I’m reading & simultaneously commenting on Debby Irving’s book Waking Up White.
Jesus.
I mean that in reverence not as a jocular aside or even as a swear word.
I just finished writing (and lightly editing) a piece on what others think, using my own self and my own growing understanding, and how little I am doing right now other that reading, writing, or talking, and Ms. Irving opens with this:
After years of wanting to help and fix others, I learned I had my own work to do.
Like an arrow it strikes: how much of what I do is for others, because the others need my help?
Jesus.
I am so transparent in my efforts.
Well. Okay.
I guess I gotta go dig some more, into me.
In this chapter, Ms. Irving talks about what we do and why. Not the theoretical. But the actual factual deeds that we believe reflect our values and convictions and passions.
I find it paradoxical that so often in my life, when I’ve felt a relationship not working well, I’ve focused on the other person and how much I wanted them to change. Even though changing myself is the one thing I can actually do, it seems to be the thing I’ve been most resistant to doing.
What an insight that, of course, is obvious: we can’t change others. Really. We can work to convince them, but that all stops once our words enter their ears or our actions touch their bodies: they get to decide if they want to think and act in different ways.
It’s us that we can change: or more precisely, it is the “me” that I can change. Maybe.
Shifting from a superior/inferior paradigm to a strength-in-difference paradigm was kind of a good news/bad news situation.
This is in reference to Ms. Irving finally (!) discovering that her husband and she were two different people and hence different personalities—and that it was not a situation where one of them was “right” or “strong” or “honest” about themselves.
I think (dimly) that this is key not only to planning how I approach deconstructing whiteness around me, but also how I approach my own white edifices that I have built and lived in, even extended, to the point where I don’t recognize that I’m “white” because all I see looks so normal: I don’t see “whiteness” as unusual or contradictory or even offensive merely by its existence.
During all the years I’d tried to help and fix people of color, part of my subconscious expectation had been that people outside my culture should assimilate to my ways, see and do things the way I’d been taught was right and normal.
I’ll be as honest as I can be—I don’t know that I’ve done this directly, although I held strong convictions for decades that the issue with people of color is that they simply didn’t act in ways that fit in with what’s normal. I didn’t see that my expectations were shorthand for “act white.” And it is taking me a long time not only to start to unwind from that foolish, self-centered, ignorant, and hurtful attitude, but also to see whiteness for what it is, and to attempt to break free from it. Not to somehow not be what I am physically. I can’t do that. And I won’t costume myself to do so, because it would be enormously distasteful and dishonest. I’m white, associated with all that white people are. What I strive to, now, is to untangle myself from whiteness. What happens next, I don’t rightly know. I figure I’ll work my way through it, though.
Because throughout history speaking up has cost people of color jobs, homes, and even lives, too often the choice is to stay silent. There’s a long and painful American history of people of color, when in the presence of white people, conforming to survive. The cost is staggering. The silencing of feedback from people of color can create a deadlock dynamic in which white people remain ignorant about their impact, while people of color accumulate frustration.
It’s astonishingly awful the world we created and the world we live in. We are forced to live in two distinct worlds: one where we can be honest with ourselves and those who are like us, and a separate, parallel world where we simply do not know our neighbor and do not know how to communicate with them. And our neighbors are locked in the same world, even though it is not by their first choice: for survival, they must find ways to avoid honesty, because for them, honesty can kill.
Understanding and working toward breaking this dynamic is central to dismantling twenty-first-century racism.
Bingo. There is no way to simply pray it away, hope it away, ignore it away, redefine it away, or even just embrace it with the attitude “this is just how it is.”
To break these destructive racial divisions, we must understand and work. Yes, we have to work at knowing and acquiring knowledge. But we also have to work at breaking racism: we have to, as Dr. Kendi puts it, “become antiracists.”
Until I began to examine how racism had shaped me, I had little to contribute to the movement of righting racial wrongs.
I can testify this is hard work. I don’t know if everyone has to have it be that way. I know that for me I’ve invested in a few hundred books (and have read about 160 of them) in the past decade. I’ve listened to a lot of music. (The poets tells us truths that words cannot.) I’ve watched a lot of movies. I’ve deliberately sought out people and groups where I’m the distinct minority so that I can listen to people, meet them, and become their friend (as much as that is possible, and with the grace to understand that it may never be fully possible).
It is work. I read and fight the texts. I listen and I am not sure what I feel or how I should respond to anger and joy and frustration and hope: is it my place to do so? If not, then what? I watch and I reserve my reactions so that I can keep watching. I try endlessly to empty myself not so I become an non-entity, but so that I become, as far as possible, un-white: careful, open, honest, trustworthy, and safe. (It is a goal that is also a journey.)
Doing all this, increasing my efforts, digging deeper into myself, has been the means for me to reshape myself, to become someone I want to be rather than just to be what I was shaped to be.
I might never ever right a single wrong. But I can listen, I can work, I can be there, I can hope, I can support, I can love. Maybe for now that’s all I can do.
I can never change the fact that I’ve spent my whole life soaking up the attitudes and behaviors of a single culture. As effortlessly as breathing, I can be fast, tough, competitive, goal oriented, and self-sufficient.
The attitudes that I picked up from an early age from my surroundings—to be bold and confident and assertive and stubborn and creative and disruptive—are things I learned in order to survive and thrive in our white society as a white male. It works to make me successful—a rather ordinary and undistinguished person with little formal education or credentials. I stand on the shoulders of those who went before me and made it a smooth escalator ride up, up, up if I just don’t screw up too badly and make a few good, but lucky, choices here and there.
It is preposterously unlike the experiences of others. And using my formed character around those I would learn to understand builds such walls of resentment that it is impossible to get to know them.
What I must do is to not only unlearn my habits, but to break the things that make me—to become something I don’t know how to be: unwhite and undominated and unmale.
If I see this as negation and destruction—well, maybe that’s not healthy.
If I see this as restoration and repentance, of going back to what should have been, way back, before I screwed it up (and before I was screwed up)—that sounds hopeful and healthy.
Slowing down and making myself vulnerable to my own ignorance and to other cultures’ ways of being and knowing requires intention and effort.
Yikes. Both of these. Slowing down, not jumping ahead, listening, waiting—just not what I am! This is a hard thing for me. And making myself vulnerable—really, truly transparent and open and honest—well, just tell me to not be me. I am doing very well presenting myself as kind, but inside I’m waiting for the chance to explain myself and correct your mistaken ways…
I have so far to go…
Questions
Can you make a list of the ways in which America’s dominant culture has left an imprint on you? I could not have created much of a list before this journey. If you have trouble making one, you’re not alone!
- I need to be confident to survive
- I can succeed if I just keep trying
- I deserve to succeed and will either complain until I do or quit with the excuse that it wasn’t fair.
- I belong in the center.
- America is for people like me.
- America is usually always right in foreign affairs.
- America is the best country in all of history: the kindest, the most generous, the most faithful, the most trustworthy.
- America makes a place for every citizen.
- America is the shining city on the hill.
- America is built and blessed by God—specifically, the God of the Christians with a nod to the Jews for their framework.
- America was built by Christians who came poor and broken in order to worship God freely.
- Christians conquered and colonized America with some hazy misunderstanding with the indigenous along the way.
- While chattel slavery existed, it was largely beneficent, confined to the worst of the Southern slavemasters, none of whom were Christians, and was likely to die out anyway.
- Black Americans have no one to blame for their difficulties but themselves as a group and as individuals.
- Welfare is a handout, equal education does not require equal funding, voting is freely available to all, and poverty is a state of mind.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
I’ve been blogging this book along with a few other people 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/