Growing Up White: White Privilege in a Midwestern Childhood
This is the second part in a five-part series of posts about reckoning with whiteness. Please read the first post to learn about my intention for writing about my experiences with white privilege and white supremacy as a white person. While I am deeply wary of centering my own voice here, these posts are written to address other white folks as my goal is to start an honest conversation about whiteness. It is critical to listen to and amplify BIPOC voices and organizations. Today I want to spotlight Three Blacks Girls Guide Through Chicago, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation by Natalie Y. Moore, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by renowned psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum, Black Boy by Richard Wright, which was written in the 1940s, but opened my eyes in the early 2000s, and Steve James’ documentary series, America To Me, which was filmed in the high school I attended almost twenty years after I graduated. I urge you to learn about the community building work and donate to Austin Coming Together, My Block My Hood My City as well as check out this incredible list of 20 Black-led groups working toward racial justice in Chicago.
Before you read my story — a white girl’s story of growing up in Oak Park, Illinois in the 90s, I want you to read this, a Black girl’s story of growing up in Oak Park now. This Black woman is a member of the 2020 graduating class of Oak Park River Forest High School, the same school I graduated from in 1997. Seriously, read her story first. Not only is it more important for you to hear her voice than mine, comparing the experiences, one Black and one white, 23 years apart, is extremely telling.
The summer that I turned eight, my family moved from St. Louis to Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb that sits on Chicago’s western border. Both of my parents had lived in Chicago before, my mother having lived in or just outside the city for most of her life. She’d been born in the west-side hospital that we passed every time we exited the Eisenhower Expressway — a hospital in the Austin neighborhood that was now predominantly black and described as “dangerous” and “high-crime.” A neighborhood that was literally across the street from my neighborhood.
My parents chose Oak Park specifically because it had enacted policies in the late 60s and early 70s to discourage white flight and encourage equitable access to housing. We landed in the southeastern corner of town. The north side, I would eventually learn, was wealthier and whiter. My elementary school was diverse. Though I am guessing it was at least 50% white, I had Black classmates, Asian American and Pacific Islander classmates, Middle Eastern classmates. Of my three closest friends through elementary school, one was Vietnamese, one was white and Jewish, and one was biracial, though she lived with her white family and did not know her Latinx side.
In terms of optics, it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech come to life. I was living the rainbow in my diverse town with my progressive parents, right?
Sure. On the surface. But I was actually getting to know racism, white privilege, and white supremacist culture in more insidious ways.
My white parents participated in the Civil Rights movement. I was raised with progressive values: racism is bad, sexism and heterosexism are bad. All people deserve fair treatment and equal rights. But these things, I later realized, are just the basics.
It’s easy to be a white kid and think, ‘I know this stuff and I do not judge people based on skin color, so that box is checked. I am not a racist.’ What I didn’t realize — what my parents may not have realized or known how to teach — is that there was so much more to it than having friends from all different backgrounds and “accepting them for who they are.”
As an elementary-school-aged white kid, I thought that the Civil Rights movement had brought us to a better place, that our work here was mostly done. Racism was mostly solved, at least in “diverse” communities like mine. It took years to see that being “color-blind” is a form of racism, ignoring and erasing the lived experiences of people of color. That “accepting people for who they are” is still steeped in white supremacy because there is an unspoken second part to that sentence. We accept people for who they are as long as they accept and adhere to white culture and the systems that benefit white people.
In other words, no one taught me about systemic racism. No one defined it for me or pointed it out, but I was bearing witness to and benefiting from it on a regular basis. My very earliest memories are evidence of that — being told that I, the white girl, was too smart for the majority black school; witnessing the way my black friend was treated differently — and this would only continue in my “diverse,” “progressive” town where:
The families who owned homes on my block were all white. Our neighbors of color rented apartments in the building across the alley from my house and were assumed to be beneficiaries of Section 8 housing whether that was true or not.
We had a regular “ethnic festival” to celebrate different cultures, but the children of immigrants were teased for smelling funny, talking funny, which meant they were probably stupid, and yes, even pre-9–11, potentially being terrorists.
My parents had Black friends at work, I had Black friends at school and in my after-school program, and there was one Black boy in my Sunday school class, but if we had Black folks over to our house, it didn’t happen regularly enough for me to remember — at least not until I was in high school when I became close friends with and briefly dated a Black guy, Brandon.
I met Brandon at the park where the freaks and geeks of all assorted mid-90s stripes gathered. The punk kids, the ravers, the indie rockers, the hippies, the metal heads. Acacia, a Korean girl who became my best friend in high school, hung out there too. The majority of my other friends were white. We all smoked cigarettes and pot and ditched class. When my behavior was noticed by school administrators, I was called in to talk about my “bad choices.” I was given detention, encouraged to do better, asked if I was bored or upset, and handed shiny pamphlets for expensive liberal arts colleges where everyone assumed I would thrive.
Brandon, who devoured literature and shared the same passion for writing as me, was regularly punished with in-school suspension and never asked if he was bored in the remedial classes he had been pushed into for students with learning disabilities, or in his case, “behavioral problems.”
Acacia slipped through the cracks unnoticed. She actually needed an adult to help her with a dangerous situation at home, but on the rare occasions where she tried to ask for help from counselors and police officers, she was brushed off.
When I picture my high school hallways, I see kids of every color laughing and calling out to each other. I didn’t fully recognize how segregated my school was until I was a senior. Because I’d come to hate high school, I’d decided to graduate a semester early, and in my last semester I put together a schedule that met all my graduation requirements and allowed me to get out of school by lunchtime so I could work. As a result, for the first time since I’d started high school, I was only in one AP or honors course. The other classes I took included journal writing, which was as racially mixed as the hallways, and auto shop, where I was the only white girl.
My school counselor urged me not to take those classes, to “stay on track” in honors and AP. Never mind that because I wouldn’t be there for the whole year, I wouldn’t be taking the AP tests and getting any college credit. Never mind that I loved to journal, and since I would be living on my own, I wanted to know basic automotive skills. “Staying on track” was “the better choice” for me and “for the school.”
Meanwhile both Acacia and Brandon were encouraged by administrators to drop out or complete their high school education elsewhere. Students like them were dragging down the school’s academic reputation.
These were the waters I swam in, that we all did — Black, white, Asian, Latinx kids in a “diverse,” “integrated” community and school. These are the waters that kids are still swimming in, as I was shown when I watched America to Me, a ten-part documentary about race that was filmed in my high school nearly twenty years after I graduated.
Watching it stirred up all of these memories and more. I thought about a Black boy I’d met in fourth grade at after school care, someone who I’d still smile and nod at in the halls of high school. He was shot and killed during winter break of our senior year. I still have the newspaper articles about his death, and upon revisiting them, I thought also about the spring of my freshman year, when two popular white girls died by suicide. Those girls were a couple years ahead of me so I didn’t know them personally. I had friends who did, though, and as a white girl who was suicidal, I paid attention to that coverage. And there was a lot of it. So much more than the murdered Black boy.
But a double suicide is so shocking, you may rationalize. I’m sure I did — subconsciously at least. I did not reckon with it consciously at all until my recent reexamination of the coverage. The difference wasn’t just in the inches of page space allotted to these two white girls compared to this one black boy, it was in how they were discussed.
Those white girls were described by their friends and families as happy. College-bound. Taking trips to Italy. The pain they’d faced in their young lives, that may have motivated their seemingly abrupt decision to end them, was written about with the utmost empathy.
That black boy was described by his friends and family as not a gang member. Repeatedly. Not a gang member. Did they volunteer this information or was it the first question that the reporter asked? He was not a gang member, but he was in gang territory and it was likely a gang member’s stray bullet that hit him. Also he was currently suspended from school. It wasn’t relevant to the shooting, the principal said, but for some reason it needed to be mentioned.
I should also note that in my Internet search for these articles, I also learned that in the same year those white girls died by suicide, a Black girl from our high school was also shot and killed. I couldn’t find any information or articles about her at all.
The coverage, or lack thereof, of all of these teenage deaths matters. The empathy toward and presumed innocence of the white girls. The way they were described by who they were and the Black boy was described by who he wasn’t. All of these deaths should have been equally shocking. Certainly they felt that way to the families and friends. Murder, suicide — the sudden loss of any young person is shocking. Or it should be.
Growing up in the late eighties and nineties, the messaging I received from adults was that video games were numbing me to violence. So were TV shows and rap and metal. The truth was that I’d been numbed to a very particular kind of violence — the death of Black folks, especially young Black people — simply because I lived on the border of Chicago.
This Chicago Tribune piece gives an overview of the homicides in Chicago since the late fifties. In 1992, the year before I started high school, there were 920 homicides. In 1993, 62 children were killed. The most shocking among these deaths — such as seven year-old Dantrell Davis, killed by a sniper while walking with his mother from the Cabrini Green housing projects to his school — received news coverage, but not all of them did.
This was my normal. It wasn’t until adulthood, when I moved to other cities in the Midwest and then to the West Coast, that I realized how numb I’d become. My current home is in Seattle where the high water mark for homicides came in 2018 at 31 deaths. A local news blog could list them all in a bullet-point list.
I grew up in a place where the regular, violent deaths of Black children was the norm — so much so that they weren’t even all covered on the news. I am going to repeat that so you can sit with it a minute:
I grew up in a place where the regular, violent deaths of Black children was the norm.
I also grew up very safe from that violence. It did not touch me personally until I was 17 when an acquaintance was murdered by a stray bullet in a nearby town.
I grew up in a place where the regular, violent deaths of Black children was the norm, and as a white kid who lived within a couple miles of these regular, violent deaths, I was insulated from them.
Throughout my childhood, white adults and politicians framed the things happening, over there, in “inner city” Chicago, as the fault of street gangs that dealt drugs and fought and killed over drugs and drug-selling territory. We never once in my childhood discussed the why of street gangs — the systemic racism that impacted and continued to impact the lives of my Black neighbors in the city. While I was in junior high, the Cabrini Green housing project was being torn down just ten miles away, but we never discussed it in my classes. The history of the projects. The significance of them being torn down. The impact, which included the shooting of seven year-olds on their way to school. If this was discussed at all, it was left to the kids to discuss amongst themselves or with their parents.
I did have white parents who talked about race. This was how I learned that the placement of the major highways in Chicago was used to segregate the city. The placement of the projects was intentional. And the displacement of them was also intentional. If white folks decided they wanted the land back, they infiltrated and gentrified and pushed people out. My parents spoke candidly about white flight because my mother had lived through it — her family moved from the city to the suburbs. She remembered the city in a way that her younger siblings didn’t.
But my white parents, who’d participated in the Civil Rights Movement and steeped themselves in the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., still had their limitations. We’d ended up in Oak Park, my mother admitted to me very recently, because she hadn’t been able to figure out how to navigate the deep racial divide of the city she loved. Where could we live where we wouldn’t be in the same situation we’d been in in St. Louis — living in a majority white neighborhood, attending either a white neighborhood school or bussed to a magnet school? And of course she wanted her children to be safe. Dantrell Davis’ mom wanted him to be safe, too, but she didn’t have the privilege — the white privilege — to protect him.
I was confronted with that privilege every time my family exited the Eisenhower Expressway at Austin Boulevard, though I didn’t know how to frame it. I just remember wondering, throughout my childhood and into my teens, every time we sat at the top of that exit ramp about to cross the border between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago and Oak Park, how this magical dividing line worked. How did it keep the violence contained to the city? How could one side be safe and the other side so dangerous?
The answer is simple. I had to do a lot of work to understand it, but it was always right there in front of me, obvious as the back of my own hand:
Whiteness.
That magical dividing line is whiteness.
Though some (less overtly racist) white people would be quick to talk about home ownership and education and higher taxes, these are all systemic results of white privilege. Other (more overtly racist) white people would make remarks about work ethic and good versus bad behavior and “black on black crime,” which are again systemic results of white privilege and the institutionalized racism that both our educational and criminal justice systems are built upon. And just to be clear, Blackness does not equal violence. Unemployment and poverty do. The scholarship and statistics show this to be true across racial lines.
Systemic racism and white supremacy drew the magical dividing line along the eastern border of Oak Park and I grew up watching white fear reinforce it. Fear of the street gang graffiti on garages on the Oak Park side of the border. Fear of the ER at West Suburban hospital, also on the Oak Park side of Austin Boulevard, filled with gunshot victims. Fear of the high rape rates in that park on the Chicago side. Fear of the destruction that would spill across the border and damage Oak Park businesses if the Chicago Bulls won the NBA Championship.
I grew up listening to white adults subtly and not so subtly vilify Black kids from the city. Either kids from “over there” were coming over here doing bad things or there were the families from Austin or Maywood or Bellwood whose (bad) children had infiltrated our (good) schools by using addresses that did not rightfully belong to them. (Never mind that there were white families doing this too. Never mind that every child deserves the best possible education.)
Aside from/along with gangs and guns, the biggest white fear was around drugs. The West and South sides of Chicago had been notoriously decimated by the crack epidemic of the eighties. Crack was not a suburban white people drug; they had cocaine instead. But by the time I hit high school in the mid-nineties, heroin was the hard drug of choice. It was not being “brought” into our high school by street gangs or any of the other euphemisms that white adults used to blame Black and Brown teens. And it was not simply “coming in” either, as those same white adults liked to slip into the passive voice rather than owning what was actually happening:
White kids were driving across the magic dividing line in their minivans and buying heroin. Then they brought it back to the ‘burbs and used in their basements, or if they couldn’t wait, in the parking lot of a gas station just outside the city limits.
I know this because (sorry, Mom and Dad) I’ve been in those minivans. Several of my friends, most of them white, became regular users. A couple of them were Black though. Brandon was one of them. I remember when I first realized that people were actually doing heroin, not just claiming to for some sort of cred, and I asked him how they were getting it.
He laughed and said, “Easy, especially if you’re white.”
The “easy” part about it wasn’t just scoring drugs. The white kids also got off easy. When there were raids, they rarely got caught. None of my white friends went to jail. There were at least two occasions post-high school when I ran into Brandon after not seeing him for awhile and asked him what he’d been up to.
“Just got out of County,” was his response.
There were probably other stints in County, too. I can’t ask him because he’s dead. Not from drugs. He died young of a preventable health condition that disproportionately affects the Black community.
I need to tell you that he went to college, though, and that he was smart as hell and that he traveled and he wrote. I need you to know this because he wasn’t just my friend and a sort-of, kind-of boyfriend for a hot second in high school, we were mirrors of each other. We shared a lot of the same passions and some of the same demons. But I was a white girl and he was a Black boy and those were the factors that shaped how our paths diverged. My whiteness gave me the advantage that led me to publish two books by age 30 while his Blackness led to death at age 40. And perhaps we both could have seen that coming in high school where I was given empathy and the benefit of the doubt continually and he was treated with suspicion and antipathy.
I’m not going to tell you that Brandon was perfect. He was absolutely the kind of kid whose smarts led to boredom and boredom led to shit like throwing fruit at cars while donning “white face.” (It was inspired by his love of The Crow, but he absolutely saw and embraced the racist trope he was turning on its head.) He was a prankster of the highest order. I will remember his laugh until my own dying day.
But I saw, even at 15, that the white boys could be pranksters and get away with it, while Brandon was viewed as dangerous. I was not surprised when the white kids got treatment for their drug use and Brandon got jail time. We’ve seen this phenomenon nationally — the crack “epidemic” versus the opioid “crisis” — but I grew up with it. No one cared about heroin addicts in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, but when white suburban kids started ODing, everyone sat up and paid attention. Now it was a crisis that needed gentle and effective handling.
Though Oak Park is far from perfect and the schools were, and from what I know, still are far from equitable, I am grateful that I grew up in a more diverse and more integrated community because it did help me to recognize white privilege earlier and in ways that other white people didn’t. But, as I will describe in tomorrow’s post, I still didn’t know how to reckon with it.
