The other day I wrote a post about my fear of being looked down on by older White people. I was hesitant to publish my thoughts because I didn’t want to offend or hurt anybody, especially people in my own life. After all, some of the most loving, gracious, and important human beings in my life are White.
But I did it anyway.
I felt it was important to put my thoughts out there. There is so much tiptoeing around difficult and uncomfortable issues that little gets resolved. We are afraid to ask each other questions because we fear our questions might offend people or worse, reveal our ignorance. We downplay our histories and traumas because we don’t want to appear overly sensitive or feel our own traumas are unworthy compared to other people’s sufferings.
In college, professors provided safe spaces to discuss “sensitive” issues. We could ask all the uncomfortable questions and sound as ignorant as we were because we were in a sphere of bettering ourselves through education. Then we graduated and entered mainstream society, and suddenly we were expected to know better than to ask someone where they were from. It was all hush-hush, again.
When I published my last post, I didn’t know what kind of response I would get. I was pleasantly surprised when people commended me on it, and I was touched that some even shared their stories with me. It made me feel less alone. It also reminded me of what I’ve always known (but often forget): that we are more alike than we realize.
What makes us similar is our differences!
I needed a framework and the vocabulary to figure out all this stuff in my head, so I started reading Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?.
A point Tatum makes, which resonates with how people responded to my previous post, is that each of us contains multiple identities. Some are dominant identities, like being male, Christian, or heterosexual. Some are subordinate like being physically disabled, homosexual, or poor.
But everyone has both dominant and subordinate identities, and recognizing them can help generate “empathy for our mutual learning process” (Tatum, 105) <— Wow, a citation! Throwback to writing school papers!
In response to my post, my college professor, a White woman who played an integral part in shaping the person I am today, shared with me her struggles of coming out of a working-class background. A Black female friend told me how aware she is of the prejudices and stereotypes placed on her based on her skin color. Even my White male high school teacher was conscious of the feelings I shared.
The four of us have different identities, different histories, and different experiences. But we all can relate to one thing:
Each of us has one or more identities that society makes us feel lesser by—working-class, Black, female, Asian, and nowadays, even White. We are always on our toes, waiting for someone to point out what we’re doing or saying wrong. And we work very hard to prove society wrong.
In the case of my high school teacher, even though being White is not a subordinate attribute, he feels the need to downplay it. In my opinion, downplaying Whiteness is not rejecting Whiteness, and it’s not being “color-blind” to it and all its inherent privileges. Downplaying his Whiteness is a reaction to being fully aware of the power of his skin color.
I don’t know what happens from there, but I do know that if more of us were conscious of our identities and the privileges or oppressions bound to them, that it could be a start to breaking down the social hierarchies.
Tatum’s vision is that “[our] ongoing examination of who we are in our full humanity, embracing all of our identities, creates the possibility of building alliances that may ultimately free us all” (108).
It’s the word “alliance” that gives me hope. I felt an alliance with my Black friend, as I did with my working-class professor, and with my White teacher. The fact that my experiences provoked them to reflect on theirs, and then to share with me how they feel, indicates to me that they either understand or are trying to understand how we experience the world differently.
They are entering a conversation to move us forward.
Thank you, people-reading-my-words, for being kind and open as I process these thoughts out loud! There’s more in the works!
People Pleaser