Can we talk?

Just in case you don't know me already: I'm a privileged white woman. And I want to write about the process of recognizing privilege, racism, sexism, etc. I don't think we talk about it as much as we should. There's one bunch of us who think that the way to avoid being racist is to be unaware of racism (called being "color blind") and there are others of us who are committed to social justice who don't really want to talk about the experience of coming aware.

Or maybe I should just speak for myself.

I read, in the New York Times I believe, about a man with a sort of amnesia. He had a surgery in his twenties which destroyed his ability to make new memories. Never being able to remember more than a minute or so of the past meant that he lived always in the present. His journal showed the pain of that experience. It was filled with assertions that NOW he was awake, and denials of having been awake when he wrote the previous entries. You know that moment when you "come back" after getting lost in a day dream? When you find yourself suddenly aware of your surroundings and you have to say, " I'm sorry, can you repeat what you said?" Yeah, that was his life.

And I think about him and his journals when I have another moment of "awakening" to privilege and injustice.

'Cause I think I'm pretty cool. I don't say that I'm not a racist, I say that I am anti-racist. I officially get that being anti-racist/sexist/heterosexist/etc means being aware of my own attitudes, being ready to listen when it is pointed out to me that what I did or said was something that I shouldn't have done or said.

I don't like that though. Each time I become aware of another layer I want to say, "Okay, I wasn't awake before, but I am now. Now I am really and truly awake." I feel embarrassed that I didn't see it before, that it had to be pointed out to me, that for years I have said or done something I now regard as IDIOTIC. I don't like feeling ashamed, and I want to get back to feeling like a good person, committed to social justice, helping others to see their errors of their ways, making the world a better place. (Do you hear the superhero music?)

So it is difficult to talk about these experiences because I don't want to admit I still have them.

It is also difficult to talk about it because how I feel I should talk about it varies depending on whom I am talking to. For instance let's say I am talking to one of my sons who happens to be gay shortly after having said something stupidly heterosexist. The act of telling him that I feel ashamed and that I hate feeling ashamed and that the whole experience is just ICKY, would be itself an act for which I should be ashamed. Just the thought of doing that embarrasses me. I should ask him to make me feel better about feeling bad about still being hetersexist?

But maybe I should be talking to other people who share my privilege. I would like other privileged white folks to talk to me. I want to every now and then to go a support group for recovering bigots. I want to confess that I read a blog post about why some image was racist and when I first looked at it I thought "what's wrong with that?" I want to tell someone that I picked up a novel that used to be one of my favorites and this time when I got to the part where she says that the people who work for them (people who were not white) were "like members of the family and so loyal to us because we treated them so well" I wanted to vomit. I want to confess that I spent half an hour feeling irritated that I couldn't enjoy the novel, wondering if there were any blasted novels that I could read and just enjoy without having to think about the pervasiveness of bigotry, before I realized that maybe the biggest problem here wasn't that I didn't have guilt-free escapist literature ready-to-hand.

I want to confess these things for the same reason I want to confess that I ate half a pan of brownies at Weight Watchers. I want someone to know of the mistake, still acknowledge me as a decent human being, and encourage me to keep trying. I want to do it at a WW meeting because I do have the sense to know that complaining about overeating to someone who has trouble getting enough to eat would be narcissistic (actually worse, but I don't use those words on the blog).

I also want to confess it because I have this crazy hope that it will be helpful to the white folks who find themselves saying, "I'm not a racist!" Maybe it would help them to know that people like me, people who take pride in fighting against injustice find that digging out the racism in ourselves is a job of a lifetime, that we all have to work through those moments of shame.

I want to say "Listen, the other day I got mad at the dog and I said, 'you cottonpickin' animal' and then I realized what I had said and I was embarrassed. I don't think I had used that word since I was a kid, but I'm not sure. I never thought about what it meant, it was just one of the fake swear words we were allowed to say as children, right up there with 'fiddle sticks!' This racism stuff is deep in our culture and in our psyche and fighting it is on-going. It is hard. The next time someone tells you that what you said or did was racist just say, 'I'm sorry.' Okay? If you don't understand why it was racist then just remember to bring it up at the next meeting of 'Recovering Bigots Anonymous' and we will work it out together."

I don't want it to be this way. I don't want it to be a process. I want to say, "I was still asleep then, but NOW I am really awake."

But it doesn't work that way.