“Why Should I Care About Race?”

I don’t have an answer for you. I mean, there are things I could say, but I don’t know if they’ll have you caring about race. So, I’ll say this, in the United States, we don’t have a choice in whether or not we’re mixed up with race.

Image from the author’s personal collection. Picture drawn by author’s young daughter.

In America, we find ourselves in a country with increasing racial diversity. Still, I know some people here who hold to the idea that race isn’t personal to them and racism doesn’t touch their lives. That they’re free from having to acknowledge race and the impact racialization has in our world.

To these friends, I offer this, race is and has always been, part of American life. To be part of America, is to be immersed in race. Just as male or female is assigned to us the day we enter the world, and we find ourselves gendered, so too we are born into racialization. Even if not born in the US, when we arrive to this place, we all become entangled in race. That is, we are all assigned to a racial group and a position in the US racial hierarchy. From day one, race follows us and shapes our lives.

And being tethered to race, ties us to racial inequity. To be raced is, to have skin in the game. Whether a target of racism, one socialized to sustain it, or both, we’re all stuck in it.

Racism - the narratives, ideas, practices, and structures created and sustained to privilege some and disparage others - is mostly straightforward. Understanding our part in it though, untangling the ways we are captured by it in the day-to-day, and figuring out the everyday process of working to undo it - that can be complicated.

This is the dilemma we find ourselves in. We, in America, already are and have always been part of a racialized social order and we all have to work out what to do with that. When we understand our part as non-participant, we’ve made a choice. It’s not a decision available to everyone, but when we choose to say, and live as though, we’re not connected to race, we’re choosing to ignore the ways we’re involved with racism.

For some of us, ending racism is the obvious choice, or rather the only option, because it’s clear that racism undeniably seeks to keep us down or end us. For others, like me and most of the white people that I know, the decision feels less consequential. We may feel we don’t have much to gain or lose either way. As a white person, with the privilege of weighing the decision of whether or not I’ll care about race and act against racism, though it seems not as costly, there’s still a price I pay for sticking with whiteness and shrugging off race (see this post about how whiteness is overpriced).

No matter our skin color assigned position in the American race system, we are all faced with race-related choices. Moment-by-moment we decide, will we be people who work to end racial polarity or will we leave it be. What I’m saying is, the system of racial imbalance is big and the problem of white dominance is intricate - there are many layers. Our work in undoing it is both/and - it’s about attending to large systemic change and doing many, seemingly small, things to oppose racism as we go about everyday life. It’s a daily unraveling of the ways we’re caught up in racial inequity.

I can understand why some of us may feel hesitant to jump in and embrace race. Part of my white socialization taught me to commit to what we - my racial group - has experienced of race and racism. I learned that I didn’t have to see racism because my people didn’t experience it. I didn’t have to deal with race, because white just was - it wasn’t a race, it was normal. But this view is untrue and unsustainable, especially in a country of growing racial diversity.

And then there’s the question of how. How as a white person do I do this - how do I go about identifying the ways my life is touched by race and how do I resist racism? How do I come to care about race? Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that either.

I get the sense, in working with other white people and from what I learned as a therapist, that the how, is one’s own to work out - not something that others can prescribe for us. But it is work that we do in relationship - though it’s deep and personal, we don’t do it alone. And there’s lots of people who’ve written and spoken about the how. We don’t have to start from zero, there’s a foundation to guide us (here’s some resources and books that may help you go about the work of how).

And in the vein of doing this work in community, I offer my journey here in these posts. Not as a set of instructions for others to follow, but as a way of growing my ability to be with race, resist racism, and unlearn the familiar practice of ignoring. It’s how I invite others to join me, how I counter shame, and it’s how I live into the hope that we’ll be about this work together. This is what I need to do, if I want to thrive in a diverse world.

We are all faced with decisive moments. Ones where both options feel as though we might lose something important and, whether we choose to engage or not, whether we decide to care or not, there is loss either way. We white folk get to pick what our loss and our struggle will be with race and racism. This ability to choose, it’s not something we asked for, it just is.

So, I’m not able to tell another person why they should care about race and racism. I don’t know their values and I don’t know what’s important to them. I can only guess at what motivates another human being. I’m ill equipped too, to convince others why they should care about the personhood of a fellow human. I can argue. I can put every effort towards persuading another, but to actually change the mind of another, that’s not in my wheelhouse.

But I get the sense that we care about ourselves and our loved ones. And raising the floor, establishing a base level of care and concern for all people, installing rudimentary rights to wellness and equity, helps all of us. This is what we’re doing when we’re caring about race and working to eliminate racial injustice. Because as long as marginalization of any person or group of people is part of our culture, there’s always the possibility that we find our humanity undermined, that we and our loved ones might be counted as insignificant. When we care about race and work to end racism, we’re freeing ourselves - from the strict requirements of what it takes to be at the top and from the relentless anxiety of possibly finding ourselves at the bottom.

I’m noticing that paying attention to race, means letting go of whiteness - how I was socialized to be as a white person. I’m finding too that undoing and redressing racial injustice, is how we move forward. It’s growth and expansion. It’s releasing what doesn’t work for our good and embracing something different, it’s an adaptive response to the changing world we inhabit. Whiteness doesn’t look out for the whole, and tending to the whole, that’s good for all of us. When we relieve ourselves of whiteness, we get to participate in the making of something new. When we care about race and racism, we’re caring for everyone, including ourselves.

One last thing, just because we make the choice to resist racism and concern ourselves with race, doesn’t mean, we’ll do it right all the time. We’ll mess up. We’ll probably hurt some people and have to attend to how we’ve harmed. We might feel confused. But, we don’t have to know how to resolve racial imbalance and we don’t have to go it alone.

Either way we choose, to care about race or not, there’s going to be struggle and there’s going to be conflict. Others will know the choice we’ve made by how we are in the world. It probably won’t be easy. At least it’s not been easy for me. It’s up to each of us to choose our hard.