I’m blogging my way through Waking Up White, by Debbie Irving. Along with a few other writers, we’re reading and commenting as we go. See the end of this post for more information.
Learning to value both independence and interdependence.
I am intrigued by this already. My predisposition is that independence is valuable in itself, and that is what I focus on. Gotta be honest, this was drilled into me in my formation. I can’t think of any one thing that led to this, but the entire period of my childhood and youth was that I had to go it alone, do it my way, follow my own path, build my own success. I’ve done so (although I’m not sure if I’m successful, because for me success is always where I haven’t yet conquered). The idea of interdependence sounds interesting, but I’m not sure of its value to me. I will play well with others, but I’m waiting to get away and just do it myself. It’s how I work, and how I want to work.
Like many cultural messages, the idea that independence reflects strength while dependence results from weakness seeped into my psyche without anyone explicitly saying it.
Yeah, this is it: the cultural messages that seep in from who-knows-where exactly. This is one of the messages, and I may have posted elsewhere that I found myself at some point thoroughly, but politely racist. As I’ve struggled to unwind myself from this value and this shape, I’ve found that part of my own unwinding is to figure out how this happened and who did it. Nowhere in my past can I remember of anyone explicitly telling me to be racist. I remember occasions when I heard racist sentiments and racist jokes, and I recoiled at them as being “not fair and not nice.”
And yet, with information and modeling and choices carefully aligned, I somehow still ended up to be the man who had no friends of color, no idea of what it meant to be anything but white in America, and little if any empathy for anyone who complained about their life experiences of being not-white. The racism was of the n-word variety. It was of the superiority and meritocracy that I believed in.
I believed in the Founding Fathers as being godly men ordained to establish a civilization in the wilderness, never, ever considering that many of them were white slavers or killers of the indigenous, never thinking through that they stole the property of African lives and the property of indigenous land and lives to build this Shining City on a Hill.
It’s a weird mixture of false belief about origins and meaning, and coupled with the idea that there is nothing to be valued in seeing the lives of others unless they directly can please me and help me—but I’ll do it my way, thank you very much. The enslaved and the indigenous were supplicants for freedom and liberty and dignity, and rather than see that they were robbed of what they were owed, I saw them as weak for needing.
My glorification of independence and individualism made me an easy target for the myth of meritocracy, and overshadowed what in my heart I knew to be true: the deep interconnectedness I longed for with family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers is core to human survival. Interdependence is our lifeblood.
Also true, but I never could put this into words. One of the things I haven’t talked about much but that Ms. Irving brought up early is the incredible loneliness of adult white males. We are raised and formed to be independent, noble thinkers and doers—and we end up in our 40s and 50s with no real intimacy in friendship, and we become old and alone in our 60s and 70s. We don’t lose that need for intimacy and connection, that interdependence, but we’re socialized to erase it and deny it. It is a very white thing.
I am lucky—if there is such a thing—that I encountered a recovery group back around 2008 where I met some guys and we formed a bond. Through the years the group of men has shifted, but there is a core of men here—me and another—where we’ve stayed connected, meet weekly, and let it all out. Honesty is prioritized, sure, but it’s the honesty of humility and admission, not of success and having it together.
The shifting in membership has largely been the departure of the white men who cannot handle the requirements of admitting weaknesses and need and interconnectedness, and the arrival of others, men of color, most especially Black men, but also of other ethnicities. I’ve gone from being in the clear majority (10:1) to the distinct minority (1:8). One of the things I have seen as a difference is the easy willingness and familiarity of the others with their own lives, something that just wasn’t present when the group was majority white males. There were attempts to bridge the gap, but it was too hard to continue. But what we had was good enough that others were drawn in. It is something to behold, and it is something that holds us up each week.
There is an interdependence of honesty and help that is genuine and healing. We all have that need to be connected in some ways. Independence might actually be useful, but it is not the only thing that is useful, and certainly not all the time.
What I couldn’t see until this journey was that my white family’s lack of “need” in large part resulted from our dependence on large government systems that conveyed to us the right to citizenship, land ownership, subsidized housing, preferential education, medical care, and retirement benefits.
This is significant, because all these things are almost entirely invisible to almost all white Americans. We whites just expect it to be this way: it’s natural to have a mortgage deduction to defray housing costs, but if you don’t own a house, you don’t get it. Historically Black Americans have been deliberately excluded from the housing market, so for generations they’ve lost money in depreciating assets or even in unrecoverable costs to rent and not own. But we whites look at the now, and think “If they just worked harder, like us, they’d be a success.” We don’t see the multi-generational losses that were caused by deliberate government policies and laws. American domestic governance is largely to the benefit of white Americans.
Because I couldn’t see that white-favored policies had assisted my family’s climb up the socioeconomic ladder, I couldn’t imagine the flip side: how the skin-color-based policies that favored white Americans could inhibit the hopes and dreams of Americans of color.
This is a key point. What I see is that when this is brought up in white-dominated groups that there is an explosive reaction. Shame, denial, explanation, self-promotion. But the reality is that being white is not a negative asset in life. It is not a guarantee of success, but it is not a drag on success. For our friends and compatriots of the wrong skin color and ethnic heritage, their appearance and their involuntary enrollment into the disfavored class is a constant drag on success, if not an outright block.
A Black American, for example, must not only try to succeed with all the methods and paths that white Americans do, they must also carry an extra tax of being Black and having to understand all the complexities of navigating success (“Am I too loud? Too angry? Too submissive? Too indifferent? Too emotional?”) that are roadblocks to success. It is a literal extra burden, a draw-down of energy, that white Americans simply don’t face.
I couldn’t see this for decades. I’m seeing it better now, and one of the things that has helped me to see more clearly is in being with my friends who share their experiences and roadblocks and life-draining circumstances that arise because they are Black and not white. It doesn’t have to be stated that way, of course. But as they share, I know that I will never experience their roadblocks in any significant way.
It piqued my curiosity to hear that while self-sufficiency and individual learning is a cornerstone in American schools, collaborative learning and interdependence have long been foundational in many other cultures.
Independence has shaped the American psyche, sure, but at the cost of a few winners and many losers. By design, capitalism thrives when a few are extraordinarily rewarded & can then use their rewards for power. (For example, why should a rich white man be able to buy his way into the political arena? It is simply the money that they’ve acquired.) But other cultures and nations have been successful and have stressed the cooperative nature of development. Independence is not the best thing—it is simply a thing, and it leads to some terrible outcomes for the majority, and certainly to isolation to almost everybody.
I had a story in my head about Rosie, one that said she couldn’t follow instructions, couldn’t sit still.
Rosie was a student in Ms. Irving’s class who could not sit still & who needed to jump up and help others. That was against the ideas of white propriety and respect the authority of the teacher. It was how Rosie was socialized by her own family and culture, but for five hours a day, Ms. Irving demanded that she stop being this way. Ms. Irving crushed her spirit daily but thought it was necessary for order and control. But then Ms. Irving had a flash of insight and strove to find ways to work with Rosie’s need to be cooperative and interdependent.
As I reflected on Rosie’s socialization toward interconnectedness, I wondered how I’d so thoroughly bought into the idea of independence as superior, when interdependence was also revered in my family.
Clearly we have an exception for our own needs in our own settings because “that’s just the way things are,” but we have different expectations for others. How many times we have heard “If those people would just start acting white, they could be successful”? Not with those exact words, of course, but “pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps” is often how it’s worded.
But those without boots cannot pull themselves up by non-existent bootstraps. That’s the actual meaning of this story. Yet we demand that those around us who are unsuccessful and shunned to just do what we do—but we succeed because our efforts are not impeded. The experience of the oppressed communities is that they must work together to journey together and to succeed together. We just don’t appreciate that.
…the old Ubuntu philosophy: “I am what I am because of who we all are.”
We always are this way. We just don’t always see it as true. But whether we are solitary or connected, we are formed by who we are with.
Questions
What did you learn about self-sufficiency and independence?
It was important to do all the work myself. Most of my education was self-taught (I could barely pay attention in class, and still cannot sit through a meeting and listen), and I arrived at the conclusion that as my education was on my own, so would my life successes be. “I can do that, if I try” was how I approached life—and still do.
How do you feel when you need to ask someone for help?
Invalidated, weak, helpless, stupid, unloveable. I just don’t ask for help.
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/