White Like Me

Reading Jamie Utt’s blog post, "That's Racist Against White People!" A Discussion on Power and Privilege, I come again, particularly in the comments discussion, to the place of curiosity about one of the many things that make us human beings different, each from the other.  Why do some folk, white like me, receive information about white privilege with a reaction of defensiveness, hostility and anger and others do not?  Why do some externalize the message and some internalize it?  What makes the difference in our ability or inability to hear, to listen, to be changed or to reject out-of-hand, to become more entrenched?

Utt’s interaction with a FB friend is instructive: they made progress when the conversation could be turned, even a little, from a direct discussion about ‘them’ and ‘us’ to a conversation about ‘us’, all of ‘us’.  So maybe it’s as simple as feeling included.

Yet I find even that problematic.

Long ago in a group discussion, a loving, sincere, good, young white woman commented, "but everyone's been oppressed in some way".  My thought then and now is that this point of view is a part of the problem of the well-meaning – no – everyone has not been oppressed.  To say everyone has is to say we're all in the same boat oppression-wise, which is just one logical step away from saying no one is oppressed (or perhaps better, since 'it's' happening to us all, what are we to do?)

To claim that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to oppression is to make meaningless any desire or effort to challenge systems that benefit one group at the expense of another.  In Jesus world where I (at least try to) live, that's just not on.  I cannot benefit from the pushing down of others and call it good or even just the way it is (the last refuge of moral bankruptcy).  In Jesus world, it's my job to know and to work to change, or at a bare minimum, not lie and deny.

And before we white folk cry foul, we might do well to spend a little quiet time in prayer asking God to reveal to us the ways in which we profit and benefit from the treatment and mistreatment of others who are not white in our time and place (the old adage about walking in someone else's shoes requires the thoughtful, deliberate, intentional exercise of our moral imagination).

If you think it’s not a problem, consider former Senator Jim Webb’s book, Born Fighting, where in the Foreword, he writes, “The fundamental assumption – flawed . . . was that the reins of power were unfairly held by the so-called WASPS . . . since much of American society was dominated by Caucasians of Protestant, Western European descent, then by definition all of those who, however loosely, fit this category were assumed to have shared a presumptive advantage . . .”, a position he condemns.  Senator Webb cannot accept that his ancestors, some of whom may have been dirt poor, had it better than the slaves.  I understand the crushing poverty of the Appalachias.  But you cannot compare situations in one narrow aspect and call it fair.  Slaves and indentured servants were not the same: indentured servants had a certain future that slaves did not – freedom.  And indentured servants did not have their mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children sold and forcefully removed from them.  And with the importation of slaves from Africa, white indentured servants became a higher class of worker.

Senator Webb, whose Scots-Irish ethnicity I share, misses the crucial point when it comes to black-white dynamics in these United States: no matter how bad we may have had it, we chose those paths, we and our ancestors.  With the exception of the imprisoned or impressed, no matter how poor or disadvantaged, we chose to come here.  And we were free to choose whether to remain or move on, as his book later points out in terms of those who migrated further west.  More plainly put: we started out white.  And no matter how much we want to cringe away from the reality of it, it is a disadvantage to be black in the United States.  It was in the 1600's.  It is today.  Even for the poorest among us, to start out not-black is to start out several steps ahead in virtually every aspect of our collective life.  And it does not negate the struggles of my people to admit it.

So how do we white folk talk about this?  What do we do?  How do we ‘give back’ our privilege, our edge?  Should we?  Should we even want to?  Those are all fair, if tough, questions.  But we’ve got to begin from the place where we recognize and acknowledge that we have an edge, an advantage, that we did nothing to earn and that our ancestors and the systems they put into place that continue into today, guaranteed would flow to us and not to others.  That might be a beginning.

But fighting about whether it’s true, this thing we call white privilege?  The time for that is over.  For now is the time for the grown-ups to lead the conversation.  And grown-ups do not fight about reality.  They deal with it.

***

SIDE NOTE to Fox News and others on the usage of the word ‘cracker’ and equating that to racial slurs against black people: I’m a West Virginian, so perhaps the language just doesn’t have the same history with me as it does folk of the South (to my Northern friends – West Virginia is not a southern state).  Even so, this is what I know: if someone were to call me a cracker, I would simply think it was funny or odd.  It would have no application to me.  But whenever the ‘n – word’ is used in the United States, every black person feels the assault.  I never had to have ‘the’ talk with my children about being called crackers on the street.  I do not have reason to fear for my or my family’s safety simply because the word cracker is used in a sentence.  I do not have to go out into the world always on psychic guard against the random attack of language on my personhood.  I don’t like any name calling and try my very best not to do it.  But I’m with Mr. Utt: all names are not created equal and hurt feelings are not the same as oppression.  Both matter.  But they are not the same.  One is transitory; the other is forever.


________________________
*An obvious play on the title of John Howard Griffin’s book Black Like Me, taken from a line in the poem Dream Variations by Langston Hughes:

To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.

Then rest at cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently,

Dark like me-

That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide

In the face of the sun,

Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

Till the quick day is done.

Rest at pale evening...

A tall, slim tree...

Night coming tenderly

Black like me. 

The Wanderers Among Us

Jim Webb’s opus to the Scots-Irish is, I fear, a book I will not finish.  Given me recently by a friend, I sit down in anticipation to read not just of his people, but of mine too.  But his history is not mine.  He speaks of red-necks and trailer trash.  My people, my Scots-Irish people, were farmers by and large and country people.  But they were not and are not red necks or trailer trash.  The South is not my culture.  Slavery is not my defining react-against event.  The Civil War is not something my family speak of in the present tense.  And labor unions are not anathema to us – we will always join with others when it makes sense.  And we’re not afraid of education.  Some of us just haven’t had the same chances as others and others of us understand that education comes in many forms.

We are West Virginians.  He gives us some nods in the book, does Mr. Webb, but I realize anew as I read how vastly different our experiences are.  And he can claim the vote in favor of George W. Bush in West Virginia in the first election to be about guns all he wants.  We all know it wasn’t about guns; it was about steel.  And Mr. Bush promised to bring it back.  He lied.  We should have known that.  It’s a been done thing with us.  But that’s another story.

But there is one thing in the few pages I read before I put it down in frustration that does resonate: the wanderer gene.  It may sound funny to describe a family, a tribe, that has inhabited the same few square miles of ground for centuries as wanderers, but it’s true.  Substitute the word restless for wanderer and you may have a better idea what I’m getting at.

I come from generations of restless people.  In our time, you’ll know them as the ones who cannot sit still for very long, the ones who don’t stay long at a party before looking at their watches, the ones who know a little about a lot, the ones who, if they have land, walk it often and know it well.

My grandmother, Mary, was a wanderer at heart.  She never got too far off the farm for very long, but she wanted to.  Every chance of a trip, she sprang to it.  Every ride down the road, she was there.  And when she was at home, she walked.  Constantly.  When a chore didn’t tie her down to place, she was a woman on the move.  All the time.  If she’d been a man, she’d have fought in every war just for the chance to go somewhere, anywhere.  The night I sat with her in the hospital after she broke her arm and she got mad at me for refusing to take her home, she walked around the circle of the nurses’ station all night without stopping.  All night.  Her hip would barely hold her.  But she walked.  Her sight without her glasses would barely lead her.  But she walked.  Even with no destination, she walked, sure, somehow, that the next step would bring her to something better than the last one.  Or maybe she just needed to walk.

That’s the thing of we Scots-Irish in my family – we’re home bodies who are restless.  So we want to be here and not here at the same time.  Some of us walk our desire.  Some of us spend our lives out-of-doors.  Some of us travel for work or for pleasure.  Some of us run ten errands a day.

Some looking from the outside in think we were made to work; that we’re not content to just sit still.  But that’s not it – we can do nothing like nobody’s business.  What we’re not content to be is in one place for very long.  Variety is the spice of our life, even the variety found in sameness.  So some of us who seldom leave the house where we live can tell you every kind of flower and weed and bug you might want to know.

My own restless wandering gene is harder to catch as it tends to arcs of time rather than moment to moment.  Maybe that’s the luxury of living in a healthier time, being assured in probabilities of a longer life span.  I don’t know.

I do know that after a month or two in the mountains, my feet literally itch to go somewhere – anywhere, whether with purpose or without, I have to just get out of here and go somewhere.  It can just be for the day, but go I must.  And every seven years or so, it’s time for change – life change.  Sometimes that involves moving.  Sometimes it involves changing jobs or careers.  Sometimes it involves schooling.  Sometimes it involves nothing more than a new hobby.  But every seven years or so, the orientation of my life must change.  I must look in a different direction, navigate a different vista.  I may not move an inch in life space to do it.  But move I must.

It’s been seven years here.  And I’m getting restless.  Wonder what the next change will be?  And I wonder whether the dreaming/visioning process I’m dragging the church I serve through is necessary to our shared future (what I want to believe) or just another symptom of my own wandering gene.

The others will tell me.  Of that, I am sure.  For if a vision isn’t shared, I suspect it isn’t a vision at all, but a dream.  Dreams are had one by one, but visions – those are community things.  And so, for now, I wonder if anyone wants to wander along with me.