Learning to Be White

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

10/13/02

 

Reading

An excerpt from Lillian Smith’s “Killers of the Dream,” a book of essays written in 1949 that identified, challenged and dismantled Southern racist traditions, customs and beliefs. 

 

 “Something was wrong with a world that tells you that love is good and people are important and then forces you to deny love and to humiliate people.  I knew, though I would not for years confess it aloud, that in trying to shut the Negro race away from us, we have shut ourselves away from so many good, creative, honest, deeply human things in life.  I began to understand slowly at first but more clearly as the years passed, that the warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also.  Each is on a different side of the frame but each is pinioned there.  And I knew that what cruelly shapes and cripples the personality of one is as cruelly shaping and crippling the personality of the other.  I began to see that though we may, as we acquire new knowledge, live through new experiences, examine old memories, gain the strength to tear the frame from us, yet we are stunted and warped and in our lifetime cannot grow straight again any more than can a tree, put in a steel-like twisting frame when young, grow tall and straight when the frame is torn away at maturity.”

 

Sermon

Several years ago, when Unitarian Universalist minister, teacher and theologian Thandeka set out to write a book about race, racial identities, and racism in white America, that would become the book Learning to be White, she found herself at the fork of two well-trodden paths…a place of decision that many of us who have considered race in America have also encountered.

 

One option she faced was the road that has been carved by books, workshops, committees and projects, special programs and workplace seminars about how to get along with ‘them’—that is, the blacks.  People who travel this path ask the questions “What are we to do with/about/for them?  What do they want (now)?  Why can’t they take care of themselves?”

 

Meanwhile, the other road was lined with “stall after stall packed high with books and government reports.”  People who walk this path focus on the questions “How can we show them (the whites) what they are doing wrong?  Why won’t they give up some of their privileges?  Why are they so rigid and uncaring about everyone except themselves?”

 

Neither of these roads seemed appropriate to Thandeka, for the more work she completed, the more research she conducted and observations she made, the more she realized that she was heading down an altogether different path…a way being blazed by a set of travelers who if they were only left alone, could lead us all on a real journey toward wholeness.  These trailblazers are not devout workers for anti-racism nor are they pious religious leaders crying out to God for salvation.  These travelers are simply all of America’s children who have not yet been inculcated into pre-existing notions of race…particularly what it means to be “white.”  These are the travelers not yet hindered by shame.  These are the innocent travelers whose core sense of self remains untainted.  These are the voices she wanted to rediscover.

 

Through interviews with several hundred Euro-Americans, an examination of history and the perspectives of several prominent cultural spokespeople, and new discoveries in developmental psychology, Thandeka reflects in her book upon the ways in which racial identity is learned, consciously or subconsciously and comes to three primary conclusions…conclusions that form the framework of her book and that serve as good focal points for this morning’s sermon:

1) No one is born white in America.

2) The first racial victim of the white community is its own child.

3) Racist acts are sometimes not motivated by white racist sentiment but by feelings of personal shame.[1]

 

I studied with Thandeka while I was a student at Meadville Lombard Theological School, the UU seminary where she still teaches.  She is a brilliant woman and a wonderfully efficient writer who has packed a great deal into her book.  I do not endeavor this morning to discuss all that she covers.  In fact, much of the book is devoted to examining the close relationship between race and class, a particularly cogent argument that I will not consider this morning, but which will no doubt serve as fodder for a sermon on another Sunday. I do hope, however, to use some of her conclusions this morning as a springboard to help us think about racial identity in this country so that we might consider how all of us have been impacted by our own indoctrination into the racial groupings in which we find ourselves.   I offer this summary of Thandeka’s work today, then, with the hope that each of you may find something to help you to consider your own journey and experience of race in America.

 

The foundations upon which Thandeka builds her work are the personal memories of Euro-Americans: how they first discovered that they were “white,” what that meant at the time and how that early learning has continued to impact their lives, and in turn the lives of others.  She discovers that most of these memories are stories of “small, seemingly inconsequential, defeats,” and yet, when those sharing the stories are encouraged to reflect on the legacy of these defeats, they rediscover the pervasive, though mostly subconscious, notion that something about their “white” identity is not quite right.  Small defeats, it seems, can lead to significant consequences.

 

She started collecting these stories of “white” racial identity after an experience she had in the early 90s.  She had recently moved to a small New England town to teach at the local college.  A few weeks into her time there, she was invited to lunch by a staff member, a woman she describes as “a fifth generation Smith College graduate with a New England genealogy older than the state and a portfolio perhaps as wealthy.”  Wanting to get to know her, the woman asked Thandeka what it feels like to be black. Thandeka writes:

 

 “I was not offended by her query.  Her face was open; her eyes were friendly and engaged.  She simply believed that nothing from her own background or experience could help her understand me.  I knew better.  I had been assigned a race by America’s pervasive socialization process, and so had she.  I thus believed that if she drew upon her own experience of being ‘raced,’ she might then be able to see what we had in common. But how could I make her conscious of the racialization process to which her own Euro-American community had subjected her?”[2] 

 

Attmepting to answer this question, Thandeka invited the woman to participate for a week in an activity she labeled, the Race Game.  If the woman agreed to play the Race Game, she would have to follow only one rule.  For the next seven days, she would agree to use the ascriptive term white whenever she mentioned the name of one of her Euro-American cohorts.  She would say, for example, “my white husband, Steve,” or “my white friend Mary,” or “my white daughter Meghan.”…Thandeka guaranteed the woman that if she played the Race Game for a week and then met her again for lunch, they would be able to talk using terms they would both understand.

 

Thandeka says she suggested the Race Game as a means to help her Euro-American lunch partner discover her own racial identity.  While African Americans are familiar with using racial language to describe themselves and others, Euro-Americans have also learned a pervasive racial language.  For Euro-Americans, however, their own racial identity has become the “great unsaid.”  As one historian has noted, discussions of “race’ in America usually mean talk about “African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans.  If whites come into the discussion, it is only because they have ‘attitudes toward nonwhites.’”[3] 

 

Thandeka wanted to help the woman “give voice to her whiteness as the racial unsaid in her life.  By consciously referring to this unvoiced color, she would [then] become aware of what it feels like to take on and maintain a racial identity in America.”[4]  Thandeka did not get to hear how it went.  Apparently the challenge had made the woman uncomfortable, and she never joined Thandeka for lunch again.  As it turns out, the woman’s unwillingness to play the Race Game would be the first in a pattern.

 

Later that year, Thandeka says, she recounted the lunchtime exchange to a faculty colleague, who immediately blushed and quickly confessed,  “Don’t ask me to do that; I’m about to go on sabbatical.”  Intrigued and perplexed that the prospect of playing the Race Game seemed so daunting, Thandeka decided to describe the two responses she had received to the Race Game during her next public lecture and then invite the audience to collectively reflect upon them.  During the ensuing public discussion a woman in attendance challenged all of the other Euro-Americans present to play the Race Game for the rest of the day and then to report back to Thandeka by mail.  Enthusiasm, Thandeka recalls, ran high.

 

A month later, she received the only response she would get from the previously enthusiastic audience.  The letter came from the Euro-American woman who had originally extended the challenge.  She said that she had been unable to follow through, though she hoped one day to summon up the courage to do so.  Thandeka found herself asking,  “Courage?  Why courage?  What had I asked her to endure?  What was she afraid of seeing?  What didn’t she want to feel?  To glimpse?  To know?”[5]

 

To help find the answer to these questions, Thandeka began a series of workshops and conversations with Euro-Americans around the country, where she would encourage them to reflect upon their earliest memories of forming a racial identity.  She gathered responses from people across a broad spectrum of ages, class backgrounds and religious affiliations.  And yet, their stories had some striking similarities.  Almost all of the stories were about “children and adults who learned how to think of themselves as white in order to stay out of trouble with their caretakers and in the good graces of their peers or the enforcers of community racial standards.”  Even when these individuals had engaged in or complied with behavior most of us would describe as racist,  “their motive was not to attack someone outside their own racial community.  They simply wanted to remain within their own community—or at least not to be abandoned by it.  They achieved their wish but at a price:  the quiet breakup of their core sense of themselves as different from their own community’s racial ideals—so quiet that no one noticed that the wholehearted presence of the child or the adult was gone.”[6]

 

--There was the story of Frank who remembered putting a coin in his mouth when he was five, only to have his mother reprimand him because “niggers keep them in their underwear.” He knew he would have to be more careful about what he did in the future.

--There was the story of Jack who invited some black friends into his yard, only to realize by his parents’ discomfort that he had done something wrong. 

--There was the story of Mike, who after walking past a white woman and black man walking hand in hand, heard his father and uncle make a series of negative statements about the kind of woman she must be.

--There was the story of Jackie who had spoken so highly of one of her teachers that her parents encouraged her to invite him over for dinner.  When her mother opened the door and discovered that the teacher was black she was obviously flushed.  When the teacher left, her parents were outraged that she had embarrassed them.

--There was the story of Sally whose parents were strong civil rights supporters who preached racial equality, but who prevented her from going out with a high school friend because he was black.

--There was the story of Jay, whose parents took him on a car tour of the black area of the city when he was four.  His parents knew he had never seen black people before and did not want him to embarrass the family by staring at them when the family went to New York on vacation the following month.[7] 

 

Thandeka writes, “After listening to hundreds of Euro-Americans recount their early recollections of experiences that not only made them think of themselves as white but also taught them to act in ways that would keep them within this racial pale, I began to doubt the validity of other Euro-Americans’ initial claims that there were no such childhood incidents in their own lives.  Rather, I began to suspect that many of them had simply forgotten the incidents.”[8]

 

I know that as I have reflected on my own life as a Euro-American, I have not forgotten the moment when I learned that I was white.  I share it with you now with the hope that it might trigger your own reflection and memory.

 

When I was seven, my family moved from Akron, Ohio to Wilson, North Carolina, a small town on the coastal plains, so that my father could accept a promotion.  The move brought not only some significant changes in scenery and climate, but also significant changes in my understanding of the world. 

 

In Akron, I could walk to my elementary school, a school where all of the students, teachers, and employees were middle-class and white.  In Wilson, where the schools had been recently desegregated, I rode a bus to a school several miles from my home.  Every weekday morning, I would travel from what I now know was the white middle-class neighborhood of my family to the literally dirt-road sections of town where all the residents were black.  All of the regular passengers on this school bus were white, except for one.  Before leaving what was considered to be the “white” part of town, you see, the bus would make a detour down Tarboro Road to a dilapidated old farmhouse that stood alone.  Waiting outside this house would be a black, fourth-grade girl. When she would enter the bus each morning, she would usually be greeted with silence, and once she sat down by herself near the back of the bus, she would be left alone. The morning that there were no empty seats for this girl was a morning I will never forget.  It was the morning, I now know, I fully became “white.” 

 

I can still remember the panicked look in the girl’s eyes as she scanned the bus for an empty seat.  There were a number of seats that held only one child, but none that were fully empty.  As she slowly made her way down the aisle, I could see her steel herself against what she must have known from experience would come next.  She turned to ask a girl if she could sit with her and the girl loudly responded, “This seat is taken.”  Several children laughed. Everyone knew that it wasn’t taken.  After all, there would be no other children picked up that morning.  She went to the next available seat, and did not bother to ask if she could sit.  She just did.  The boy already there had not left her more than an inch or so, so she just plopped herself down on top of him.  He quickly moved so as not to be touched his new seat-mate and proceeded to engage in a performance of theatrics that rivaled any I have ever seen.  He writhed against the wall of the bus, shouting out as though he had just been infected with deadly poison.   This boy, obviously relishing the opportunity to humiliate the girl, then literally crawled over the back of the seat, screaming expletives and racial epithets.   The bus exploded with laughter at this young comedian’s abusive routine.  This scene seemed to be one of the most entertaining things some of these children had ever seen.  I remember looking toward the front of the bus, into the rearview mirror, so that I could scan the eyes of the driver.  Of course he would put a stop to this.  But he didn’t.  He just kept driving.  I remained in my seat terrified…seven-year-old Mark, wondering what this girl must have been feeling.  Wondering why no one was stopping this, why no one was speaking up.  Here was a bus filled with children who were mostly older than me, and an adult driver, and no one was defending this girl.  I was ashamed and humiliated…and silent.

 

But who could blame me?  I didn’t have a model for speaking up.  I’d never been in a situation like this before.  Now the models that were presented to me were compliance or silence.  I couldn’t join my peers who were laughing at what was happening. But I knew that if I spoke up I would be ostracized, just like this girl.  My own survival took precedence.  I did not share this story with anyone until I was an adult.  It was too embarrassing to share…even for a seven-year-old. 

 

Thandeka would no doubt recognize my predicament, describing my experience on that bus as my initiation into the pervasive complex of emotions she has labeled white shame:  shame because it is a story that involves the discovery of an unresolved conflict…that, when discovered, makes the speaker feel flawed; white shame  because of the “racial context” in which the internal conflict is rooted.[9]

 

Thandeka contends that a person feels shame due to negative self-exposure: the self is exposed as someone it is not supposed to be, feeling what it is not supposed to feel.  Thandeka’s observations led her to believe that “The Euro-American child…is a racial victim of its own white community of parents, caretakers, and peers, who attack it because it does not yet have a white racial identity.  Rather than continue to suffer such attacks, the Euro-American child defends itself by creating a white racial identity for itself.  It begins to think and act like its community’s ideal of a white self.  When the adult recalls the feeling and ideas it had to set aside in order to mount this defense, it feels shame.”[10]

 

So often in our modern day work to “dismantle racism,” Thandeka implies, there is no acknowledgement of the ways in which the Euro-American child learns to think of itself as white, and that he does so to protect himself against racial abuse from his own community.[11]  The hope for Euro-Americans then, and in turn everyone else, is not just that we can be civil across inter-racial lines, but civil within our own racial communities and, even more importantly, civil to ourselves. At the root of all behavior currently labeled as racist is an “absence of attention to the emotional abuse that makes it difficult for someone to relate wholeheartedly to another.” [12]   If we continue to discount the self-inflected wounds of Euro-Americans--the shame that has been directly and indirectly passed from adults to children for generations--it stands to reason, we will never be able to remove our society from the clutches of skin-deep approaches to justice.  We will keep fighting vigorously and righteously against cruelty “in the world” while dangerously ignoring the cruelty that we carry within ourselves.[13]

 

So where do we go from here?  I cannot help but point to the same direction Thandeka points.  We need a new beginning…a new beginning where “loyalties need no longer be skin-deep…[where our] broken humanity can be healed…[where] difference will be affirmed as the grace of human engagement…[and where] the term person of color will finally refer to every human being.”[14] 

 

For we are all persons of color. 

We are all persons of color.

 

The road we need to travel stretches out before us…the road blazed by all the innocent children not yet hindered by cultural and/or self-inflicted shame.  The road that leads to our shared worth and dignity.  The road that leads to our salvation as a diverse but interconnected human family.  Yes, we are all persons of color, and the road stretches out before us.  We only need the courage to walk down it…together.