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February 13 - February 13, 2019
White people can be exhausting. Particularly exhausting are white people who don’t know they are white, and those who need to be white.
first I found exhausting were those who expected me to be white.
this is how being hired usually unfolds for me: First, I am given a promise, usually from a supervisor, co-worker, or member of the hiring committee, that she is a safe person for me to talk to if anything racist happens. To make the promise of safety feel genuine, she admits that the organization isn’t perfect and assures me that I can share if there is ever an inappropriate comment, a wrong
Experience being hired and joining an org as a black woman
But the white consensus doesn’t want me to point out these things. I was only supposed to name the “bad apples,” so now whiteness has a few names for me. Divisive. Negative. Toxic.
instead of giving up, I take a step back. I return to pointing out the “bad apples,” hoping that my doing so will lead others to see the systemic.
White people who expect me to be white have not yet realized that their cultural way of being is not in fact the result of goodness, rightness, or God’s blessing. Pushing back, resisting the lie, is hella work.
Equating whiteness with rightness or god's blessing - cant see how race fsctors in at all
Togetherness across racial lines doesn’t have to mean the uplifting of whiteness and harming of Blackness.
even though the Church I love has been the oppressor as often as it has been the champion of the oppressed, I can’t let go of my belief in Church—in a universal body of belonging, in a community that reaches toward love in a world so often filled with hate.
Even though the church so often is the oppressor, sees hope in its ideals and potential
hopes that we will embody a community eager to name whiteness, celebrate Blackness, and, in a world still governed by systems of racial oppression, begin to
Name whiteness and celebrate blackness
wondered why all the characters in my school’s library books seemed obsessed with campfires and playing the guitar on a beach, and I also noticed that none of my teachers looked like me.
seemed instead to be my secret knowledge. I knew all about the world of my white teachers and peers, but they didn’t seem to know a thing about mine.
Her world felt like a secret amidst a sea of whiteness
saying that segregation didn’t have to be followed with integration. Surely relegating us to the back of the bus could have stopped without us having to give up all the businesses that died because we started going to white folks.
could we have kept a great number of Black teachers if we had demanded equal funding for our schools rather than busing ourselves to theirs?”
Sep but actually equal?
There, we weren’t supposed to question history. We were expected to learn the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., thank God that we could all share an integrated classroom now, and move on to another lesson with hearts of gratitude.
“You never open an item in the store, and always have the receipt in your hand if you do,” my mother said. “You always want to be able to show someone you paid for your things.” It’s funny how in these little life lessons,
Be careful with white people was the message I received loud and clear.
The only thing I feared was being discovered.
other Black children called me Oreo and were curious about why I “talked white.”
too white for Black people, and too Black for white people. I had a boy’s name and bad acne. It was terrible.
Not belonging anywhere
she vouched for me. She believed in my Blackness. And because she did, I could, too.
“There is another way.” Another way of speaking, of thinking, of being that did not need white affirmation to be valuable.
fell in love with a Jesus who saw the poor and sick and hurting, a Jesus who had bigger plans for me than keeping me a virgin, a Jesus who loved and reveled in our Blackness.
In sermons he preached, Jesus sounded like a Black person, dealing with familiar hardships of life—injustice, broken relationships, the pain of being called names.
any given Sunday, the message was clear: God was with us.
all these things were taken very seriously, but every Sunday we were also reminded that trouble don’t last always.
Struggles taken seriously - and highlighted as impermanent
key moments in which I learned that harmony—the absence of outright conflict—often leaves deeper complications untouched.
Harmony often requires ignoring deeper issues
“Every year I use a seating chart,” she began, “deciding where each of you will sit. Earlier this week I realized that my tendency to do this is racist.”
Vonfessing her own racism
I am so disappointed with myself, and from now on, you all will sit where you want to sit.”
While I was grateful that she’d had an epiphany, or at least wanted to be grateful, the revelation made me incredibly self-conscious.
Unintended Consequences
grateful that I didn’t have to deal with overt acts of racism, but was it better to know that teachers silently believed I would be a nuisance unless I proved
I wanted to see myself reflected in the curriculum, I had to act on my own behalf.
inspired us to interrogate the assumptions we held about culture, ethics, laws. He wanted us to color outside the lines of our black and white thinking.
Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.
felt deeply gratifying to have my own experience named, lifted up, discussed, considered worthy of everyone’s attention. And yet, I had no desire to be the Black spokesperson. It felt too risky. I wasn’t sure that my classmates had earned the right to know,
No matter how well reasoned their responses, they just couldn’t know.
grateful that my teacher was equipped to navigate that conversation without making me the momentary substitute teacher.
Breaking the social policy of just ignoring race didn’t have to end badly.
“If the University of Michigan hadn’t let unqualified Black people in, I, who am obviously deserving and qualified above and beyond those people, would have easily been accepted.”
more concerning was that four years at a racially diverse school hadn’t been enough to challenge my classmate’s belief that whiteness, on its own merit, made her more deserving. Our school’s “racial harmony” might not have created that assumption, but it didn’t help her unlearn it either. A lack of confrontation had done her no favors. As high school came to an end, I took this lesson with me and became determined always to question what looks like unity at first glance.
Question calls to unity for the sake of quiet
In every previous classroom, I had been responsible for decoding teachers’ references to white middle-class experiences. It’s like when you’re sailing…or You know how when you’re skiing, you have to…My white teachers had an unspoken commitment to the belief that we are all the same,
masked for them how often white culture bled into the curriculum.
She winked at me, and I grinned from ear to ear. I relished the sense of belonging I felt in her classroom. Suddenly I wasn’t content to feel like I was attending a college made for someone else.
They reached for anything that would distance themselves from the pain and anger of the moment; anything to ward off the guilt and shame, the shock and devastation.
don’t know what to do with what I’ve learned,” she said. “I can’t fix your pain, and I can’t take it away, but I can see it. And I can work for the rest of my life to make sure your children don’t have to experience the pain of racism.”
“Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.”
Doing nothing is no longer an option for me
The inspiration to be part of their legacy was palpable, and the ways Christianity had been used to uphold all the evil of this history was not lost on me. Somehow,
In our minds, we were fighting the good fight. But I must confess: These first collegiate attempts at seeking racial justice were a little unhealthy.
“privilege walks” focused on making white people recognize the unearned advantages they’d gotten at birth.
amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation.
That whole story was on immigrants, but why did it focus only on immigrants of color? He wanted us to pay attention.
