The liberation of letting go of my self-image.
Choosing to engage in the effort to dismantle racism promises to bring with it discomfort, yet how can I compare my discomfort to what people of color endure?
While I don’t like this for a few reasons, I think I understand the meaning behind it. Still, it doesn’t help to say “your feelings don’t count because other people have it worse.” This is what we’re told when we feel bad or angry or disappointed—and it’s a way to dismiss the validity of our feelings. White people who work to dismantle racism—to become, as Dr. Kendi says, “actively antiracist,” will experience discomfort, and we should be prepared for it even though we won’t experience anything like what people of color experience. If we think we’ll have no problems, or we minimize our problems, we are going to be shocked and hurt and angry when our expectations of smooth sailing generate real pain. Also, it feels a little dismissive of the agency of people of color, as if each and every person of color always has it worse than each and every white person each and every time. That’s not how it works, even though there is a long history of truth behind the idea that people of color generally have it worse than white people in white cultures.
With that said—it is important to consider that our trials and our hard times must not supersede our awareness of our friends who have a distinctly more difficult journey. As Ms. Irving says earlier, there are headwinds and tailwinds, and white people simply do not experience the hard realities of a white-supremacist culture in the way that people of color do. If you’re doing the work of anti-racism—you’re going to get flack.
When I think about the fear of saying something wrong that held me back for so long, I think I was a whole lot less afraid of hurting a person of color, actually, than I was of saying something that would expose my ignorance and make me look bad. I was working overtime to protect my self-image and my ego.
Yeah, this is me, right here. I hate it that I stumble and say stupid things that I regret almost instantly because it’s ignorant or self-centered or just terribly, terribly insensitive. And I do it all the time, too. I try hard to be both genuine and careful, and in almost every conversation I find myself looking back at what I just said two seconds ago. Jesus, I can’t even keep it from coming out in church or at work or in social settings. I know it’s a matter of growth + time. And I know that unwinding from my very self’s identity that was formed in a white-supremacist culture is hard. But still—can I just get a break once in a while from myself?
How silly, really, that when confronting a four-hundred-year-old problem that includes millions of people, I should put my own self-image front and center.
Yikes. This right here. This puts my complaints in perspective, doesn’t it? I might stumble and fail—but it is not about me. It was never about me. It’s not about maintaining the image of perfection, or even of polishing a few rough spots. It’s about digging in to do the work of discovery and repentance—without the hope that it will “make me look good when I’m done.”
I’m humbled by this for boasting that I’ve come so far.
The sense of freedom that came when I let go of worrying about “how good I am” at courageous conversations, or antiracist work, or life in general has sent new currents of energy through my body. Embracing humility has opened up my heart and mind and made way for vital relationships with people of all colors.
Good point here from Ms. Irving. It is enough to just start where we are. We don’t have to do prep work to get ready, to get the really bad parts chipped off, to do in a sense what we do when we hire house cleaners—we go around and try to pick up the place so they don’t think we’re absolute slobs. (I’m not saying we’ve ever hired house cleaners. But I’d be tempted to get my kids back for a week just so we can clean up enough so the house cleaners could come….) What’s important is not what we look like right now. Confidentially, we don’t really know how we look right now. We think we do—but I can assure you, we do not. At least not to the ones who see us as white.
Just let go, be genuine, try to be humble and self-aware. And go from there.
For so much of my life, wanting to be perceived as flawless caused me not only to avoid tricky conversations but to feel horrible about myself if I wasn’t measuring up to some cultural standard.
How many times I’ve had a shallow conversation instead of a real one because I did not want to be seen as flawed! Geez, this was me this very weekend in conversations at church. (I know–we’re supposed to not be ourselves at church anyway, but I was even less genuine than I could have been.)
But what I long for is just to take off all the front and cant and surface and fakery, and just have a genuine conversation.
Once I learned I had postpartum depression and that many people experienced it, it quickly subsided. I marveled at how just naming it and talking openly about it took away its power and allowed the healing process to begin.
It helps when we as white people see ourselves as white, and see the goofiness and lack of awareness and self-assurance and ignorance—and then realize that we’re all caught in the same trap. None of us are that much better than any other. It isn’t a contest to be the most virtuous. It is just how we were formed, how we’ve been trained to act and react, and how much it all feels “like us” when we act white. It’s almost impossible to get out of all on our own. So we should give ourselves a little grace when we discover our weaknesses.
Why were we all hiding from one another? In my experience, vulnerability, the opposite of bravado, is where humanity reconnects and recharges its circuitry. It is the hardware of the life force that sustains us.
I see this as hiding from two sets of people:
We hide from our white friends because it is embarrassing to be vulnerable about race. It will lead to all sorts of unpleasant conversations and uncomfortable moments. The White Code tells us that we absolutely cannot talk about this without a sense of guilt and shame, which leads to denial and self-defensiveness and justification and minimalizing—and who wants that? So we avoid it or talk around it. We center ourselves as having no part in the choices or the process of instilling and evangelizing whiteness, which also includes othering and compartmentalizing.
We hide from our Black friends because, as I said, we have great hope that our friends don’t see through the façade, and that they take us, not at face value (we’re really transparent to them—I assure you of this), but at the person we present to them in our words and our invisible thoughts. “Trust me—I’m one of the good guys” is how we attempt to message it.
But in neither case are we being vulnerable and open and honest—and free. What we most long for—intimacy and trust and safety to be wrong and weak—we cannot get, because we cannot leave behind the need to “be best” in all things and at all times.
It is too bad. Most of us white people go through life never having that fully charged intimacy that friends with open faces have with each other.
Getting over myself in the racism department has been similar. All that effort I put into maintaining my self-image served only to strengthen racism’s invisible hold on me. Talking about how I experience racism, even when it’s unpleasant, even when it betrays my own level of ignorance or stored racialized thoughts, is like taking the top off a boiling pot.
Such a good word here. It is ugly to talk about racism. It is threatening. It is shaming. It is corrosive to our self image.
But—by doing so we break its power. All the things about it in our lives that we fear seeing—we are letting our flaws control our behaviors and choices. We are avoiding the very freedom we long for because we simply cannot imagine that we would reveal the truly ugly person that we are.
This is the way out, though. You grasp the nettle, you pull it up firmly and relentlessly, you shake it so the dirt falls off the roots, you experience every agony and grief and shame—and then it is over. There are no half measures. You cannot put your hand to the plow and look back at the barn. You cannot look ahead to the journey and look back to the bed and home you are giving up.
My heart has been touched many times in these past few years, each time I see the curiosity and hope in the eyes of people of color when I admit I didn’t understand racism until I was nearly fifty years old. When I describe my efforts to understand how being white shaped my views and allowed me to perpetuate racism without knowing it, I see shoulders relax, and often a smile. Sometimes I even hear words to the effect of “Good for you.” Ironic, isn’t it, that admitting my ignorance and missteps is what is considered “good” in the eyes of those not attached to the idea of perfection but to the idea of truth?
I try to avoid saying it in this way. I try to just be as open as I can. I’m not sure whether for me it would work to tell people of color that I “didn’t understand racism until I was fifty years old,” because I’m not sure what message that sends. Maybe I should. I don’t know. I try very, very hard, though, to be as thoroughly transparent as I can be, and to choose to love and admire and praise and support and just be.
If I’m doing it wrong, I hope I receive correction. The goal, as this chapter points out, is not to be “good.” It is to be free.
Questions for Discussion
How do you want people to see you?
As someone who is open, loving, honest, hopeful, healing, accepting, trustworthy, safe, and humble.
List five adjectives you’d hope people would use.
- Kind
- Faithful
- Uplifting
- Supportive
- Good listener
What behaviors do you employ to convey this image?
- Kind—I try to see people where they are, as they are—human, flawed, hurting, full of dreams and energy, waiting. And I try to give them grace and to see myself as needing the same grace.
- Faithful—I try to keep my word, fulfill my promises, show up on time, show up when I say I will, work with the people I say I would work for.
- Uplifting—I try to be positive, see the good, help when I can, and provide guidance when requested.
- Supportive—I try to praise and agree to what someone is doing (within the bounds of goodness, of course!). I want to give my full & energized action to those whom I say I am supporting.
- Good listener—I try to practice the skills of asking good open questions, of letting people talk and actively listening, of reframing what I hear so that I get acknowledgement that I heard right, avoid giving solutions or analyzing problems unless asked to do so. Irreconcilable differences, intractable problems don’t need my condemnation. They need my empathy, and I try to offer that to the people I listen to.
How would admitting ignorance or wrongdoing, no matter how unintentional, challenge your desired image?
It would be to reveal that I’m a goof, a broken person, an insincere friend, a false man—but it would be to admit who and what I am. There is great relief in admitting my failures and opening up about the things I do wrong. As far as my desired image—I strive to be the person I want to be, but I try also to instantly admit when I fail at my promises.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
Here are others also blogging along with this topic:
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/