I’ve been blogging with friends as I read through “Waking Up White,” by Debby Irving. We’re committed to reading, thinking, and then writing about our thoughts. For a complete list of posts from my own journey, see https://stephenmatlock.com/category/writing/wakingupwhite/
Quote from Ms. Irving’s book appear using a format to distinguish them from my own words in response.
Race is not a cause, it’s a part of becoming fully human. —Billie Mayo
Goodness. Interesting and provocative! One of the great temptations of white people when confronting racism is to wish earnestly that it would go away as a difficult and troubling topic. And yet—here it is.
I write and edit for Our Human Family, a magazine about diversity, inclusion, and equity. We have a motto “We are more alike than we are different.” Not “we aren’t different, at all.” Not “we are exclusively slotted into immutable categories that also define and limit us.” But rather “we are individuals unique but together always a family.”
I couldn’t have known at the age of five that by thinking a fellow human being less human, I made myself less human, or that by disconnecting from my human family I began the process of disconnecting from my natural intuition and ability to love, relying more and more on what I was told and less and less on what I felt.
I think back, as much as I can remember, to how I became turned into a racist. Now I know that raises hackles in the minds of a lot of white people. “You weren’t racist. You were perfectly adjusted.” And more tempting to hear “You aren’t racist now, except when you focus on racism. Then, you’re unpleasant. So stop being unpleasant and return to innocence.” Lordy, it is the apple offered to Eve but an apple that removes knowledge and accountability. Polish it if you must, make me wait while you give it a shine, but I want it, right now.
I don’t think that many people were deliberately skewing my understanding of race and racism. Almost all the people in my experience were simply doing what felt right and normal to them. We lived in a white neighborhood. That was normal. We socialized with white people only. Normal. We were educated among white children only, with white teachers and principles only. Normal. We were given jobs by white owners and managers and worked alongside white people, and occasionally might have direct reports who were not white—but who were not on the same track as we were. We are bred white, raised white, and we live white—and it is entirely normal and functional.
But Ms. Irving, again, points out that racism is not only a wound we make in others, it is a scar that hardens our own hearts. Racism not only separates us from others in the Beloved Community; it stiffens our emotional range and reduces the depths of our experience. Racism isn’t just a bad thing; racism is destructive to our humanness.
Now obviously this: fighting racism isn’t about white people discovering a Bad Thing and then making it right. This isn’t some sentimental glurge about “being nice” and “playing fair” and “if only we wouldn’t see color.” Balderdash. Racism is a destructive, inchoate, endemic, and systemic thing that we created as white people to live on top of the world in absolute confidence, isolated, sure, but “winning.” Being anti-racist isn’t just about doing a Good Thing and getting the award or ribbon or cookie.
It is about doing the very real work to restore justice to our friends and to bring equality and freedom and restoration for all that has been robbed.
But the robbery was not just of our friends’ enjoyment of life: it is also the robbery of our own souls and our own sense of connection and worth. We who are racist are not simply wrong (and yes, we are wrong: sit in that feeling for a while)—we have been broken by racism and made to live a much lesser life. We are constrained in the full expression of our humanity in similar ways (but not with similar restrictions) to our friends. Fighting racism is the decent and good and right thing to do, yes. Those are moral values we seem to be imprinted with. But the mercenary value here is important as well: when we unlock ourselves from racism, we also are made free from hate and isolation and division.
If you can’t fight against racism because you just don’t see the value, or don’t see the importance, or don’t believe the pain—then I’ll do what I can to argue for your own selfish motives, that unwinding from racism will make you free, and whole, and able to feel.
I wish we were noble people who did things because they’re right. Maybe we do—sometimes. But often we do what’s right because frankly it works out to our own healing and satisfaction. So I’m making that plea: for your own sake, for your own joy, for your own satisfaction—fight the racism that has corrupted and broken and stained you.
You will live again if you do.
As I picked up the notion that race and racism belonged to other people, my mind was trained 180 degrees away from the harsh reality that racism is a problem created by white people and blamed on people of color.
It’s very hard for us to see what’s right in front of us, and most of us spend our entire lives doing so—which gives rise to the practice of therapy. I do not, in any way, disparage therapy. I’ve been in therapy a few times, and in every case, I’ve benefitted immensely. I would not dismiss the value and do not dismiss the process—it is time and listening and thinking and then, sometimes, doing. What I’ve learned in therapy, though, is how much of it for me has been simply rediscovering who I really am as opposed to who I should be or what I’m expected to be. And in that discovery of myself, I discovered the freedom of seeing the truth.
I can’t tell you that there is a magic solution to this problem of race and racism. You might be under the care of a therapist and not arrive at this conclusion for yourself. You might be convinced that you already see the truth. Our minds seemed to be so constructed as to convince us that we understand even when we are completely ignorant and mistaken—and white men, I have to say, are formed to be this way to a degree unlike any other mind in the West.
There is a sense of culpability and guilt when we think about race, and often it blocks us from truth. I’m not saying that we can’t look at facts like 1+1=2, or that in fourteen-hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. These are what we fairly consider to be facts. But what we can’t see—because we’ve been trained not to see it!—is the reality of the world around us. 1+1=2, which has led to the idea (among others) that an increase in ownership is more satisfying than an enjoyment of the present. The arrival of Columbus in the Americas was catastrophic to the Americas—and to Europe as well, leading to the rise of white supremacy because it was so extraordinarily profitable to be a white supremacist. We have white supremacy baked into Western culture precisely because the white mind chose events and circumstances that glorified whiteness, from religion to art to politics to war to the economy. White minds shunted off every other fact and every other meaning, from the erasure of the indigenous by Manifest Destiny & the Doctrine of Discovery to the preposterous but widely accepted lie that the U.S. “belongs” to the white race. (Guys, we weren’t here first, and the only reason we think we own it is that we killed all the former owners and voided all their contracts. We “own” the United States much like Al Capone “owned” his empire.)
But I’m telling you, as bluntly as I can—we white people own the issue of race, 100%. We literally created this problem because we created “race.” The only people who can change race and racism are us. That’s it. Only us.
I understand the desire to find anything else to blame or anyone else to take up that cross. But it is ours to take. And when we do—it is for our own healing and redemption as well as the restoration and liberty and freedom of others.
I am telling you—there is an extraordinary freedom waiting for us if we would simply take ownership of racism.
By being taught to buck up and compete in a world of individual players, I learned to silence feelings of vulnerability, curiosity, and compassion.
This is a key thing for me as I am unwinding from racism. My formation as a white person stripped me of the satisfaction of my feelings. They were still there. But I was directed to void them, and focus on the mind, and the objectives, and the goals. Leadership, strength, purpose, duty, sacrifice. But in that entire creation, what I wanted and what I was didn’t matter.
I’ll admit, I absolutely hate the feelings sometimes. I hate the feelings of shame and guilt, of culpability and of ownership, of acknowledging what a shit I am most of the time. I am badly behaved, and my character is badly formed. It’s not an excuse of “I can’t help it.” It is the very deep, raw knowledge that I know better as well as I want better, and yet—here I am, constantly choosing the worst possible options. Of course I’m tempted to simply do away with the feelings. As long as I’m doing the right things, my feelings don’t matter.
Be strong. Be brave. Don’t cry.
Well, okay, I’ve done that. I’ve been successful at that. But I lost the connection with my self.
One of the things I do now is cry. Openly. I am experiencing the feelings in the moment. I am not ashamed of reading a book on the bus and weeping. I’m not ashamed of hearing a friend discuss their pain and crying with them. I’m not ashamed of tears when my emotions are overwhelmed. There is nothing—nothing!—weak about crying, because emotions are, and emotions tell us what our feelings mean.
Who cares what others think? Living life connected to my emotions is life to me.
Allowing myself to feel anger, grief, or confusion was tantamount to saying I was weak. Admitting vulnerability felt like letting go of my ladder rung and plummeting, landing who knows where.
All of this. All of this.
Feelings are okay. There’s something very wrong with us that we think the way to comfort people in their griefs and pains is to tell them “you shouldn’t feel that way.” [Swear words deleted. There is still the hint of the Puritan in me.] There is no one right way to feel. You feel what you feel. When you are broken or hurt or incapacitated and you feel the emotions, you are okay for doing so.
You and I are going to screw up—badly!—in our anti-racist work. I guarantee it. You and I will say things that are ignorant, hurtful, mean-spirited, even thoroughly, undeniably racist. Even as we struggle to do it right, we will fail.
But we simply have to go on. We have to feel our feelings of shame and lament, feel our sorrow over our imperfect understanding and practice, feel our sense of removal and disconnect by our actions. All of them. This is how we grow as humans—we feel as well as we think.
I cannot tell you of the many, many stupid, hurtful, destructive, selfish, arrogantly racist words I’ve said and things I’ve done since determining to work on my racism. I assure you, I have hurt the people I claim to love, repeatedly, thoroughly, aggressively. I am ashamed of my actions, and if God would grant me one favor it would be to let me go back and just stop me, just one time. I’ve hurt my best friends—really hurt them. I’ve brought them shame and embarrassment. God, I’ve been an entire ass. I do not think for a moment any one of them should stand by me, and I’m sure that every one of them is always on guard because I’m untrustworthy and unsafe.
But I’m going to grasp the nettle of failure and pain and even regret because it is the only way that I know to be responsible, to grow, to learn how to be compassionate, and to love my friends. I am a terrible friend, in many ways. But I will fight to make myself a better one, every single day of my life, as God gives me breath.
My vulnerability also became the birthplace for the courage I needed to put this book out into the world, as part of an effort to embolden other white Americans to reconsider their ideas about race, racism, and their role in it.
I feel this so much. It’s odd, after the fact, to think that it’s courageous to speak the truth and to seek healing. I look back and think “what a pretentious person I am. Making it some valorous duty to fight racism. All you are doing is simply the right thing. There’s nothing courageous about that.”
But. As laughable as it is in hindsight—it is still difficult for the coward to be brave, for the liar to speak truth, for the undependable to claim honor. We know how unfit we are to speak out—we who have participated in this construct of racism our whole lives: how can we be fit to now claim to have moved beyond or above.
It’s perhaps not a very remarkable thing at all, for the racist to say “I think I’m wrong. Maybe I can do better. Maybe we can all do better.” But for me, it is enough that we are doing so. My journey was started a dozen years ago, and through many turns, many failures, many, many mistakes, I’ve come this far. I look back and I think “what a putz you were.” But even though I’m a putz, I’m still trying.
One of the short stories I wrote earlier is about an ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. And “finds himself” is doing a lot of work here. It’s set in a world that is simply collapsing, and the only hope is for national alliances to find their best and brights—and just send them away to start over. The Earth is simply beyond saving. David Ifiemi is going to settle a distant planet as an exobiologist but discovers that along the way he is asked by fate to make an extraordinary sacrifice. Nothing in life showed his bravery—all along the way it was duty and honor and filial obedience. But then, in the moment, he remembered that courage is not that we are brave, but that we are willing. “Courage is that I tremble, but I still try.” And that is enough to spark him to his life’s passion and purpose.
Now, in the story David is heroic. I’m not heroic. I’m rather ordinary and undistinguished and have a reputation as a clown and a lightweight. But I’m going to use what I am—who I am—as fully as I know how.
Racism demands an artificial and divisive construction of humanity, in terms of how I make sense of others and also how I envision myself.
This is a key thought. Racism of course is destructive to people. But also—it is so isolating. It is as if we humans, having decided that the pain of loneliness was so great, that we decided to impose a solution that increased the loneliness. It is the opposite of healing and meaning. But we choose it. Something in us is so broken that we choose pain instead of healing.
I believe it’s possible, though, to reach through that pain and that loneliness, and work to restore the connection.
[My father’s] love for fellow human beings he may have wanted to use his privilege to reach out to was outweighed by his fear of losing his privilege by doing so.
In the closing days of her father’s life, Ms. Irving points out that he was mostly silenced by his final disease. And yet he blurted out at one point, near the end, that he wished he had done more. But in the context of the world he found himself in—of success and wealth and status—he may have also found that he had not grabbed anything worth keeping. (Ms. Irving admits that she could not probe his thoughts, not only because of the circumstances, but that she herself was not able to have those intimate discussion that were about truth and listening.)
We can’t do a single thing about yesterday. We certainly can’t guarantee what we’ll do tomorrow. All we have is today, to make use of it the best we can.
I had not yet learned the power of bearing witness to a fellow human being needing to release a private pain.
Goodness. This right here took me out. This is all that it is, really. This is what intimacy is, and friendship, and community, and love. This is connection. This is life. This is experiencing life. To sit with your fellow human being, listening to them share their own pains, and simply bearing witness.
Lord knows I don’t ever want to find myself at the end of my life, my body spent, wishing back time so I could love more deeply or do more to leave the world a better place.
Oh lord. None of the 24,000 days of my past are available for edits. They are a permanent record. All that remains is whatever day—or hour, or minute—of today, and then maybe tomorrow, if it’s granted.
The best I can do is to do what I can, today. If it is good, then great. If not, then Lord, help me to learn and repent and do better tomorrow.
Social evolution is inevitable; it’s how we guide it that’s up for grabs. If taking part in transforming the bully requires the discomfort inherent in growth and change, I’m on board.
This isn’t a guarantee that social evolution will go the right way—as Ms. Irving says, how we guide it is up to us. We can participate in doing it well for the liberation of our own souls as well as the souls of every one of our brothers and sisters. It is entirely our own choice, every time.
We are going to meet up with resistance. We are going to fail. We will see our efforts opposed and our accomplishments reverse. But still—we can insist on resisting the bully. And we can enjoy our own defeats and hurts as we push forward. They’re signs that we are doing something.
I used to say I wanted my epitaph to read, “Good Person.” Now I think I’d prefer something like “Faced the Bully.”
This is a good word. It doesn’t matter, really, if we’re nice. “Nice” is simply no more than “accommodating to my demands.” When we realize that we’re in a fight, that it’s a good fight, and that we can make things better, ever so slowly sometimes and with great leaps forward at others—it is worth doing.
For my epitaph? “He thought it was all worth it” would be good enough. Every step of the way, the failures and disasters and utterly wrong choices. All the mistakes and errors, all the pain. All of it worth it, for the reasons of plunging into life itself.
Self-examination and the courage to admit to bias and unhelpful inherited behaviors may be our greatest tools for change. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to expose our ignorance and insecurities takes courage. And love. I believe the most loving thing a person, or a group of people, can do for another is to examine the ways in which their own insecurities and assumptions interfere with others’ ability to thrive.
Indeed. I was talking with friends yesterday about the work of anti-racism. (At their call, not mine. Who’d talk to me willingly, much less give me the floor, if it was at my request?) I made the statement that the work of anti-racism is fired by love. The love for my brothers and sisters in the communities of color. The love I have for my own kind, white people who are locked so desperately in isolation and fear and shame. The love I have for my own self, for my own freedom and utter enjoyment of living.
All the other things, the difficulties, the shames, the failures, the desperate attempts to hide—nothing matters because only love matters.
Love is the arms that carry me. Love is the hand that guides me. Love is the air and the blood that enflesh me, and love is the uncreated that recreates my heart and my mind.
And with that, the journey through this book is done. But I have only just begun.
Let me know if you want to continue on this journey with me. I’d be honored to be a resource and a help while I encourage you to do your own work. This isn’t about passing a test or completing a checklist. This is about the change in our lives. Life is about experiencing everything in life. I offer you the chance to experience the joy and satisfaction of knowing and loving people.
Come with me.
Of course, I cannot end this series without bookending with the great James Baldwin. He was a man who so thoroughly could see things that he frightens me. And yet—he is entirely relatable and human. He is, in fact, the kind of human I’d wish to be.
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” ~ James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Questions
Ms. Irving has no questions at the end of her book. There are several pages of resources for further exploration.
So I’ll turn the tables on you, dear reader.
- Where are you right now on your journey?
- Where do you hope to be?
- What steps are you taking to get there?
- Do you have friends coming with you?
And most importantly
- How are you doing, and have you found your center of love?