experienced in the following days, one must have been grief. I grieved for the mess we were all in and for the life of blissful ignorance I’d compromised in choosing to dive into it. I grieved for the hurt I’d inflicted on others. I grieved for the breakdown of my own naiveté.”
Man. This.
I don’t often have the moments of memory and regret because they’re painful, but I have been here in the grief. I am in grief over the pain and hurt that has impacted my black and brown brothers and sisters, and I am in grief over how I’ve contributed to it.
Can I be real here?
There are times when I’m just weeping. I’ll hear a song or a testimony, or listen to an interview, and the pain that comes through rips through, because I have helped to contribute to that unasked-for pain. I’ve been the white guy erasing the black co-worker or talking over the black instructor or ignoring the black customer agent or walking past the black security guard, as if they don’t exist. I can fool myself that they’re used to it from us, but I know that what I’ve done and am doing is hurting people that (in my faith) are the Beloved Community. I have hurt people, often the people I say that I love and respect.
The pain doesn’t mean I’m forgiven or even that I’ve repented. It is just the realization that my intentions of ignorance and expertise are actively hurting people that I would, in a better world, see and love and cherish.
“Unlike my home culture, in which I could sniff my way through social cues effortlessly, this one had me feeling like a fish out of water, guessing at how to behave, when to speak and when not to, what to say and what not to.”
I feel this.
I deliberately stretch myself by pushing myself to expand my experiences, by intentional actions to meet with and form relationships with people of color. Not to rescue me. Not to fix them. Just to do that hard work of forming real connections. And when I’m occasionally invited to the cookout, I know that sometimes I feel as if I don’t know the language or the rules. I say stupid things, I do stupid things, I laugh at the wrong places or express displeasure at something everyone else is laughing at. “He doesn’t know the territory” from The Music Man comes to mind: I’m a thief and cheat and a liar, and I’m not to be trusted.
The first time it happened I had to leave and go sit on the porch until a friend came out to talk, and honest to God, I said “I feel like I don’t belong.” He was the host, he was (and is) my friend—and I was telling him to his face that he made a mistake by inviting me.
It is an awful, awful thing. Not just that I guessed wrong, but that I was doubting my friend who had invited me and I was distrusting his friendship. I regret it now, but at the time I was frozen in those actions—it was all I could do to handle my discomfort and unease and feeling of “I don’t belong here.”
“If this were at all representative of the experience of a minority in a white person’s world, I concluded, I’d have been a tragic person of color. I don’t believe I could have weathered such stress with anything close to grace.”
Lordy, I was not expecting this chapter.
I know that my friends of color can sometimes let loose when I’m around and express some of their frustrations and anger and sadness and rage. I don’t think I ever see it all—it’s something that’s saved for when they’re around their safe friends. But Jesus, I don’t know what I would be like if that feeling of alienation and isolation would be my experience 24x7x365.
Questions
Think of a time when you hurt someone’s feelings without intending to. Was your impulse to defend yourself?
Yes. Flat out. First impulse was to say “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t intend to. You misunderstand.”
If so, why do you think that urge to defend your intention felt so important?
Because I’m not wrong—I’m innocent, and I make mistakes. I’m not actually doing something wrong. To say I did something wrong is to say that I’m in much worse condition than I am.
If you eventually shifted from focusing on your intent to focusing on the impact of your words or actions, what inspired you to do so?
Truthfully, a time of introspection, a time to have my mind say “you said you believe in confessing your sinful actions, but here you are deny them. Who are you, really, and what do you believe?” My own convictions spoke to me and somehow the me that was telling me I was doing wrong convinced the me who could make the decision to do the right thing.
What was ultimately required to heal the rift?
On my part, frank admission. On their part—the rift is not yet healed. I need more clarity as to what I should do different.
This is an interesting line for me: I wrote an essay (published earlier here) about the situation between Hazel Massery and Elizabeth Eckford. You might remember the picture of a black high school student entering Little Rock Central High School, and a white high school student with hatred etched on her face spewing out the foulest of invectives. And I wondered, in that essay, why Ms. Massery couldn’t dig deep enough to understand what she did, and why Ms. Eckford didn’t really every fully forgive her—which is Ms. Eckford’s absolute right. Forgiveness is an ask, not a given. And Ms. Massery was mystified why her apologies and her requests for forgiveness weren’t met with her desired “forgiveness” and erasure of her actions.
And here I am considering the same thing, and tempted to believe that I have done all that’s required, and more; now it’s they who must take the next step and forgive me, because I’ve done all the right things.
Jesus, I’m older now.
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/