Early Adventures: How I Met My Whiteness

This draft has been sitting in the "saved" section of my blog for quite a few months, following my mad dash to finish my last quarter in college (when I had planned on staying for three more) and my old computer crashing. I've had my new computer for awhile but never got around to updating. But at long last, here is my second entry. (Julia, I told you I would post it!)

The first clear memory I have of my whiteness is me talking about it. I was probably about five or six. I don't remember who I was talking with or exactly what we were talking about. Whoever it was was an adult, and must have been explaining to me what racism was and the "bad white people" who do it to people of color (or, more likely for this conversation, "black people"), because I distinctly remember asking my conversation partner, "But, we're good white people, right?" I can only assume the answer was a firm "Yes," leaving me reassured with a metaphorical pat on the back that I wasn't one of those, bad white people who committed that awful "racism" thing, and I was free to go on my merry way.

The next (and last) clear memory of my whiteness I have from my childhood took place a couple of years later. My sisters and I had had several nannies and babysitters, the latest of whom was explaining to me that she got paid more than our Guatemalan housekeeper because, "It's really hard to find good nannies to take care of little kids, especially white nannies." This is a person for whom I hold deep respect and care to this day, and not someone I would label as "racist" in the classic, overt sense of the word. But I distinctly remember the shock and confusion I felt at her words. Part of it was because I got the sense she was saying that some people were better than others, which I knew you weren't supposed to do. But mostly it was because I was just not used to hearing the word "white" used to refer to people. It just sounded weird.

When I was fifteen I was made aware of my whiteness in a whole new way. I attended a week-long program put on by the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ) called Brotherhood Sisterhood Camp (BSC -- they do love those acronyms). We spent the week "dialoguing" about a range of social issues -- including sexism, classism, homophobia, and racism. That week was a life-changing experience for me in many ways, and one of them was that I was re-introduced to my whiteness.

I sat in a room full of white people, which I had done many times before. But it had never been because we were all white. That made me uncomfortable, but I didn't yet understand why.

I was resistant to ideas like white culture and white privilege that wasn't tied to overt racism, at first. I saw whiteness, my whiteness, as something that was boring, normal, uninteresting and unremarkable. It wasn't something I was invited or supposed to name or explore. EVER. In my mind, any mention of whiteness was per se racist.

I'd like to say I quickly overcame these false notions of whiteness, but my experiences at BSC (and later with AWARE-LA, the Association of White Anti-Racists Everywhere in Los Angeles) were just the starting point for an ongoing, lifelong process to unlearn the racial fallacies that have become ingrained in my subconscious. This process has included lots of analysis, guilt, pain, discussion, arguments, realizations, and understandings. To condense my experiences into bullet points does not do the experiences I've had nor the people I've learned from justice, but despite that, here are a few things I have learned since being re-introduced to my whiteness:

-I receive privilege based on my skin color and physical features that I neither asked for nor earned. (For a concrete list of examples, see Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.)

-There is an institution of white supremacy alive and well that grants me this privilege. (By white supremacy, I do not mean ogranizations such as the KKK, but a covert system of oppression that benefits me at the expense of others.)

-I have been (and continue to be) taught to accept and ignore my privilege and the consequences it has for those who are harmed by it.

-My temporary guilt can arise as a natural emotion in the process of re-discovering my white identity but serves no long-term purpose to anyone.

-There are spaces, activist and otherwise, that I will be neither invited nor welcomed to because of my privilege and despite any sense of entitlement I feel to be in those spaces.

What all of these initial experiences did was the crucial first step of unlearning racism: naming whiteness. Despite everything we whites have been taught about ignoring our whiteness and what it means to be white, that it even has meaning anymore, naming my own whiteness has helped me to understand that whiteness still has a great deal of meaning, and that if I am going to commit myself to anti-racism, I need to start with myself. My implication in the system of supremacy. My whiteness.

Adventure 1: Introductory Post

I have been a contributor to a number of blogs in my time. Some have been personal, others private, a couple were group blogs. But today I was inspired to start my own, public, *capital-letter inclusive* blog (a first for me) about something near and dear to my heart: whiteness.

I have been experiencing whiteness for basically my entire life -- even if I wasn't aware of that fact for much of it.

I had been casually introduced to my whiteness a few times in my childhood, but had remained blissfully ignorant of it for the majority. But since our official introduction when I was fifteen years old (to be expanded upon in a later post), my whiteness and I have spent some quality time together.

For the last seven years I have been in begun the process of exploring my whiteness in a deeper way. I have thought, talked, read, researched and/or written about whiteness on a semi-regular to regular basis. I have discovered such terms as "white privilege," "white normativity," and "white culture" (yes, there is such a thing), and the fact that it is possible, -- even, okay -- nay, it is NECESSARY -- to talk about whiteness for a purpose other than perpetuating racism. In fact, I have been made aware that it is NECESSARY to talk about whiteness in order to dismantle the very institution of racism that we liberal-minded, well-intentioned, "colorblind" whites are so fearful of upholding through our talk -- when really, we do it on a daily basis through our silence.

I hope to use this blog as an outlet to flush out my thoughts, ideas, and experiences about whiteness and my own white identity, and perhaps as a resource for others looking for such an outlet in their lives.