“Born on White Street” — Unearthing the Roots of Racial Inequity in America
Chapter One of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
As chance and ancestry would have it, my life as a White American began on White Street, at the end of the first week of May 1955, in the small town of Clinton, in DeWitt County, smack dab in the middle of the state of Illinois. Clinton was, on the day of my birth, a town of six thousand souls — all but a handful of them White people — hemmed in on all sides by freshly-turned soybean and corn fields.
I was born under the skylights of the third-floor operating room in the old, red brick Dr. John Warner Hospital three doors east of the house that would be my home for the next eighteen years. By late May, the towering ancient apple tree in our backyard would be peppered with white blossoms and the lilacs alongside the garage would fill the air with their unmistakable fragrance. The giant weeping willow, the one behind the garage, the one I climbed so often in my boyhood, would be shaggy beneath its fuzzy coat of catkin flowers, not as flashy to mere human eyes as the lilacs and apple blossoms, but a feast for the bees. May can be a lovely month in central Illinois.
For the first eighteen years of my life, I lived in Clinton, in the middle of middle America with my middle-class White family in a medium-sized white house on West White Street. Although I have spent my adult life far from the rural Midwest and my racially-isolated hometown, in many ways, “White Street” — think of it as the racially-privileged version of “Easy Street” — is the place I have always called home.
Growing up in an overwhelmingly White community, I was immersed in racialist thinking, actions, and institutions. I have lived my entire life in a world where my Whiteness mattered and has given me rights and freedoms denied to others.
Despite the unquestioning faith in the superiority of Whiteness shared by all my childhood family, friends, and neighbors — or perhaps, because of it — as a child, I was convinced I was not at all racist. I could look back to the time of my parent’s childhood and see clear evidence that racism was a much more serious problem in their generation than it was in mine. As a child in the 1960s, imagining myself as fully enlightened on matters of racial equality and civil rights, I felt my generation would be the ones to solve the problem of White supremacy in America once and for all. I had no idea how far we had to go.
As a child, I was not only ignorant of how deeply White supremacy was embedded in American history and culture, I also possessed a completely groundless certainty about the geographic limits of racism in America. I looked south from my central Illinois hometown and imagined a dividing line, a western extension of the Mason-Dixon line marking the border between the tolerant North and the racist South. In general, I grew up thinking White supremacy was primarily a problem of a different time and a different place, not something related in any way to me or my community.
But, of course, the history and geography of racial inequity in America are far more pervasive and complex than any younger versions of myself ever could have imagined. As a White American male, I have lived a life of entitlement and privilege and yet, until very recently, the myriad ways I was advantaged by ancestral legacies of Whiteness remained invisible to me, too ordinary-seeming to attract notice.
James Baldwin wrote and spoke often about the importance of facing the truths of our history. In 1965, he wrote:
… the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, because it is to history we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.[i]
We cannot know ourselves until we know our true history. But the truths of Whiteness in American history have been intentionally buried. For generations, White Americans have taught their children a history full of white lies, a sanitized and whitewashed version of American origins designed to maximize (White) American pride and minimize any feelings of discomfort (for White folks).
Lies are contagious and destructive. Even seemingly harmless white lies — like emphasizing love of liberty and downplaying preservation of chattel slavery as explanations for the American Revolution — have insidious and far-reaching effects. James Baldwin believed that when we deny our own history, “we literally are criminals.”[ii] When we deny our history we become complicit in the cover up of past crimes against humanity and accomplices in the perpetuation of the cruel injustices of White supremacy.
Facing up to the hard truths of racial injustice in American history is not something that comes easily for most White Americans. As a White child in the 1960s, in the small town in rural Illinois where I grew up, I was taught not to talk about race. The folks in my family and community were uncomfortable talking about race for the same reasons they were uncomfortable talking about cancer. Such unpleasant topics were best avoided. Cancer could not always be ignored. It sometimes struck close to home. But the White folks in my hometown rarely felt a need to mention race. Race was considered somebody else’s trouble, not ours.
Everything I learned as a child about my family and about my family’s history made me think race had very little to do with who I was. I was taught to see myself as a member of a family and community made up of just plain Americans, ordinary White folks. We often heard news about racial “unrest” in other parts of America, but it felt like news from a foreign land, not something connected in any way to my family or to the families of any of the White folks in my rural, central Illinois hometown.
Even now, a half century later, the White folks in my hometown, like other White folks throughout America, continue to deny any personal connection to racial hierarchy and inequity in American society. But this denial of reality takes a toll. Refusing to face the obvious injustices and suffering resulting from America’s race-based social hierarchy comes at a high cost.[iii]
Our collective failure, as White Americans, to confront our personal stake in maintaining systems of White racial domination undermines our sense of self-worth and diminishes our capacity for compassion. Self-deluding denial of responsibility for the persistent inequities and injustices resulting from White racial domination causes many White people in America to live in a constant state of distress and agitation, cowering in fear of blow-back from fires of racial subjugation and violence we ourselves have ignited and constantly refuel.
Denying complicity in the maintenance of White supremacy is reinforced by faith in the false narrative of the Unites States as a quintessentially White nation. To maintain our faith in this illusion of a White America we are compelled to make a hollow shell of American history. We pledge our allegiance to a nation defined by White lies, a nation dedicated to White supremacy.
Scraping away the Whitewash from American history and laying bare the roots and infrastructure of race-based hierarchy is a starting point for attacking White supremacy. By telling the truth about how racial identities and statuses came into being in America and how notions of race have evolved and adapted to maintain the dominance of Whiteness throughout American history, we can begin to expose and subvert the institutions and actions maintaining White supremacy in the United States now and into the future.
Dismantling racial inequity and White domination in America will not be quick and it will not be easy. The systems and ideas supporting racial inequity in America will not disappear simply because we wish it so. Race-based hierarchies and inequities are deeply entrenched in American culture and society. Dismantling structures of White racial hegemony will take time and hard work. Change will come slowly, but change, over time, is inevitable.
Revising historical narratives of American origins has an important part to play in promoting change. Origin stories of racial and national identity are constantly being supplemented and revised. To create the political will needed for the long hard work of dismantling systems of racial inequity and injustice in the U.S. we need new multiracial narratives of our history, new stories of our origins as a people and a nation.
Stories of racial injustice and violence have too often been pushed aside as footnotes to the mainstream narrative of American history. In old-school American history, race is depicted as a primeval and somehow “natural” categorization of humans. As a result, the American history most White Americans have learned contains nothing about how White identity and dominance first developed in America and how Whiteness has adapted and remained dominant in the face of multiple historical challenges.
Far too many White people in America still imagine the origins of our racial identity and status as determined by biology or by divine will. In truth, the actions, institutions, and ideology of White racial domination are neither natural nor divinely-ordained. But many White Americans are reluctant to acknowledge the human decisions and actions that created and continue to maintain systems of race-based hierarchy and inequality in America.
White racial domination in America is perhaps best understood as an ongoing socio-historical phenomenon, a series of “racial projects,”[iv] an ever-adapting work in progress created through the actions of our ancestors and updated and maintained by actions we take every day.
To be sure, for White Americans like me, facing up to the race-based violence and injustice hiding in plain sight in our family trees can be a daunting and emotionally challenging task. For many of us, ignorance seems a better choice than shame and guilt. Tommy Orange, in his novel There There, noted the reluctance many Americans might have to take a close look at the facts of their own family history:
If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger.[v]
By choosing ignorance and misrepresentation of our ancestral legacies, we can maintain the illusion of ancestral innocence, an illusion that prevents us from acknowledging and confronting the reality and persistence of race-based inequity and injustice in our own lifetimes.
If ignorance, in the case of White American ancestry, can be bliss, why awaken the sleeping tiger? For me, and, I believe, for many other White Americans, taking a critical look at our White American family history can help us understand and reckon with the privilege and social and economic injustice embedded in the legacies of Whiteness, White supremacy, and White Christian nationalism we have inherited from our ancestors. It can also help us recognize the centrality and importance of racial identity in our lives, the many ways in which our Whiteness unjustly works to our advantage and to the disadvantage of others. It can help us become active participants in the subversion of the institutions and ideology supporting race-base hierarchy and inequity.
On the other hand, refusing to examine our own history as White people makes us complicit in the perpetuation of racial inequity and ignores our responsibility for helping to put an end to racial injustice in America. In a 2020 essay, Eve L. Ewing makes this connection explicit:
As long as White people do not ever have to interrogate what Whiteness is, where it comes from, how it operates, or what it does, they can maintain the fiction that race is other people’s problem, that they are mere observers in a centuries-long stage play in which they have, in fact, been the producers, directors, and central actors.[vi]
A critical approach to family history, specifically, an examination of the roles of race and racial power dynamics in shaping our ancestors’ social, political, and economic opportunities and status, is one way for White Americans to begin to understand the roots of race-base hierarchy and inequity. Critical family history can open a window on the origins of the institutions and ideology of White supremacy and reveal the ways White racial identity has adapted to withstand challenges and perpetuate systemic racism.[vii]
Filling in the missing multi-racial social contexts of the lives of my American ancestors has helped me envision the long historical process through which racial inequity has become embedded and continually renewed in core American institutions, in our economic system, in our political and justice systems, in our churches and schools, and in our families and communities.
Failure to confront personal and family connections to the history of racial violence and inequity is not a problem confined to small towns and rural backwaters in America. It is a failure of the United States as a whole. Other nations have done far more than the United States to confront the trauma of a history of racial injustice. Unlike Germans who have made efforts to memorialize the Holocaust or White South Africans who have taken steps to recall and take responsibility for the damage done by Apartheid, too many White Americans remain mired in willful forgetting. In the end, the possibility of experiencing some discomfort or shame cannot justify ignoring the facts of history.
As uncomfortable as it may be for many of us, the path to racial healing begins with bringing old wounds into the light. Unearthing uncomfortable facts of American history is the only way to prevent the deep wounds of enslavement and genocide from continuing to fester, continuing to block the emergence of the “beloved community” dreamed of by Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many other anti-racist activists.[viii]
NOTES
[i] The quote is from Baldwin’s essay, “White Man’s Guilt” first published in Ebony, August 1965 and reprinted in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985, pp. 413–417).
[ii] Near the end of the 2016 Raoul Peck film, I Am Not Your Negro, the narration, based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember this House, includes the following: “…Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals…” (timestamp 1:26:12 to 1:27:13).
[iii] White supremacy weighs on the souls of all Americans. This toll has been described painstakingly and beautifully by Black anti-racist thinkers and writers from Frederick Douglass, to W.E.B. Du Bois, to James Baldwin, and, more recently, Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Carol Anderson, Isabel Wilkerson, Heather McGhee, and so many others. See, also, Alison Bailey, The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
[iv] In Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2015, 3rd edition) argue for the centrality of race as the basis for “making up people” throughout American history and emphasize the variability of racial identities across social and historical contexts. On page 127, they provide a succinct interim summary of the theory of racial formation: “The theory of racial formation suggests that society is suffused with racial projects, large and small, to which all are subjected. The racial ‘subjection’ is quintessentially ideological. Everybody learns some combination, some version, of the rules of racial classification, and of their own racial identity, often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Thus are we inserted in a comprehensively racialized social structure. Race becomes ‘common sense’ — a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world. A vast web of racial projects mediates between the discursive or representational means in which race is identified and signified on the one hand, and the institutional and organizational forms in which it is routinized and standardized on the other. The interaction and accumulation of these projects are at the heart of the racial formation process.”
[v] The quoted passage appears on pages 138 to 139 in There There: A Novel by Tommy Orange (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).
[vi] See Eve L. Ewing, “I’m a Black scholar who studies race. Here’s why I capitalize ‘White’” (July 1, 2020, published online https://zora.medium.com/im-a-black-scholar-who-studies-race-here-s-why-i-capitalize-white-f94883aa2dd3 ).
[vii] In researching my family history, I found myself wanting to learn more than the information I needed to fill in names and dates on a family tree. I wanted to learn more about the social contexts and power relations that shaped my ancestors’ lives. I eventually found myself using methods and perspectives consistent with what Christine E. Sleeter and others have called critical family history. See Sleeter, “Critical family history: Situating family within contexts of power relationships” (Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, Vol. 8, №1, Spring 2016, 11–23, available online at https://jmrpublication.org/wp-content/uploads/JMR8-1.pdf#page=13 ).
[viii] The idea of the Beloved Community was first developed by the philosopher and theologian, Josiah Royce and popularized and elaborated by Martin Luther King, Jr. For King, the chief barriers to achieving the goal of the Beloved Community, a vision of social and economic justice for all, are the intertwined, triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. See notes on “The Triple Evils” at the King Center website at https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/ .
