This is a moment in time when there are a lot of conversations happening about race, more conversations, with more depth, than I’ve ever seen happening before. At work, in my relationships, in my social groups, that personal reflection is there. One thing that I can do right now is to reflect on myself, my life, and my choices, be honest with myself, and tell honest stories. And I don’t mean that I want to use this space as a confessional for white guilt. It’s not a matter of guilt and absolution. It’s a matter of being honest, seeing who I am and how I got here. I truly believe that telling and hearing our stories humanizes all of us. Now is the time for white people to think and talk about all of the ways we have and exercise privilege, exercise it without thinking twice about it, and to think and talk about all of the times that we’ve been overtly or covertly racist, whether we intended to be or not. Looking at it helps us see it; seeing it might help us mitigate it. This is our work to do.
Honesty can be very uncomfortable. I’m divorced. In my marriage, there was a lot left unsaid, because honesty is vulnerability, and vulnerability is uncomfortable. Learning how to communicate honestly without blame and anger, without guilt, or shame, or fear, to learn to give and accept grace, that takes work and patience. In my romantic relationship now, every single time that we have entered into dangerous waters, when feelings run high, when shame and guilt and fear rise up in me, when I am not sure if I can or should be honest, I am always glad afterwards that I spoke my truth out loud. It has always made things better for both of us to be honest, and to mix that honesty with kindness and humor. I can’t help but believe that honesty will help us now.
I grew up in the white suburbs or north Dallas. We didn’t live in the richest part of town, but we were in walking and biking distance of some of the richest parts. In my elementary school, I can remember three black students, two of whom were twin brothers, and one student whose parents, in my memory at least, came to the U.S. from Iran. All or nearly all of the rest of us were white. I am not educated enough to take a deep dive into how low property prices in the suburbs and low interest rates from federal home loans were accessible to white families like mine but not to black families, contributing to a lopsided growth in wealth after World War II. But the suburbs I grew up in were white.
I did not then, of course, have enough knowledge or experience to understand anything about the historical context of race in the United States, but I did know intuitively that there was an us and there was a them, there was normal and there was weird. Black and brown were definitely weird. My parents fostered children in our home from the time that I was 6 until I was 19. It’s true that there was a lot of racial diversity among those 38 kids, but they were mostly infants and toddlers. I didn’t have to learn how to interact with them as equals, to navigate social situations with them at school. It was eye opening to grow up with them and hear the stories of their origins and their travails in the court system, but still, my suburbs were white.
Being born in 1972, I was aware in elementary school of U.S. citizens being held hostage, blindfolded, in a country called Iran, by a government that appeared to be lead by an angry, crazy, murderous religious zealot. I didn’t have that vocabulary to put to it, but that was the impression. A girl in my class, named Yeshim, had a last name that started with H; elementary schools kids stand in alphabetized lines frequently, so I was near her a lot. Her smell was strange to me, and her behavior baffling. In 2nd grade, she stood up in front of the class when the teacher stepped out, and she lifted her dress and pulled down her underwear. And in 4th grade, when I was getting a drink from the water fountain in the cafeteria, she dumped a glass of ice water down the back of my shirt. I don’t remember what I did, or maybe didn’t do, to provoke that response, but to me, she was strange, incomprehensible, and definitely an other.
Now, with more perspective and experience, I wonder what it must have been like for her and her family growing up in suburban Dallas in the ‘80s, to have the Iranian hostage crisis constantly tied to your identity, to be treated to racist epithets and accusations of terrorism. I still remember a bit of doggerel scratched into the wall of a bathroom stall in the public library around this time: “Here I sit, bowl’s complainin’, giving birth to another Iranian.” She must’ve dealt with a lot of crap like that. On top of that, I wonder now what else she may have been enduring to make her think that exposing herself would endear her to the other kids at school. I don’t know. It must’ve been a hard childhood for her, and I was absolutely part of her marginalization.
There was also an incident that I was a part of, one that’s uncomfortable to recall, involving that one black kid who was not one of the twins. I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember how it started, or who did it. I do remember a group of 4 or 5 white boys around him, yelling and taunting. For a long time, when I occasionally thought of it, I remembered this moment as a fat shaming incident. I had a lot of body image shame of my own as a child, a fat kid who didn’t want to take his shirt off at Boy Scouts or at the pool. I hated changing in the locker room when I was briefly on the football team in junior high. And that’s how I remembered this incident for most of my life, as kids teasing that other fat kid. I didn’t think of it as racially motivated, and I certainly didn’t at the time have the context to understand the historical or cultural implications of white men feeling threatened by and attacking the genitals of black men, but I remember that somebody in that group of boys stabbed that kid in the crotch with a sharpened stick. We all ran away and left him writhing and screaming in pain. I don’t think I was with the boys; I think I was just there. I don’t think I was yelling at or taunting him, I think I just saw it happen. I know I didn’t wield the stick. But all of that, all of the “I didn’t”, the “I don’t think”, the “I just saw it”, all of that is just me working harder at making myself feel better than at taking responsibility. I don’t know how badly he was hurt, but in my memory, he moved away shortly after. I didn’t confront any of the boys that participated. I didn’t tell anyone that it had happened. I’m sure I weighed the moral value of telling versus being a rat, doing the right thing versus getting into trouble. And I chose the easier path.
And I’ll tell another story, though this assault was sexual, not racial, because it shows another moment when I chose not to act to help someone who wasn’t me. In high school, when I worked at a pizza delivery place, I used my privilege to stay uninvolved, to witness a wrong and do nothing, to avoid confrontation, to stay safe.A shift manager, a man only a few years older than me, pinned the arms of a female employee and tickled her. It lasted several minutes. He was laughing; she was yelling at him to stop, but also laughing, while she squirmed and twisted and tried to escape. I was laughing, uncomfortably. It didn’t feel right. I told myself it was just joking around, but there was a titillating aspect to it that made it doubly uncomfortable and wrong, and made it clear that there was an unwelcome sexual aspect to it that I was trying hard not to acknowledge. And I didn’t stop it or report it. That’s what she saw of me in her distress, another man watching, and laughing, doing nothing.
Later on, after my first year of college, the loan my parents took on to send me to an expensive out of state private school ran out, and I had to work. I worked second shift, in a litigation document services company. That means I made photocopies for lawyers. I was the only person on the second shift, 2-11pm, so when everyone else left at 5 or 6pm, I was alone. I got tired of the same old music on the radio all the time, so I started listening to talk radio. In the evenings, they rebroadcast shows from earlier in the day. Yes, I’m ashamed that I listened to Rush Limbaugh regularly.
The liberal, progressive bent that I’d developed in my last couple of years of high school and my year in college in the big East Coast city, it started to warp a bit. Or more than a bit. I started believing the idea that government was in the way of human potential. That forced redistribution of wealth was wrong. That private charity was far more effective than bumbling, fumbling, corrupt government ever could be at solving social ills. That poor working class joes like me were being kept down by oppressive taxation.
Eventually, I realized what a lot of propaganda that was, but I do have to account for the fact that I listened to and regurgitated the party line. I didn’t think of it as racial, that is racist, then, but I’ve learned and grown enough lately to see how deeply white supremacy is rooted in the rhetoric of the right, and how much work Rush Limbaugh and his copycats did to move the right into the far right.
I have no doubt that given the time and the attention, I could come up with plenty more incidents across my life where, blind to my privilege, blind to my own ingrained racist perceptions, I participated in, perpetuated, and benefited from white supremacy. But here’s just one more story, from less than ten years ago, after I had enough time, enough reading, enough conversations with good people to drastically change my political views and become a good white progressive. And still, this is what I did, just so you know that it’s always there, waiting to come out.
When I became a stay-at-home dad, and started working part-time nights and weekends as an usher supervisor, one of my favorite events to work was football. I loved it. I supervised a crew of about 14 people, mostly temp agency workers, and we scanned tickets, gave directions, welcomed people. I was good at the customer service part, but it took me awhile to get good at the supervising part. One of the times that I absolutely failed at the supervising part, a temp worker, a black woman older than I was, flat out refused to do what I told her. My supervisor had told me that we were overstaffed on temp workers for the day, so if there was anyone who wasn’t working out, to come to her, and we’d send them home. So instead of talking to this particular temp worker, finding out what was going on, and treating her like a person and a valued member of the team, I went to my supervisor, who was also a black woman, and told her I had a temp worker who was getting “uppity.”
I had known my supervisor for years. We were coworkers when I worked full-time, before I became a stay-at-home dad. I liked her. I respected her. The look on her face when that word came out of my mouth was one of disappointment. She, and another black woman usher supervisor who I had known and respected for years who also happened to be there when I said it, were both clearly, deeply, disappointed in me. I think it was only out of respect for our long relationship that neither of them unloaded on me.
They told me that “uppity” was a racially loaded term. I tried to argue that I didn’t mean it that way, that I didn’t even know it had connotations, that I just meant she wasn’t respecting me as a supervisor, and she was just a temp worker. But as soon as they called me on it, I knew. I felt it. I knew that the only time I’d heard that word, it was quite overtly steeped in those connotations because it was always paired with “the N word.” My anger at the temp worker was all about race. It was all about class. It was all about my white outrage at not being given my proper due by a black person that I saw as beneath me on a hierarchical ladder. And that has everything to do with race and power. I recognize it in what that white woman did in Central Park when she weaponized the police against a black man recently when he called her out for her bad behavior in not leashing her dog. I wanted to punish that temp worker for not conforming to my view of what was our proper power dynamic: me with it, her without it. And I was deeply ashamed that I let that part of me show in front of those two women whose respect I valued. I can only hope that my eventual apology and acceptance of responsibility helped me earn a little of it back. Honestly, though, they probably weren’t that surprised. I imagine white people disappoint them in exactly that way pretty frequently.
So, anyway. I say all of that not in a guilt and absolution kind of way. Not in a self-flagellation kind of way. It isn’t about guilt and shame and moving past it. To me, I think this moment is about looking honestly at myself to find my biases so that I’ll recognize them sooner when they come up. It’s about sitting in the discomfort and the awkwardness, letting those feelings of guilt and shame linger awhile, because feelings aren’t bad things. If I sit awhile with them, if I sit awhile and really listen to them, without denying them or pushing them away, then I might be more prepared, more willing, to do the right thing the next time that opportunity comes up. I might sit down with that temp worker and talk to her for a minute. I might tell those boys with the stick to leave that kid alone, or I might stay with him and help him get what he needs. I might tell that manager to leave that woman the fuck alone and ask her if she wanted my support in reporting it. I might paint over that bathroom graffiti. And if I can look honestly at my racism, to say, “I did this,” without saying, “I did this, but…” and if I can inspire other people through my example to do the same, then maybe my social media feed and my conversations with most especially older white men might not be quite so filled with sentences like, “I know what that cop did to George Floyd was wrong, but…” Then maybe, if we stop saying “but,” maybe we can stop putting all of our focus on what comes after the but and really look hard at what came before it. And that’s still not really enough. But it’s a start.
