I’m blogging, along with several others, as I read the book by Debby Irving “Waking Up White.” We’ve committed to writing about our thoughts as we read along, and so this is another post in the series. For the complete list of posts, see https://stephenmatlock.com/category/writing/wakingupwhite/
Quotes from the book are formatted using a different style than my own reactions.
Somewhere early in this journey, a man of color signed a note to me, “In solidarity, James.” The word “solidarity” jolted me. Here he’d just extended to me the honor of being “in” something with him, and I was feeling uncomfortable about it. It made me feel like a fraud and a jerk.
Do you ever have moments of thinking “Get out of my head!”? It happens when I’m reading or listening to someone and they track with me on something so closely it’s as if my thoughts have become speech balloons and not thought bubbles.
My lord. This opening paragraph gets me right where I am.
I usually think that I am forever outside, rightly so, doing what I can for my own conciliation and understanding, forming friendships and relationships and becoming part of communities because I am looking to improve me and my own reactions. I’m not trying to fix anyone else; I’m not trying to save the world; I’m just reporting about the journey. And as far as I can tell when I examine my motivations, I’m doing the work for me and reporting the work so that others like me can find some analogs to their own journeys and perhaps warnings in my own missteps and misdirections that might help them avoid the pitfalls of soul work. I think my relationships are genuine, even though I am always suspecting that I’m not seeing my real motivations, and I think I’m making true decisions and developing true insights, although I grant that I am very, very often facile and shallow in those moments. I can’t just do theoretical work of essays and thoughts: my growing understanding impels me to make decisions on how I relate to people, even whom I relate to. I’ve deliberately made the effort to dive into the worlds that were once invisible to me, reading and listening and watching and appreciating not only the expressions but also attempting to comprehend and empathize with my friends as I listen. I’ve deliberately sought community with people who are unlike me—well, unlike me in ways that I once thought were the essentialist me that was white and male and straight and Christian; it’s not so easy now to make those statements as something I hold onto as whiteness. But I attempted to grasp, in the strongest sense of the mental condition, the meaning of whiteness, and in opposition, Blackness.
You can’t do this work of peeling away whiteness and encountering people outside the lens of whiteness without forming relationships, relationships that are real and open and honest. You can’t do the work of climbing down from the elevated position of isolation and supervision without entering into an egalitarian community. You can’t do the work of understanding the dreams of others and the needs of the human to grow and thrive and prosper without advocating the same, even to the point of expending energy and time to enable such pursuits of happiness.
You can’t do the work without forming bonds and building trust and finding friends. You can’t have friends if you are not, in return, a friend.
And you cannot be friends if you do not develop trust and respect and love and affirmation to the point that you admit that you are meeting on a bridge where you both can engage each other as open, honest, face-to-face souls.
In short, you cannot be in this journey and remain a spectator: you must, if you’re honest, become a player and find your position within the team.
For most of my life, I never used certain words of affirmation or relationship because they were simply foreign to me. I would not go beyond “friend” to any relationship outside of marriage and family, and a “brother” or “sister” was simply a sibling or a direct descendant in their relationship. (“You two play nice: you’re brothers.”)
When I began reading Christian literature, even before my conversion, I recognized that certain communities used “brother” and “sister” in ways that communicated a Christian understanding of connection and membership within the church. It was common in some Christian contexts that were open to me, and in many that were not. As I grew older, I began to realize that there was a special place for these two words in the context of the Black church, and I saw it as an element of the flavor that was not mine to take, to my eyes not much different than Quakers’ use of “Friend” to describe their own, a context I could not—and would not—share.
And then as I got to know my friends in the Black community and as I read literature and listened to music and watched films and videos and simply hung around with my friends, I began to see another meaning beyond the church meanings that I thought the word held or the shallow, secular meaning of “I know you well enough.” My friends used the word to refer to each other; I watched and listened very, very carefully to understand when it was appropriate and when it was not, so that I could understand if this was my word, too.
It was not my word, I learned at the start of this journey, by watching the reactions of my friends to its use by white people. I had learned earlier about other terms that were used by both groups to refer to my friends, and quickly caught on that context was entirely the meaning of the reaction to certain words. There were words that were for them, for them to use, and not for me to use. It wasn’t a difficult shoal to navigate. It was quite simple, and people like me, white males, mostly knew the unspoken rules. Violators might be given a pass the first time, but the response was usually an instant transformation from openness to becoming shut down. An empathetic person would recognize the faux pas and apologize. More commonly, the person using a term without owning it would just blather on, and community became a pointillist exercise in outlines and frozen relationships.
And such was “brother,” a term that was used by my friends, but not by me. It was not a loss, because it was not a word that I used in my life anyway. It was a word that indicated a relationship that was necessary and protective. I’m not included in that meaning, even though I am included in the word when used by my actual siblings, and that is okay.
So it startled me when a friend first used the word in a similar situation. “I’m…not a brother like that. Why are you saying that?” I know there is a wide space that’s likely not bridgeable given the ways things are. We can get closer, but the reality in the world we all live in is that I can never lose what was pushed onto me and that eventually became me: my whiteness. I can never be included with the same familiarity I might have with my own family and my own white friends because it is always there: I’m white. I’ve just accustomed myself to that, and that’s fine. I’m not a brother. It doesn’t work like that. It’s neither my world nor my word, and I am careful never to use the word because I see the value it has to my friends in their community and in their safety and trust. And that is okay.
So it startled me again this weekend when a friend used almost these same words as Ms. Irving quotes: “Welcome, brother, to the struggle.” I know what I’m being included in, and what I’m not being included in, and it’s fairly clear to me. Still, it was a moment of “wut?”
What solidarity? What struggle? What allyship? What accountability? I’m doing this for me and my own purposes, right? And at any moment I can back off—and have backed off—because it’s too hard or too threatening or just too much work. I can always, always, just walk away. There’s not a single thing that would keep me connected if I chose no longer to continue the journey.
And yet.
I was trusted.
It’s hard to explain how that hit me. I know all my faults and prevarications, my excuses and my absences, my temper and my ignorance, my false confidence and failed achievements. I know me. I’m not fit for such an appellation; I’ve not earned such an accolade.
Somehow, though, that wasn’t important. Sure, I’m all the faults, a collection of mistakes. But that wasn’t what made me, in their eyes, an ally. A brother. What it was is just simply that I was. I was there, and I was working, and I was building.
Welcome to the struggle, brother.
Golly.
So what does solidarity really look like?
Ms. Irving tells a powerful story of a teacher attempting to explain empathy to her students for a fellow classmate who, while undergoing cancer treatments, lost her hair. After failing to bridge the gap with words, she came in one day with a shaved head to indicate solidarity in a way that made sense to her students.
This makes sense to explain solidarity, and it makes sense to perform out of love and freedom acts that show my understanding of the lives of my friends. As Ms. Irving lists, there are things we can simply do as white people in blissful ignorance that our friends cannot; rather than attempt to make our friends fit into our worlds, such as telling them to act with officials in ways that are safe for white people, we make the effort to experience the world that our friends experience by not using our whiteness to get out of a pickle or to plead our case.
In addition to being prepared to stand up against institutional and political decisions that advantage white people while simultaneously disadvantaging people of color, I need to commit to bringing a new level of care into my relationships with colleagues and friends of color.
Again Ms. Irving relates a story from a friend about the value—and cost—of a friendship from the perspective of a Black friend. “For you, it’s a stroll across the room. For me, it’s a crawl through broken glass.”
I think about this very thing, a lot.
One of the people in my life who most inspires and leads me is a young Black activist, Andre Henry. I was not quite aware of his work for a while, just seeing his name here and there, but then maybe a year ago he posted something that just broke me: “I don’t know if I can trust my white friends.”
Now, up to that moment I’d never contacted him. I just followed him on Twitter because he was interesting and pointed and honest.
But that moment was a wince for me because it was true, true for Andre, true for me. He can’t trust his white friends, and I’m someone who’s untrustworthy because I might listen and nod my head and say “Amen” and when the organ sounds stand up with my testimony and flip my offering into the plate—but it’s also very likely I will simply walk away unchanged, unconvinced, and will take the time to correct what was said with a “well, actually.”
I think I replied with something like “I’m so sorry for this. You don’t deserve to be treated like that.” Not “Hey Andre, not all white people, y’know? You can trust me! I can do the work and stay consistent.”
I regret that people in my life and people I look up to must be clear-eyed about me, about those who are like me, and always remain a bit separate for their own safety.
I know the value of trust and safety when it comes to my friends, and they have been hurt and disappointed again and again. The safest thing for them is to keep the barrier up and to be casual and non-committal because eventually, their white friends are going to let them down. It’s a painful thing to realize, and it is almost impossible to fix.
Still, we must try—and if not “we,” then “I.”
I asked my friend if her daughter was planning to do a winter sport. Instead of using her daughter’s name, however, I used the name of the one other black girl on the team.
Oh. God.
I have now done this twice in the last year, and although I’m mortified, my feelings don’t make the situation better. And although apologies were made, the reality is that an apology does not really fix the situation or the reactions or the feelings. It is just an admission of error and a promise of correction—all good things, right?—but the continued behavior of white people in forgetting valuable, important facts such as a name is a way of saying “we’re friends, but in the sense that I might occasionally remember your name.”
“Not want to have to learn his name? Are you kidding me? That’s what this is about? Man, we black folks have been learning everything about you for years! We know your TV shows; we know your hair products; we know your names; we know how you like to do things. We have to! Is it really that much to ask to meet us halfway?”
The story here is that a lawyer in a law firm was not included in the law firm’s social net because his name was “hard to pronounce.” In response, a Black lawyer gave them the readout on the hard work that people of color must put into living around white people, and how little work white people put into it by contrast. The “We have to” refers to something that white people don’t see: we’re dangerous and unpredictable, so the world around of us comprising people who are not-white must be on guard at all times in an attempt just to stay safe—and with such vigilance, relationship and intimacy are extremely difficult to create and experience, much less enjoy. There are countless stories of Black Americans essentially minding their own business when a white American decides that they don’t belong or are doing something that the white person doesn’t like or simply exercising choices that white people think (unconsciously) are reserved for white people. Having a BBQ in a park, entering an apartment complex, taking a nap in a common room, enjoying a pool party in a gated community—these are all things that have triggered white people to call the authorities. Of course the people who are around us white people are vigilant! And if they can take the work to understand us, then we have no excuse to not do the small act which is to get to know their names as well as their appearance. (Nothing is so dreadful as to be one of two or three people of a race in a community of white people and to be swapped out as interchangeable. I’m telling you this. Don’t skip this.)
Questions
Think of an issue in your own community (town, school, workplace, religious organization) that has been raised by people of color. How would you approach people who are focused on the problem? How would you go about being in solidarity with them? What could you offer?
Policing of the presence of Black people
One of the issues I hear from friends (and see on their mobile videos) is the policing of their presence. Sure, it’s done by the police themselves, either at the behest of someone else or the curiosity of the police officers, but there is a sense that our Black neighbors don’t really belong. Whether it’s dismissing the concerns of our Black community when the police department hires an officer with a documented past of racist actions against Black males in other jurisdictions, concerns that are dismissed with “Well, with so few Black men it’s not likely to happen here,” or it’s being stopped by officers as they shop or take a walk or jog, or it’s having the police be called out when a car with Black people in it drives through the neighborhood, there is a common belief that Black people don’t belong here.
How would I approach them? I think I’d say that I hear you, and I want you to be fully accepted here. I’d do my damnedest to believe them and to listen, and then I’d do what I could to explain to my neighbors and white friends that what they’re doing and saying is harmful to the community. Solidarity would be more difficult because this is a case of definitely being “othered.” I’d hate to simply call the police out on white people misbehaving because that doesn’t fix the issue. I can passively not call out behavior. I don’t know how I’d participate in actions of solidarity here. Maybe the conversations can be escalated with questions like “Who can jog around at night? Are you calling the police on white joggers? Why can a car full of white teenagers drive around at night?” and so on. I need further education here
More than a racial reconciliation advocate
One thing I do hear from my friends is their annoyance in being clumped together as “racial reconciliation advocates,” as if they all have the same characteristics and that it’s just a peculiarity that they have this desire for justice that white people don’t have. “I’m more than an Angry Black Man” is what I hear, and yeah, that gets thrown around as well. While there is plenty to do in reconciliation, in many instances my friends just want to eat their meal, have a drink, do some shopping, pump their gas without it turning into a White Person Gets Saved moment.
How would I express solidarity? I guess by not treating meetups as a moment to explore Black issues but rather just be ourselves, which can include this but doesn’t have to. It’s tricky for me—not every conversation needs to go into the direction of racial issues, but so many times things that are important to us have an element of discomfort based upon race. We like to golf, sure; but then when my friends play golf they have confrontations with white guys who demand to play through or whatever, and it escalates. It’s the common experience that every situation with white people can escalate, so in every instance, my friends must be vigilant unless they’re in a safe place where, by design and choice, there are few, if any, white people.
In a few instances when I’ve been with my friends and a white guy starts erupting in racism, I’ve stood up and read them the riot act, but my friends don’t ask for this. I think they’re not happy with me making a scene because it will redound to them, whether it’s abuse after I leave or having us all threatened with ejection. There’s a reason my friends attempt to quiet down a racist eruption by neutral words and by changing the subject, and I think it has to do with the idea of “sacrifice some self-defense so we can have a little peace.” So I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
If I love You, I Have to Make You Conscious of the Things You Don’t See
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/