exploring my whiteness

My whole journey of writing my book, quitting my job, and starting my podcast has been about growth. Recognizing where I have gotten off course, owning that, and actively changing it. And as I stated in the intro to my book, I’m committed to sharing the process. Because “in process” is where we all are. While sometimes we like to pretend we’ve reached some finish line of success, or education, or wealth, or knowledge, the truth is – we can always know more. We can always grow more. I believe that is the entire purpose of our time here – to learn and to grow. 

The problem is this process is often very messy. It involves recognizing our mistakes and admitting we don’t know everything. It’s full of facing insecurities, embracing vulnerabilities, and owning shortcomings. Those are all things our society doesn’t tend to promote. Instead, we usually put on a mask and walk through the world trying to convince everyone we are already the best versions of ourselves. That we have nothing left to learn.

Embracing the Mess

Well, I’m not about that mask life. I lived it for a long time and abandoned it several years ago. I’m not the best version of myself… far from it. But I continue to work towards it. That’s why my podcast is named The BETTER You, not The BEST You. To me, if you’ve reached best, then there’s nothing left to work towards. It’s a self-imposed ceiling. ‘Better,’ on the other hand, always leaves room for growth.

So, in staying true to my commitment to sharing my process, this blog is me sharing my most recent growing pains. And I say ‘pains’ because growth is rarely comfortable… especially when it surrounds emotionally charged topics like race.

Heads up that while writing this, I am full of fear and insecurity. I fear being judged. I fear you will roll your eyes at the things I’m saying and stop reading. I fear saying the wrong thing. I feel like I still don’t know enough to even speak on this topic. I feel like it’s not my place. I fear that my newly uncovered, very deep-rooted white privilege beliefs will be woven throughout this entire thing and I’ll actually do more harm than good.

But something inside me still feels compelled to share this part of my process. And as Ijeoma Oluo instructed in her book, So You Want To Talk About Race, that I’m currently reading, we have to have these conversations. I’ll likely do it incorrectly, but I should still do it. So, I hope you will give me grace in doing so.

Here goes…

Wait, I Don’t Know Everything?

I could easily be classified as an educated person. I went to private school from kindergarten through high school. I attended college where I graduated with honors with two degrees. And I have a graduate degree – a master’s in business administration.

Yet recently, I feel extremely uneducated. No, not just feel – I’ve realized I am extremely uneducated in some very important aspects of life.

There are a couple of things that happened that have pushed me into 1 – realizing how much I don’t actually know, and 2 – wanting to know and understand more.

Now, I will admit that it is very likely I learned some of this stuff in my history classes growing up and I simply forgot it. But it is also very likely that I never learned it. That it was lost in the condensed versions of history we learned growing up – a mere subsection of a chapter attempting to convey all the complexities of slavery or the Civil Rights Movement in a week or two of lesson plans. Either way, they were things absent from my awareness at this point in life… until very recently.

It began with a couple of movies. None of it planned. They weren’t watched because of the Black Lives Matter movement or in an attempt to better understand race in this country. They were mostly movies my boyfriend picked out and I happened to be home so watched them as well.

Commence History Lessons

A couple of months ago – before the death of George Floyd – he was watching the movie The Banker as I was doing stuff around the house. I wasn’t really watching it at first, but I quickly got sucked in as I learned more about the plot. It’s the true story of two African American men – Bernard Garrett and Joe Morris – who set out to become bankers and landowners in the 1950-60s. But that was a near-impossible thing for black people to do at that time, so they hired a white man to pose as the head of the company while they would pose as the janitor and the chauffeur to hear what was going on in conversations and meetings.

What I learned from that movie that really got me thinking was that banks were allowed to deny loans to people based on race. I did a little more research and read about how government surveyors used to grade neighborhoods – color-coding them based on credit risk, in large part because of the residents’ racial and ethnic demographics. This practice, known as redlining, continued until 1968 when the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in housing. But recent research has actually shown that many of the neighborhoods redlined back in the 1930s are still in poverty today.

Again, did I learn about that back in school? Probably. But did I think about the larger implications for families not to be able to get a loan from a bank to buy a home or start a business? Nope. And while it was 50 years ago, that’s really not that long ago. And when you think about it in terms of generations, you can clearly see the impact it would have on families today.

But it was a bigger picture aha moment for me. Learning this opened my mind to realizing – WOW! – there’s probably a ton of very specific barriers like this that either I never learned or have forgotten. The Civil Rights movement was much more than water fountains, bathrooms, and bus seating… which sadly, are the only parts I tend to recall from my history classes… or come up in conversations regarding segregation.

Sidebar – I am not blaming the education system. Yes, it played a part but ultimately, I take full responsibility for my lack of understanding of our history. What I learned in school could have been a jumping-off point – tiny bits of information to spark my interest and inspire me to dig further and know more. But at that time, I was more concerned with boys and being cool than fully understanding our nation’s history and the implications it had on the people and the neighborhoods I so rarely encountered in my privileged, upper-middle-class, white life. I’ve been blind to how much I don’t know for a long time. But now I am not. Now I am aware. And awareness is always the first step. Now I can do something about it… like educate myself.

The next movie my boyfriend and I watched that got me thinking was Just Mercy. It’s the true story of a young lawyer named Bryan Stevenson who, after graduating from Harvard, decided to move to Alabama to defend those who were wrongly convicted or not given proper representation. This movie is full of heartbreaking stories of men who were not afforded the rights our justice system has in place to protect us, simply because of their race. But what really got me thinking from this movie was that the main case it follows took place in 1987! 1987! That’s within my lifetime and this kind of racist discrimination was still happening.

I, like many white people, naively thought we were way past that by the 1980s. I naively believed that the Civil Rights Movement actually made things equal. And I was wrong.

Next, we watched Django Unchained. I never watched it when it first came out because I’m not a big Tarantino fan. I don’t like all the blood and violence. All I knew about the movie was that it was about slavery. Now, this movie was not based on a true story like the other ones, but this one shook me to my core. I knew slavery was awful and I knew it was wrong. But again, my uneducated mind always imagined black people out in the hot sun doing all the manual labor of picking cotton. That was the extent of the awful I pictured. Never in a million years did I picture or even think about some aspects of slavery depicted in that movie. I don’t think I knew slave women were used for sex. I guess I’m not surprised, but I never really thought about it. I was absolutely appalled during the mandingo fighting scene – where two black slaves were fighting to the death for entertainment. I couldn’t even watch it. I was in total shock, yelling at my boyfriend, “This is awful! Did this really happen??” I’ve done a little research into that and it appears that most historians haven’t found any real evidence that practice actually happened, but there are rumors that it did. Regardless, that scene painted a very clear picture in my head of the horrific nature of slavery. As did so many other scenes in the movie.

Letting It All In

And that’s the bigger point – in my adult life with my adult empathy, I’d never really thought about slavery. Never really let it sink in. Never imagined the horrors those people endured. The impact it would have on them… not just at that time, but for generations to come. I definitely want to learn more about intergenerational trauma, transgenerational trauma, and historical trauma, which all look at how trauma can be passed down and affect future generations.

Shortly after watching that movie, George Floyd was killed and the Black Lives Matter protests and marches began.

As I’ve admitted before on my podcast, my first reaction wasn’t to get involved. Political activism has never been my lane and I, like many people, thought, “I’m not racist, I believe everyone is equal, I treat everyone fairly” ipso facto I’m doing my part. Nothing else for me to do.

But then I started to notice the discomfort. I felt uncomfortable every time I saw a social media post about it. I felt uncomfortable hearing people talk about it. I felt uncomfortable that I wasn’t addressing it on my podcast. And then I felt super uncomfortable when I attempted to.

And it was the presence of that discomfort that really got my attention.

Facing the Discomfort

As I’ve heard in so many conversations on my podcast, negative feelings are always here for a reason. They have something to show us, something to teach us. They always reveal a wound that isn’t healed or an area where we can grow. Yes, they can be about the external, showing us where we are being treated unfairly or where change needs to happen. But they are also always about something internal. Something within us that needs to be addressed.

I knew my discomfort on the subject was telling me something… so I started reading.

The first book I read, recommended by podcast guest Coltrane Lord, was White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about race by Robin DiAngelo. This book was like diving headfirst into the discomfort. It tackled all the reasons white people get so defensive about race, why the defense mechanisms exist, and how our culture supports them. It was crazy – not long after starting the book, I had a super uncomfortable conversation (borderline argument) with someone very close to me about the Black Lives Matter Movement. The reactions I was getting and the things this person was saying were the EXACT white fragility responses discussed in the book. Like, to a T. I heard things like:

I don’t see color.

Everyone struggles, but if you work hard…

If people are respectful to me, I’m respectful to them.

I grew up poor so I didn’t have any privilege.

I grew up in a diverse neighborhood.

I have black friends.

My family members were immigrants and they were discriminated against but they still succeeded.

The true oppression is class.

The book explains why all these reactions are so predictable, where they come from, and how they help keep systemic racism in place.

Understanding My Own Race

It was honestly the perfect book for me to read first because instead of trying to teach me about the black experience, it taught me about the white experience. It helped me better understand myself – which you all know I’m all about – and really opened my eyes to what systemic racism really is, what white privilege really is, and how it stays in place. And most importantly, it taught me a new term – whiteness.

Robin writes that “Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.”

Think about it – if I were to describe a woman to you, saying that she is tall, thin, long brown hair, and hazel eyes. Unless I specifically say that she is black, you are picturing a white woman.

White is the norm in which everything is compared. Whiteness drives our view of how life is supposed to be lived, how people are supposed to be, and how the world is supposed to be.

And furthermore, the white perspective is driving the global perspective. Robin shares the following concerning statistics:

In 2016-2017:

The 10 richest Americans are 100% white.

US Congress: 90% white.

US Governors: 96% white.

Top military advisors: 100% white.

President & Vice President: both white.

US House Freedom Caucus: 99% white.

US Presidential Cabinet: 91% white.

People who decide which TV shows we see: 93% white.

People who decide which books we read: 90% white.

People who decide which news is covered: 85% white.

People who decide which music is produced: 95% white.

People who directed the 100 top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95% white.

Teachers: 82% white.

Full-time college professors: 84% white.

Owners of men’s professional football teams: 97% white.

And if all those statistics don’t blow your mind and make you realize that the white perspective is the dominant perspective being pushed out in every medium and form of communication, policy, and business, then think about Jesus. Actually – google it. Google Jesus and look at the images that come up. Now, keep in mind that Jesus was Jewish and born in what today we know as Israel. But what do the pictures reveal? A white, blue-eyed, often blond-haired man. Jesus is the perfect example of how we make white the accepted norm.

Connecting Some Dots

My next lesson came from watching The Conspirator, a movie that tells the story of Mary Surratt, the only female conspirator charged in the Abraham Lincoln assassination and the first woman to be executed by the United States federal government. This movie got me thinking about the Civil War and how just like with slavery, I don’t actually know much about it. I can’t remember much of what I learned, and chances are high that what I learned was a watered-down white version. I certainly never thought about what all it entailed and what that means for how things are today. A civil war – that’s a huge deal! No wonder I saw so many confederate flags on my drive up to visit my sister in DC.

I had never really understood the confederate flag thing – why people in the south (and I’ve lived in the south my entire life) are so attached to it. But when you really think about the Civil War, it makes more sense. It’s part of an identity for some people – a side, a team, a tribe that fought together in battle. They felt so strongly about their cause that they were willing to die for it. The team lost but they aren’t letting go of the camaraderie. 

People say things like “I’m a democrat” or “I’m a republican.” “I’m a Christian” or “I’m a Southerner.” Think about that language - I am.

That’s why conversations about race, politics, and religion get so heated. People get so upset and personally offended because to disagree with some aspect of their belief system is to disagree with who they are. This idea is also discussed in White Fragility and Robin explains a concept called the good-bad binary which perfectly explains why white people are so averse to recognizing their participation in systemic racism. We think it means we are bad people because we have things so closely tied to our identity.

But you are not a political party. You happen to agree with the majority of the principles of that party. You are not a religion. You happen to believe in the majority of the beliefs of that religion. And you are not your race. It is nothing more than a social construct based on the color of your skin. These things do not make up our identity. We are so much bigger than all of them.

So we should be able to talk about these things, disagree even, and admit where we’ve made mistakes without it feeling like a personal attack on our character. Because we know that we are so much more.

But if we cannot recognize and appreciate who we actually are, how can we ever see it and allow it in others?

Mostly, the movie about Lincoln’s assassination got me thinking about the enormity of the Civil War, and how much I don’t know about it and the history of this country altogether. Furthermore, I started questioning everything I did know about the history of this country. How much was being left out? How much was watered down? How much was only from the white perspective?

Considering I grew up receiving a white, Catholic education – praying to that white Jesus – I knew the answers to those questions. A LOT!

Seeing My Privilege

But here’s what’s even more important – how is it possible that these important points in our history, with all of their huge, long-term implications have been absent from my present awareness for so long?

Because I have the privilege that they can be. After all, they don’t affect my life. They aren’t in my family tree and their repercussions aren’t felt in my day-to-day experiences. After restating them on some history test back in high school or maybe even elementary school, I had the privilege of forgetting them.

That isn’t the case for black people. I see that now.

None of this happened that long ago and the consequences are incredibly present and strong.

Discerning Issues

I have always been sensitive about racism though. I never had a tolerance for racist jokes or racist viewpoints (well, within the very limited definition of racism that I had up until recently).

I believe the sensitivity stems from my mother’s career when I was growing up. If you read my book, then you likely remember the story about Jashawn – a young boy living in a rough neighborhood who I formed a special bond with after spending a summer with him as a camp counselor. Because of my mother’s work in the nonprofit sector – from Big Brothers Big Sisters to the YWCA – I was exposed to poverty at a young age. I saw the conditions some children were growing up in. I knew they depended on a free lunch program. I learned about their family structures – father in prison or siblings with different dads. I knew at a young age that there were children growing up in very different circumstances than I was. And I, of course, recognized the majority were black.

When you look at my experience growing up, you can understand why I might marry the two – blackness and poverty. Why I might think they are almost one and the same – more black people are poor than white people. And if you did a statistical analysis of all the people I encountered during the two summers I worked as a counselor for the nonprofit summer program, that would be true. But I always leaned more towards seeing the relationship as a cycle. Yes, I was aware of the racial inequality of the cycle, but I mostly saw it as a cycle that anyone could get trapped in. The cycle of poverty.

My mother’s work toward the latter part of her career was in early learning. A summer spent working for her as a PR intern taught me all about the importance of the brain development that happens for children from birth to five years old. How simply the number of words they are exposed to during that time can impact their ability to learn in the future. The difference between the number of words a child hears in a low-income family vs. a high-income family is in the millions!

Couple that with nutritional deficiencies caused by the food desserts that exist in poor communities, and the psychological effects of exposure to violence, absentee dads, financial stress, and everything else that comes along with growing up in poverty, I could absolutely see the incredible obstacles the children I met those summers would face when trying to be successful by society’s standards. And I knew in my heart that many of them wouldn’t make it out. Many of them would stay in the cycle. And I didn’t blame them for a second.

But poverty and race are two separate issues. They are very intertwined, but they are separate. There is a cycle of poverty and separate from that, there is racism… which is the reason there are more black people in that cycle. History plays a big role in explaining this. Black people came to this country as slaves. After slavery was abolished, they started out in poverty, obviously. You don’t go from being a slave one day to the middle class the next. But then racism and segregation kept them in poverty. The Civil Rights Movement helped remove barriers, but to think with the sign of a pen that all prejudice and discrimination were gone from systems, business practices, and people is just foolish. It lingered and it lingered in a big way… ensuring the cycle of poverty remained primarily black.

President Lyndon B. Johnson made an incredible point in his Commencement Address at Howard University in 1965. He said:

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.”

That’s one of the major points here. Just because the legislation was signed to attempt to make things equal, doesn’t mean it actually became equal. And even if the sign of a pen really could suddenly make things equal, we still aren’t recognizing the fact that the black people at the starting line were entering the race at a huge deficit. Most of their competition was well-rested, well-fed, and already off and running with the sidelines full of fans cheering them on.

Then you usually hear people’s complaints about how desegregation was done poorly, and affirmative action isn’t fair to white people. Robin addresses all of this in White Fragility as well. Guess who has actually been the primary beneficiary of affirmative action? White women.

Seeing Blackness

Just recently, I finished Austin Channing Brown’s book, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. It was the perfect follow up to reading White Fragility. After Robin helped me better understand myself and my whiteness, I then got to see what it was like to walk in Austin’s shoes, the shoes of a black woman who did not come from poverty. She grew up in a middle-class home, got a good education, went on to college, and also got a graduate degree. She is smart, articulate, insightful, and worked in ministry! She is someone I would never think encountered any kind of racism.

But boy did she teach me a lesson. Something about hearing her explain how she was too black to fit in with the white kids but not black enough to fit in with the black kids, really hit home with me. ‘

Not fitting in. That’s something everyone can relate to. And it was her that helped me fully understand the pain caused by whiteness.

Understanding the Weight of Whiteness

And sadly, but not surprisingly, I could only fully understand the pain she’s felt after finding a way to relate it to the pain I’ve felt. Whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t know. But I share the following with the hopes it will help connect some dots for you as well.

Let’s look at whiteness with a broader lens for a second –

Think about all the ways you’ve been taught or pushed or outright pressured to live your life a certain way. Think about the societal norm about how life is supposed to be lived and how stressful it can be not to live up to that norm. How angry you can feel that the norm even exists.

That norm is part of whiteness. It’s whiteness that tells you that you have to go to college, and then get a job in corporate America, and then get married and have babies. It’s whiteness that says you have to stay in your marriage despite being unhappy. It’s whiteness that says you have to be married in order to have a child. It’s whiteness that says you should be attracted to the opposite sex. Whiteness that tells women to be ashamed of their sexuality and stifle their anger. It’s whiteness that kills our playful side and pushes us to always be polite. It’s whiteness that says you can’t have tattoos and have to look a certain way in order to be professional. Whiteness that says the kind of names we should have, how our hair should be done, and what we should wear.

Whiteness involves all the ways in which we are prohibited from just being ourselves. From being our unique selves.

Think about all the ways it frustrates you and angers you. All the ways it kills your spirit and your dreams.

Now think about how the cornerstone of whiteness is the color of your skin. What if you had – according to whiteness – the wrong color? What if you never even had a chance of playing by whiteness rules, or convincing the people around you that you were “part of the club?”

Take every frustration you have about the barriers you face to living as your unique self in this world and multiply it by about 10 million. It’s a whole other level of anger.

Spiritually Speaking

Now, some of you who follow my work and know my very spiritual side, may be wondering where spirituality fits into all of this? As you know, I believe in past lives and that we choose this life because it will provide the exact lessons we need to learn as part of a much larger path of growth. I believe everything happens for a reason and from a very high-level perspective, there is no right/wrong because everything – and I mean everything – that life throws at us is right simply because it happened. There are no mistakes. It can sure seem like it and feel like it, and that’s because we’re down in the weeds of it. But when you zoom out… which we will all do when this life ends… and look at everything that happened, we will see and understand all the whys behind them. We will know why they had to happen. And those whys always come down to our learning and our growth.

So, if you take that logic, you could easily brush away everything that’s happening with a, “Well, it’s all perfect and supposed to happen” attitude. But that would be looking only at the external. I believe it ultimately always comes back to the internal. Everything that happens in your life is there to show you something, teach you something, help you grow. Life is a reflection of us.

So, when you look at what’s happening in the world around you – what do you see? What are the reflections telling you? What do you feel? I believe that’s the lesson for each of us. Everyone has their own lane in life and with the race situation in this country specifically. Whether that be educating yourself, having conversations with people around you, or participating in protests or political campaigns, it’s important to have self-awareness. To know where your pain points, your triggers, and your areas for growth are. That will help whatever the work of your lane is to be coming from a place of – to borrow a term from Buddhism – Right Action.

And when you’re in Right Action – just as so many religions and spiritual philosophies say – it will always come back to helping others. Helping the collective. We go internal to heal and know ourselves, and in doing so, we come out the other side with the purpose of helping others. It, like everything, is a process.

Where are you in the process?

Going Inward

For me, I have a crazy thirst for knowledge right now. I suddenly want to better understand the history of my country. What really happened and how has it impacted today. Just like so much personal development work, I think it’s important to understand the past so you can understand why the present is the way it is. Then you can work to change the future. But just like with self-work, we can’t get stuck in the past. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 100 times – there’s no point in arguing with reality. It happened. We can continue to be upset about it, wishing it were different, or we can choose to learn from it, so it never repeats itself.

I’ve learned a lot these past few weeks. But I think the most important thing I’ve learned is how much I still don’t know. So I’m going to continue down this path of self-education. It is uncomfortable and to be completely honest, it is scary. I know it will come with many more uncomfortable moments of realization, many more stumbles where I say or do the wrong thing, and many more tough conversations with people in my life. It could forever change some relationships. And I have to be okay with that. I am okay with that.

This is yet another opportunity in my constant battle to choose myself and the way I want to live my life instead of folding to the comfort or to the desires or expectations of others. I don’t want to be part of the problem anymore. I don’t want to be ignorant. I want to be well-educated. I want to be part of the solution.

And I share all of this with you – as always – simply with the hope that it will spark something inside of you. Light a fire under you that gets you moving in whatever direction your lane takes you. I share my process hoping it will make you think about yours. 

This is a transcript of Ep. 62 of The Better You Podcast: getting personal – exploring my whiteness.