My White Responsibility
I am a 48-year-old, white, heterosexual American man living in Seattle and watching all of the chaos the world seems to be descending into. I could choose to see the protests to end police violence and white supremacy as a threat. After all, it threatens my whiteness: My way of moving and being in the world. From all directions, I’m hearing how being white is damaging to others, threatening to people of color, and provides a level of privilege and access to those who share my phenotype.
I have been white all my life. I grew up in white communities and played with other white children. I went to schools predominantly filled with people who looked like me, talked like me, and whose ancestors came from the same continent as mine.
My people are churchgoers and charity givers. My grandmothers taught me the importance of caring for the poor and standing up for the disadvantaged. My grandfathers taught me the value of honesty and the need for integrity. My parents worked hard to teach me to make decisions that would not harm myself or others. They taught me to use my manners and the value of being polite.
It doesn’t feel wrong, harmful, or improper. It feels appropriate, yet the world seems to be trying to tear it down. It feels like being polite in society is worthless, and that anarchy is needed. Is this true? Maybe. Is it more probable that the truth of the matter exists somewhere in between? I would say yes.
My parents and grandparents taught me all these things through direct and indirect lessons. There were moments when my grandmother taught me a straightforward lesson, like keeping my elbows off the dinner table. Then, there were many more moments where she modeled a lesson in the subtle words she used and the attitudes she held. Just as my parents taught me who to be, they also taught me who not to be.
In 6th grade, I came home exclaiming I had a girlfriend. She was my first girlfriend, and I was admonished for not being old enough to date. When I told my family that it was the black daughter of our new principal, the dinner table erupted in a consequential conversation around my youthful decision. The conclusion was that I couldn’t date that young lady, nor any like her, in the future because it would be improper. God didn’t design the races to mix.
A similar lesson was conveyed when my mother told me the girlhood story of how her father wouldn’t let her friend sleepover because she was Black. Another was when my grandfather gave me my first slingshot. He carved the stock, assembled it, and promptly called it a “n*****-shooter.” These are the direct moments of modeling racist attitudes, and thankfully, there were very few. Not everyone can say that. There are far more for some, and for others, even less.
My parents and grandparents held relatively egalitarian views on race. These moments were bracing because they disrupted what I knew as the status quo on race in our family: God created all people equal. We value a person’s actions rather than the color of their skin. It isn’t polite to bring up race in mixed company.
My parents and grandparents believed the issue of race was settled in this country in 1964 with the adoption of the Civil Rights Act. The law had spoken; everyone had equal rights, and that was the story’s end. To continue the conversation about race in society only perpetuated the problem. Race should be allowed to fall by the wayside so we can move beyond it as a country.
Far more destructive were the subtle acts of modeling in my upbringing: The concepts of us/them placed between my experience as a white child in America and those youth in the inner city, the ones I only saw on television. These ideas were formed by my parent’s response to news stories of black violence, drug trafficking, and crime. Weeds of segragation were watered with my lack of exposure to any restaurant, book, television show, radio host, pastor, leader, or house guest that was Black or brown.
My dad had several Black and Hispanic employees. He treated them as fairly as any of his white employees. They all respected my father as an employer, and many stayed on for years. However, when they fell on hard times, needed extra help, or failed out of the company altogether, the response to their failure, as opposed to that of his white employees, was different. Both were due to character flaws in his assessment. One seemed to be innate and inevitable, while the other was unfortunate.
As a young man in college, I further exposed myself to whiteness. My roommates, my friends, and the members of my church were all white. My university was predominately white. It was a state liberal arts school, so the opportunity to expose myself to challenging material abounded. I tried to take advantage of this opportunity. One quarter, I was encouraged by a humanities professor to take the African American Literature course.
The professor spent the first class explaining phenotype — the set of observable human characteristics resulting from the long-term interaction of genotype with the environment. He ended the class by telling us that although he presented as white, his father was black. I found that almost impossible to believe at the time.
I had his class three times a week, and only one African-American young man was in the course with us. This fellow student’s next class must have been in a similar direction as mine because we walked out of the building and through the main square together at the end of every class.
Not once did I strike up a conversation with him or introduce myself. As I remember it, I generally walked in front with him several paces behind me. This event occurred after class throughout the quarter, and I remember a growing awareness of the discomfort I felt having a black man walk so close behind me. One day, it abruptly dawned on me that this somatic response was present in my body, which was shocking.
I became constantly aware of this bodily response. It was present every time I saw a black man walking on the street coming toward me. I recognized it when a black person entered a predominately white space I was in. My gaze slid off to the side, and I intentionally didn’t make eye contact.
It took years of conscious self-reflection and relationship to work through it. If I grew up not being in relationships with black and brown people, then where did this come from? I know now that it is a programmed response from exposure to subtle messages about race and racialized ideas from family, media, movies, news stories, and societal attitudes.
The code of this physical-emotional response is embedded in every television episode where a black man is portrayed as a dangerous thug. It’s in every movie script that tells the story of black society being fraught with the dangers of drugs, illicit money, and the violence they produce. It’s woven into every news highlight of black violence, black drama, black poverty, black anger, and black militants. It is in the archetypical tone of the angry black woman and the cutting look of the oppressed black man’s eye provided for my consumption through various media outlets.
These encoded learnings are the lessons of my youth. I never spent time in black communities, nor was I ever taken to black neighborhoods or cultural events. The only thing given about blackness was that it was dangerous, angry, ignorant, and poor. It was ruthless and savage to itself and outsiders, and I should stay away.
Being a liberal arts student who pursued a degree in creative writing, I did more than most white folk in educating myself on the “African American plight”. My bookshelves hold volumes by great black authors. If they were white, they would just be authors. I have several African-American artists displayed on my wall; if they were white, they would just be artists. I have several African-American friends; if they were white, they would just be friends.
Perhaps this is what it means to live through a lens of supremacy. After all, isn’t supremacy the best word to describe everything taught about the difference between growing up white and growing up black? Was I not shown how growing up white was far better, far safer, and far more exceptional than what it must be growing up black or brown or other?
I’m not alone in this subtle and invisible indoctrination. Every individual’s experience is different. However, if you look like me, male or female, you can likely relate to my growing-up experience. Could this not be the explanation for the term white supremacy that we all bristle when mentioned? Folks from the African-American community are not the only ones who utilize the term white supremacy to describe the wall they encounter in their American experience. Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Polynesian Americans, Asian Americans, and Indian Americans all understand this experience.
What is it called when people from incredibly diverse communities and backgrounds all describe the same experience in dealing with systems of government, education, and policing in this country? Is it just all in their collective imaginations? I’ve come to believe it’s far more probable that their experience with race in America interacts with the white experience adversely. Perhaps it is time that people who live, work, and play within the white American experience take a very personal inventory of why that is.
Jeremy Tunnell is an author, presenter, and consultant with Co3 Consulting, LLC. Jeremy writes and presents on dismantling whiteness, personal and organizational resilience, and worldview amendment. With his wife and partner, Dr. Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, they lead teams and organizations in equity work. Together, they host The Plowline Podcast.
