“White folks’ first experience with race is at least as far back as the moment of our births, at which time we enter the world as members of the dominant group; the group that has always made the rules, and for whose benefit the rules were made…”
—Tim Wise, White Like Me“I came into the world on Monday, July 10, 1948… I weighed seven pounds, ten and one-half ounces and was twenty-one and one-half inches long. When I was born, I was bald or almost bald. As soon as I got hair it was bright red and it still is.”
—from essay “Me!” by Janet Carter, grade 7, 1960
I was born a little white baby. I sit staring at that sentence. What 
does it mean? It means something now, but it didn’t mean anything then. To me. But it did mean something, like Tim Wise says. I was marked for life. Invisibly marked with a stamp of approval, good for entrance into most circles, the ones I thought I had to work my way into, I had to earn. Which I did. Both are true.
So, how did I see myself as a young girl? In a series of essays written in seventh grade—“My Home and Its Surroundings,” “My Family Team,” and “Me!”— I come across as a self-reflective child with a sense of humor, belonging to a chaotic but happy, loving family. The oldest of six children, I felt a responsibility to help take care of the others and to do well in school, to make my parents proud.
Growing up in Vermont, I certainly never thought of myself as white. That I was an American was taken for granted. I liked saluting the flag, putting my hand over my heart, and pledging allegiance, especially proud of the “liberty and justice for all” that made the pledge meaningful. “America the Beautiful” was one of my favorite songs, with its spacious skies, purple mountains’ majesty, and best of all the way the words “crown thy good with brotherhood” rolled across my tongue, ending with the breath-taking image, “from sea to shining sea.”
Raised in a state that was – and still is – almost exclusively European-American, I had few opportunities to meet people of other races in my classroom or community. What I learned about race and racism I learned indirectly, through family, school, church, Girl Scouts, television, books, movies, and games. And in some ways, what I didn’t learn had an equally large effect on me.
My Story: “It’s not fair!”
Me, age 9
Besides learning to read and write, school gave me another kind of training. We sat in desks in straight rows facing the front, where the teacher usually stood. Seated alphabetically, “Jan Carter” was always behind “Rodney Carr.” I learned to sit still, raise my hand, and resist talking to my neighbors. If I made a report to the class, I would stand stiffly, look straight ahead, and try to speak clearly. Body movement was only encouraged on the playground or in physical education.
My fifth grade teacher was Mrs. Patterson, a tall, handsome, soft-spoken woman, whom I loved and admired. One day while working at our desks, kids kept getting up, interrupting each other, clamoring for the teacher’s attention. Finally, the usually unflappable Mrs. Patterson said, “The NEXT person who gets out of their seat will go to the principal’s office.” The class settled down for a few minutes. I kept working diligently, and then suddenly I just had to show her my paper. I jumped up. “Mrs. Patterson!”
She turned to look at me, slightly dismayed. Then my favorite teacher said firmly, “Go to the office, Jan.”
Stunned, I walked between the rows of seats and out into the echo-y hallway. Step by step down the stairs, carefully holding onto the wooden rail because my legs felt funny. My face was making strange motions of its own accord. What was happening to me? Oh… I was about to cry. The principal’s office! How could Mrs. Patterson do this to me! It wasn’t fair! I hadn’t meant to jump up. I just couldn’t help it. And now I was being punished.
But because I was an exemplary student, a “good girl,” I received no punishment, certainly not one I remember. In my diary that night I reported matter-of-factly, “Today in school the teacher said whoever got out of their seat had to go to the office. I got up to show her a paper so I went down. Marcia and Hershy and Ruth Ann went down too.” My humiliation was short-lived.
How different my experience of “unfairness” was from that of another child, also ten years old at that time, also an exemplary student, who would one day be my friend and brother-in-law, but whose story I would not hear for another 40 years.
Bob’s Story: “I will not give in!”
Bob, age 9
Bob McIntosh was also the oldest child in his family, the son of a black man and a white woman. His parents sheltered him in his earliest years from the harassment they experienced as one of the first interracial married couples in Seattle. The family lived in mixed neighborhoods where he had both black and white friends. Like me, Bob was a responsible student, high achieving, and he knew his parents expected him to be the best. He did not feel that his skin color made him inferior to anyone.
When Bob was ten, they moved to one of the “projects” in South Seattle. His new teacher, Mr. Skelton was his first man teacher—white, as were all of Bob’s public school teachers. One day, early in the school year, Mr. Skelton stepped out of the classroom for a minute. Two of the white boys started getting rowdy, throwing paper and talking. Bob, who had always been a model student, never in any trouble, got caught up in the moment and joined in. When the teacher came back, the three boys were taken out in the hall. Mr. Skelton said a few words to the two white kids and sent them back in. Then he turned to Bob and told him directly and unabashedly that because he was a Negro, he should show more respect and keep his mouth shut in class. Bob was stunned.
In relaying this story, Bob said, “There were so many layers of message in that one sentence. Here was an authority figure I looked up to telling me, essentially, that black kids didn’t really have an inherent right to be at that school, so they had to earn the right by not making trouble… being seen but not heard. I actually don’t think he believed that black kids would ever be ‘on par’ with white students, but he would tolerate their presence as long as they behaved. If they didn’t, black kids would be dealt with more severely than white kids, and would have to work extra hard, would have to be excellent, just to be seen on par with average white students.”
But even that loaded reprimand wasn’t the most painful lesson. When Bob came back into the classroom, he looked around with new eyes. All the other black kids were staring down at their desks. He knew that they knew what Mr. Skelton had said to him. And they had known about this double standard for a long time. That was why his black friends, who were so lively and rambunctious on the playground, were so subdued in school, always keeping their eyes averted, never speaking up in class. And that was why they were such terrible students.
Bob’s response was unequivocal. “I will not give in. I’ll show them black kids can excel,” he told himself. He says if he had not had ten years in which he had already done well, it would have been much harder to be defiant. “Most of the kids had gotten that message since they were five or six,” he said. “I was lucky.”
Eventually Bob went to Renton High School, the largest in Washington state, with a student body that was historically 15% to 20% African-American. As far as he knew, he was the first black student ever to make the honor roll.
Meanwhile I, as a little white girl, did not receive any overt messages about my race, but continued to believe that if you were smart and spoke up, you would be recognized and rewarded. If I had been in Bob’s class, instead of one where racial differences were invisible or did not exist, how would I have perceived what happened to him? Would I have noticed what he noticed about the other black kids? Would I have taken for granted that they were quiet because they weren’t very smart, and seen the recognition of my own achievements as the result of personal effort rather than any advantage of being white?
And, if Bob had been my friend back then, what would this blatant unfairness have done to my faith in America as the land of “liberty and justice for all”?
Perhaps it’s not surprising that when Bob grew up, he became an educator and a strong voice for equity in our schools.
For two current day perspectives, see “White Teachers at the Crossroads” in Teaching Tolerance magazine, Fall 2000.
What about you?
Looking back on your early school days, what do you remember or see now about racism that was overt or under the surface, or even invisible to you at the time?
Good Little White Girl 
The whiteness of my educational experiences makes me so sad and I still struggle to wrap my head around. I mostly am sad about the opportunities lost. Growing up in a mostly white suburb of Chicago, I had very, very few interactions with non-white peers. I never ever thought of myself as white or had any awareness of my whiteness. I believe I just assumed white was the way and everyone else was just a guest in my white world. One time in junior high, I spoke a few times with a black girl who I kind of had a crush on. I can remember my parents being skeptical and asking some probing questions that were not exactly supportive. At the time, I sadly don’t think I thought twice. Any non-white students were never in my inner circles. They sat at different tables at lunch and played different sports that I did. My elementary school was named after Andrew Jackson, good grief. I wonder if his Native American policy was a focal point in the curriculum. My high school mascot was a Duke and the girl’s teams were called the Lady Dukes. Hard to get more masculine and whiter than that. This continued, sadly, through college. My recent thoughts about education revolve around me as an educator and how I perpetuated white conditioning despite thinking I was doing much the opposite ie my at times classroom management policies and expectations for ‘good behavior’ strike me as being very white. Raise your hand to speak. Sit and listen to me or others in very orderly ways. If I could do it again, I’d try to embrace relational conditioning and advocate for ‘messier’ classroom learning opportunities for all students to be part of all phases of their learning.
My family was a liberal San Francisco family, until my sister hooked up with an African American boyfriend. I heard my mother saying “What will the neighbors think?” and I thought “She hates the neighbors, why does she care what they think?” She lectured my sister on how she’d be limited in life in a relationship with a person of color, like they were gonna get married the next day or something. I was blown away, my mother was a racist! I had no idea! To this day it frightens me to know that I might have acquired all sorts of “isms” from my family, the TV, books, and my so-called “education.” But today it doesn’t matter, I’m responsible for my own racism, and even though I may have been taught some wicked things it’s my duty as someone who wants to participate in repairing the world (or tikkun olam as my Jewish teachings have told me) that I have to take accountability for my own racial privilege and how that has and continues to harm people of color.
I grew up in a predominantly white town, in a predominantly white neighborhood. Most of my peers and classmates growing up were white – and specifically, Irish American or Italian American – and there were maybe 1-3 students of color in my classes throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school. All of my teachers were white throughout my educational years, except for some substitute teachers and language teachers. Race wasn’t something I consciously thought about or was aware of at all, and I believed the narrative that racism was a piece of history rather than present day. I definitely believed in the narrative of meritocracy, that working hard and being smart would provide a kid with respect and success in school. I was a high achieving and hard-working student, and I did not understand how being born advantaged impacted how positively my intelligence, achievements, and self were received by my teachers, peers, and community. I do know that I was the recipient of the benefit of the doubt, both because of my grades and undoubtedly because of my whiteness. I mostly followed the rules but I also was sarcastic and spoke back to teachers. I broke some school rules (big and small) and did not get into trouble for them. I was exempt from harsher judgments or punishments for misbehaving because of my race and my status. This was all completely outside of my conscious awareness at the time, and I feel like I’m just starting to scratch the service of how my whiteness is responsible for so much of my success and being well-perceived and well-received by others.
Thank you, Janet, for this insightful (and heartbreaking) post. I grew up the eldest of three siblings–my brother and I were/are white, and my (adopted) sister was/is Black. My (white) mother sent all of us to the local public schools in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s-80s. We lived in a racially diverse, upper-middle-class neighborhood, very close to the “projects” where most of the residents were Black. All the other kids in our middle-class neighborhood (white, Black, and South Asian Indian) went to private schools. From Kindergarten through 8th grade, I was the only white kid in my class (and usually the only white kid in the whole school). I was keenly aware of how much the Black kids hated me for being white, and I was ostracized (at best) or beaten up, robbed, and verbally abused pretty much all the time. My Black sister was also attacked by the other kids, despite her race, because they knew she had white parents. I do not recall any anti-BIPOC racism in my schools, but I did actually experience unfair racial treatment of me on at least one occasion: in middle school, I was among the final three contestants on the stage in the citywide spelling bee for my grade; the other two contestants were Black girls. The adult judges kept giving the two Black girls words that had already been spelled in our round, but gave me harder and harder new words until I finally spelled one wrong. Then, once I—the sole remaining white contestant—was disqualified, the adult judges started giving the two Black girls new words again. I saw this happening in real time; I knew it was because of my race, and I knew it was unfair, but I said nothing. I had already been conditioned through years of mistreatment not to speak up for myself—much like your friend Bob’s Black friends at his school, who had also learned to submit to their own racialized abuse. My (white) father was in the audience at the spelling bee, and he also didn’t try to defend me, but I remember later hearing him express anger at how “unfairly” I was treated. The antiracist, adult part of me can look back now and sympathize with the adult judges who were valiantly trying to support Black excellence, to offset the million opportunities given to me that the Black kids never had and might never get… but the little kid part of me still hurts!
From 8th through 12th grade, the schools I attended started sorting students into tracks (“gifted” and “scholars” programs vs. “regular” classes). My 8th grade “gifted” class was mostly composed of students bussed in from other neighborhoods, and was about half white, half Black. Starting with 9th grade, I went to a public high school far across town, where the student population was much more racially diverse, thanks primarily to bussing. However, my “scholars” classes there were almost entirely white, with one or two AAPI students; I don’t remember there being any Black or Brown students in my academic classes. I didn’t construe this disparity as a sign that white and Asian kids were inherently smarter or more hard-working, because (in addition to my sister) I knew lots of smart, hard-working Black kids who lived in my neighborhood—they just all went to private schools. At the time, I associated poor school performance with economically disadvantaged students, who just “happened” to be mostly Black. It’s only now, decades later, that I look back and recognize this correlation among race, low academic achievement, and poverty was not a random coincidence but the predictable outcome of centuries of white supremacist beliefs, policies, and practices.
Thank you, Janet, for another thought-provoking question! I enrolled in my local public school system in the late nineties, roughly three decades after the district desegregated. As I grew up through 13 years in the system, my classes shifted from racially representative to predominately white. This process started with a ‘gifted’ reading class in elementary school, continued through ‘advanced’ English and math courses, and culminated in the ‘Advanced Placement’ coursework of my junior and senior years. At the time, I recognized this pattern as overtly racialized: I spent my bus ride, homeroom, and electives with Black and Brown peers who were not in the same core academic courses as me. What was up with that? My belief in meritocracy reinforced deficit stereotypes: that most of my Black and Brown classmates didn’t apply themselves academically or didn’t have the same levels of support at home. Some classmates were the exception that proved the rule: he is trying hard or she comes from a ‘good’ family. Here’s what I’ve come to understand about the underlying racism that was at play: my racial isolation in ‘advanced’ academic programs was no accident. It was systemic and existed by design.
Consider this: my older sister didn’t qualify for the ‘gifted’ program at my elementary school. My parents advocated for her inclusion, reassuring the faculty that they could place her back in the regular reading program if she couldn’t ‘keep up’ academically. She thrived. Educational research explodes the myth of tracking, where students are evaluated (via racially biased IQ metrics) and then split into different learning pathways based on their presumed intelligence. Here’s the reality: learners will engage with rigorous, meaningful coursework and disengage from rote, remedial drills. Racial biases are well-documented in the placement tests and teacher recommendations commonly used to sort students into tracks. These policies effectively ensure that white students are engaged while students of color are disengaged. Tracking creates an opportunity gap, which results in achievement gaps. Maddeningly, the achievement gaps are then used to justify calls for even more tracking: “Black and Brown students are so far behind! They need more remedial education!”
I am noting how strange and twisted I consider it to be to call a lack of outright emotionally and/or physically abusive behavior towards white people (in contrast to BIPoC people) “white privilege.” It is NOT “privilege” to avoid falling prey to a system of abuse, oppression and violence. It is abuse, oppression and violent to emotionally and/or physically abuse human beings – PERIOD.
I could say I was “privileged” to grow up in the much more diverse town of Madison, Wisconsin, as this supported me to be more naturally comfortable around people of varying skin pigments and cultural norms… this is a “gift” I received that is not all that common in what has been a mostly white and mostly racially and culturally divided nation. I also received the “gift” of a relative lack of physical violence or addiction in my upbringing.
I enjoyed it when the busing program began to integrate schools when I was in the 4th grade because the black kids were much more fun to play with on the playground than the white kids. I had no taste for “cops and robbers” (from my previous mostly white school) where the boys were the cops and the girls were the robbers – pretending helplessness when the boys “caught them and locked them up.” I was a gymnast. I was doing round-offs and backhand springs on the large grassy field… and I was one-upped by a black kid who could run up a wall and do a back flip off… I loved watching him pull that trick and wanted to learn it myself. I loved learning to jump double dutch. And I was grateful for the connections made there that followed me through high school.
I never saw fights break out. I did not see outright racist events happening to my fellow schoolmates. I was fortunate. This should NOT be a privilege. It should be the way life is for everyone – relatively free of violence and oppression – because we see each other as brothers and sisters – not as skin colors.
I never thought of myself as “better/superior” than others in any fundamental way. I was generally better at math and athletics, but others were better at science, history, athletics and the arts.
When I read that Janet’s school teacher sent her to the principle’s office for jumping out of her seat, proud to show the work she had done, I felt sad as the teacher’s punitive response fits into the systems of domination and oppression, fulfilling at least 2 of the 4 components necessary for these unfair systems to continue.
1. Moralistic Judgment – the teacher assumed ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, and established her own judgments as true.
2. the idea of “Deserving” – this is when we use the basis of moralistic judgment… right/wrong… good/bad… as rational for “deserving of a reward” or “deserving of a punishment.” In this case, the teacher assessed Janet’s actions as “wrong and deserving of punishment.”
These actions do not meet my (universal human) values for compassion, understanding, fairness or kindness.
When I read about Bob’s experience with a teacher right around the same age, I felt furious (stronger than sad) as this more potently did not meet the very same values (compassion, understanding, fairness or kindness).
Was Janet privileged because she did not fall victim to a more harmful outcome (like Bob’s)? Or are they both victims of varying degrees to a system of oppression in which someone with greater power can deem what is right/wrong, good/bad, and therefore “deserving of reward” or “deserving of punishment”?
The second two components of a system of dominance/oppression is this combination:
3. Suppression of self – numbing of one’s own emotions and one’s own needs/values/longings/desires – disconnecting from the wisdom that comes from within.
4. Amtssprache (This expression was used by Nazi officials to describe a bureaucratic language that denies choice, with words like: “should” and “have to”… when these officials were asked how they could have possibly made orders to have humans tortured and executed, they responded, “Easy… Amtssprache… it wasn’t my responsibility. I had to do what I was told.”
Consider how these dynamics might be alive in the teachers… I doubt Janet’s teacher really wanted to send her to the principle’s office… I’m guessing she told herself she “had to.”
And as for Bob’s teacher, it seems he had an upbringing imbued with racist stereotypes that conditioned his as to how he “has to” treat black people. He demonstrated failure to connect to his own humanity and to think from his heart.
“White Privilege” is only less oppressed than those who are BIPoC or otherwise minority groups. But just about all of us are living and unintentionally participating in systems of dominance and oppression.
What’s the remedy?
1. Rather than using moralistic judgment of right and wrong or good and bad, move to value judgment – “How does this action meet or not meet my personal, yet universal values?” (Web search “Universal Needs Values) to see a list of those that have been well-defined by experts in Psychology.)
2. Rather than engaging in “deserving” of punishment and reward, STOP trying to manipulate, control or coerce people. That is a game of win/lose, and it is participating in oppression. Instead, seek to understand you underlying needs and values and discover solutions that are the most likely to be experienced as win/wins by yourself and others who are impacted by your choices.
3. Gain emotional awareness and emotional literacy. Do the same with needs awareness and need literacy. Practice empathy. Connect to the LIFE that is inside of you. Treat it as sacred – in you and in everyone.
4. Do not follow orders just because they were given to you. Check in with your values system. YOU are always responsible for your actions, regardless of what influences you consider before taking action. Be self-responsible, with compassion, consideration and care for others.
My “privilege” and my witnessing of the injustices in our world, has led me to this passion – to change the system that oppresses us all. May we all rise up as one hUmaNITY. Oppression ends with me.
I went to a private religious school where 100% of the students were white. My only encounter with People of Color were the janitorial staff at our school. Throughout my childhood, the staff seemed to me to be very kind and friendly and not so intelligent or well-educated. My first interaction with an educated Black person wasn’t until I was 21 years old and in Nursing School in NYC. I perceived Black people as unintelligent because I hadn’t known any Black people personally that I considered to be intelligent. It’s painful and awkward to write this. Thank you for reading.
thanks BF; it’s uncomfortable to read ‘my first encounter with an educated Black person …’; I remember it took me many years to realize that my assumptions had always been that’Black’ and ‘educated’ didn’t go together. In reality it’s certain that the interactions I had with Black people up until I began to be aware of my racist conditioning included interactions with educated Blacks. It’s painful to see in me the continued blocks to seeing reality.
I appreciate your truth-telling.
As a child, I don’t remember having any Black students in my elementary school. I wasn’t sure if that was because I was oblivious to the role of race in society, or because I was actually in an all white school. I’ve asked my parents and my siblings, and they all have the same sense of fogginess about whether there were any Black students. So, I did a bit of online research and it seems that not only does that elementary school not have many Black students currently (less than 1%), as recently as ten years ago, it had ZERO Black students. The high school, which is across the street, currently indicates it also has a 1% population of Black students.
So, my experience of race was that it existed, but certainly wasn’t affecting me in any way. It was a problem “over there” for other people to monitor and deal with. It became a second layer of a white cocoon, keeping me from having to even notice whiteness in myself.
Such a powerful post, thank you. Several of my elementary school years were spent on a military base where I was the only white child in the class. I remember feeling special and was the teacher’s pet, who was white. It felt strange, even then…I wasn’t a perfect student, but she called on me often and praised me in front of the rest of the class. I can’t fathom what that felt like for the other children, the bias and racism begins so early and hearing about Bob’s story was a helpful reminder that parents can only protect children so much.
Wonderful to see all the responses to your post here, Janet. For me, the only black persons I was aware of before high school were two people in my 3rd – 6th grades. One black boy and one black girl. They seemed to “fit in” well though I never got to know them much. The girl wore two tidy long braids in the same Euro style the rest of us did. She was in our Blue Birds group, but always got picked up after school and Blue Bird meetings in a long shiny black car while I had to walk home. I heard that her parents were attorneys. I never got to know her other than that–she was pleasant, bright and fit in with the rest of us white girls. I always envied her a bit because my mom was by then a single mother working and I had to be the stand-in mother for my sisters. I knew she was more upper class than I though I could not have stated it that way then.
In high school, there were also no black students that I ever saw until a team of black basketball players showed up one gym period to play our all white team. I was co-captain of our team. We were scared of the big size and powerful vibes coming off the black girls, whom we’d never seen before at school. I don’t know why and am still trying to research what was the segregation/integration picture in Sacramento in the late 1950s. It is a long story about what happened with that team. The bottom line is that we beat them and they threatened us for that and pushed me into the girls bathroom the next day to beat me up. A history teacher saved me. The girls got sent to the principle’s office and we never saw them again. We white girls just went about our lives as if that never happened. We never discussed it with each other nor the teacher nor principle or anyone. White privilege just kept us insulated from harm or knowledge beyond our own lives. I am horrified about this story now, curious and determined to learn about the context around it.
I grew up in a predominately white neighborhood in new jersey. Even as i write this now i realize i am ignoring the fact that there was a good percentage, although not majority, of Asian students as well. There were also a small population of Latino students. The only racial group with no representation were Black folks. In high school there were two brothers who had one white parent and one black parent. They were the only black kids in our school, and they were teased as collectively making up the only single black student in the school. there are so many layers here that are not right. Categorizing these brothers in a black group and erasing their individual identities. Ignoring the other races in our community and out of the desire to be comfortable, not actually recognizing the folks of other races in our town and instead focusing on the dominant white identity of the community. I never fully appreciated the white supremacist mentality of our town. Not that they were overtly racists, although many were, but rather the superiority of white culture and identity and its power to essentially erase for the communities experience the other races of which people in our community were. I can only imagine the experience of the non white members of our community and how living in our town must have felt for each of them. did some folks enjoy being at home more because they could be more of their authentic self, was there more conflict between parents and children due to children assimilating more to white culture and parents holding on to their culture, or perhaps it was the opposite with the children wanting to hold on their individual identifies and parents pressuring their kids to “fit in.” Whatever the case may be, thinking about to the town i grew up in, i can much more clearly see now the culturally chocking power the white supremacist culture of my community must have had on people of color in the town i grew up in, and how this was not something our community, certainly not the white members of the community were aware of or discussed. I wonder who, if anyone, actually understood what was going on.
I moved to suburban Boston in middle school. It was a really white community, and African American students were bused in through a program called Metco. In retrospect I wonder if other students also were joining the school through the Metco program, but only the Black students were called “The Metco Kids” by teachers and students whereas perhaps the other students who weren’t Black were able to assimilate or integrate into the school more easily? I recall seeing the Black students being repeatedly reprimanded in the hallway for their exuberance – while other white students’ loudness and “big” ways of being were not reprimanded. I particularly remember how I was scared by a group of white boys who moved through the hall in packs – and they were never told to separate, lower their voice or to share the hallways. The black students at school – whether or not they came to the school through The Metco Program were consistently othered by the adults and kids in the school – although I’m naming this only now in retrospect.
Growing up in a small town in Vermont I had a similar experience to what you describe in this post. I was very unaware of the fact of my whiteness and anything that might mean for me or others. I believed so strongly that racism was a thing of the past that even when it was presented to me blatantly, I didn’t really understand what was happening.
In high school I played on the soccer team. At some point a young Puerto Rican woman moved to our town and joined the team. I don’t remember even taking in that she was not fully European American in any meaningful way.
One day we were playing a game against another team and one of the people on the other team shouted a racial slur at her. I was clueless. I didn’t know what it meant and even when someone explained it to me, I didn’t have any empathy for my team mate that the slur had been directed at. To me it just seemed like a stupid reason to insult somebody. I had never had the experience of being discriminated against in this way, and I had no understanding of the history and context of racial slurs to understand how it could be painful to be on the receiving end of that insult.
I’m an organizer, and a crucial part of community organizing is telling “your story.” When I used to tell my story, there were many things that played a key role, but mostly — how I told it back then — was that it was luck. At least a lot of it.
That’s certainly how I talked about my experience with education — I dropped out at 16, but had a lot of encouragement and safety nets in place (and I now realize, my whiteness) that ultimately led to me not only graduating, but going to college, getting a great job, having a great apartment, great life, etc.
Over the years I’ve come to realize how much of it was not luck, but me being white. It’s incredible how we are trained on all these different ways to think about and share our own personal stories, except never with the lens of our white privilege.
I went to a private Montessori school for most of my childhood, with a two-year stint in public school for fourth and fifth grade. At Montessori, I had what my parents would have called a “diverse” class, which really meant mostly white with a few kids who were black, East Asian American, and South Asian American. My teachers at private school were white. I don’t remember having overt thoughts about the race of children in my early elementary school class, but I know I must have been aware of differences and what I had been subtly taught they signified. One memory sticks out from kindergarten: I told my mom about a boy in my class I didn’t like, named Hector, and she asked what I didn’t like about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it; she kept asking, I couldn’t say. I suspect now that it was because he was Mexican, and I didn’t like that, although I had already been taught not to name that fact. I wonder what was going on in my five-year-old brain.
When I went to public school, my classes and school experiences became much more actually diverse, and I think I began to learn more lessons about… well, not about whiteness. Perhaps about social segregation and the rules thereof. I remember observing how the black girls danced and talked differently than what I was used to, and not really having a way to analyze these differences except to file them into a system that slotted them into stereotypes I’d already been taught. I was friends with a few kids who weren’t white – Jasmine and I played basketball with the boys every day at recess, El d’zjan was a sweetheart – but my close friends were almost always white. I vividly remember matter-of-factly butting into a conversation to inform two black girls sitting at my table group that “ghetto” was actually a word originally used to describe Jewish-only areas during the Holocaust. This speaks to me of an early-taught presumed superiority, cloaked in the individualistic personality trait of being smart-alecky. A sense that I had a right to educate them.
I never had a moment like Bob’s, where I was intensely brought face to face with my race and how that would define my experience. Janet’s story reminded me of a time when I got in trouble in Mr. Murray’s class. He told the class to put away their independent reading books, and, completely lost in my book, I didn’t hear him. He must have told me multiple times, and I ignored him, so my recess was taken away. I was upset and embarrassed, my sense of injustice sparked. I told my mom and the next day, she marched right into school and told Mr. Murray off. She really gave him a piece of her mind – she explained how I got so wrapped up in my books that I couldn’t hear, I would need a tap on the shoulder to get my attention, how dare he punish a child for reading! She demanded I be un-punished and treated with complete individualized attention, and she got what she demanded. I wonder how this scenario would have been different had I not been a little white girl with a white mother. How my mother’s indignation on the part of her child would have been read if she was a black mother, likely coded as an “angry black woman” and, probably, dismissed. The ability my mom had because of her whiteness to be a hard-headed, unabashedly protective mama bear, and how I got to benefit from that. I was given the benefit of the doubt, period.
Hi there – thanks for writing this and offering the prompts at the end to facilitate conversation.
I grew up in NE Texas. All of my teachers from the beginning through high school were white. They were all female as well aside from 3 that I can remember. Stereotypically, 2 were history teachers and one a health ed teacher who was actually (and firstly) a coach.
Now that I think about it all of my college professors were white. And… all of my grad school professors were white as well! (I went to “good” schools.)
I’m not sure I have as solid a story as yours. One interesting element: the place I most interacted with non-white classmates and the only place with a non-white teacher was in athletics. And it started with football in the 7th grade (it was Texas after all)! It sounds very Remember the Titans but on the field I always thought we were equals, it was about talent, etc. In the locker room… “We all put our jock straps on the same way, one leg at a time!” I can hear someone saying. Looking back now though, I wonder how true that was. I wonder how much I missed. My ignorance around this, the blindness i had at the time, is the most telling. Though you were in Vermont and surrounded by whites and thus ignorant to your whiteness, I was in Texas and surrounded by – or at least interacting a lot with – nonwhites and yet still I was ignorant of my whiteness. After all, they lived in different neighborhoods than me and, of course, I never went to those neighborhoods. So the places we interacted were sometimes around school, but mostly through sports where we all wore the same jerseys, all played by the same rules, with a clear official in the middle calling the game. The game which I thought we were all setup equally to win…
I used to understand how much of my educational privilege came from being wealthy, but don’t think I realized until much later how much of that also came from being white. But this article had me thinking on how much is lost for white people when we live in a white supremacist society with white norms. That same privilege that got me into a good (private and expensive) high school and then a good (private and expensive) college which led into jobs, etc etc, is the same ‘privilege’ that means I’ll never really know if I earned what I have and will always question how much I have simply because of the color of my skin.
Good to wonder — keep that wonder close at hand. Let it help you (me, us) strive for justice in our society, in any and all ways that it falls to us to ensure fair play. Starting with marshalling forces against voter supression, being sure our neighborhoods can be integrated without resistance, legal or otherwise, and countless other small “clicks” that a raised consciousness registers.
Thank you for the post, Janet, and to everyone for your heart-rending and thoughtful comments.
As I read and reflect, I realize my sadness in missing my first Black friend, who was also a neighbor, when I was 6 or 7… we had such great times together. Where did she go? I am frustrated with myself that I let our friendship slip away, and never tracked her down, though I’ve thought of her many times. Part of my inertia, I believe, has to do with subconsciously wondering “how would she ‘fit in’ with my life now?” which I think is part of my white conditioning/training, and a messed-up way of continuing to cut myself off from meaningful relationships with people of color. Ugh.
When I was 5, my family lived in Japan for 3 months while my dad was on sabbatical. It was an amazing experience – living with a Japanese family and going to an all-Japanese (and non-English-speaking) kindergarten. The kids and adults in the town where we stayed had mostly never seen a person with blonde hair before, so many folks would come up to me and want to touch my hair. I remember feeling a mix of emotions – nervous for being singled out and not having control over people’s responses to me, but also aware (both feeling discomfort but probably some ego and a sense of protection in that too) that blonde hair was valued, even prized. I think part of the discomfort was about feeling exoticized, objectified. As an Asian friend about the same age as me told me recently “of course, all our dolls growing up were blonde.” I’m glad I had the experience of being in the minority as a young person, though in no way is it comparable to the experience of a person of color in an all-white school in the US, which I can only imagine as terrifying.
Later on in school, most of my close friends were Jewish. I romanticized/exoticized urban Jewish family life, dreaming of living in an Jewish neighborhood in the Lower East Side that I thought would be very exciting, full of good food, meaningful rituals, connections to the “old country.” I think this in part came from a lack I felt in having a connection to my own culture (Thandeka talks about this in “Learning to Be White”). In my public high school in Vermont, one of the only Black students was super high achieving, very popular, a big leader on campus… at the time I think I took that for granted, but now I really wonder how much stress and strain he was under (I never asked). I wonder what it was like for him and what (I imagine) incredible pressure he likely experienced, with the burden (due to white supremacy culture) of being constantly seen as “representing” his race.
Like others, I too was unaware of my own whiteness in my childhood. I think that at least some part of unlearning my own privilege and white conditioning involves undoing this pattern of unawareness, which persists today. I grew up in a predominantly white region of northern California and attended a Catholic grammar and high school, both of which were not very diverse. White was definitely the “norm.” Thinking back to my classmates of color, I can see the way in which the school I attended “whitewashed” these individuals. There was a seeming pressure on them to appear and behave in white ways. We never, at least not that I remember, ever discussed racial differences or differences in family customs that, to my mind, would have made for interesting and important conversation in my youth. And I was not immune to this – in hindsight, I can see the ways in which I treated my peers of color as if their experiences were exactly the same as my own. I see now this was not the case at all.
Despite white supremacist and overt racist messaging I heard around me, I was raised to believe that all people are the same and to not recognize important cultural differences. Further, the message present, yet implicit, was that because of that perceived sameness, all people are treated equally. This perspective, of course, shifted, as I entered into adolescence and developed a more nuanced perspective on the world. I also think that awareness of my own “difference” as a gay kid cued me into the ways in which people are treated differently based on perceived and actual difference. I can see now that this assumption – that all people are treated equally – is an assumption in white culture that serves to keep white folks feeling comfortable, and away from the crisis of consciousness that arises when we become aware of how we benefit from the status quo oppression.
I went to an almost all white Christian school until 8th grade and I don’t remember noticing anyone’s race except for my first crush- Louis (Asian American). I feel a deep sense of regret for my obliviousness and wish that I could go back and relive my childhood with an awareness of my whiteness… Also the fact that my first crush was not white highlights my pattern of attraction that continues to this day (exociticizing POC).
When I got to high school, I became more aware of race. A black coach spoke to my class and told us how he would get pulled over by cops in our community. This was the first time I remember hearing an authority figure confirming that racism is real and was not just a thing of the past. Around that time my white guilt began growing and I sought out the Asian students in my honors classs to hang out with. Being friends with them made me feel Interesting by association and like a good white person. In one of my classes, my Asian American friends and I acted out a scene (that we came up with) where I was the white tour guide leading them around while they took pictures. At that time I thought this demjsbtrated that I was aware of race but now I feel ashamed that I thought it was okay to perpetuate these stereotypes.
One more thing- I don’t remember any Latino students at my school. Were they just “blending in” and I was oblivious? My community was very much anti-Latino and I was a part of that. I held a lot of negative stereotypes about Latinos. I refused to study Spanish in high school because I thought it was “inferior”. I cringe even just typing tray 😦 But I say all of this to point out how hard it must have been for any Latino classmates to thrive in such a hostile environment. No wonder they were invisible to me and my white peers!
I grew up in all white private schools on the East Coast. Like the author of “Two Kids in the Land of the Free” I did not give much thought to race, but rather saw myself as an American. Perhaps this was because my parents were immigrants and being American was important to them. There was one Jewish girl in my mostly WASP class. My mother chose to send me to her father as my pediatrician. It wasn’t until 30 years later, when I learned that we were Jewish, after being raised and sent to church as a Christian, that I understood my mother’s comfort with this particular doctor. Perhaps she saw him as part of her tribe.
There was a second unexplained incident in my childhood. My family had a summer membership at the country club. When I went to use one of the lockers like my friends did, I was abruptly expelled from the club. I never understood why my mother did not stand up for me. On later reflection I realized that, as a Holocaust survivor, a Jew in a non-Jewish world, my mother probably expected this unfair treatment.
Throughout my high school years, good sportsmanship and integrity were stressed. I grew up believing that if I worked hard I would be successful in anything I chose. It wasn’t until I went to work in the corporate world that I experienced some serious stereotyping and unfairness as a woman. While working in accounting I saw the salaries of the people I worked for and with, noting the discrepancies in salaries for men and women. I learned that women not only did not earn as much as men in the same grade level, they also did not receive the same opportunities for advancement as men. I learned that women had to work harder to prove themselves than men and that I would be the first to be laid off under the assumption that I did not need my job as much as a man because I was not the primary bread winner in the family.
Barbara
I realize that my personal experiences of unfairness and discrimination are small in comparison to the harsh racism the black boy in the article faced. Never the less, I believe my personal experiences help me to respond with compassion when I see any kind of racism played out before me.
I grew up in a 99% white suburb of Los Angeles during one of the most tumultuous times (as far as race relations were concerned) in LA history. It was on the cusp of the Rodney King verdict and subsequent riots, Anita Hill maligning and the OJ Simpson acquittal. I knew nothing of the corruption of the LAPD or anything that was beyond my small insulated world. It seems impossible to me that I was so amazingly clueless given the proximity to LA and that my family had a daily newspaper and watched the evening news every night.
Nothing about what was happening to people outside of my bubble of friends and school seemed to matter. Like most So Cal suburban white kids, I cared about going to the beach, shopping @ the mall and talking on the phone with my girlfriends. I got good grades in school and had an affinity for African American writers like Alice Walker, but mostly thought about racism as something from the 60’s that got fixed. I had no natural curiosity about why my school had only one black family and only one Spanish speaking teacher – who was in fact the Spanish teacher.
I’m not sure what causes such a myopic view of the world – perhaps it is a symptom of the homogeneous nature of suburbs – but it certainly doesn’t lead to deeper understanding of difference and how to live in harmony in a multi-cultural world. I feel stunted because of my childhood which is ironic because I had “the American dream”; education, healthy family, middle-class home. I think we need to dream bigger.
In my Missouri Synod Lutheran grade school in a suburb of Chicago, there were no students of color, only we white students of mostly German descent. In my Geography book, I learned that Africans where “savages” in the heading under a picture of Africans carrying clubs and wearing loincloths. I know and remember this because I recognized my Geography book in an antique store quite a few years ago. The only people of color that inhabited my world were in the pictures in my Bible History text book and when I went to downtown Chicago to see Santa Claus at Christmas time. I remember crossing State and Madison streets, the very center of the city, diagonally, and at the same time I remember seeing African Americans for the first time as they crossed the street with my Mom and me. I must have asked about their skin color, but I remember no conversation taking place with my mother. I only remember a heavy feeling of fear, dread, shame, and the unspoken phrase completely laden with an established sense of superiority, “We don’t talk about them.” I have a remembered visceral sense of my mother’s fear, and an almost-panicked hurry to avoid any contact with the black people downtown or with me in answer to my curiosity.
Race was absolutely invisible to me growing up. We lived in a series of small, almost entirely white communities (as evidenced by current day stats). I do not even remember thinking anything about race at all until I had more exposure in college. What stands out to me is how invisible race was due to a total lack of exposure. My Catholic elementary school was all white as far as I can remember. Looking at my HS yearbook now, I see that my graduating class of 270 was all white, with the exception of 5 Blacks and 2 Asians. I have no memory of even registering the existence of these 7 people. Very sad to actually reflect on that.
One of my more significant memories/experiences was my senior year in HS. Due to a chaotic, dysfunctional, alcoholic household I traveled 3000 miles to California to live with my sister to get away from my toxic home environment. I planned on staying my entire senior year, but went home in December thinking things might be better. They weren’t. I found another home to live while I completed HS. In looking back, I think I was just an average student and while I took basic courses I wasn’t in any advanced classes. I was in some “secretarial tracked” classes. At some point after returning to my original HS, I asked a HS Counselor about what I needed to do to go to college. His answer was something to the effect that you can’t just keep picking up and going to where the grass is greener and get anywhere in life. This statement made me incredibly angry, as I believed he had NO understanding what I was going through at home. All these years later (I am 62 now), I have told this story as though my anger propelled me into a “I’ll show him” stance and I proceeded to figure out how to do the paperwork to get into a state college (in NJ where I lived). I had no help or support from home or school and neither parent finished HS. I have said things like, “it was a total fluke” that I ended up in college. I can sense this attitude was laden with the feeling that I got to college by my sheer grit and determination. I have lived in the Bay Area for over 45 years now and my exposure to race has increased. Now that I have started this anti-racism work, I look back at this experience very differently. Had I been a Black student coming from a similar home background, I can see now that I would not have had the same doors open to me. Being White afforded me privilege that I had no idea even existed. I was continually rewarded throughout my childhood for my grit and determination even when maybe the “credentials” were just average and certainly not stellar.
I hated Tim Wise, or what he wrote, when I first started to explore race. Thought he went way too far and was an arrogant shit-disturber. I no longer see arrogance in his words, and I have great respect for what he writes. I respect and fear the shit-disturber part.
I had no African-American classmates until grades 7- 12- but I’m not even sure if I did in those grades either. I feel discomfort in not remembering if my class of 250 or so kids at the most prestigious public school in Boston had any African-American kids. I think there were a couple. But I have no real recollection of them: their names, who they hung out with (I can guess that they were definitely the “black kids sitting together in the cafeteria”, not driven there by any developmental or identity stage but by pure necessity in the ultra-segregated Boston milieu), how I avoided them. There is a sort of paradox here- I learned to spot “race” (read ‘blacks’) instantaneously when very young, but managed to not take in these couple or few kids at all during six years at this school in a class that was not very large.
So now after some research I find that 2 students in my graduating class were African-American. I wonder how hard I worked to not know them, to never have a (memorable- or probably any) conversation with them. And I wonder how alienated they felt by our nearly all-white class (I think there were around a dozen Asian-American kids).
Yeah, ‘marked for life’- myself, and these two boys (Curtis and Jeffrey). I can feel the responsibility (and have the power to turn it off too) to respond to the system of markings and meanings, and appreciate this (UNtraining) group and its insistence on not getting bogged down by regret, shame, and the like. And its insistence to keep leaning forward.
The author writes of Bob’s experience with the teacher: “telling me, essentially, that black kids didn’t really have an inherent right to be at that school, so they had to earn the right by not making trouble… being seen but not heard”. I carry that viewpoint inside of me- I hold persons of color to higher standards around things like driving, waiting in line, owning things. Another of those ugly and uncomfortable things I continue to discover in me, in my conditioning. The author goes on to question (my own responses to her questions, bracketed below, come much too easily): “If I had been in Bob’s class, instead of one where racial differences were invisible or did not exist, how would I have perceived what happened to him? [My already negative view of Bob would have been confirmed, and I would have felt a mix of comfort and unease- comfort because the teacher was helping to keep things in their right place, and unease because despite the intensity of conditioning, the light that still shines in me was shining through those years too, and I was able to recognize, if not make sense of, injustice.] Would I have noticed what he noticed about the other black kids? [I would not have noticed what Bob noticed; rather I would have felt a smugness in the black children looking down and showing subservience.] Would I have taken for granted that they were quiet because they weren’t very smart, and seen the recognition of my own achievements as the result of personal effort rather than any advantage of being white? [Yes, my assumption would have been that they were not capable of ‘smart’, like I was.] And, if Bob had been my friend back then, what would this blatant unfairness have done to my faith in America as the land of “liberty and justice for all”?” [Just like the lack of exploration I gave to the words of the Catholic prayers recited every week, even when young I saw phrases such as ‘liberty and justice for all’ as no more than platitudes. By this young age, while I still believed in and hoped for the outcomes of fairy tales, there was something sour in my view of ‘my’ country- so there was a mix of comfort and unease, as above. But the “if Bob had been my friend back then”- I see how on my first few contemplations of this paragraph I avoided consideration of that phrase. The easy way out is to say that I would not have had a non-white friend back then. But if I go deeper, and imagine the possibility, well now I see why I avoided consideration- it’s too painful to imagine. So to be fair and respond to the question, I would have tucked that experience of seeing injustice into my growing box of unconsciousness. I would have known enough to not take the question home for exploration within the family.]
I feel the sadness of having spent so many years in delusion. I got tricked, drank the Kool-aid, and went on to sow my own seeds of racism by staying faithful to the party line. I’m super grateful for the opportunities to wake up now.
Thank you, Tim, for this deeply reflective and honest comment. You noted that while you were trained to see “race” (black people), at the same time you didn’t really notice or relate to the two black kids in your class. You’re not alone in this paradox. There’s a chapter in my book called “The Invisible Visible People” that explores this phenomenon. I grew up in a relatively small, very white city in Vermont. When I asked family members and others who grew up there about the number of African Americans living there, they invariably and decisively said, “There were two black families.” In the census records of that time, there were at least 100 people who identified themselves as black. Still a very small number, but more than two families. We are conditioned to see and not see at the same time.
I’ve always been teased by classmates about my innocent face. I was often able to evade punishment for little offenses because, I was told, I just don’t LOOK like I would do anything wrong. Through this piece I’ve really come to appreciate that my whiteness is a bedrock of the presumption of innocence, childhood, or benign intent, and that other children aren’t afforded the same protection.
The other day my wife and I were telling our mixed-race god-daughter that she’ll be going to summer school. Her mother wants her to be well-educated, and agrees with that choice. Her mother is also just one class short of a Master’s degree, and is working at a minimum-wage job. I’m not questioning the choice, but in doing the multi-dimensionality practice, it struck me that we have this bedrock assumption that a better education means a better life, with a higher income, and the accentuation of other aspects of white privilege that come with class privilege. It’s the default path for us. What’s it like to put in the effort, as Bob did, knowing that you’ll still need to struggle, and maybe be lucky, to reap the rewards? And what is it like to be told by two members of the white middle-class that you’ll have to put in extra effort to have a chance of getting those rewards?
This post made me feel heavy and sad, because it speaks the truth, of which I know now, but did not know or understand as a child. Just this week, I was sharing with my buddy of my experiences in school, namely how school has always been an environment that I’ve loved. I have felt held and supported there, and was able to learn and flourish. Mistakenly, I have always attributed this to my own personal qualities as a student, along with the help of my teachers. Its’ quite sobering to look at my race as an added layer here in regards to why I excelled in school. The invisibility of it made it something I did not question earlier in my academics. Thank you for your openness in looking at this.
My childhood school years regularly reinforced my white privilege. I was treated as an individual without being openly associated with my racial group. My challenges and failures where my own and not generalized to other whites, and my successes where never communicated to me as being a credit to my race. I was the same race as all of my teachers until 7th grade. In the fourth grade when my classmates and I were assigned roles from important figures during the California gold rush, I was assured to have many options from historical characters to choose from who were white. I struggle to recall any specific incidents that were inherently racist towards the few black, Asian, and Latino students in my class, but it seems crystal clear in retrospect that through our entire educational journey there were many instances, interactions, and assumptions that constantly reminded them of their “other” and “inferior” status within our classrooms and social standings in society. The mere fact that I cannot provide concrete examples speaks further to the white privilege I benefited from, never having to consider or consciously concern myself about race throughout my early childhood education.
My experience growing up in rural Massachusetts sounds so similar to yours, Janet. In particular, I remember trespassing with bravado all the time as a kid. I used to sneak onto construction sites or neighboring farmland, jump over fences in the woods, or even climb out onto the rooves of my school after hours. It was all great fun, and if I ever got caught, it was just a warning and I was told to leave. These memories have always been somewhat charming and nostalgic, yet in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin and others, I see that I was able to enjoy these escapades because of the safety my skin color provided.
When I was in sixth grade, we moved to Cambridge, Mass for the better public schools. My mom and I toured a number of middle schools, and I ended up going to our first choice school, the King Open, a progressive public school with great teachers. I remember a certain self-satisfied feeling I had, that was shared by my parents, to be going to a good school that was public, that was also very racially diverse. What we never talked about was how in Cambridge, white families had better/easier access to choosing the schools for their children for a number of reasons, and this was reflected in the much higher numbers of white families attending what was generally agreed upon as the best three middle schools in Cambridge, one of which was my school. We talked and learned a lot about social justice at my middle school, which was wonderful, but meanwhile Cambridge overall had a completely unfair middle school system that served white families better than families of color, and this is still true today. This is a really big deal. People are so duped by the idea that Cambridge is ‘liberal’, and the white people (like my family) love how racially diverse their schools are, meanwhile the racism in the way the schools are structured runs deeeep.
While I can’t seem to think of any stories from early education, this post brings up a specific incident that I have been thinking about recently in light of some overtly racist things that recently happened at my high school. I played basketball at a medium-sized Catholic high school, and the team my senior year was primarily white. Unlike other basketball teams I had played on or against, I had only one black teammate my senior year — the year I was captain of the team. She was our point guard, and as such controlled the court when she was on the floor. One game she got into a bit of a verbal tiff with another player on our team, which resulted in an embarrassing shouting match observable to anyone watching the game (including the other team). As a captain I saw this as a result of growing tension amongst players, and I wanted to address it right away. Within the next few days our coaches called an entire team meeting, planned to be able to clear the air. I can’t remember the specifics of the meeting, but I do remember that my teammates started berating our point guard for being too controlling and being a difficult teammate. I remember thinking that this was turning out to be a horrible meeting — and no one did anything to stop the downhill spiral! Later that night I called our point guard to make sure that she was okay, given the way the meeting went. She was not okay, for good reason, and said that she knew why we all ganged up on her. She told me it was because she’s the only black girl on the team. I was shocked! I couldn’t believe what she was saying. In my head I was so angry that she was playing the “race card.” I tried convincing her that’s not the case, and that the meeting was a horrible idea, etc etc. And at that time I was CONVINCED that it was NOT about race. Now I’m convinced it was. I wish I could remember more about the meeting and why things got out of control. I also wish I could go back to that team with a different lens to see what it was like for her to be the only black girl on a team at a school that was primarily white. She had to constantly deal with both explicit and implicit racism, and I would love to dig deeper to see what I can remember from high school that would shed light on this racism.
This story reminds me of my best friend in early grade school, Steve Miller, a black boy who, along with me, was the best student in our class. We loved each other, and exalted in our innocent friendship by racing each other across the playground, running as fast as we could but never caring who won. I moved away after the 4th grade, and returned three years later, eager to reconnect with him. On the third day of 7th grade, I ran into him, walking between two other black boys, and rushed up to greet him. He looked at me with cold regard, and without a word, moved on with his friends. I rarely saw him after that. He was in none of my classes, filled mostly with “smart” white kids, and we never spoke again. I can only assume that he was excluded at some point from the group of students who were tracked as high achievers because he was black.
Painful story, Micaela. Besides your friend being tracked out of the high achiever classes, I am guessing there were also the identity issues that hit us all around that age, like Beverly Daniel Tatum describes in Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria…
Aieeee! As in the cry of the heart — this brings it home. My first inkling of outrage against the separation based on color came, not on behalf of the disenfranchised but as a direct experience of my own loss, around age five, when I was told my new friend, a “little colored girl” in the parlance of the times, was not supposed to come in the front door and play with me in my room, (and she had just done, drawn in by my happy hand, and as I had been doing for some time at her house). We were told she could be fed in the kitchen if I brought her in the back door. When the child got the message and ran away home, the look she shot back at me scalds to this day.
This may seem a far-fetched association, but there’s a movie, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” in which the child of the Director of a concentration camp befriends a child his age who lives on the wrong side of the fence — In the end, the director’s little boy has dug under the fence for regular visits to his friend, and is there when the round up for the gas chamber sweeps both boys into the “showers” — The parents learn too late what has happened …
I think of the wrongs done by the unconscious perspectives of whiteness and of the harm done to all, including the white children on the privileged side of the fence — and to the innocent bonds of friendship among the young — what we lose seems unbearable —
Heartbreaking, indeed. And not a far-fetched connection at all. A very vivid image of the cost of the wrongs done, whether deliberate or unconscious.
Yes, Catherine, unbearable. In my case, my first encounter with racism was similar to the one you recount, when at age seven, I asked my mother if my friend Steve could come home with me after school and play. She asked if that was the “colored boy” I’d been talking so much about, and when I said “yes,” she said it would of course be alright with “us,” but we had to consider what other people might think. I was totally baffled and dismayed by her response, but I think subconsciously felt a massive barrier dropping down between me and Steve, our friendship denied by one who loved me most.
There are a lot of things that struck me here… I also agree that the statement “Body movement was only encouraged on the playground or in physical education” rings true for me as well. As a white woman who grew up in an environment that was focused on academic excellence, it took a 200 hour yoga teacher training course for me to really get comfortable with movement and being in my body – and in a non-competitive way. I’ve recently started noticing my discomfort in talking about race – such as feeling the urge to fidget when the topic comes up – and how our “conditioning” to “be polite and do the right thing” comes up as a sense of stiffness that underscores a lot of silence that perpetuates injustice.
I’m having a hard time reaching back in my memory to notice whether children of color were treated differently in the military schools of my childhood. It didn’t occur to me that they would be, and I doubt I would have noticed if it had happened. As a child I thought teachers liked all girls better than they liked all boys. Girls sat still and we were quiet and respectful. Boys were wiggly, disruptive and disrespectful. I didn’t notice any difference along a racial divide.
In trying to recall my teachers, I’m pretty sure they were all white until my junior and senior years in Honolulu. I got out a 1967 yearbook from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, where the base kids were bused to a civilian high school. As a young teenager, I had thought of it as an exotic place, because instead of being just plain American, there were Greek kids and Polish kids, and French Canadian kids, with all the associated cultural richness. I did not find one African American or Asian or Hispanic student in the whole yearbook. Even though we moved there from Burlington, NC, where I had seen the desegregation of the city’s schools, I had never noticed that there were no students of color at Chicopee Comp. They must have been represented in the families on base; in fact, my best friend was named Neefee Salinas, and I remember she spoke Spanish at home. Odd that I can’t picture her at school. The yearbook did reveal two African American teachers, both women. One taught business (shorthand and typing) and the other was a chemistry teacher.
I wonder what I have yet to learn. I always thought that since I grew up in an integrated military environment, and since I never felt any difference between myself and any other sergeant’s child, regardless of race, that I was not a racist person. I’m sort of startled that there is much beneath the surface that I don’t have any idea is there, the privilege that I have been able to take for granted without even realizing how much difference it made.
I really appreciate the stories of experiences that you all have told here. I have many of my own. One thing I am struggling with is how to get a handle on separating my experiences of “whiteness” from my experiences of learning about and being faced with and acting against racism in many ways throughout my life. It seems a way to learn about our whiteness is to see and hear racism so that like in your story Janet of your experience as a white girl being so different than Bob’s story as a black boy, in comparing how we are treated, we can feel and know these differences. I keep feeling that I am doing this all wrong in these classes because I have been so focused on detecting racism so that I can learn not to make mistakes and hurt people of color, so that I can help white people learn what racism is, and so that I can learn what privileges I have as a white person by seeing how differently I am treated than people of color.
Being the mother of two children of color for 30 and 25 years, I have learned to be a protector. After hearing from people of color in workshops and daily life what they don’t want to hear from white people, and how they want to be treated, what they do want to hear, I am very focused on this. So now, I am struggling to try to look at this differently, focusing on myself and what it means to be white, without just focusing on myself as a self-centered white person taking up too much space, being in my privilege focusing on myself! Phew!! My head is spinning and I am willing to keep at this!
Thank you for writing, Janet. My thoughts too lie with the “taken for granted” idea. Our conditioning can be so deep, it feels innately a part of us. I think that’s why I have a lot of difficulty even attempting to respond to your question, and why it’s hard to accept that unconditioning actually is a choice and is do-able. When I look back on my early childhood elementary school days, I have to reeeallly reach and reach to think about anything having to do with race. One element does strike me:and that is the fact of all my teachers being white, just like me. I didn’t know any other way. Of course the people who mentored me and who I looked up to were white like me! I completely took this for granted and now I think how much easier it has been for me to get along with my dreams and aspirations when the people pushing me, encouraging me, challenging me …look exactly like me! It probably has made me think: I can do anything! That attitude is also likely something I don’t even notice in myself. Did the kids of color in my classes notice that their teachers did not look just like them? How did this affect them?
I also am reminded me of the drastic dichotomy of, for lack of a better term, the “color of care.” While in the classroom, the leaders are European descent white like me…and on the playground after school, the nannies are Jamaican and Filipina women. Even this outside/inside juxtaposition strikes me now in a way it never did before …it’s complicated though because when we’re little, we learn so much from our time outside the classroom. So there’s a value standard that’s different: white comes to symbolize the formal setting, color (and to be fair, also white as there were white nannies) the non-formal setting. I’m young and learning in both worlds but again, there’s a value added to the formal setting that doesn’t exist in the non-formal setting. Not only a value, but a certain set of expectations exists in the all-white setting that in our culture lead one to believe that what’s learned in the classroom will dictate how one ends up in life. There’s the stereotype — and I must have picked this up when I was very young — that what you learn outside the classroom are your “street smarts,” and for me, growing up with a black Jamaican nanny, I learned my “street smarts” from a woman of color. So I definitely had/have (sidenote: something else I struggle with in terms of race is this idea of past/present tense… I tend to talk about things in the past even though they live within me today. It’s part of my shame and it’s super hard to shake.) the impression that my tactical knowledge derived from someone different from me who had more experience in the “real world out there.” This stereotype persists today: that people of color “know” the streets, know the “games.” The outside/inside — and we can say us/them — divide of school teachers and nannies is certainly something I saw when I was little and the implications of “who is an expert where” stays with me today.
Emma, this is a great example of what happens when we get curious and look back with intention! At first you felt like it was a stretch to see anything at all about race from your childhood, but then you bring out the profound experience of the two worlds — “inside” = school and white authority figures/nurturers and “outside” = the “real world” with women of color as authority figures/nurturers. You describe the conditioning around this so clearly, the different value systems attached to the inside/outside frames. Many white children had/have nannies of color and this can be a deeply affecting (and confusing) experience of relationship and race (and class, of course). Especially if you had one nanny for a long time. Worth exploring more for yourself. About the shame of speaking of past vs. present, perhaps a multidimensional approach can help. Of course the past lives in us now, and so do many other parts we have developed since we were children — in addition to the basic goodness of that child self who was just innocently taking in the world and trying to make sense of it. I think we can love that about ourselves for then and now.
It’s interesting- because just like you- most of my memories in grade/junior high school were of my own sense of being treated unfairly without looking at race. I remember being called a kike by a boy who usually was a trouble maker- and I chased him around the room- ready to punch him in the face if I got that close. Other kids were laughing and cheering us on- as entertainment. The teacher wasn’t in the room at the time- but when he finally came back I told him what had happened. I looked up to this teacher, and was also a “good little white girl”- getting good grades. His response was minimal- telling that boy not to call me that and then presumed with the class. I was outraged. This boy was always so mean- it was so unfair!
So I like what what you wrote in response to Bob’s story- would you see things differently if you witnessed what he went through or would you have pretended that it was okay and not say anything? I grew up in queens ny- and the school this happened in- was mixed, not only with race but with SES as well. Differences were apparent- and I was just starting to have a conscious about injustice- but didn’t know what to do about it. Instead- I tried to stay more invisible in that sense- not wanting to be seen as different and not knowing how to stand up when I saw something unfair. But I liked even more when you wrote: “Would I have taken for granted that they were quiet because they weren’t very smart, and seen the recognition of my own achievements as the result of personal effort rather than any advantage of being white?”- I know this is something white people unconsciously learn as being part of the dominant culture-the taking for granted part- and unless we are taught as children to look at those difference and understand the injustice- the next step in the developmental process as white people, would be to experience that shame and guilt- for being ignorant and staying quiet. I’m still figuring out how to work through this.
Thanks for your reflections, Genna. One thought about the shame and guilt for being ignorant and staying quiet. In the process of writing about myself as a white child, a number of times I found myself using a sarcastic tone as I talked about my ignorance. I couldn’t stand seeing that part of myself. My developmental editor said, “You can’t trash the little white girl for what she didn’t know.” This was a wake-up call about myself as a person and as a writer about this topic. The sarcasm came out of shame and guilt, which as you said, are a stage in the process of awakening. But those are not places to dwell. I see guilt as remorse for something done or not done, whereas shame is more of an overall condemnation. Guilt can be a springboard to change, if we don’t get stuck in it. Shame feels deeper and it requires a lot of self-love to work with it. As I write and explore my white conditioning, I keep coming back to the place of having to hold my experience in basic human goodness. Otherwise there feels like no way to go forward. No space for forgiveness or awareness to grow in a healthy way. As you say, if we can validate children’s sense of injustice and help them to see there are ways to combat it, we can disrupt the comfortable ignorance we take for granted as white people. And we can start with the child self that still lives within us!
As I tour schools for my son and enter into numerous discussions about public schools in San Francisco with friends, I am often triggered by the notion of a “good” school and how this seems to correlate directly with the number of white students a school has.
There are so many deep connections between our white training and schools. Schools act as creators and reinforcing agents of racism, even while claiming a colorblind approach. It enrages me and saddens me to know that Bob’s story is not isolated, but the norm. Even the discourse of educational reform — the “achievement gap” and the “school-to-prison pipeline” imply white supremacy while trying to critique it. I am encouraged, though, by the educators who want to create equitable schools and who are looking directly at their own racism and white training to make real shifts in all students’ experiences, especially those of students of color.
I thrived in school as the “teacher’s pet” because I wanted to please the teacher and craved praise. I had an ability to learn the system and expectations and meet or exceed them, and this was certainly enhanced by my whiteness and understanding of white culture. I now have a much more critical eye for what was happening, and I am thankful for the ability to revisit this training and begin to recognize it and unlearn it.
Thanks, Courtney. You point out how we white people can talk about race in coded language so it doesn’t seem like that’s what we’re doing. “Good” schools, “good” neighborhoods,” etc. can be spoken of and the listener knows what’s implied, but no one has to come out and say it’s about race.
I appreciate your comment Courtney, and that it must make these issues so much more real when you are experiencing them as a parent. I’m particularly interested in your comment about the “school-to-prison pipeline” and would like to hear more. Maybe we can chat at our next meeting
I always got the benefit of the doubt from my teachers. I was always really engaged in class, more because I wanted to please my teachers than because I was a really good student or smart or anything. I think that’s one of the biggest reasons why I have been able to get so far academically. The first time anyone told me that I was smart was in 4th grade when a substitute told me I was smart. She said that because I asked her if she wanted to know anything about our class. From then on, I remember thinking that if I was really nice to the teacher they would think I was smart. So crazy that I did all this mainly for attention. My mom was also a teacher at that school so I knew that if I misbehaved in class at all my mom would know about it before I even saw her after school. I can imagine that this is a multi-dimensional thing that has developed in my life, but probably because I was a girl and my mom was a teacher and because I was white–the same skin color as every single teacher I ever had until high school–that I became considered to be “smart” and was given the benefit of the doubt. I was in the higher level math group in 6th grade (already being tracked) and the whole class had a pretty easy math homework assignment that for some reason I just didn’t get. I turned it in and got it back and all my answers were incorrect. My teacher pulled me aside and told me he wouldn’t count that grade in my semester grade because he knew that I was an “A” student anyhow. That’s privilege on so many levels!
Something that I grew up learning about people of other races is that they were more “interesting” than white people. That’s what my mom always told me (and still does). Considering that I grew up in a town where 85% of the population is white, the people of color stick out much more than for example, Oakland. Now that I look back on the boys that I had crushes on in elementary school, they were Zach–Korean, Edward–Chinese-American, Antonio–Mexican-American, and Nathan–Japanese/European-American and another Nathan–African American. Even now, the two longer relationships I’ve been in have been with an Ethiopian person and a Mexican person. It creeps me out to think that part of the attraction is this belief that people of color are “interesting.” As for the relationships that I have been in, I know that there is so much more than the race of the person I’m with, but I can’t shake the feeling in the pit of my stomach that this is some subconscious factor in me when I choose a partner. 😦 I don’t even know how I should talk to my partner about this…
Brave sharing, Elena! Good tracking of the effect of that early message from your parents about people of color. That tendency of some white people to exoticize people of color is certainly one end of the spectrum of white racist conditioning. One of the hard things about starting to see this stuff is we can feel like that conditioning contaminates our love and connection with people. That’s why recognizing it as conditioning, not as who you are at heart, is so important. Our racial conditioning is always part of our connection with friends and partners of color — and vice versa. It’s that social level which impacts the personal and relationship levels. But once you see it for what it is, it will not have so much power. At least that’s my experience. It’s there, but just as a part. Not a part we chose to have. But one we can choose to look at and see it for what it is.
I totally appreciate Elana’s dilemma — and thanks, Janet, for this lucid response. It couldn’t be better said — fearless awareness, honesty with ourselves (such as Elana models) is the path to some degree of freedom from being run by our conditioning.
So much to pay attention to in your story! What really jumps out at me today is this sentence: “Body movement was only encouraged on the playground or in physical education.”
The stiffing of our body, emotions, and affects is one aspect of white conditioning that I am deeply troubled by. Personally, I’m profoundly affected by this “rule” that I should disconnect from my body. Although there are other, non-related aspects of my childhood that also fed into this “rule”, the whiteness of it is pervasive.
I know that constraining my own natural physical movement and expression of my being deadens all sorts of things including my ability to know or set my own boundaries and also to feel joy flowing unfettered. I’ve been undoing this training for years and so can see it and work with it better now but still feel its effects daily.
This deadening creates a kind of closing off and rigidity. And now, as I consider the larger implications of this deadening, I wonder at how much it functions as a tool that contributes to oppression and superiority over those who do not restrain their physical life-force in that way.
Tara, the point you’re making is huge. The way we are taught to control our bodies oppresses parts of ourselves — inhibits our free expression of joy, sorrow, anger, longing, curiosity (“don’t touch that!”) – and we then project that onto others who are freer in their ways of expressing. Defining “civilized” in our own image. White people have historically had power over the bodies of people of color — literally, in slavery and in more subtle ways now.
Your refections on a white child’s invisible and unconscious privilege are astute, and Bob’s story brings up all the outrage at racial unfairness I began to feel around the age of fifteen when I began to catch on. There were of course no black kids in my schoolrooms — your query, “What would it have done to my faith in America to have witnessed this blatant unfairness” is a good one. Growing up with Jim Crow, in Charlotte, NC, the evidence of discrimination was all around me but not in a way that would suggest the possibility of protest or change and certainly nothing that dampened my enthusiastic patriotism and belief in America’s highest ideals of equality. A child pretty much takes the status quo for granted, and when I first vocally protested the separation of white and black (once in a bus station waiting for my sister, when I couldn’t sit next to our maid but had to wait on the other side of a barrier, with my daddy), my objections were firmly repressed. But not my inner rebellion, which bore fruit in coming years as young white people found ways to act in the civil rights movement and voter registration drives. Still, I carried far into adulthood the haunting sense of having been an unwitting and unwilling participant in gross injustice and injury of people whose hearts and feelings and minds were like my own.