Reckoning With Whiteness
Dear White People,
As I write this, at the beginning of June 2020, America is on fire. The air is thick with tear gas and people are choking. They can’t breathe. But they are out there anyway, despite the tear gas, the flash bangs, the rubber bullets, and despite a pandemic.
They are out there because we as a nation saw a white cop kneel on George Floyd, a Black man’s neck. We heard George Floyd beg for his life, heard him say, “I can’t breathe.” We watched his murder.
We watched his murder.
And this was not the first time we’ve seen a Black person murdered by police. Not by far.
Three years ago this month, in Seattle, the city I call home, Charleena Lyles, a pregnant mother who struggled with mental illness was murdered by the police officers that she’d called for help. The lawsuit against them was dismissed.
Six summers ago, 18 year old Michael Brown was shot to death by a white cop and his body left in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, the city where I was born and lived until I was almost eight years old before we moved to a suburb of Chicago — a city well-known for violence against Black bodies.
I do not mention my proximity to these scenes to center myself, but to make clear that as a white person, I would have to choose to ignore these stories, the body count of white supremacy. I would have to be willfully ignorant, intentionally tuning it out because it “doesn’t involve me,” or more accurately, because it makes me uncomfortable — as it should. Murder, dead bodies, lives ended by violence should absolutely make everyone uncomfortable.
And yet there has been a whole lot of white justification of the tear gas and the rubber bullets against protestors. There has been a whole lot of white rage and concern over damaged property and stolen merchandise. There has been a whole lot of “that is not the right way to protest, that is not the right way to show anger.”
The right way. The white way. The quiet and peaceful and easily ignored way. Non-threatening and non-disruptive. By the way, taking a knee during the National Anthem doesn’t qualify as this because the National Anthem is sacred in this nation. Firebombing a church and killing children is not sacred though. Nor, apparently, is an American president ordering the tear-gassing of peaceful protestors gathering at a church so he could get a photo op.
It’s time to reckon with whiteness, to confront it head-on. In fact, it’s way, way overdue.
As white people, we have to look long and hard in the mirror and deep inside of ourselves. We have to examine our own complicity and complacency with the white supremacist system we were raised in. Because we were all raised in it. There is no white innocence. We all benefited from privilege we did not earn — we were born into it simply because we happened to be born with and to people with less melanin. We took advantage of that privilege, sometimes unknowingly, but sometimes knowing damn well. Many of us were not actively, knowingly racist, but all of us have internalized racism, and as a result, committed racist acts.
We need to own this, as a starting point, and then go deeper. We need to examine our histories — national, familial, and especially personal. We will have to work to develop a lens we were never taught and use it to look at our past, our present, and our future. This work will not have an end point. It will be lifelong and it will be generational — just as the legacy of racism has been. This work will be messy. We will make mistakes, a lot of them, and when they are noticed, we will feel shame and indignance. That is a symptom of white supremacy culture. Perfectionism is one of the traits that I internalized most deeply as a white girl, and I have used it as an excuse to avoid this work again and again.
This work is deeply and inherently uncomfortable and we white people are trained to avoid discomfort — that is another piece of the white supremacist legacy. We perceive comfort as a right, as something we are owed. This is why we cry when we are told to wear a face mask to prevent others from getting sick during a pandemic; why we behave like toddlers wielding AR-15 rifles when we are told we cannot get a haircut right now, that we have to stay home for the greater good.
Even those of us who identify as “good white people,” who scoff at the Karens crying about face masks and the gun-toting MAGA hat crowd — we can sit with the discomfort of masks and Stay-at-Home orders, but we have a much harder time sitting with the discomfort of our mistakes. I include myself here. It is hard to reckon with my whiteness, with the times I caused harm or stood silently by. But that discomfort is nothing compared to a knee on the neck for nearly nine minutes. That discomfort is nothing compared to dying face down on the street or in a hail of bullets with hands up.
So that is why I am here, sharing publicly what has been a six-month private journaling process where I confront myself, my whiteness, my internalized racism. I am going to fuck up here. I am not going to have the right words. I am going to miss the nuances. I am going to cringe when I reread parts of this in months and years ahead. In fact, if I don’t, it will mean that I’ve stopped working at this.
I am already cringing because I know I am centering my white experience here. I want to be upfront about that and own it. But I also did not want to use that as an excuse not to talk about and own my whiteness. Just like I didn’t want to use my lack of expertise as an excuse. I do not have a Ph.D. I have taken race studies courses, but I majored in creative writing, not history or sociology. I am a deep and voracious reader though and I have been immersing and re-immersing myself in the writing of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, bell hooks, Ijeoma Oluo, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates — all voices that white people need to be reading, centering, and reflecting on.
We white people need to be brutally honest with ourselves and each other though. We need to deconstruct our whiteness and face the ramifications of it together. In service of that goal, I lay this personal work out in front of you. In the hopes that it will allow other white people to reflect on their privilege and experiences and be in conversation with each other.
“If the heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of anti-racism is confession, is admission, is acknowledgement, is the willingness to be vulnerable, is the willingness to identify times in which we are being racist, to be willing to diagnose ourselves and our ideas and our country… The first step is acknowledging the problem.” Ibram X. Kendi on Brene Brown’s Unlocking Us Podcast
I am going to start with the first time I became aware of race — an awareness that may be on the early side for white people, but is likely much later than most Black and other people of color.
I was seven years old.
I attended a K through 8 public school in St. Louis, Missouri, called Wade, that has since been shuttered. My admittedly foggy memory of being at Wade is of being one of a very small number of white kids. Specifically, I remember only three other white kids. Two of them were twins, who were both pulled out of class with me to attend the school’s gifted program.. At the end of first grade, the twins’ parents and my parents were encouraged to send us to a public gifted and talented academy. The twins went. I didn’t because my mother would tell me, “I didn’t want you taking a bus at 6:30 every morning at seven years old” — a choice, which I want to pause and acknowledge, was in and of itself a privilege and one that white families have had since the start of desegregation.
So I went into second grade with just one other white kid in my class. The rest of my friends and classmates were Black. The gifted program, if I recall correctly, went on a brief hiatus and then there was a new teacher, a Black woman, who was tougher on me than the previous grandmotherly white lady. I didn’t like her at first, but by the end of the year I deeply respected her. The books and reports she assigned were more challenging. She prepped me so well that at the end of the year, I gave a speech in front of the entire school.
She also told my parents then, “She is too smart for this place. You need to get her out.”
I left because we were moving anyway — mainly for my father’s job, but I know that the schools played a role.
I hope that if we hadn’t moved, I would have stayed. Because I wasn’t that special. I wasn’t that smart. I was just white. A white kid with college-educated parents.
I hope that Black children benefited from this teacher too. I can’t remember how diverse the gifted program was because my vague memories of it center my own anxieties and experiences. My best friend at school, a Black girl named Janelle, used to tell me that she wished she could go to Gifted with me. I’m not sure if that was because she envied those books and reports I told her about or if she just wanted to get out of our regular classroom. Maybe both. Maybe something more. I told her that she was smart, that she could do it, too. I told her that she could do anything because that’s what my parents told me. I didn’t realize then that I had an unfair, systemic advantage over her. I did see it in action though.
I cried a lot in first and second grade and was comforted, kindly handed tissues.
If Janelle had a runny nose or a dirty face, as little kids often do, tissues were thrust at her with a look of disgust. “Wipe your nose, girl.”
During the last week of second grade, it was hot. St. Louis hot, which means sticky Southern humidity. Our school did not have air conditioning and our district had a rule about not wearing shorts. Janelle came to school in them anyway, having heard that they were making an exception — or maybe her mom had just decided that they damn well should make an exception, which I remember my own mom saying though she’d ultimately sent me to school in the lightest weight thing that adhered to dress code.
I was such a rule follower that it’s very likely that I insisted on sticking with the dress code despite my mom’s fears of heat stroke. But if I hadn’t — if I, the white girl, had broken the dress code, I am willing to bet that it would have been overlooked. The exception wouldn’t have been made because I was white, of course, but because I was “good.” The smart little girl who’d given a speech in front of the whole school. At the very least, I would have been treated better than Janelle was.
Janelle was so proud of her cute summer outfit. I remember that. It was a one-piece, a tank top connected to shorts. It was new, and unlike me, she was not sweaty! Our teacher didn’t say anything about it, but someone on the playground did. I can’t recall if it was the principal or if Janelle got sent to the principal by a playground monitor. I just remember that the principal was involved and Janelle was so deeply ashamed. Since her mom was at work and could not bring her a change of clothes, she was made to go to the “free box,” a place where she’d had to get clothes from before, though she’d gotten to take those home for her mom to wash at least. Over her outfit, she had to put on a hoodie and a pair of jeans that were much too big. She spent the rest of the day sweating, but she didn’t cry like I would have. It wouldn’t have done her any good, just earned her a “Girl, wipe the snot off your face” to add to her humiliation.
This is the first time I’ve written down this whole story. I’ve written about Janelle and the free box, but I was always reflecting on what a shock it was for me, a few months later when I started at my new elementary school in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb that my parents chose based on its diversity, and I was suddenly being judged for my “generic” clothes. My friend Janelle had never judged me. My friend Janelle had sometimes gotten her clothes from the free box.
I generalized about that. I locked down that very potent memory of the day that Janelle had a brand-new beautiful outfit and had been forced to wear hot, oversized, old clothes from the free box. When it comes to early childhood, my memory is hazy, but I can picture the hurt on Janelle’s face as clearly as if I’d witnessed it last week. I remember watching the emotions shift in her light brown eyes — from fear to shame to anger.
This was the first time I witnessed the policing of a Black girl’s body — saw something that made her joyful and proud being used to shame her. It may or may not have been the first time Janelle experienced this.
It has taken me thirty-three years to see that memory for what it is and to recognize what I did with it — how viewed through my white lens, it became about class rather than race, and the parts that were clearly about race were just things I didn’t talk about. Even worse, I co-opted part of Janelle’s story and used it to explain my own experiences with class. In that way, I equated my experiences as a white girl being bullied by other white girls over my clothes to the racist treatment of Janelle.
This is white privilege.
This is my white privilege. And it is only the beginning.
I will follow this post with four more posts. I will also point you toward the work of the Black people whom I have learned from and organizations led by BIPOC that I encourage you to support. Today I encourage you to learn about and donate to Action STL, a grassroots racial justice organization born out of the Ferguson Uprisings of 2014 that seeks to build political power for Black communities in the St. Louis region. Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race laid the foundation for the anti-racist work I’ve been doing lately, while reading Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis as a teenager first illuminated my privilege and positionality. Buy them from a black-owned bookstore. Watch Ijeoma Oluo in this incredible townhall conversation while you are waiting for your book to arrive.
