What does whiteness mean to you?
Today, on Martin Luther King Day, I am thinking about the man who was never embraced by white America when he was alive —and the caricature of him we celebrate today. (If we revere him as we pretend to do, why haven’t we taken seriously his call for reparations and a universal basic income?)
In what way can we honor him that is not performative? By marching? Going to church? Inviting friends and neighbors over to discuss his legacy? I’ve done all this; it’s not enough. What could ever be enough?
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetrate it,” King said. “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
To be a white, middle-class American today is to be bound up in oppression, exploitation, destruction. How can we possibly protest it all? And what form should our protest take?
Today I’m also reflecting on whiteness as I experience it in my life. Like my soul, whiteness will be with me until I die. But unlike my soul, it holds no hope of redemption.
Whiteness is erasure of history, both national and personal. Whiteness denies the body’s truth. To be white is like being a black-out drunk: you wake up in a strange place, with signs of struggle all around you. In the air: the acrid scent of shame or self-hatred. Your memory fails.
Whiteness is numbness: television or tumblers served at 5 pm sharp. Too much exercise or shopping, too much religion or porn. Too much talking and not enough listening. Whiteness is an empty mind – not the enlightened kind, but the absence of crucial facts. Nobody wants to hear about your whiteness, but you must learn about it for the rest of your life. Like I once heard Tanehisi Coates say — and I paraphrase — for a white American to wake up to the reality of racism is like facing that she is an alcoholic. Every single day after that, she must learn to live into that reality. The work is humbling, and it never ends. And choosing it is infinitely richer than the sleepwalking life of denial.
What does whiteness mean to you?
P.S. check out this article about MLK Day.
