The White, Educated, Well-Intentioned Racist Dilemma
In a video recorded after Charlottesville a few years ago, Brene Brown spoke for about 30 minutes on Facebook about her understanding of white privilege, and she said something that I think holds lasting value for all white people who may end up reading this post. She said, “If white people don’t own their own story, the story owns them.” She went on to say, “If white people do own their story, then they have the opportunity to write the ending.”
This week, I wanted to write directly to the issue of Whiteness, and Brene Brown’s words are the inspiration to do so. My story, and so many of my white colleagues’ stories feature a main character that is white, educated, well-intentioned, compassionate, caring, and racist. A hallmark feature of Whiteness is resistance in the form of both intellectual and emotional recoil away from the word racist. For me, the educated, and well-intentioned type of racist, my recoil is about shame, ignorance, denial, and fear.
I feel shame and pain having unfairly benefitted from specific, intentional and systemic decisions to put people that look like me, people who are white, in positions of privilege and power. Along with that shame and pain, despite multiple advanced degrees, private education and numerous brilliant mentors, is ignorance about Whiteness that I have become increasingly aware of in myself. I didn’t understand what Whiteness looked like, what it sounded like, and like the fish swimming in the ocean, I was not aware of the concept of water despite my existence being perpetuated by the existence of that water. My denial is a defense. Instead of owning my story, feeling my feelings of shame and pain, I have constructed a reality in my mind that makes sense to other white people which is convenient because, in my life, I am mostly surrounded by white people. I have used my intelligence and training to delude myself and rationalize things to escape from the reality that I am a part of the systems that continue to create an unfair and systematically racist reality. These patterns of thinking only hold up with others like me, and I have unconsciously enjoyed my ignorance.
What I am describing is the definition of privilege = unconsciously being able to enjoy one’s own ignorance because the system has been set up so as to reward a lack of understanding of others with the sole intention of perpetuating the system.
Lastly, my fear is a backward-facing, cowardice, rooted in the preservation of the privilege I enjoy. I don’t want to give up my privilege because even though I didn’t consciously curate it, I have certainly unconsciously become accustomed to it.
This is what Whiteness is, and now that I am looking closely at it, I am able to see myself in it. Luckily, I am not intrinsically white. I am actually, if we are being specific, beige and pink and sometimes even red when I am out in the sun or flustered. Whiteness is a concept, a cult if you will, and Brene Brown is right that there is power in telling this story, and a creative and conscious empowerment that seems to be a byproduct of being honest about it in one’s self.
So the dilemma we face, white people, especially those of us with our identity wrapped up in being not racist, is owning our part of Whiteness, racism, and white supremacist culture which is defined as the thinking and actions stemming from the unconscious or conscious belief that being white is better than being __________ (anything other than white).
Ironically, this is much easier to do than we make it seem.
In fact, Immersion tip #1: Stop talking about this work as difficult because it really is an inaccurate use of the word difficult. This work, is, at worst, uncomfortable, and when we frame it as harder than it really is, we participate in the ongoing perpetuation of a white supremacist culture. Roll up your sleeves and get uncomfortable. You’ll live.
More importantly, we, white people, are not going to think our way into new actions. Instead, we need to act our way into new thinking, and this is the basic premise at the heart of our most recent collaboration and program offering called The Racial Immersion Experience 1.0. Our professional learning regarding race must be immersive, like travel, heartbreak, love, or grief, and the resulting learning must affect our head, but originate in our hearts. This is a tall order, and we needed help.
Together with our partner, Remington Holt, the CEO and Founder of Remington Holt Consulting, we have designed professional development that calls on senior leadership teams to become immersed in the work of seeing the world with a racial lens first, before the rest of their communities. We purposefully set out to design a professional experience that was different from other D.E.I. offerings we had researched or experienced. We wanted to build experiences that changed people at their core, and we wanted to model a messy and relational commitment to growth capable of knocking the white, entrenched, and privileged status quo on its back. We met weekly for seven months to do this work just for ourselves; one white educator, one black educator with almost nothing outwardly in common. The result of this time spent is The Racial Immersion Experience 1.0 for senior leadership teams in schools and other educational organizations.
We want everyone to check out this program, and we wanted to provide a few immersion tips that you can begin with right away.
Immersion Tip #2: If you are white, go out into the community (digital or in-person) depending on what is safe given our global pandemic and become a minority. If you are white, this might seem hard. How can you find a space online or in-person where your way of thinking, acting, and the cultural norms and beliefs you hold are foreign and possibly even viewed as problematic? Find an all Black, all Latinx, all ______ group and join it. You will be uncomfortable, but you will live. For those of you that are independent school educators, you might start by familiarizing yourself with NAIS’s POCC Conference. This conference is not a white educator space, and white educators should not attend without having done significant work to prepare, but it is a great example of a space educators in this network have created that is not organized by Whiteness. If you do this work and get a chance to attend, some people of color at the conference might resent that you are there, and they will feel empowered to be clear about that in a way that is not possible in any other space governed implicitly by Whiteness. We are not saying this good or bad, but it is helpful for you to be aware and feel it because white people normally walk around unconscious of the massive privilege they enjoy being welcomed almost everywhere.
Immersion Tip #3: Follow 300-500 new people on social media that are from different races, countries, religions, etc., and spend time in your daily scroll reading the posts that you have never seen before. Explore #blacktwitter or read @Blackat(fill in school name) and notice the content you see and where the ideas, thinking and discourse pushes you out of your comfort zone. Reflect on the fact that you have more than likely unconsciously curated a scroll experience on social media filled with white opinions, white people, white ideas, white pictures, and in general perpetuated your own incomplete understanding of the world. Reflect on your own resistance to the bluntness of this tip. Do you want to explain to me that your feed is actually very diverse already and you are actually more woke than this tip implies? If so, this is Whiteness mounting its defense in you.
Immersion Tip #4: Re-learn history using this as your starting prompt: I have been misled by the system, and I want to imagine that my understanding of race is incomplete, and I am in search of primary source black voices to listen to understand. You can start with the 1619 Project, and you can move to Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, and keep going to authors like bell hooks, Beverly Tatum, Paul Beatty and thousands more. The suggestions here are not meant to be a top ten list, rather the point is that this information is easy to find if you are motivated to immerse yourself in a different version of reality.
What makes this conversation amongst white educators so hard is the uncharacteristically blatant ignorance and denial of the need for us to own the issue. People of color have been clearly communicating this need as long as I have been alive. For me, the key has been to see this problem in me, not outside of me with someone else. By owning the story, and immersing myself in it, I am empowered to write a new ending, one that is more equitable, and I can see clearly the intentional barriers built to sustain racism. I have unconsciously helped to build these barriers, and I can see that my own future happiness is tied to consciously unbuilding them because racism is a cancer, and like cancer, white supremacist culture, thinking, and systems is bad for everyone, black, white, beige, pink or red. Join us!
