#WakingUpWhite
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 20: My Robin Hood Syndrome
“You know, we’re trying to focus on programs that serve Boston’s inner-city youth. If you could develop a vision that includes that population, we’d be more interested in supporting you.” This is an intriguing chapter, and one that is perhaps the turning point from comfort into awareness. The author is given great power and influence, and then is tasked to “go do something good for people.” Intriguing because the attempt was made, but here, at the beginning, perhaps the attempt went wrong when there wasn’t an inquiry into what is needed and how versus what do I think is needed and how can I help? Us white people “doing good”…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 19: My Good Luck
“… I returned … with my childhood ideas about a level playing field, a world teeming with opportunity, and myself as a good person fully intact.” I thought this chapter was interesting about the smooth ride that being both rich and white can make of life. I wasn’t “rich” by Ms. Irving’s standards, of course, but I was never in want. Travel to other lands when I was in my teens and twenties helped me see a bit more about the differences in lifestyles, but I don’t think seeing the destitution in the poor in Mexico, for example, elicited anything more in me than curiosity. And travel to Europe was…
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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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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 15: The Whole Story
“One of the most powerful tools of racism is stories.” More broadly, all history is stories, sometimes told in a Domesday Book, sometimes told in a slide deck. We have to pick and choose what we think matters in history—the world every instant is crammed full of events and meaning, of people and actions. No one thing at an instant is “the one thing” of the instant. History is shaped by what we want to remember. That my mother was expelled from Ukraine in 1933 is just as much a matter of history that Hitler came to power in Germany, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco started construction, and…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 14: ZAP!
The fact that the playing field is not level means that life experiences are not merely different, but unequal and unfair. This is a hard concept to hold on to. Theoretically I understand it, but essentially I ignore it. And yet, every so often I hear the stories and hear the pain. I take for granted that everyone has a life like mine—you simply do the work required and you are rewarded. This is extremely not so. I’ve made it a point to not bring up personal stories from now on that involve people without their permission, and as a result I’ve removed about half of my blog entries. (The…
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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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#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…
- #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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#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…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Civil War, American Exceptionalism, faith, history, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 6: From Confusion to Shock
“Racism wasn’t about this person or that, this upset or that, this community or that; racism is, and always has been, the way America has sorted and ranked its people in a bitterly divisive, humanity-robbing system.” I suppose everyone needs a hero, and I suspect everyone wants to be a hero. This chapter explores the idea that we can want to resolve terrible issues in our culture and in our world, and we can even attempt to do so—all while being completely unware of what we’re doing and why. There’s an impulse to do good when we think we see a problem and we think we see the solution. “I…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 5: Within the Walls
“For me, part of the waking-up-white process is acknowledging that I’m a recovering lemming*…I never considered that the space I was taking, or the resources I was using, might be being withheld from another to make it all possible.” I found this chapter to be provoking and troubling, and I lead off with this twinned set of quotes. So much of my experience is similar author, not in fulfillment but in similar design. The creation of whiteness, and its enveloping me with its cocoon, led me to believe that this is just how things were as a child and even as an adult, that it was reasonable to expect others…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, faith, family, history, justice, racism, Southern California
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 4: Optimism
“By pretending the world was virtually problem-free, my family culture left me grossly underprepared to solve problems.” The 50s and 60s were a time in America unlike any before or after. We had won a war (with the uncredited assistance of Russia who lost 10 million men and 14 million civilians to our 410 thousand men and some civilians), there were no real economic challenges (Soviet Russia was a political challenge, but who knows how much of it was hyped up to win votes?), we were prosperous and confident and expanding. Scouts and YMCA and camping and museums were all out there for our entertainment and enrichment, and we simply…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 3: Race Versus Class
“Which one is the real issue?” The temptation when confronting a difficult issue is to find a subsidiary issue, make that primary, resolve it, and be done. So it is with race and class. These two issues can be conflated but they are different, and the easiest way to show this is that we can move up and down class hierarchies, but we cannot move out of our race. “Race” is used as a distinguishing and exclusionary element in every class. There are a few interesting stories to illustrate this point—perhaps the most disconcerting is the one where Dr. John H. Franklin, honored by President Clinton with the Presidential Medal…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 2: Family Values
“One of the things my white mother could not teach me was to honor feelings of outrage.” This chapter is a short one—about family origins. What kind of family did you grow up in? My family is like all families, I suppose, in the sense that we half-invented it and half-followed existing models. That’s how you survive. In this chapter the author talks about the long history of her own family and how that controlled her own behaviors: it was instilled at an early age. Now, of course it was an all-white environment, but there was more. There was the subtle inculcation of values that established the author as white—and…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 1: What Wasn’t Said
This chapter* opens with a provocative quote by the author: “‘WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALL THE INDIANS?’ I asked my mother on a Friday morning ride home from the library.” Gotta tell you, this not a question I had growing up in the 50s in the middle-class white suburbs of Los Angeles and Orange County. “Where are all the people of color?” I did not ask because for me the world was white. I cannot remember a single person I met before the mid 70s who was black except for our neighbor’s maid, and I tell you this with a sense of shame and embarrassment that I never knew her name,…
- #WakingUpWhite, Books, Celebrate Recovery, challenges, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, racism
If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see
James Baldwin* said this, I’m told: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” I can’t find the source of this quote, but it is widely attributed to him, and as I see no one protesting that these are not his words, I’m gonna go with it. Which leads me to the main purpose of this post: to introduce you to a new project I’ll be undertaking with a few friends, a journey to read the book “Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” by Debby Irving. I’ve not read this before, so the plan is for each…
