This is another post in the series Waking Up White, exploring the book by Debby Irving of the same name. For the complete list of posts, see https://stephenmatlock.com/category/writing/wakingupwhite/
I’m not an active snob, just a well-programmed passive one.
The problem of thinking that life is either or, says Ms. Irving, is that after we divide people, we stop paying attention to those in the “wrong” group. We favor the “right” people. We become, conscious or not, of class and status based upon our classification system and our values used to rank people. What Ms. Irving suggests as a replacement is curiosity and kindness and respect and active listening.
When I think about where I got the idea that intelligence and insight correlated to a certain type of person, it comes back to what wasn’t said. Though no one close to me bad-mouthed people outside of my culture, the constant praise for people, especially white men, within my culture made its mark.
Key point for me, I think, in that for the most part I was raised around people who were not overtly and grossly white racist. My memory is of course somewhat hazy, and we sometimes befog the lines of remembrance for reasons we don’t understand (Why did I suppress the death of a best friend for 40 years? I still do not know why—but I know that I did.)
But passively I grew up in a culture that told me that white people, especially white males, were the true heroes of every story, the discoverers of every land, the inventors of every clever tool and toy, the initiators of all good things, the deciders of all that was good and just—and I self-selected the resources growing up and becoming an adult that confirmed that.
One measure of this is in my reading and consumption of the arts and entertainment. For the most part, everyone I read and all the works I consumed where white, and almost always white males.
I can’t tell you the first non-white author I read, and knew that they were not white, but I think it was The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coats. It’s his coming-of-age book, describing his childhood, youth, and early years of adulthood. I loved the style, but something in the book struck me. I’ll tell you what that was, but with the caveat that I’m not necessarily happy with my own thoughts at the time. Take them as the thoughts of someone discovering for the first time that there is a hidden land that exists all around them that they never saw.
The first thing that struck me was the writing. It was beautiful, and even though Coates has gone on to distinctly improve his style, this book, his first book, is full of stark honesty. I loved the writing.
I loved the story and the unfolding. I loved hearing about an entire manner of life that I had little experience with. My own family life seemed straightforward and uncomplicated. His…was not. We can survive a lot as kids and as adults, it seems, and the experience always changes us—but most of the time we’re recognizably & purely human.
And I loved the insight of a young boy sitting on his bed reading the stories of Narnia. That was the connection for me—not so much Narnia itself but the discovering in isolation the ideas in a book and consuming them. Hey, that’s just like me. That was the eyeblink moment when I first realized how much I’d been othering people like Coates. (I’m saying this to help you see what I am, and maybe for you to see what you are. It’s good to come out of ignorance and self-centeredness and even smugness, but the process isn’t a pure one.) There was—and still is—very little that is common in the life of a globally recognized literary resource and the life of someone like me who muddles along in obscurity. But there is a lot in common in the humanity and personality and uniqueness of everyone who discovers thought and self and purpose in reading alone on a bed one day.
Yeah, that awareness can be seen as boxes and ladders. But for me it was that first connection with the other. “Oh, I see.” It was the break.
He took a deep breath and said, “You want to see who I really am?”
Gotta confess, I have done similar things, most recently this year, when there was some kerfuffle about my bona fides, and I responded in self-justification. I regret doing so and regret my manner of responding. But in general I’ve come to realize that the very worst thing I can do is to show off my own journey.
But wait, you say? What do you call this? This journey I do in public is all a series of justifications, right? Look how pure I’m becoming. Look how righteous. Look how much I am the most excessively & deliberately accommodating in public on a blog.
Well, perhaps it is almost entirely all that.
My goal, however, remains the same. I’m a white male who grew up in an all-white environment where whiteness and maleness were considered the highest and best of all things. Getting out of that required—and still requires—magic and fairy dust and hopes and illusions and even faith, but what I needed—and still need—is the idea that I can do this, the model by people who’ve done this before, the broken path and hard journey by others who’ve tried, and maybe even succeeded enough that they could say “I have overcome.”
I do this in public for the people like me, so they can believe for themselves that they can unwind from stark white racism, even when it’s hidden behind politeness and carefulness and obedience. I figure that if I do this in the open, with all the mistakes exposed and with all the ways in which I try to polish my efforts to appear better than they are, as a way to help those people like me who want to find the way out, but don’t have that first door opened yet.
It’s possible to change, no matter when you start. Don’t follow me, but maybe take some ideas on how to walk the journey yourself.
But trying to cram the complexity of humanity into either /or and better/worse categories has robbed me time and again of connecting with and learning from fellow human beings.
Being white and racist is a very successful strategy. It assumes the smoothest road and the greatest rewards at the end of the journey. As was said earlier in the book, it is the tailwind that pushes white men and women along, an extra oomph. It takes effort and choices to fail (not always from oneself) as a white person.
But…
…it is very hard to form connections along the way. Peak whiteness is friendless, and at the end whiteness is to die with the most toys.
Whiteness means not knowing people in all their wonderful quiddities and oddities and peculiarities, their hopes and dreams, their failures and their brokenness, their incredible strengths and their desperate failures.
I’m satisfied now to make the effort to know people, as they are, and not worry about how I appear to them. Letting go of whiteness is a great relief, of course, but it is also the pathway to an incredibly rich and fulfilling journey.
People have lost friends, family, jobs, status, and lives by trying to speak up and take action for racial justice.
Well… This is true, almost no matter how little we do. (I suppose, like a Secret Santa, we can do the work of antiracism without anyone noticing, but I suspect it can’t be done for very long without something coming out.) I won’t bore you with the details, but yes, doing work for racial justice will lead to the disruption of some connections. It doesn’t even take an overt action against someone in your own community. Simply speaking up will cause some of your connections to disconnect. The more you do, the more of your connections you’ll disrupt, and in my experience, the more people you will lose. Most of the disconnections will happen without anything being said to you. Some will come with an overt statement (I’ve had only one of these in eleven years). Some will come with a set of questions but without understanding behind it.
I’d just suggest that it’s okay to leave behind people who do not want to know you as you are and as you are becoming. Really. Your choices do not make them bad people. They are not in the “wrong people” category (to keep up the theme of this chapter). They are simply not able to follow you for all sorts of reasons.
You’ll find new people. Really. The more you speak up & the more you do, the more you’ll find new people who are doing what you’re doing—and if you take to heart with what Ms. Irving says here in this chapter, part of the delight in finding new people is learning to see and listen to them without slotting them and without making them the “new right people with the approved values and perspectives.” The new people you’ll find are part of your process of discovery. Some might not even be sympathetic to you, but you’ll be learning how to see and love people as they are.
You’ll fail at this, and you’ll revert to the boxes and ladders—but this is all a process, and you’ll keep learning.
Will you eventually see value in the people who hold on to racism? Yes. They’re people, but with destructive ideas. Someone who thinks a dam should be built to water the land and provide water to people, and someone who thinks a dam should be destroyed to cause a catastrophe, are both people, but you don’t have to agree that the ideas are equally constructive. (I’ll give you a hint: learning to see people outside of the boxes you created will give you an entirely new spectrum of things to see and value.)
Had I known sooner, perhaps I would have run toward, not stumbled on, the borderlands where people from different cultures come together to understand their connection to a shared social system.
Yes, this. Finding out the wonderful place of freedom is worth everything—and finding it as soon as possible makes for a life that is as full and rich as possible & as early as possible.
No one has to wait to begin.
Questions
Boxing and Ranking
Pick a six-hour period in which you commit to noticing your tendency to box or rank a person or idea. Make a note about each incident, be it a person on the bus, a family member, a colleague, or a person in the media. At the end of your observation period, explore one incident in which you boxed and ranked a person with whom you were interacting. Does your conscious mind agree with your initial judgment? What, if anything, do you think you could have learned had you replaced judgment with curiosity in that situation?
I’m off work for a few days (Thanksgiving Day holiday), so I can’t do this immediately. I’ll give it a try when I return to work on Monday.
(Note: it’s “Black Friday,” which might be the best day to see humans as who they are, with the greatest temptation to put them into boxes and baskets. Maybe I’ll take a quick drive to a megastore to watch people at the Black Friday sales…)
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/