racism
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 29: Intent and Impact
The process of "waking up white" isn't just to be aware of whiteness. It is to wake up, and then to leave it. To go to something that's better and more life-affirming and full of health. And to not even be sure where the destination is, but with the calm assurance that it's out there.
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Moral Switzerlands
This is a prescient verse from 3000 years or so ago: “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15, AV White people are gonna have to choose, every single time. Every single time we choose complacency and choose safety and choose white solidarity we are choosing wickedness and cruelty and destruction. Whether we want to be honest about…
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The Voices Are Coming from Inside the House
Before this day in 1957, Hazel Massery (white) had never met Elizabeth Eckford (Black). After this day, they did not meet again until a decade later. And yet Ms. Massery became the face of white reaction to the mere presence of Black people in their reserved spaces. Without prompting, she exploded in anger and fury—and yes, hate. Something in whiteness trains us to be like this. To simply hate not only the “other” but the “inferior.” We’re trained to believe in the innate superiority of white people; in things where we appear to fail we say we have no interest. What was the actual problem Ms. Eckford caused that would…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 28: I Am the Elephant
This chapter explores the meaning behind not only identifying as white (which is simple enough when we check off the census form), but also identifying white as a race in the same construct that black is a race. Being white, or whiteness, is a construct, with similar rules and roles and obligations as those that are imposed upon being black, or blackness. “[B]eing a part of American organizations, institutions, and traditions came so easily to me, I couldn’t imagine what could be so tough about adjusting to them.” There are at least two parts to being white. One is that we have an entire set of behaviors and standards, of…
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Juneteenth, Reparations, and What Do I Do About It?
Today is June 19th, a day when we remember that our American experiment with freedom included over 200 years of enslavement for Africans stolen and sold to white slavers. Today is the day when HR#40, a bill to set up a commission to study reparations, was introduced for discussion in a House subcommittee hearing. And today I considered the long and winding road of my own presence in America. I have a history, y’all. My father’s family came to America in the early 1700s from England—the region where Matlock, Derbyshire sits. The family split early into Northern and Southern branches, with one group leaving for North and West, from North…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 27: Living into Expectations
This was a fascinating chapter for me, in that I hadn’t really dived into this before: what is it that we thought about ourselves when we were young that has somehow determined who we are as adults, based upon the choices we made from youth to adulthood. I was talking about this today on the bus with a friend. In high school the guidance counselors said “You can pretty much do whatever you want—you have no one specific passion.” And I’ve done that in life, settling on my current career of doing something interesting in tech while I wait for something to pique my interest elsewhere. I’ve done all sorts…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 26: Surviving Versus Thriving
In this chapter Ms. Irving recalls a famous experiment conducted in 1968 by Ms. Jane Elliott on a class of third graders, and then repeated in other circumstances with adults in various settings, including corporate settings where the participants came in order to learn about prejudice and race issues—and yet they were unable to process their experiences and feelings even though they knew they were there for such training and understanding. The experiences of discrimination overruled their intentions and their self-knowledge. “I’ve had plenty of moments where I’ve felt underappreciated, invisible, or misunderstood. I can’t imagine feeling that way most of the time at school, at work, on the train,…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 24: Everyone Is Different; Everyone Belongs
We need to do the right things when we can, but it is critically important that we continually reevaluate whether we're really doing the right things. We might not be able to wait until we have all the data before we try to make changes, but we absolutely must be willing to reexamine our efforts and even our understandings.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 23: Diversity Training
More than having a map, a method, and motive, grasping what race and racialism in America will involve something deeper than just a way to work things out.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 22: Why Do I Always End Up with White People?
Ever wonder why it is that even when good people want to fix things, nothing really gets fixed but a lot of talk passes by? I grew up in the fabulous 50s and 60s, and I remember the talk on how we were well on on way to fixing racism. “Just a little while longer,” I heard, “and we’ll get this discrimination eliminated. Just a few years more and all God’s children will be playing together.” Spoiler: It didn’t happen that way. The effort needed to make change happen is much, much great than the effort needed to think about making change happen. We can wish all we want. We…
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News and Updates
So here’s what’s going down… Some of you might know that I’ve been thinking about and writing about issues of race and equality for a long time. I’ve been vocal about my beliefs and vocal about my insistence that we all must repent and change. A few months ago an online publication, Our Human Family, reached out to me to begin writing for them. They had been reading my work and were interested in what I was saying, and they considered my work to be helpful and healing for the conciliation of us all. As they put it in their mission statement, “OUR HUMAN FAMILY exists as a safe digital…
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There Are No Racists
I’m involved in a group that’s digging into American white racism, and I gotta say, there are times when I feel so discouraged that I feel like giving up. It’s too hard, it’s too much to deal with, it’s so overwhelming—and no one’s really a racist, anyway, except for maybe some white people in the South with CBFs on their pickup trucks. Or something. What I saw was some white people saying “Is it really helpful to call anyone a ‘racist,’ when that could just push them away from wanting to change? Calling someone ‘racist’ isn’t going to get us anywhere, and besides, you might be tempted to call me…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 18: Color-blind
We talk about the things that are important to us, or we talk about the things that are completely unimportant to us in order to avoid talking about the important things that threaten us. Intimacy threatens us. Empathy scares us. Accountability scares us. Responsibility and connected-ness provoke us. In our heart of hearts, with our bosom friends, we may, if we are very, very fortunate, have a brush with intimacy or reality. Race in America scares us white people. Scares the bejesus from us. I see things we do to ameliorate the pain and the fear. We talk over it. We deny it. We claim it’s not us. We say…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 17: My Good People
“How it was possible that I was both a ‘good person’ and utterly clueless.” It’s possible because being “good” does not mean “also smart” or “also educated” or even “also aware.” I’m good. I do good things. I have good intentions. Even when I was actively participating in conservative politics that were leading to the destruction of the oppressed, I was good because I had good thoughts and good intentions. Being good isn’t anything unless it’s coupled with intelligent action, and intelligent action isn’t good if it sets a priority upon intention rather than impact. Hand to God, I am ashamed and embarrassed by my words and actions to people…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 16: Logos and Stereotypes
“The monumental cognitive task of processing the millions of pieces of information that flood us daily requires that we sort and categorize.” I agree here that this is a survival skill and, on the face of it, neutral. The problem is that we then use the sorting/categorization not just as identity but as threat-analysis. White people are our friends; people of color are likely antagonistic and unwilling to compromise with us like white people do. The identity is not only what they look like, but what they represent, even though that representation is largely imagined. “One way people differ from animals, however, is the way we use symbols to make…
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Enough
If you don’t know by know I’m a believer and follower of Jesus Christ, then I’ve done a damned poor job of making my faith explicit, and for that I’m sorry. I believe in Jesus the son of God, true God of true God, born, lived, died, and risen. But with that said, I stand with my brothers and sisters in the Muslim Ummah right now as we all are reeling in shock from the latest atrocities of white supremacist terrorism that’s being done in the name of Jesus Christ and for the followers of Jesus Christ. It is an abomination. Full stop. If your church is teaching that whiteness…
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#Waking Up White Chapter 13: Invisibility
“We were pushed hard to be cognizant of what we did and did not notice. And most importantly, why?” This is the hardest—the why of our actions and our inattention. Why do I feel that white people around me are just worth my time, and yet black people are somehow safe to exclude? That came from somewhere, and I picked it up, but why do I think this and act this way—that is the part of me that still has mysterious roots. Did I really choose to be racist? Based upon what I’m reading and thinking about, it seems more and more likely that yes, I did choose this. “I…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 12: Icebergs
“One of the breakthroughs I had … was understanding the degree to which I tend to align what I see and hear with my underlying beliefs.” You know, this is a great opener to help us understand how it all happened with us, the good people. I presume that most white people think they’re good people, and therefore just assume that they can’t be either racist or contributing to racism. “I don’t generally feel negative emotions about people of color, and generally don’t think negative thoughts about them.” How could anyone be contributing to racism or even be a racist themselves if they don’t have overt emotions and thoughts? We…
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Green Books, Black Lives, and White History
I’m reading some interesting responses to “The Green Book,” which, if you have been in a cave in Thailand for the past six months, is a movie about a white racially antagonistic chauffeur who ferries around a black musician. There have been complains, and their have been counter-complaints, largely on the line of “it’s just a movie.” (I have written elsewhere about how our entertainment does matter. A movie is never just a movie.) The complaints about the movie itself might be due to what’s in this article, about a slice of history that is used as a prop for another story entirely. I researched the meaning of the Green…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 11: Headwinds and Tailwinds
“Skin color itself is not the barrier; it’s the beliefs attached to it. And beliefs, compared to birth dates or other more tangible barriers, are harder to pinpoint and also much harder to change.” The chapters are starting to get down into the weeds now, and it’s getting thornier to navigate. This chapter explores the systems that create systemic racism. Helpfully, it does not just say that systemic racism is a thing, but it explores the interlocking small systems that make up the bigger system. The systemic part of the systems—they all work together in their small cycles to become one big Krebs cycle of racism. This reveals something in…
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To Wrestle with the Angel
Today I participated in a hands-on seminar led by James Whitfield, CEO of the Leadership Eastside organization. We went through a series of exercises and discussions about the topic of racism—what it is at a personal level, what it is at the systemic level, and what it is as expressed in our social structures. It was a preliminary discussion—in three hours with 27 people it can be difficult to get much deeper than introductions and first steps. But it did make me realize a bit more of how deeply the systems of racism are entwined in the American definitions of “American” and “white” and even “Christian.” As a class (as…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, education, family, history, Life Recovery Skills, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 10: The Melting Pot
“The United States has reaffirmed its commitment to being a melting-pot society adhering to Anglo-Saxon standards, as opposed to a mosaic nation built on the diversity of multiple cultures.” This chapter dives into a common myth about America—that it is a “melting pot.” It is, if by that you mean that everyone is baptized with fire to lose their heritage and identity, to be reborn as a WASP-y character—as long as they have visibly white skin and features. The stories here match some of the experiences of my mother’s side of the family—she was an immigrant from World War II, and when she went through Ellis Island (figuratively; I’m not…
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To Study Portuguese
When I was younger (well, any day in the past is when I was younger, but stay with me here), I worked in an environment where many of my co-workers did not have English as their first language. The most common language they spoke was Portuguese. Because I’m curious about things I don’t know, and because I really wanted to be able to talk with them and understand them better, I decided to add classes in Portuguese to my college courses. I took a year of Portuguese hoping to get familiar enough to be able to listen to them, and perhaps even to have a real conversation. I remember at…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 9: White Superiority
[Edited 2/23/2019 A point of clarification on this post: the indented portions are quotes from the book by Debby Irving, “Waking Up White.” Along with several other people, some who are posting in public, I’m going through the book chapter-by-chapter, attempting to think out loud what I my responses are and what my desires are. While I am attempting to be truthful, I am also attempting to be sensitive to my friends and family in the wider community, including my friends and family who are of non-European descent. If something I write seems injurious to you, please do let me know—while my intent is one thing, I realize that impact…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 8: Racial Categories
“The biggest problem with America’s idea of racial categories is that they’re not just categories: they’ve been used to imply a hierarchy born of nature. Regardless of how racial categories came into being, Americans have been cast in racial roles that have the power to become self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecies.” There’s some great things in this chapter which pulls apart racial categories using a great analogy of dividing people arbitrarily into groups based upon hair color. Each hair color is associated with a type of achievement based upon who-knows-what, but there is some assignment done that people accept. (Work with me here. It’s analogy.) Now, over time, the original philosophy of…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 7: The GI Bill
“I couldn’t shake the duped feeling—duped and infuriated to have inherited a legacy that contaminated me with injustice.” This chapter just slays. It nails the center of gravity in American white racism—Economics. Money. Power. Fear. Greed. Exclusion. Hatred. Willful ignorance and blind indifference. These are all here, but it boils down to economics. The earliest Africans brought here in August of 1619 were brought here as economically advantageous assets to white landowners, white entrepreneurs, white households. Chattel slavery was economics—how could you grow tobacco and cotton for the world market at competitive products at a profit if you had to pay your workers? Jim Crow was a de facto extension…
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Review: When They Call You a Terrorist
Yet another reminder of James Baldwin’s words* “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, is a deep book, y’all, and it is not a philosophical treatise of the meaning and purpose of “Black Lives Matter” as something that is plopped down into life, shoving aside other things, just one of many interests in the black community. This is the story of one person growing up–and growing up–to see the world around her with an acute eye as to its hostility to her and her…
