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June 15 - June 24, 2020
My legs stilled. That’s why the librarian hadn’t believed me. She didn’t know a name like Austin could be stretched wide enough to cloak a little Black girl.
It would be comical if it wasn’t so damn disappointing.
I am not interested in getting anyone in trouble; I am trying to clarify what it’s like to exist in a Black body in an organization that doesn’t understand it is not only Christian but also white.
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.
white people often professed, “I don’t even see color,” reassuring me that I would be safe from racism with them. And yet, I learned pretty early in life that while Jesus may be cool with racial diversity, America is not. The ideology that whiteness is supreme, better, best, permeates the air we breathe—in our schools, in our offices, and in our country’s common life.
White supremacy is a tradition that must be named and a religion that must be renounced. When this work has not been done, those who live in whiteness become oppressive, whether intentional or not.
I knew all about the world of my white teachers and peers, but they didn’t seem to know a thing about mine.
Black is not monolithic. Black is expansive, and I didn’t need the approval of whiteness in order to feel good in my skin; there was no whiteness available to offer an opinion. It was freedom.
praise. I 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.
Like many Black students in predominately white schools, if I wanted to see myself reflected in the curriculum, I had to act on my own behalf.
Resisting an education built on a white worldview meant constantly having to evaluate the risks of telling the truth or furthering the myth.
The true gift was that I didn’t have to create my own sense of belonging in her class. 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, a default setting that masked for them how often white culture bled into the curriculum.
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. I paid tuition like every white student.
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.
“Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.”
Doing nothing was no longer an option for me.
the ways Christianity had been used to uphold all the evil of this history was not lost on me.
We always told Dr. Simms that he ruined our lives. He made us so aware of racial bias, we could no longer watch the news as leisure.
Dr. Simms wanted us to be emotionally connected to our learning, to sit in the pain, the horror, the absurdity of America’s racist history, and to humanize those who dared stand against the system.
Far from an imposing beast, I found that white supremacy is more like a poison. It seeps into your mind, drip by drip, until it makes you wonder if your perception of reality is true.
It’s so easy to believe the pretty pictures on the website filled with racial diversity, to buy in to the well-crafted statements of purpose, to enjoy being invited into the process of “being part of the change.” The role of a bridge builder sounds appealing until it becomes clear how often that bridge is your broken back.
White institutions are constantly communicating how much Blackness they want. It begins with numbers. How many scholarships are being offered? How many seats are being “saved” for “neighborhood kids”? How many Black bodies must be present for us to have “good” diversity numbers? How many people of color are needed for the website, the commercials, the pamphlets?
Whiteness wants enough Blackness to affirm the goodness of whiteness, the progressiveness of whiteness, the openheartedness of whiteness. Whiteness likes a trickle of Blackness, but only that which can be controlled.
Rare is the ministry praying that they would be worthy of the giftedness of Black minds and hearts.
We demand because we believe in our own dignity.
speaking to me in a way that he wouldn’t have to anyone who looked like him.
This is partly what makes the fragility of whiteness so damn dangerous. It ignores the personhood of people of color and instead makes the feelings of whiteness the most important thing.
If Black people are dying in the street, we must consult with white feelings before naming the evils of police brutality.
most white people still believe that they are good and the true racists are easy to spot.
When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it’s easy to start believing bigotry is rare, and that the label racist should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. The problem with this framework—besides being a gross misunderstanding of how racism operates in systems and structures enabled by nice people—is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful. I am expected to come closer to the racists. Be nicer to them. Coddle them.
White people desperately want to believe that only the lonely, isolated “whites only” club members are racist. This is why the word racist offends “nice white people” so deeply. It challenges their self-identification as good people. Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful.
White people believe this is because people of color haven’t thought it through or are stumped by a well-made point. But the truth is, oftentimes people of color don’t have the time, energy, or willpower to teach the white person enough to turn the conversation into a real debate. To do so would be a ton of work.
I don’t have much use for white guilt anymore. I used to interpret white guilt as an early sign of a change in heart, a glimpse that a movie, program, or speaker had broken through and was producing a changed mind. While that may or may not be true, for those on the receiving end, white guilt is like having tar dry all over your hands and heart. It takes so much work to peel off the layers, rub away the stickiness, get rid of the smell. Unsolicited confessions inspired by a sense of guilt are often poured over Black bodies in search of their own relief.
None of these confessions involved me. No one was apologizing for not listening to me, for being mean to me, or judging me unfairly. But after I had heard all of those confessions, it felt personal. It felt like I was sitting at the table when the racist joke was made and the confessor said nothing.
But I am not a priest for the white soul.
“So what are you going to do differently?”
resisting the easy comfort of having spoken the confession.
We have refused to acknowledge slavery’s role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable “states’ rights.”
We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren’t just “mean.” They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness.
Ultimately, the reason we have not yet told the truth about this history of Black and white America is that telling an ordered history of this nation would mean finally naming America’s commitment to violent, abusive, exploitative, immoral white supremacy, which seeks the absolute control of Black bodies. It would mean doing something about it.
Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort.
James Baldwin,
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you. Part of the rage is this: it isn’t only what is happening to you, but it’s what’s happening all around you all of the time, in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, the indifference and ignorance of most white people in this country.
Meanwhile, whiteness twiddles its thumbs with feigned innocence and shallow apologies.
Diversity gets treated like a passing trend, a friendly group project in which everyone takes on equal risks and rewards.
“Is there more?” white innocence asks before bursting into tears at the possibility that we would dare question its sincerity.
I feel anger. Even more frustrating, there are so few acceptable occasions for my rage to be expressed. Because I am a Black person, my anger is considered dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted. Because I am a woman, my anger supposedly reveals an emotional problem or gets dismissed as a temporary state that will go away once I choose to be rational. Because I am a Christian, my anger is dismissed as a character flaw, showing just how far I have turned from Jesus. Real Christians are nice, kind, forgiving—and anger is none of those things.
Zora Neale Hurston,
Nina Simone,
I was more afraid of my own rage than I realized.
