A new year has me thinking about beginnings. Namely, the start of how I came to examine whiteness (I wasn’t always interested in what it means to be white) and the early days of this blog (I never imagined myself a writer).
It was through relationships, varied experiences and circumstances that I began to notice there was something big I was missing. Ever get to a place where you realize just how little you know about something? Like, this thing has been right in front of you and you overlooked or drastically misunderstood it? That’s what happened to me with whiteness.
It wasn’t an all-at-once discovery but a series of realizations that went something like this: to be part of the USA is to be steeped in an unequal system of classification based on skin color; adhering to whiteness is the way I learned to navigate a culture organized by race; while a white person’s life can be very hard, it’s not made more difficult because of our race; it’s a continual process, holding onto what I’ve learned of our racial system, growing my knowledge of it and working to undo it; the oppressive racial system in the US has us all bound up in it, resisting it is exhausting and we need each other. There’s likely more I’ve left out here, but this is about beginnings.
Looking at me, one can safely assume white is part of my social identity. Though I knew my whiteness was visible to all, I chose not to see it. Along the way, I’d learned to feel badly about acknowledging my connection to whiteness. I think it’s because I imagined that doing so meant I was aligning with the white people who established white as privileged. I thought that to say I am white was to say I support the unequal racial hierarchy. On top of this, knowledge of how my white skin afforded me safety and unearned benefit, made me feel ashamed.
So, I ran away from whiteness. I told myself that my experience with race and racism was limited, situating myself as novice and other people as the experts. I was convinced that I lacked community and social oneness that showed me what it means to be a white person in the context of my country. But I was wrong, I know a whole lot about being white. While I may be inexperienced and unknowledgeable about a lot of things, whiteness is not one of them. I just chose to let my knowledge of my race go unnamed and unnoticed.
As I let myself see whiteness, I could better see the racial inequity that surrounds me. How it is disseminated and continually reconstructed at all levels in the US – individual, institutional and cultural. How it feeds me racist ideas, convinces that racist concepts and policies are not racist and provides alternate and untrue explanations for inequity. I could see how it gives white people like me connection and belonging through whiteness.
The clearer racial imbalance became, the more I wanted to do something about it. But I didn’t know what to do and struggled to imagine what my role could be. I couldn’t talk about being white without feeling lost and ill-equipped, comparing myself to others, being overwhelmed or needing to defend myself. Instead of engaging with race, these reactions had me shutting down any exploration of it. I realized that before I could begin addressing the problem of racial inequity, I had to be honest with myself about my part in it. I needed to grapple with the fact that, within the social web of race, power and inequity, white is my position.
This made me uneasy. If I’m honest, I think there’s something about whiteness that disturbs a lot of white people. For white people that I know, whiteness looks unsettling. I see it in facial expressions and bodily movement, sense it in how the mood shifts and energy changes and hear it in the way white people respond when I bring up whiteness. I get it. I didn’t want to examine my racial identity or connection to racial inequity for much of my life. There’s a part of me too that instinctually reacts when whiteness comes up.
But white is not a personal attribute and how we construct our understanding of race is changeable. Critically examining whiteness is also not an attack on my person or individual white people. Whiteness is bigger. It is the linchpin that holds our racial structure in place. It is a force that works, on a smaller level, to keep me bound to our racist system and on a larger scale to keep us all bound to it. Not exploring whiteness impedes my becoming antiracist. And not just that, leaving whiteness unexamined maintains the racial status quo. I had to dig into how and why I found my connection to race and racism troubling.
I had to put aside my angst about bringing up race – especially with other white people. I also had to overcome some potent imposter syndrome. Here I am, decidedly not a writer, composing publicly about my reckoning with race. This is no little thing for me. Even so, my inward study requires an outward component and I need accountability in this endeavor. Being vulnerable here helps ensure that shame and fear don’t get the last word – like they have many times before (see post can whiteness be good).
This is where the blog comes in. I started to write because I needed to move beyond the solitary inner work I’d done mostly in isolation. I began working out my relationship with whiteness in the open because I came to understand that whiteness isn’t known in solitude. I’ve found this work around collective story and shared meaning isn’t accomplished in surreptitious ways or in a manner void of interconnection.
So far, this journey has brought hope and relief in my struggle. Recognizing that I’m white hasn’t required that I avow whiteness as my own or single-handedly remedy all the harm whiteness perpetuates. Being white also doesn’t mean I’m a terrible person. I haven’t experienced a mass exodus of people from my life, as I feared I might. This process hasn’t demanded that I be perfect – I continue to mess up, say racist things and think racist thoughts. Thankfully, this effort isn’t about wallowing in guilt and shame or even about being a better white person. It might seem obvious, but it took some time for me to appreciate that this work is about something much larger.
My hope is that we do the work that’s ours to do. That we white people can be counted among those who did something to end racism. That we’ll stop telling the same old shared stories of race, learn to lean into and attend to the pain racism generates and shatter an inequitable racial order. That we discard the belonging whiteness offers and embrace new belonging. One that reflects care for common humanity and our need for one another. Where together we pursue shared liberation, nourish connection and embrace wholeness.
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