Whiteness in Threes
A new mural in Milwaukee. Photo by LD.
I've been letting this dagger of a piece by father Kenneth Tanner sink in. It begins reflecting on four Black women who taught him as a child. It ends wrestling with the damage white supremacy does to white people. This piece does so much well in such little space.
First, it avoids the Good/Bad White Person binary that limits so much thought by white people and about white people: George Zimmerman on one side. Atticus Finch on the other. I gave a lecture in 2015 about how this binary leaves white folks to live a shadow existence, defined by having not done bad things in their own estimation. By avoiding this binary, the piece leaves room to understand that whiteness is ambivalent.
Second, it touches on what I find the most difficult concept to get across to white folks and understand myself as a white person: the number that white supremacy has done on white people too. Thandeka (another minister) discusses this phenomenon in her 2001 book Learning to be White. She argues that whiteness is a conception of self built upon the trauma young white children experience when they see white parents enact racism and white supremacy.
I like how Tim Lensmire unpacks this idea from Thandeka in White Folks:
White children's desires do not, in the beginning, recognize the racial boundaries and hierarchies of our society. But soon enough, white children are confronted by adult disapproval that suggests that desires for friendship and love that point outside the white community are wrong and that if the child persists in pursuing such desires, then adult support and love may be withheld.
For me, this is what Kenneth is describing in the piece when he recalls a conversation between his mother and their neighbor:
She told our neighbor that after three black teachers, she’d made sure that I had a white teacher for fourth grade. I did not understand everything my mother was saying but I knew then and I know now that I did not like her inferences.
I will not go into the things that were said or the stories that were told but they were still said and told in front of me, and there’s something about words when you are young, they work the work of words. When disordered they are evil incantations. Words that at the time your young heart finds bewildering and revolting still get inside of you. They put up scaffolding, even when we consciously reject them.
Too many white writers at this moment would pivot to let readers know I'm not like that anymore! I've discovered this scaffolding and have torn it down. But this piece doesn't, and that's the third thing it does well. It avoids the evangelical White Confession narrative: I once was lost, not recognizing my privilege and walking in ignorance. But now I'm found: recognizing my privilege, letting other people know I recognize it, and now calling out other Bad White People for not recognizing theirs.
Instead of this pivot, the piece ends with the recognition (not confession) that this white supremacist scaffolding is still there, and it calls for the prior teaching from these Black women "to demolish what remains of white supremacy in me, in this moment of trial and in all the times that are left to me."
Bravo.
William Upski Wimsatt writing in Bomb the Suburbs (2001):
Other white writers have tried to show white people how bad they are, but it doesn't work because the writer himself stays above the fray. Then all the reader has to do is identify with the writer and he’s home-free, exempt from white supremacy.
Upski is writing about his 1993 The Source article, “We Use Words Like Mackadocious” (and other progress from the front lines of the White Struggle) -- and the decision his editor made to cut his final N-Word having paragraph. In his design, the paragraph was the key tactic to disable white readers from having that exemption. It was the piece arming itself against this singular, inevitable white reading. The whole piece and its Bomb the Suburbs commentary from Upski is worth a look over on Genius.
A text message this week from a friend, making some final plans for a workshop:
Hey brother. How y'all holding up? Yo how's this sound to you: "White culture is a collective uncaring attire toward the suffering of people who do not appear to be white, upon which a dishonest approach to understanding race and the historical development of the entire world is based."
Status Board
Reading: Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard.
Writing: Finishing up an evaluation report for National Equity Project about their leading for racial equity work in Grand Rapids, MI. It feels good to get paid to write.
Listening: With the 20-year anniversary of Fantastic, Vol. 2 this week, it's only right to be going back through the Slum Village catalog.
Viewing: Spike Lee's new film Da 5 Bloods, which could be about a particular red hat and the misfortune it brings upon the head of its wearers.