My Whiteness

I’ve interviewed for a bunch of roles over the last two years as I was being pushed out of athletics and all of them had a question related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The phrasing is usually similar, with a few twists, but something along the lines of “tell us about a time when you worked with a diverse community”. As someone who has been immersed in what I think is the good work of trying to better understand issues of equity and advocate for change in policy and practice, I’ve been pretty prepared to share my own journey in this area.

As with anyone else, my journey starts with my own identity, my self awareness, and my evolving understand of the mental models I have absorbed in my 60 years of life. Mental models are the efficient short cuts that our brain develops because it’s fundamentally lazy and tries to save energy whenever possible. They’re imprinted on us by our family first, then our friends, and broad social and cultural influences. Sometimes we explicitly embrace them as core to our identity. Sometimes we’re not aware of them until and unless we get called out on them. At their worst, they emerge as some combination of bias (implicit and explicit), ignorance, disrespect, disregard, dismissal, and worse.

I became interested in social justice issues late in life in a formal sense. Even though my first couple of internships were in human rights and I was very conscious as a theology student of my yearning to serve, particularly my responsibility especially to serve underrepresented and disenfranchised folks if I wanted to take the messaging of Jesus and my church seriously.

But I didn’t really have the words to discuss “social justice” until I lived in Washington DC and benefitted from immersion in a Jesuit institution. My growing interest in structural racism as a concept lead to a great deal of reading and exploration intended to fill in the giant, gaping holes in my historical knowledge when it came to the lived experiences of people who don’t look like me. As I learned, I realized how little I knew and how much more there was to digest. And I had to confront what I came to understand as the privilege that came with my whole set of identities - cisgendered, heterosexual, physically able, highly educated, white Male of Northern European descent. That required me to begin the process of wrestling with my Whiteness and what it means for how I show up in the world now.

It was easy to feel guilty and ashamed. I remember first learning about the Tulsa massacre and being horrified that a slaughter of Black people by White people in the early 20th century had been somehow disappeared from all of my US history education. I was encouraged by a friend to read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warm of Other Suns and I started to understand, for the first time, what the Jim Crow era was and what the African Diaspora was in this country. Then I tried to read Baldwin, WEB Du Bois, Angela Davis, Ibram Kendi, and the other Black authors that had never made it onto my reading list or even awareness. I felt ignorant for not knowing, and guilty by association. I felt confused about how to feel - fortunate that my life had been relatively simple and blessed, confused about how much I benefitted from my own efforts vs. the Whiteness I wear with me wherever I go.

I haven’t really sorted all of that out yet and don’t have a great answer to structural racism as an ally or advocate. The evidence and the history seem pretty obvious to me that people that don’t share all of my identities have had it harder over the course of our history. Harder to get good grades, harder to get support, harder to find work, harder to get higher education, harder to be safe, harder to feel safe, harder to get good medical care, harder to be trusted, harder to be seen. Just harder.

It’s felt like we’ve made some progress over the last decade as more people have gained awareness and learned the language of inclusion. I’ve experienced a little inappropriate pride for my own efforts, and a little shame that I could feel pride for really doing the bare minimum. I really felt like the election of Barack Obama was going to be a historical milestone that would open up new opportunities and perhaps erase some of the structural constraints we have always imposed on people who are not straight, White men. Sadly, I was wrong.

There have been a number of authors and thinkers trying to sort out what exactly has gone wrong since 2008 and I remain conflicted about the balance between implicit racism, explicit racism, class resentment, propaganda, and revenge of the nerds. There are certainly elements of all of those, and I don’t really know where to focus, which I suspect is where most people land right now. Where do we start when the problem is so multifaceted and we’re being blasted with opinions all over the place.

That’s why I was glad to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ piece in The Atlantic today. I love to read and mulling over strong writing from people that make me think is something that keeps me going. I don’t always agree with Coates’ take on things, but he’s a very thoughtful observer and I think “The First White President” is helping me to focus.

All of those other issues remain, but if I have to concentrate my energies on one thing it must be confronting and addressing structural racism wherever and whenever I can. I’m the furthest thing from great at doing so, and too often I am more quiet than I ought to be and take unreasonable comfort in my advocate and mentoring of young people. Coates does a really helpful walk through the rise of Trumpism and clarifies that a lot of what fuels it is racist thinking. Some White people want to be able to take their racism out of the closet, strap it on, wear it around, celebrate it, and share it with friends. Some White people feel dispossessed by class and economic issues and are looking for folks to blame. Some White people are doing just fine economically (most of Trump voters, it turns out), but fear for a future where people who don’t look like them will have access to the same benefits and opportunities.

When you operate from a mindset of scarcity, or see the world as “zero sum”, then everything in your world has to be about winning or at least making other people lose. It’s easy to let your mental models get warped by the people around you or social media engines designed to extremize you and validate your worst impulses. When you resent a Black man becoming president, you might find an easy path to electing literally the worst human possible to make the point that any White man can and should do the job over one of the most gifted and talented Black politicians in our history.

I’m wandering a bit now and can’t do justice to the thousands of words in Ta-Nehisi’s piece, but I highly recommend it with a long dose of reflection. I don’t think most people are racist, but not enough of us have been antiracist. In the pre 2024 world we had normalized antiracism, introduced it into the mainstream, and even convinced most of our institutions that we need to be more thoughtful in doling out goodies and opportunities given centuries of advantage for White people to the detriment of everyone else. In the Upside Down, we have now normalized that any person who is not a straight White man did not “earn” whatever they have and merit simply means being a White man. Or a slavish follower of the cult.