grappling with whiteness

Every time I write out my thoughts on racism, I feel self-conscious, presumptuous and self-indulgent as a white person. But writing helps me process my thoughts and move forward. Also, it is clear that white people need to talk about issues of race more. Otherwise, for us, race is the perpetual elephant in the room and nothing will change. In fact, one thing I am committed to is to consistently bring the topic of racism to the forefront with the white people in my world.

So, here goes my latest two cents...

Taking it in

Since my early years in this country, I have been concerned with issues of race and racism, a topic close to my heart, perhaps because some of my strongest initial bonds in the US were with friends and lovers who happened to be people of color, and who opened my eyes to their experiences. As a white person, I have wrestled with trying to grasp how the reality of living in a racist society impacts me and how I can be useful in efforts to counter and not collude with the oppressive system that exists. This process has taken on a special significance for me since I have become a mother of a white child whom I want to raise with an antiracist consciousness. More recently, I have also become a stepmother to a biracial child, and, again after many years, I am now involved in a black-white interracial relationship.

I spend time every day learning about the inner workings of interpersonal and systemic racism and its impacts on people of color, as well as the meaning of whiteness in all this. I listen with an open heart to my friends' and strangers' stories, read about and watch videos discussing issues of race, I participate in interracial dialogues and workshops. I monetarily support community and civil rights organizations I believe make a difference and occasionally attend protests. Last year I completed a human rights fellowship in Europe, listening to and writing about the struggles of people of color there to educate the international community as well as my white circles in deep denial. I need to know how life is for people of color in the motherland, in this heavily stratified society, and in my overwhelmingly white city. I feel the need to compare how other whites grapple with white privilege, and the responsibility it bestows on them, on us. All this in order to grow and be able to be a good ally; to even perceive injustice, let alone challenge it.

While I process all this, I feel the pain of racism people of color share with me deeply, although it will never be first-hand since I am white. Simultaneously, I get frustrated at how invisible and ungraspable the traps of whiteness are to me. I get impatient, often admonish myself for being slow to understand and, moreover, for not doing enough to upset the status quo interpersonally, and on a larger scale, institutionally.

Parenting right

As a white person who hasn't come across many effective everyday antiracist role models, to use the words of Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy in their book, Raising Biracial Children, I am not sure "how to approach parenting in a way that explicitly acknowledges the omnipresence of race in daily life." I want my family to be one in which "active attention [is] devoted to addressing and explaining race, and where children are encouraged to assume an antiracist stance;. . . where [my son] learns the meaning of [his] whiteness and [learns] to critically challenge notions of white supremacy." I certainly don't come from a family with such a conscious upbringing, so this feels like an uncharted territory. But I know there are valuable resources, such as this article on how to talk to kids about race, available for parents.

In order to provide my children with clear guidance that helps facilitate healthy racial identity development, I feel it would be helpful to form a group of those dedicated to our own growth as antiracists and antiracist parents. That is my next task. (One model I found out there is White Noise, a group of white parents with white children who have been meeting for two years to learn together and support each other in ending white supremacy.)


Claiming whiteness

In my own journey towards racial awareness, being of Jewish heritage (specifically, the granddaughter of concentration camp survivors) and an immigrant whose family was poor for many years, I am still having a hard time claiming my whiteness and claiming US history as my own, even though on an intellectual level I grasp the fact that I am now a part of a racial hierarchy stemming from a very particular historical past, from which even I, a white person who didn't grow up here, benefit tremendously.

I only say this to acknowledge my particular vantage point and history; not as a cop out, keeping in mind the words of Bonnie Berman Cushing and Jeff Hitchcock in their book Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: "In an increasingly multiracial society, the historic and present baggage of whiteness and white privilege lead many to eschew a white identity. Yet the privilege remains."

On a cognitive level I grasp that. I am familiar with Peggy MacIntosh's Invisible Knapsack of White Privilege. I get that I have advantages in this society because I am white. For instance, I never get racially profiled while driving or walking down the street. I don't stand out visually in most places in my predominantly white city. I don't generally get followed around in stores as a suspected thief or questioned about items I'm returning with or without a receipt. I am not feared or harassed by the police when in public in a group of my white peers. My skin color makes me seem financially reliable when I pay for merchandise. I don't get called racial epithets. Statistically, I can count on better quality health care and more longevity than people of color. I am aware of all that, but, to be completely honest, there is still a resistance in me in letting the reality of white privilege sink in. Why?

Part of the resistance to claiming my white identity stems from the immigrant and the Jew in me having resisted assimilation so strongly in order to preserve my authenticity and sanity, that I have eventually found comfort, even pride in inhabiting that "otherness" ascribed to me here of someone foreign, someone with an accent; about living psychically on the margins of American society. But when it comes to racism, as a white person I am in the oppressor group. I benefit from the system, and like most white people with whom I have had conversations about this, I have a hard time deeply acknowledging that. For me in particular, it is scary to be associated with the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), middle class mainstream influence which I have so vehemently tried to filter out of my life and my identity because, in many ways aspects of that culture have felt empty, hegemonic and oppressive. Clearly, this disassociation on my part needs bridging, which can be found, for instance in the commonality that for US-based whites, it is key, even if profoundly upsetting, to acknowledge that in American society, we automatically get the benefit of the doubt while we stand on the shoulders of men and women of color whose land, cheap or free labor and lives were (and continue to be) taken from them, seen by whites as nothing but fuel for this capitalist beast in whose belly we now find ourselves.

What a history to inherit.

Untangling race at home

Now I'm in a relationship with a man of African slave ancestry. I don't know how to make sense of our different histories coming together yet. Conversation about racism is a daily occurrence. I am learning so much from him and at the same time continuing my own work. While it is true that every intimate relationship is intercultural, to a degree, since the partners almost always have differences in backgrounds, communication styles, and world views to meld, in a black-white interracial relationships, the weight of history and the reality of everyday racism sometimes plays itself out in a more pronounced way. This is especially true, I'd venture to say, in geographic locations where people of color are disproportionately outnumbered and highly visible in a perpetual sea of white faces (as one blogger described in her piece, What does an all-white room mean?). As Randall Kennedy writes in his book, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption, "at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a wide array of social pressures continue to make white-black marital crossings more difficult, more costly, and thus less frequent than other types of interethnic or interracial crossings."

Our most visible differences aside, my partner and I do have some experiences in common. Both of us are immigrants, acutely familiar with being uprooted and on the margins in this society. We are both deeply rooted in our home cultures since we moved to the US as teenagers. We share similar political views. We are "blended culture" people who each speak several languages and are widely traveled. We are both college-educated, both divorced, each a parent to one child of the opposite gender from us. Although race is blatantly salient in our relationship, so are gender, class and culture. All these are so intertwined that it becomes quite a puzzle to try to untangle or isolate them to get at the core of differences or conflict. But it's worth trying. We have overcome several big points of friction already, and excavating the sources of the disagreements has been key.

Longing for healing

But back to the impact and implications of living in a highly racialized society on my experience as a white woman. I have come to recognize that my domain of impact in this life is not organizational or political; it is relational. As law professor and author Randall Kennedy argued when explaining why he chose to write about interracial relationships:

People usually expect talk about regulation of laws at the workplace, the regulation of race with respect to housing markets, the regulation of race with respect to education… People don't think about spending a lot of time on the regulation of race with respect to marital intimacy, sexual intimacy. Though if you think about it, if you think about how people get jobs, if you think about how people conceive of themselves, if you think about how people learn about the world, these sorts of relationships are incredibly important. Friendship as an institution, dating as an institution is incredibly important. One thing that drew me to this subject was the extent to which actually people did not talk about it and thought of these relationships as rather trivial. . . This topic is actually more important in social consequences than some of the other institutions upon which we focus much more time.

The place where I connect most intensely around how racism impacts me as a white person is the pain of loss. I am keenly aware of how racism can cause friendships and close bonds to rupture and fall apart or to never form because of mistrust in the first place. On an emotional level I get how racism divides us. And that is the place that spurs me on; it's the desire for this society to become whole, for us to heal, to find each other alive and breathing under the rubble of centuries of injustice, and to feel the richness, vibrancy and joy in bridging the divide. Only when we come together being our authentic selves, speaking and hearing each other's truths, can we create long-lasting change.

So, I'll keep doing the work of learning and engaging with others … for that; for the love that was, is and that could be.

Do "white schools" make white kids racist?

Last month, ABC News reported on a study of elementary and high school students, aimed at finding out whether children use race to socially exclude other children from their groups.

The study of nearly 700 fourth, seventh, and 10th graders of different ethnic and racial backgrounds living in the mid-Atlantic region found that "children and adolescents who had friends from different ethnic backgrounds were significantly more likely to say it is wrong to exclude someone because of their race, citing unfairness or hurting the feelings of the excluded child as reasons."

"In contrast," the article continues, "students who reported few or no cross-race friendships were significantly less likely to view excluding someone on the basis of race as wrong. Their reasons were often based on a lack of familiarity, such as, 'They won't have much in common.'"

Specifically, "European-American children attending 'all-white' schools were more likely than European-American children attending 'mixed ethnicity' schools to use stereotypes when explaining why someone might not be friends with someone, or invite them home to their house, solely because of their race."

This is interesting. At first glance, it makes sense. However, I wonder about the conclusions that can be drawn from this study. Some of the most enlightened white anti-racist activists whose work I read, respect, and learn from, grew up in very homogenous surroundings, comprising of almost only white people. Vegankid, for example, who is part of the Ally Work collective, grew up in a small town with only two families of color. It was Vegankid's sexual identity and his experience as a Queer person that acted as a brigde for his developing of empathy for those affected by racism. You can read Vegankid's Learning Empathy story here.

Like Vegankid, Rachel of Rachel's Tavern, another brilliant anti-racist activist and blogger, grew up around all whites, and her parents, like Vegankid's taught her to treat everyone with respect and dignity. In her piece, Racism and Empathy: Some of My Approximating Experiences, she remembers challenging her white classmates on their racism. For that, she was called a “nigger lover” and threatened. As a result of these experiences, she began to develop a sense of empathy towards people of color. She writes: "I am by no means saying I get everything. I just know what I felt like when these things were directed at me. I knew the fear, the powerlessness, the exasperation, and the anger that racism was creating in me. Because of these experiences (and others), I dedicated myself to fighting racism."

I guess my thoughts on whether integration is really key to lessening racial prejudice in children are mixed. Of course, having friends of color inevitably leads to empathy for those affected by racism, however, maybe the logic in this study is faulty.

I think the failure is in the fact that racism among whites is rarely discussed. White children, in general, receive virtually no anti-racist education. White privilege allows whites to not have to think about race and racism unless directly confronted with it. White children who have friends of color are probably more likely to learn about racism and discuss it in their circles. But this doesn't have to be the case.

As seen in the two stories above, it is completely possible to develop an anti-racist consciousness in a predominantly white environment.

I am by no means advocating segragation. What I am saying is that many people do not have a choice. They live where they live, they go to school where they go to school. Still, lack of a racially diverse environment doesn't and shouldn't have to be an indicator of the degree of race awareness and empathy.

Though I live in the whitest major city in the U.S., though I grew up in a predominantly white society, and though I am married to a white man with whom I have a white child, I feel a moral responsibility to work on helping to eliminate racism. Why couldn't most white children develop the same kind of desire and turn a future study like this on its head? What's stopping them? I am apt to think it's the white adults in their lives who benefit from White Supremacy and white privilege too much to rock the boat. I don't want to be one of those people and I am working very hard to counter, on the one hand, the reality reflected in this study and, on the other, the very stereotype of the bigoted, racist, and ignorant white person from Whiteville that this study perpetuates.

the global nature of racism - Part I: Healthcare

As I do my daily dose of self-education about racism, I find so many similarities between institutional racism across the world. For example, just in the last two weeks, a number of news stories have come out about reports on inequities in health care for various groups of color in several countries.

For example, the Colorlines Magazine article I mentioned in an earlier post, discusses racial disparities in healthcare and the conscequences of "colorblind" policies on the health of people of color. The article includes such alarming statistics as:

- Blacks are dying at a 40 percent higher rate than whites &

- The infant mortality gap between Blacks and whites doubled between 1950 and 2002.

Though heavily edited by the Bush administration, the National Healthcare Disparities Report, cited in the Colorlines article, and released in 2002, reveals that "racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities are national problems that affect health care at all points in the process, at all sites of care, and for all medical conditions—in fact, disparities are pervasive in our health care system."

This according to Kai Wright, writing for Colorlines:

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) report "rocked the healthcare world. Conventional wisdom had thus far been that racial health disparities were primarily due to access to care, that people of color got sick and died more often because they were more likely to be uninsured or underinsured.

But the IOM study asserted that much more was at play. It declared that even given the same insurance, the same income and the same type of treatment facility, people of color were less likely to receive quality care. The disturbing gap existed across a wide range of treatments-breast cancer screenings, angioplasties, hip fracture repairs, and on and on. Whites were even more likely to get an eye exam than nonwhites.

The IOM cited a host of complex and dynamic causes for this inequality. There were structural factors, such as financial incentives to limit services given to poor patients; communication factors like missing translators or English-only signage and literature; even factors driven by the patients themselves, whose own beliefs and preferences led them to refuse certain types of care or fail to follow doctors' instructions. But what grabbed everyone's attention was the IOM's charge that at least part of the disparity results from care providers making racist and stereotyped decisions about when and what treatment to offer." (emphasis mine)

Now compare this to a study that was just released last week, on May 8th in Australia, which found that "Aboriginal health in Australia was 100 years behind the rest of the population in quality."

"Leprosy, rheumatic heart disease and tuberculosis haven't been experienced in white populations for decades, but they are still problems for some indigenous communities," WHO researcher Lisa Jackson Pulver, quoted in a Reuters article, said.

(If you read the article, notice the unethical insertion of the journalist's/editor's bigoted opinion in the sentence describing the issue of governmental budget allocations needed to: "drag Aborigines off welfare.")

The Australian study found that "Australia's Aborigines live 17 years less on average than other Australians."

The article continutes:

"Australia's 460,000 Aborigines make up two percent of the 20 million population. They have consistently been the nation's most disadvantaged group, with far higher rates of unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, and domestic violence.

The report said Australia ranked last among first world countries New Zealand, Canada and the United States for life expectancy among indigenous people.

While Australia's Aborigines died nearly 20 years younger than other citizens, in other countries the figure was seven years. For infants, the mortality figure was three times the rate of non-indigenous Australians."

And, finally, compare this to yet another study, released last month regarding the access to health care for the Eastern and Southern European Roma ("Gypsy") population. The study states:

"For the millions of Roma living in Central and Eastern Europe and South Eastern Europe, persistent discrimination and marginalization are a daily reality that results in poorer health for individuals and communities. Roma make up the largest ethnic minority in these countries with an overall population estimated at 5 to 6 million people. Available data consistently shows higher rates of illness and mortality among Roma than in majority populations."

These are some of the findings:

- Life expectancy for Roma populations in Eastern Europe is about 10 years less than the overall population.

- Infant mortality rates are twice as high among the Roma than the non-Roma in the Czech Republic (my country of birth!!!), Slovakia, and Hungary.

- It is widely agreed that TB, HIV/AIDS, and viral hepatitis disproportionately affect minority populations in Eastern and Central Europe. In a Serbian Roma community, the TB prevalence rate was found to be more than 2.5 times the national average.

And here is the pinnacle, for me, of the last study:

The disparities in healthcare are due to "direct discrimination by government policies" and health care providers. Sound familiar? The study states that "an overwhelming majority (95 percent) of the Roma women who had experienced gender discrimination also believed that health care professionals discriminate against Roma."

I have shared here the results of three different studies from three different continents. The U.S. study incorporated the health care disparities for a number of minority groups, though my quotes illustrated the impact of the disparities on African Americans. The other studies each focused on a single group - the Aborigines, or Native people of Australia, and the Roma, the largest ethnic minority in Europe, perceived as a "race" and racially discriminated against by many white Europeans.

What all these studies bring home is that institutional racism is real worldwide and that what ties these discriminatory practices together is institutionalized White Supremacy. That so much suffering happens worldwide at the hand of White Supremacy, is all ll the more reason to work on dismantling it.

White History 101

Read this excellent article in The Nation by Gary Younge. Here is an excerpt to wet your appetite:

So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders "get assassinated," patrons "are refused" service, women "are ejected" from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility.

. . . Logic suggests, you cannot have black history without white history. Of course, the trouble is not that we do not hear enough about white history but that what masquerades as history is more akin to mythology. The contradictions of how a "free world" could be founded on genocide, or how the battle for democracy during the Second World War could coincide with Japanese internment and segregation, for example, are rarely addressed.

"I am born with a past and to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present relationships," writes Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue. "The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide."

The purpose here is not to explore individual guilt--there are therapists for that--but collective responsibility.