Woke

Photo of Shirley Chisholm during a campaign speech

“I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace” - Taylor Swift

My grandmother was a big-boned Italian with full lips, thick red hair, abundant, well-placed moles and a sculpted Roman profile that would make Helen of Troy jealous. She was prejudiced, but no one considered her to be racist. For one thing, she worked with Black people. Mostly Black women, as a keypunch operator for the city. She climbed the ranks to become supervisor and retired with a decent pension, and described what she endured as “reverse racism.” All those years, those Black ladies refused to invite her to sit with them at lunch, they never asked for her to join their card game, and that hurt her feelings!

My mother was definitely not as prejudiced as her mother had been. She even invited a Black couple to her wedding. The picture of Dr. Green wearing a long-sleeved, floor-length, floral gown and her husband, in a color-coordinated ruffled shirt, is the first wedding photo in the album she’d show off for company. Dr. Green was her thesis advisor in graduate school, and a woman, and Black. My mother couldn’t praise her enough.  

My parents raised me in the suburbs and in high school I joined the Cultural Awareness club. Eventually, I came around on the subject of white privilege, which the Club’s second-wave feminist sponsor venerated in hushed tones. Growing up where everyone was white, at first I didn’t believe in white privilege. Privileged over whom, I always asked. Ourselves? But, I respected the theory and agreed I was probably prejudiced, just in ways I couldn’t necessarily perceive, in the same way I probably benefitted from systemic injustices in American society, again, unknowingly so.

In college I was more fearful of befriending the Black women who shared my dorm suite then I was my white Jewish roommate, though I’d never met another Jewish person before, either. Around Black people my speech ground to a halt; if my suitemate had given me a present wrapped in festive wrapping paper, I would not have known what to do with it. [open it, duh!] At functions hosted by Black students, I didn’t, for example, offer to clean up, which I had otherwise been taught was rude. There was a chasm of difference that frightened me. The world I moved in simply wasn’t very diverse, but not for lack of trying! I attended Delta Sigma Theta and Delta Gamma rush events. I listened, attention rapt, as one of my suitemates’ boyfriend’s explained football was about white men defending a goal bound by two white poles - representing the open legs of a prone white woman - from penetration by a brown phallus. I even attended a Louis Farrakhan rally and became hysterical, asking my Black neighbor:  “Do you think I’m evil?”

I was, frankly, relieved to discover the concept of microaggression. It felt good to name the feelings of alarm that overcame me, apropos of nothing, as I passed a Black man walking in the opposite direction. I tried not to, but as I shifted my purse to the shoulder furthest from him, relief and shame washed over me simultaneously. Whenever I heard a “Black” voice at the other end of a customer service call, I felt justified, instead of undignified, if I “had to lose my temper.” When a Black child wandered over on the playground, instead of greeting him with a smile, as I would a white child, I found myself ignoring the boy, and as my awareness grew, struggling to consciously include him, which seemed worse. 

I knew I would never see the same potential that I saw in my daughter, in a Black teenager crossing the street with his jeans belted below the curve of his buttocks, his cotton boxer briefs raging. Until reading Becoming, I thought Michelle Obama was just another “angry Black woman.” And when I read Between the World and Me and asked myself, am I the type of white woman who would have pushed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s five year old son off the escalator? I knew in my heart the answer:  maybe yes, maybe no, which wasn’t good enough. 

So, what I do about it?

My husband and I enrolled our daughter in a preschool that catered to immigrant and refugee communities; meaning, the school was majority Black. It also happened to be the public charter school with the most economical before- and after-school-care program in our vicinity. Our daughter was one of only two white children in Ms. Mary Anne’s preschool class, where she flourished, she blossomed, she became beloved. I would hear, as I entered the school building, echoes of her name being sung like a hymnal. Everyone knew her, all the other students wanted to be her friend. I thought my daughter’s experience would mirror that of the few Black kids I’d grown up with; they had been the only ones. I thought my daughter would be an outsider, an other, that she wouldn’t belong.

But the funny, and terrible, thing is instead of being ostracized, she was adored. She was popular, her attention was constantly sought after and playtime with her was jealously guarded. I had wanted for her the experience of being excluded, so that she would learn not to exclude others, especially those most different from herself, and learn to welcome the outlier in her midst. Instead, she was put on a pedestal, almost worshiped.

My daughter wasn’t born a racial minority, and only spent a single year at the charter school that served them. But my daughter turned out differently than me, and my mother and grandmother before me. She wandered around the playground looking longingly at groups of Black girls to befriend before approaching the white girls at school. She deferred to Enesio and Tanisha and Aaliyah in a way that she didn’t defer to their white counterparts. She was more comfortable talking to Black women commuting home on the “L” than to white. 

Did I do my duty, I ask myself, as a self-described woke white woman? I guess it’s a start. It’s not enough [it’s not reparations], but it’s a start.