Feeling for a Way Out of White Helplessness
When I learned I was a racist, it threw me for a loop. Me, a racist?? How could I possibly be? I’m the nicest person you’ll find this side of the moon! I put on my niceness mask a long time ago to keep people from wanting to hurt me, and since then I’ve been so completely law abiding and good and kind that my mask has morphed into the most comfortable suit of robotic armor that moves my limbs and makes me walk and talk and do things its own way, so automatically and always I am above and beyond nice. So how can I be a racist?
Living in the Big White House
Now that my eyes have been forced open, the answer is abundantly clear.
It’s because my white family still lives in comfort and safety in the big house, and we still depend on the services of people of color, to whom we grant only the most meager of necessities. We don’t even try to hide this reality. The leader of our racist democracy himself lives in state, in a colonial style mansion called “the White House…”
Innocent by Ignorance
How could I not have noticed? But I didn’t. Maybe because I was always told, and believed, that I was innocent.
My parents told me about prejudice when I was little. Prejudice was wrong, and prejudiced people were evil, but they had nothing to do with us. We were good white people because we knew that here in the land of the free all people were equal.
Of course all this was theoretical, since we lived in an upper middle-class white suburb and knew almost no people of color. One of our few black acquaintances was Alice, an older lady who came once a month to clean our house. Whenever she was there, I tried hard not to notice her blackness, since noticing would mean I was prejudiced. It was impossible — the harder I tried the more impressed I was with the darkness of her skin, the different way she spoke, and the embarrassing deference with which she treated us.
But I knew I was ok because I wasn’t prejudiced. If other people were vile bigots, that was unfortunate, but it wasn’t my problem. All I had to do was treat Alice politely, and if I did that, I could basically ignore the problem of racism. Thus absolved, I went my merry way without the slightest idea of the harm I was doing by being silent.
A Democracy of Hypocrisy
Only now, with the massive anti-racism protests that have been taking place all across the country, have I felt the whiplash of seeing my whiteness. Only now have I suddenly realized that I am a white person still living in a racist mansion built and maintained by people of color.
Only now am I finally becoming aware that our founding fathers designed the wonderful machinery of white “democracy” in order to enable and conceal the unapologetic racism of people like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “all men are created equal” while enjoying the services of 600 black slaves.
What is perhaps most horrifying is that since then nothing has changed. Even if I have not personally killed any people of color, the system my lifestyle depends on still kills them for me, bleeding them dry and tossing them out with the rubbish.
Gratitude and Grief
It’s incredible that I’ve managed to live more than 70 years without being aware of the ongoing atrocity to which I owe my comfortable life.
For this long-overdue awareness, I have to thank both the Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic. It is the Black Lives Matter movement that has slapped me out of my reverie and made me look around me, wondering what all the fuss is about. And it’s the pandemic that has given me, as one of the many benefits of white privilege, the time to ponder all this in the safety and comfort of my home.
I give thanks that at last I know the truth of my heritage, and that knowing that truth, I can finally grieve.
I grieve for people of color, today and down through history — for all the lives destroyed, all the families separated, all the joy drained away, all the endless, fathomless grief.
And I grieve for my own people, for white people today and down through history, for the crushing obscenity of our self-betrayal, our heartlessness and cruelty, our ignorance and denial.
I only hope that my grief, and the grief of others like me, will enable and impel us all to work together to change the system: to dismantle the structures of institutionalized racism, and to make reparations for all the wrongs we have done.
Feeling the Human
I would love to be an ally for the Black Lives Matter movement, if only I could figure out how.
I think about that all the time.
For a moment, a few days ago, I thought I had a clue. One of my white friends reminded me of something we used to do back in the 80s, when it was the Cold War and we were going to the street as peace activists. It was a disarmingly simple exercise called “the experience of the human.” Granted, it was conceived by a white guy, but at least he was dark-skinned enough that his nickname in his language meant “Black.”
Back then, when we did this experience with strangers on the street, it was lovely the way it seemed to melt the walls of difference between us. It was simple. We’d approach some innocent passerby and ask them, “Hey, do you want to have an experience?”
Most just hurried on, pretending not to have heard, but once in a while someone would say sure, why not.
Then we would stand across from them, take their hands and look into their eyes, and invite them to repeat our words and do what the words suggested. They’d agree, and we’d begin…
Me: “I feel the human in me…”
Them: “I feel the human in me…”
(pregnant pause for feeling…)
Me: “I feel the human in you…”
Them: “I feel the human in you…”
(another pregnant pause for feeling…)
Me: “And it is exactly the same.”
Them: “And it is exactly the same.”
In the silence when we finished, we’d stand for a moment looking in each other’s eyes, and usually we’d smile, and sometimes laugh, and often even hug…
Then they’d say goodbye and walk away, probably wondering what all that had been about.
But once in a long while someone would enjoy themselves enough to accept our invitation for a coffee, and then we’d tell them all about our tiny movement of international peace volunteers, and they would end up joining us. Little by little over the years, as we carried out this and other projects, our movement grew, so that by 2009, when we put on the World March for Peace and Nonviolence, we had somewhere around a million people participating in countries all over the globe.
Still Trying
Needless to say, none of that ended the violence. But we had a great time trying, and we haven’t given up yet, even though a lot of us are now old enough that instead of going to protests we’re stuck at home avoiding the coronavirus.
That’s why I keep thinking and puzzling, trying to find a way to lend my heart and hands to this beautiful new energy that is manifesting itself in this great heart-wrenching outcry for peace and justice.
And I keep coming back to that old experience of the human.
Even the high school students I used to work with used to like doing that little exercise. When my friend reminded me of it, it seemed like the perfect answer to all our troubles. Why couldn’t we just make a video of different people doing it, put it on youtube, and have it go viral? Maybe it would help more people focus on what we all have in common, instead of just feeling terrible about what some of us have done to others.
But when I asked my kids if they remembered the experience of the human, they quickly burst my bubble. People of color today, they pointed out, would very likely see something like that as just another white attempt to prove our “color blindness,” to “white-wash” over our inherent racism instead of facing the urgent need to change ourselves.
I knew they were right — times have changed, and today that well-intended exercise might understandably be taken as offensive.
But I wasn’t about to give up on my idea.
Embracing Guilt
Okay, I said, but there has to be a way to come together in our common humanity without giving offense.
What if instead of asking people of color to accept me just because I say we are all human, I show them my humanity by acting on it?
What if I start by doing everything in my power to share my new understanding with anyone who will listen, especially other white folks, both those I think will agree with me and those I fear will reject me? That will mean admitting terrible things: that we have been complicit in the atrocity of racism in this country, that our garden of plenty has been and still is fed and watered by the lives of people of color, that we have not lifted a finger to do anything about it, and that we must now do everything we can to change it.
It hurts to admit this, and it scares me to say I will change — so much that as soon as I finish saying it, I can hardly resist my nice-white-person compulsion to beat a hasty retreat into guilt and shame… But I don’t retreat.
Not that I deny my guilt, my shame, or my complicity with all the cruelty and inhumanity of our history. On the contrary, I embrace all of it, and I grieve for all of it.
But I will not let it swallow me.
Standing Together in our Strength
So what can I do?
What if, instead of letting my guilt and shame swallow me, I affirm the best in me? What if I affirm my strength, my kindness, and the intelligence of my heart?
I say that these qualities are self-evident, for without them I never would have been able to admit my guilt!
So I affirm my strengths, and I affirm that they are the strengths of all human beings, including those I look down upon and those I consider my enemies. I say that even if these strengths are not always apparent in everyone, they are there, deep down in each of us, if we look hard enough.
Which is important. Because if we are to end the cruel system we live in, we will have to work together.
So here is what I promise: to embrace both my weakness and my strength, and admit all my mistakes and my ignorance and helplessness, and to go out of my way to encourage others to do the same.
Only then might we be justified in humbly asking those we have hurt to accept us as allies.
Jump Starting Our Common Humanity
Perhaps then, if they will accept our help and we all stand strong together, we will be strong enough together to tear down all the rotten structures of institutionalized racism, from the big house to the shanties, from white supremacy to white helplessness, from all the myriad forms of institutionalized racism to every last vestige of abuse and disrespect toward people of color.
That will mean not only pulling apart the machinery of racism, but making reparations for all the injustices that have been done to people of color over the centuries. And we will do this not to punish anyone, but because it is just.
Perhaps then we will be able to build on the bare, razed earth a new, welcoming community, a home of warmth and caring, kindness and understanding for all people, with an open future for all our children.
Then it will be a moment of strength, and joy, and deep truth when we tell each other, “I feel the human in me… I feel the human in you… and it is exactly the same.”
