It’s been a while since my last post (7/29/19!). I’ve been busy over the summer, far busier than I expected. I’ve gotten more involved in some relationships and responsibilities, and my writing output for short stories, scripts, and essays has jumped considerably. (I even had Ms. Irving stop by a set of Facebook posts…) But it’s time to get back to this book.
Ms. Irving is still processing her experiences at a conference, and so this chapter opens with an incredibly important insight, one that I’d like you to read a few times to consider what this means. It’s that necessary:
One of my first challenges in the hours and days following the workshop upset was to stay at the conference and just let the feelings come.
Let the feelings come. I will be as bluntly honest as I can here with you, you who are struggling to work through the issues of whiteness and racism: there is a lot of information to process, and that is just how it is. I’ve been working on this stuff for myself for eleven years now, seriously trying to unpeel the layers and scrub out the stains using my mind, my will, and my hopes. But I also have had to spend moments—sometimes long stretches of time—feeling what I was thinking.
Feeling is what connects us to others. Our minds, our thoughts, our opinions, our goals—the are the things that help us to align ourselves and find congenial minds.
But the feelings are what give us the human touch.
It was feeling what Emmett Till was going through that helped me experience the terror of death for no reason other than for being an uppity Black kid.
It was feeling what Eric Garner was going through as he was choked to death in New York.
It was feeling what Sandra Bland was going through from the moment she was stopped until the moment she passed this world, killed in a jail cell, alone and unseen.
And is feeling what my own attitudes and actions and beliefs have done. Feeling what my friends have experienced—my friends, whom I cherish and love!—in America as they are degraded and abused and excluded and threatened because they are Black. Feeling what I have done to add to their pain and terror. Feeling what I am doing in the present to add to their despair and alone-ness. Feelings of guilt and shame and regret and anguish and embarrassment.
The feelings help me connect in my human-ness to what I value and to the people I value. I need to sit in the feelings and let them just come. Hiding from them guarantees that we will not be healed.
Ms. Irving notes that the suppression of feelings and the suppression of the desire to feel is part of her socialization, and mine as well. We are taught to avoid the feeling and to shift the responsibility away. We didn’t do it. We aren’t bad people. We never said overtly racist words. We have no responsibility. But as we lie in our beds at night and the thoughts come—what are we really doing and what are we trying to avoid—we sometimes realize that by pushing away feelings we are not only pushing away change and responsibility, we are pushing away connection and responsibility. Unless we comprehend the lives our friends have who have been forced to endure an entirely nonsensical and hateful reaction to their bodies, their skins, their presence, we are simply never going to be their friends. We will always be on the outside, watching. Never living with them. Just among them. That’s satisfying for a great portion of white people. But to quote my friend Andre Henry, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
It just doesn’t.
One of the things that kept me going was the indebtedness I felt to the rough-cut group who had supported me in my worst moment.
I feel this, so deep. I have been treated with extraordinary kindness and love by people who extended to me their friendship (and still do!) when I have been (and still am) an ass. I sometimes wonder if they just have to take what they can get. I deeply regret my actions and words, and my stupidity and selfishness and indifference. I have been a terrible human being, and an even worse friend. A friend does not lie—I have lied. A friend is loyal—I have been disloyal. A friend is there for the hard times—I have been absent.
Still. Still they ask me to hang around. They invite me back. I’m with their families at meals and parties and celebrations and even times of tragedy.
Perhaps the friendship from their end isn’t transactional. Perhaps they are simply loving me, and hoping for the best for me.
I hold on to that as I work harder to dig in to this in myself, to root out my hatred and fear and my deepest desires to cling to whiteness, and I use all my strength to call upon God to help me change. Because they have been previous with me, and they should receive honor and truth from me as a response. Goodness, they’ve heard terrible things from me, and still they will sit with me.
I felt broken yet connected, in pain but acknowledged, a welcome contrast to what I’d known for much of my life.
I’d put it this way: “I am feeling alive.” To be alive is to see oneself, all the way through, all the way down, all the way in, to see all the strengths and flaws, all the godliness and all the sinfulness (to use Christianese), all the good and all the brokenness. This is me. No shadows, no corners, no hiding places. Everything is just there, naked and unashamed.
We can sometimes be pushed into a box where we are forced to behave a certain way, and like bread dough in a springform pan, we take on the shape of the box around us. We grow, but we don’t realize we’re stunted. The emotional connection is broken through the design of disconnection.
I internalized this “Nice is good” norm so thoroughly that I came to loathe conflict and judge harshly those uncivilized enough to stir it.
Ms. Irving is diving into an aspect of whiteness, which is niceness. Not everyone is raised with this same set of values, but I picked it up, unaware of what I was doing. I saw the world around me exploding in anger and rage in the 50s and 60s, and I chose safety and sameness. I’ve loathed conflict, sought the good and the peaceful way—and in doing so lost the ability to feel bad about what I was doing. It relates to my utter shock when “Andrew” (you can read about him more on my Medium post My Journey into Blackness) said point blank to me “Do you know that I’m black!” He was outraged and tired and frustrated and angry and disappointed and lost because again the white people he was relating to simply didn’t see him. (Andrew is extremely private, but in the past eleven years I’ve pieced together many parts of his story with me and the group of men we were involved with.) He was hurt and shocked and degraded, but I was extremely upset because I was a nice guy who would not intentionally hurt anyone. Here was someone I respected (we were not yet friends) telling me You are wounding me. I was nice, so I was good. I was friendly so I was conflict free. I was accepting so I was not judgmental. But I didn’t see Andrew, and—I really never saw me, either.
The more I could tolerate anger, fear, and grief, the more I could feel joy, love, and serenity.
This is important, the feeling. Being white and being racist are not healthy things—they stunt our growth, our imagination, our connection with people, our understanding of ourselves. (We refuse to see our racism and so we refuse to see a very large part of ourselves.) We exchange the exhilaration of living for the blandness of predictability.
It is not a good exchange.
Whom exactly does the culture of niceness serve?
Honestly, it serves the needs of the community to keep the peace, and it serves the need of the individual to be left alone—but I must emphasize—it offers nothing else but bland existence. Being “nice” removes you from the emotional richness of confrontation, of challenge, of risking great things because sometimes there is great reward.
Ignoring feelings and trying to smooth them over with pleasant chitchat only promises to hold people back from allowing their hearts to join their minds in recognizing injustice when it’s right in front of them, or even inside them.
Niceness is deadening. Avoiding feelings is deadening. It is existing, not living. It is silos of grain waiting in the darkness, not acres of wheat dancing under the golden sun. It is the insurance that we will never be challenged by our actions, but we will also never have connection with the people whom we have pushed away and sidelined.
Change requires tolerating the kind of emotions that arise when the constraints of nice conversations are lifted.
This just resonates. I know I want to be liked and appreciated, and sometimes I try too hard to read the room. But what Ms. Irving is suggesting here—and what I’m agreeing to—is that letting the feelings express themselves is the way to get to the next level.
For that, dear reader, is what the journey is all about.
Question for Discussion
What lessons were you taught about crying? Do you feel differently if you see a man, woman, or child crying? For whom do you tend to feel empathy? For whom do you tend to feel judgment? Why?
I don’t know that I can remember much formal education (!) in the value of crying. I recall (I think!) being told that I’d get something to really cry about if I didn’t stop. I learned at a very early age that my tears were never, ever acknowledged. Part of that might come from the background of my parents, who lived through the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II, from both sides of the Atlantic. Tears are not helpful when you’re desperate for food or a job or safety. And tears are not wanted when you’re growing up in the safe white suburbs of the ’50s.
I do get uncomfortable by people crying. I find that because I have not cried much in the past, controlling with great rigidity any such feeling and outburst, that when someone cries in my presence it is extraordinarily moving. (Having a friend cry when I’ve shared some details of my own life with them was something I still can’t process. You feel for me? Not even I feel for me.)
But along with the recovery I’ve been involved in over the last eleven years, I’ve learned to just let myself cry. I still avoid it in work situations—but if I’m at work and something connects emotionally, I’ll cry at my desk, not hiding. It can be happy tears or sad. But it is my way to connect to the people and the story.
I think I feel empathy with the broken and discouraged and cast-off and wounded and silenced and injured. My friends’ misfortunes and pains get me crying. The dead-ends and tragedies in my own family. The celebration of accomplishment and reward. The feeling of connection in church. The joy over someone’s happiness. I tend to feel my emotions when I see the people down where I am having an emotional or difficult moment. I find that I’m unable to cry when someone who is very privileged and rewarded experiences a frustration or a block because (I’m being honest here) I want to say “what do you have to feel sorry about?” Which, based upon this chapter, is probably wrong! For example, when some media star who is a star for no reason other than that they are a star experiences a setback, and yet 99.9% of their lives are still extraordinarily privileged, I simply express my displeasure at their indolence and lack of industry, and move on. But in reality, that they are dead to their world and their true emotions in the pursuit of glitter and fame should also make me weep for their lostness.
I guess I’m still quite a sinner in this.
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/