As a white lady, trust me, it’s not a good look. How do I know? Well, people of color who care for me and whom I trust and care for are kind enough to call me out on it and let me know. So take a page out of my book — maybe my story could save you some trouble.
“Can you not.” My friend said.
“Can I not what?” I naively asked.
“Can you not take what I’m saying about race and try to make it not about race?”
Here’s the context: My friend is black, and I’m white. They recently told me about an incident that happened to them and explained how it was tied to race. They shared how it impacted them, how they’ve experienced something like this before, and what they were left with after it happened. Despite not being present during the incident and never having lived a day in black or brown skin, I immediately responded with what I thought was happening.
When my friend asked me to stop and had to explain to me what I’d just done, I immediately felt regret. Honestly, I felt some shame too. It wasn’t the first time that I’d disregarded my friend’s experience with race and offered a quick, uninformed response. I’ve put my loved ones of color in positions where they’ve had to explain things like this to me before. Too many times.
I’m trying to break a bad habit that I loathe. It begins with me learning something new about race or racism, such as a news story or someone’s lived experience. Essentially, any form of data about race that I didn’t gain from my own experience as a white person. Here’s the bad part — instead of fully listening and being present to my loved one, as I wish I would, I almost automatically respond with a reason why it wasn’t racism or didn’t involve race. I could tell everyone why their experience wasn’t what they thought it was, simply because it differed from my own experience as a white person.
The good news is that with time, self-reflection, the support of community, and practice, I’m improving. Though I might occasionally catch myself doing it in my head, I’ve developed the ability to stop myself before it comes out of my mouth. However, despite my desire to change and not be this way at all, my social conditioning as a white person runs deep and is challenging to overcome.
This bad habit of mine has several problematic parts. For one, it’s a terrible way to be. When someone attempts to tell me that they understand my experience better than I do, it’s frustrating and makes me feel invisible.
Additionally, it contradicts how I typically behave in my relationships. I don’t usually disbelieve people I care about, and I’ve noticed that this tendency is specific to race. I don’t tell other women that their experiences of sexism aren’t real, and I don’t brush off or create alternate interpretations of what happened to loved ones who differ from me in other ways, such as religious belief, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, or size. My friends and loved ones who are different from me in some way other than race have never had to ask me to stop questioning their daily reality. It’s disturbing how easily I’m able to take race out of the story.
This isn’t the person I want to be. When I do this, I show myself to be untrustworthy and selfish. I send the message to my black and brown loved ones that I’m not there for them when it comes to this important part of their lives. I signal to them that I don’t have their backs when it comes to race. Instead of being present and supportive, I erase their experiences of daily life and a part of who they are to serve my own needs. This habit erases my accountability too. And it serves as a shield to protect and uphold whiteness.
The urge and impulse to shift the focus away from race and racism is destructive. It undermines relationships, erodes trust, weakens human connection, and hinders efforts to end racial inequity. Although race and racism affect our lives in different ways, they impact us all.
I didn’t just pick up this habit on my own; rather, I learned to ignore and explain away race and racism through whiteness — the social conditioning and racial identity I received. I watched the white people around me engage in this behavior, and I followed suit. The fact that I once considered this an acceptable response, and continue to struggle to overcome it, illustrates just a couple of the ways that whiteness influences me.
This behavior is troublesome for me and for many of the white people I know and care about. I don’t want to take part in it, and I know many of my white loved ones feel the same. We don’t endorse this way of being with one another, and we definitely don’t want to be seen as people who disrespect and disregard others.
Yet, I see us doing it. I often feel like we don’t know how to stop. I sense helplessness and shame when we find ourselves doing this or witness other white people doing it.
So, why do we do it? Why do we continue to ignore race, explain away racism, and persist in being the people we don’t want to be? I’d say it’s because of whiteness.
This kind of activity keeps us tangled up in a lie that tells us, as white people, we are objective and unaffected when it comes to race and the problem of racism. It’s a lie we’ve learned to maintain so that the story of whiteness as unblemished and blameless can endure.
My inability, along with other white people, to hear about race and racism prevents us from seeing the harsh reality of racial inequity in our country. It also prevents us from accessing invaluable and hard-won knowledge that people of color possess — wisdom that could help us better connect with one another, understand our own humanity, and open up new possibilities for togetherness. By failing to acknowledge these issues, we forfeit our capacity to see and learn from the things that our particular social position allows us to overlook.
Personally, I let myself down too. I’ve found that I miss out on the opportunity to be there for black and brown loved ones. When people of color in my life share their intuition and experience with me, they are offering me a gift — an opportunity to understand things from their perspective. If I cannot hear or see them, or can’t let go of my imperfect and incomplete ideas of race and racism, I am missing a chance to demonstrate that I care.
And, when I fail to change this habit in myself or challenge it with other white people, I perpetuate a system and culture of racial imbalance. I contribute to the continued existence of racism and the violence it brings. I become desensitized to the pain of others, disconnected from our shared humanity, more out of touch, and more deeply influenced by whiteness.
Perhaps my stories can help you. I know it helps me to tell them. Maybe we can learn from each other, or, at the very least, from my mistakes.
My encouragement to my fellow white people when it comes to race and racism is this — listen, believe, learn, and grow. If we make a misstep and fall into denial or alternative story development, or offer possible explanations as to why something may not be about race, let’s make amends and apologize for the harm we’ve caused. Let’s show our friends and loved ones of color that we’ve heard them and trust their truth through both our words and our actions. And when we notice racism or learn about it from others, let’s help each other be and do differently.
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