Book Review: Learning to be White, Thandeka

I’ve spent much of the last decade building an understanding of my cultural identity. As a white woman, as someone raised working class in the Midwest, as a member of the LGBTQ community, etc.

My increased understanding is part of what has led me to commit my life to creating racial equity — not because I want to save people of color, but because what I know now makes it clear to me that racism has caused white folks to trade in our humanity for privilege. We’ve gained safe, comfortable lives filled with isolation and shame. Racism isn’t working for anyone.

Thandeka’s book Learning to be White describes this process of loss more poignantly than anything I’ve read to date. Through extensive interviews with white people she crafts a narrative of the lived experience of becoming white. As she describes, Euro-American children experience a sense of: “unacceptability in the eyes of others and an essential separateness and isolation from [their] own community of caretakers and peers.”

You’ve likely seen the shirts that say: No One is Born Racist. So what are the experiences that teach racism? Thandeka recounts story after story of white children acting as though closeness with people of color is natural and normal, as though they belonged with people of color or could invite them into their family and community life. In a wide variety of ways — from subtle to overt — the children consistently got the message this behavior was unacceptable, inappropriate or not in good taste.

As she describes:

“The child and then the adult learn how to suppress such risky feelings of camaraderie with person’s beyond the community’s racial pale in order to decrease the possibility of being exiled from their own community. And added to the loss of these feelings [of camraderie] is the loss of self-respect resulting from discarding them.”

White identity development involves disconnecting from our inherent thoughts and beliefs, from our original sense of our self, in order to not lose the love, respect and acceptance of those upon whom we rely — our parents, teachers, faith community leaders — to meet our basic needs and care for us.

The result of this process, as Thandeka describes, is that: “The Euro-American child learns to feel ashamed of its own differences from it’s community’s white racial values.” What is experienced is “an attack against the child by members of its own white community because the child is not yet white.”

Now I want to pause here and say two things:

1. Our white parents are not bad people. They too were socialized into a racist society. They likely passed on less racism than what was handed down to them — I know for certain this is true of my parents.
2. The experiences that instill racial values do not have to be overt, hostile or even ill-intentioned to have the impact Thandeka describes. They simply have to communicate to the child that something about their judgement of the situation was incorrect. Their assumption of connection, belonging, inclusion was not quite right. “Small but not inconsequential personal defeats” as Thandeka calls them. The fact that your parents didn’t use racial epithets or preach prejudice did not necessarily protect you.

One of these stories from own life is when my parents remarked about the humor in seeing a black man on a motorcycle. When I asked about why this was funny, their response was that it would be like seeing ‘a black man in a cowboy hat’. This of course made no sense to me, but it communicated a great deal. I was suddenly aware that there were things that white people could do that black people should not, and thus the reverse must also be true. I remember feeling angry on behalf of that black man, ‘why shouldn’t he be able to ride a motorcycle?’ — but I quickly discounted this feeling, choosing instead to trust my parents as providers of useful and accurate information about how to navigate the world. And in doing so, beginning to accept that the rules were not the same for everyone, we were different.

Thandeka goes on to talk about how this shows up when we begin to call out whiteness as adults — when we are asked to accept and acknowledge our white racial identity:

“It reveals the differences within the child that it had to deny in order to become congruent with its own caretaking environment. The induction process of the Euro-American child into whiteness is costly. The child must begin to separate itself from its own feelings”

White people have tremendous privilege in our society. Our lives are easier, safer, more relaxed, comfortable and enjoyable. We also have a tremendous amount of healing to do as we work to create racial equity. These insights from Thandeka have proved useful to me on that journey. I’ve still got much of the book to read and will share more as I reflect and learn.