#WakingUpWhite Chapter 40: Bull in a China Shop

Domino tiles laid out on a wooden table

I’m reading chapters from Waking Up White, by Debbie Irving, and blogging my responses. Quotes are from the book, and my responses follow.

How habits that seem so innocuous to me can alienate people of color.

What is unbelievable is how timely this is for today, for right now, for this moment. I’m sure it’s no secret that I an consciously engaging in communities that are not like my default white community, for reasons that have to do with my own understanding, to repent of my selfish self-centered ways, to become a genuine human being, to learn about the lives of other people, and to see their value—and ultimately to love them. (Yikes. This sounds so much like a self-improvement project. Welp. I’m being honest with where I am, right now. I’d rather tell you as much of the why as I can understand without worrying too much how it makes me look, and perhaps the self-awareness is a sign that there is more stuff still to come.) I’ve been white-centered for five decades, and I think it’s time to let go of that identity as my only identity. Am I really being in the moment? Am I listening? Am I becoming less “white” in what I do and say and how I think and feel and react? I don’t know, and I don’t know how to not be the way I am. I’m batting around in the dark trying to hit something. And yes, I worry that my attempts to unwind myself from a white identity is just another form of white identity—the identity of the Good White Guy Who Is Still Both Painfully Clueless and White.

So I’m all here for this, on how to behave as less offensive and less alienating.

I should add to this my regret at my past actions and my present condition. Because I’ve been largely focused on myself and my own community for most of my life, I haven’t built the bridges to understand my friends in the communities where I am attempting to live right now. I am still (and maybe will always be) on the outside. This has worked splendidly in the past when I neither knew nor cared, but now—now it’s different, and it is a grief to me that I’m going be unable to be with them in their own grief. I’m sure I’m not missed, as my friends have gotten along without my involvement. But still—I regret that the consequences of my indifference are now expressed as the lack of intimacy and connection. The best I can say is that I am in sorrow when they are in sorrow, and that will have to be the best I can do—it is not possible to be genuine and to interrupt someone in their grief. But I watch, and I grieve, and I understand.

What passed for normal in my white world had the potential to alienate people of color. Until I understood this problem, I moved clumsily around people of color, creating unintentional slights, reinforcing the white stereotype, and perpetuating the kind of mistrust and misunderstanding that fuels racism.

This is so key, right here. I think it’s great to be working on becoming anti-racist, or less white-centered, or less presumptuous of stereotyping people. Really. It’s great to have the will to do this, and I would say this to anyone who says “I want to unwind myself from this coiled spring that is the power of white racism.” I mean, yay for that. But the desire to become a more loving and understanding and accepting and even powerful and dynamic about equity and fairness does not translate into being automatically a great white person around BBIPOC (Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color). Sure, we can behave less overtly racialist, but there are still the white social structures and behaviors we still participate in, even evangelize about, because they seem ordinary and normal to us as useful tools for social connections. And yet, these tools are actively harmful to our friends. We don’t know about it, usually, and when we find out that what we’re doing is actually & actively harming our friends, I gotta say that our typical reaction is to deny that we harmed them because “we didn’t mean any harm.”

Uh, no. That is not how it works. I can appreciate this idea that because we mean well that the results of our efforts are for good, but the actual factual reality is that this is a lie told to us to make us feel good about our actions and to excuse us from repentance about our ignorance and our wounding of others.

As my friends say, “Impact > Intent.” We can have the best of intentions, but stupid, ignorant behavior can be as harmful as focused directed harm. Just. As. Harmful. We can feel that we don’t deserve the blowback because “All I said was,” and really mean it. But our sincerity does nothing here to affect the feelings and reactions of our friends and our communities.

We need to be sure no one’s trying to put himself or herself above anyone else. One of the ways we can do that is by not going around thinking we’re experts, or trying to figure out who’s the better antiracist.

I love the trap Ms. Irving is setting here. I immediately signed on to this. “Of course I’m the truly humble student learning and not bringing judgments. I’m not like those other people who are just not doing the work or living in the community or elevating others. I’m actually doing quite a nice job. Where’s the gold star?”

I’m not saying I’m proud of thinking like this—but I assure you this goes through my mind until I become aware & shut it down—because it’s embarrassing. I’m not sure I’m doing the work to root it out, though.

“And this is hard to say, but I gotta say it,” Dr. Moore continued. “This conference is killing our colleagues of color.”

Dr. Moore is the organizer of the White Privilege Conference where Ms. Irving attended as a participant/facilitator/leader, and this shocked her. All around here were well-meaning people who all seemed to have the desire to help, and the conference organizer was telling them directly that the white people in the group were acting—right at that moment!—so white that it was hurting the BBIPOC participants and leaders. And of course Ms. Irving is dumbfounded—and confused, and a bit hurt and a bit angry.

I would be, too. I mean, I am so good inside

“Catch your white brothers and sisters, and help them. Don’t fall into the kind of thinking and acting that hurts people of color.”

Dr. Moore tells the white leaders and facilitators that they should be on the alert for the behaviors and words that hurt people of color. It comes across to me that the white leaders and facilitators were expecting the more overt signs of racist behaviors and words, such as well-recognized harmful words or actions that of course nice white people working on their anti-racist actions would never do. I’d be just as puzzled, and I would genuinely ask “who, me?”

“What kind of things is he talking about? How are people being hurt?” “Oh you know, white people acting all professional and talking about this degree or that degree. Stuff like that.”

This was a twist for me, because yes, I do ask people about their careers. And although like Ms. Irving I don’t have a degree, I can get offensive about asking about degrees. I mean well (!) in that I want to acknowledge hard work. But it comes across as credential-checking, and it’s offensive.

Yikes.

As we walked away, Barbara said, “You remember how you asked Henry right off the bat what he did for work?” … “That’s one of those things I’ve learned can drive people of color crazy.” … “This glorification of professional status is a white culture thing.”

Barbara is Ms. Irving’s Black friend. Henry is a Black man at their lunch table. Ms. Irving asked the innocuous (to her) question “so what do you do?” Perfectly reasonable, but in the reality of the communities of color, this comes across as “you don’t have as much meaning if you don’t have a recognizable job that brings you status.

Man, I wish I had read this a year ago. But I don’t know that it would have stopped me. I’d just find another “innocuous” white thing to do because it’s ingrained in me.

I wondered if perhaps these white antiracists were taking things a little too far. What took me much longer to see was the connection between my tip-of-the-iceberg behaviors and the underlying belief system that drove them.

Yes, this. Underlying the actions—which I attempt to beat down as they pop up like those gophers at a game arcade—is the underlying belief system and the feeling of being okay now that I’ve worked on the hard stuff. There’s something still to work on in me, the “whiteness” that drives me to speak and act as I do, to center myself and my safety and my “goodness.”

Yikes

It’s still hard for me not to start a conversation with “So what do you do for work?”

Yeah, me, too. It’s something I do, and if I vow to rethink this—this is going to be a major change.

Part of becoming multicultural means letting go of the need to be perfect, or even polite, as you’ve known it. It means being willing to be authentic and to stay engaged when it gets uncomfortable.

This might sound like a switch in what Ms. Irving is saying, but it’s not. It’s part of the white behaviors and attitudes that we are supposed to be “good,” and when we’re not, we’re “bad.” So we are mortified when we do “bad,” and either hide or excuse it. “I’m a good person & I shouldn’t have done that.” Well, I get that, but this isn’t that. This is a matter of ignorance and learned behaviors, as well as a shaped character that’s formed to center us as white people being white people.

I think it’s okay to be mortified. We didn’t act according to our stated or held values. We slipped. We fell. We erred.

But what Ms. Irving says here is far, far different and far, far harder: when we do something stupid and self-centered and harmful, we need to stick it out to work through the repentance and restoration, to let those whom we offend be able to tell us, directly, what we did.

Gotta say, it’s like dying.

But we gotta do it if we want to re-form our image into something that we want—into someone whom we’d love.

Could there be any greater irony than having once thought myself raceless only to discover that not only do I have a race, but nearly all my thoughts and actions are born of the culture in which it’s embedded? I know now that I am not raceless; in fact, I am a living, breathing expression of the white culture.

<raises hand…>

Yep. I will probably never not be “white.” The forming is so strong, so often re-applied, so often checked and approved. I regret that. But I will try to unlearn and unwind and unstick myself, as best I can, and I intend to stay through the entire mess. I’m sorry for all the problems I’ve caused, and will cause. But if I do nothing, I’ll stay the same. And that is not something I want to live in, not anymore.


Questions

Make a list of five conversation starters that have nothing to do with identifying a person by where they’re from, what they do for work, or any other sorting and ranking criteria.

For example, think about how you’d feel asking or being asked, “So what was the most interesting thing that happened in your day today?”

  • So tell me about your hobbies.
  • What is the thing you’re most passionate about?
  • What something you wish more people understood?
  • If you could be what you wanted to be as a child, what would you be doing now?
  • What gives you the greatest happiness?
  • What do you hope that the future brings?

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/

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