Me and Black History Month
We are intersectional. All of us. My privileges are not bound by the color of my white skin. They are also related to my straightness, my cis-ness, my class background. I didn’t create oppression and I’m not responsible for fixing the whole mess of systemic racism and oppression. Just as I’m not responsible for eradicating misogyny or xenophobia. But I can make a list of how my privilege (white and otherwise) has affected me. That is very do-able, you know?
I am grateful for my privilege because (duh) who doesn’t want access to safety and wellness and education, and I’m interested in how to leverage it; how to expand it so that it doesn’t stop with me. This can be confusing because I don't want to carry the role of white savior (consciously or not), and I don’t want to be so arrogant as to think I can just fix the legacy of slavery and colonialism. Yet there I believe there has to be engagement in thought and action on the part of white folks. I’ll admit that though I’ve known about it for a while, I haven’t yet made the time/had the guts to read Layla F Saad’s Me and White Supremacy because I’ve felt pretty maxed out with my attempts to offer healing in this world, and I’ve been afraid of what she might ask me to consider. As in Do I have the bandwidth to make more changes right now? I downloaded it though, and am interested in finding some people to read it with.
I’m claiming no authority on the topics, but I’m not new to the idea that we have deep wounds of racial injustice festering in our country. I’ve been learning about oppression, and systemic racism and the intersections of race and poverty and gender in higher education and informally for a long time. I spend time digesting what WOC teachers like Ebony Janice, Thea Monyee, and Rachel Cargle have to say about white people, POC, and the world at large. Ebony Janice [@ebonyjanice] is teaching me about womanism and offers a lecture called Womanism is to Feminism as Purple is to Lavender. Thea Monyee [@theamonyee], whose work decolonizes joy, pleasure and mental health, has taught me to think of “symptoms” as “signals." Rachel Cargle, [@rachel.cargle], who started a foundation to fund therapy for Black girls, says things that bother me sometimes - because one of her roles in the world is nudging white people out of complacency. I follow them and other WOC thinkers/movers/shakers/decolonizers on Instagram because I want to learn more about what hasn’t been taught to me by default. I’m curious - I want to learn more about Black culture as a force in this world - one that's been created by the forces that be, and created itself brilliantly in spite of them. There’s so much learning outside of the whitewashed mainstream - Black culture simply hasn’t been centered and there is much beauty and magic and pain and dignity and struggle in what I’ve been learning.
While I’m inclined to bring up race in my personal life (with my mostly white friends) and am comfortable discussing race, class, and privilege, I have chosen not to write too much about it publicly for a few reasons:
1. Because I haven’t wanted to be reactive and simply “virtue signal” that “I’m a good white person.” That’s an impulse I feel come up sometimes. Sure, I’m a good white person - I'm a good person in general - in that I do good as much as I can whenever I can. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have racist thoughts and attitudes. I do. When they come up, I challenge them. I think and feel a lot about racial justice; I just haven’t given myself much permission to “have something to say” in the broader sense.
The whole reactivity/virtue signaling thing is complicated because while it definitely involves an integrity to self, it also flirts with prioritizing my public image over raising up the voices of POC. In fairness to myself, I write and share about race/social justice sometimes - when it feels aligned and not, like I mentioned, reactive.
2. Because I am uncomfortable with being a white person writing publicly about race. I am uncomfortable with centering my experience in a world where white voices have long been dominant (internal thoughts like, “Why not just listen? Why do you need to chime in here?”). Does the world need another white woman’s opinion on the matter? I don’t know. Maybe - I’d rather take the chance than stay quiet.
This is unfair to myself. Of course I need to listen. And I do listen. In conversation with POC, and most consistently via the Instagram accounts I linked to above. Instagram is one of my favorite ways to educate myself on the topics mentioned above. There are a lot of opinions about what everybody - especially socially conscious, well-meaning white liberals (tho I’m not a liberal) - should be doing because we do a lot of damage without realizing. And for better and worse, I’ve internalized that. This internalization needs its own space and will unravel in its own time.
3. White privilege is awkward to dive into because as a concept, it’s worth critiquing. Like anything to do with identity and oppression, it’s complicated. It’s critical to acknowledge wrongs, past and ongoing. There is a need to raise up voices not historically heard and to make injustice clearly evident. And there is also the idea that we can perpetuate the status quo by focusing on something like white privilege (I owe my awareness of this to Amber J. Phillips, the High Priestess of Black Joy and Jazmine “Da K.O.S.” Walker of The Black Joy Mixtape podcast). I know from personal experience that hanging out in stories of trauma can definitely strengthen my sense of victimhood, and I imagine that a certain amount of attention to the wrongs, and centering positivity are an approximate recipe for moving in the right direction. But just take a look at the comments on Rachel Cargle’s Instagram and you’ll observe we’ve got a long way to go.
I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a friend who is a racial justice educator. It was about the Black Hole of Enoughness that seems to harass most of the women I know. The phrase “I am not enough” has played itself out for years in the form of me questioning my role, complacency, and points of action in the madness of our unjust world. It’s an issue of the spirit that projects outwards (and FYI, it’s getting better). My friend challenged my sense of despair (kindly hinting at the absurdity that racism might end if only I became engaged enough), helped me to break down my priorities, and offered a container for what I can expect of myself - what I can do so as to neither burn the candle at both ends, nor ignore my privilege. And I am grateful I called her, grateful for her taking the time to hash it out with me.
And so, without further ado, here’s a list of ways I recognize my various privileges, including the white kind:
**PS: Inspo for this post came from an IG post by @adrifult via kerryconnelly.com - here's what she posted:
