Whitesplaining Stamped from the Beginning

Looking at the world and its many, many failings, I’ve decided: what the world needs now isn’t love, it’s not just empathy; it’s education.

Sometimes I struggle to talk about race. I wonder what’s the right tone, what’s the right angle. I would never want to overstep or talk over anyone. I don’t want to come across like some “woke” princess seeking attention. But it’s something I’ve been drawn to for awhile now — these injustices set up in society, piling on in some obvious, some sinister ways.

I’m 5’8″, thin, somewhere between blonde and brunette, of obvious Anglo-Saxon descent. I’m pretty sure I had family on the Mayflower and both sides of my family tree took root in America early on. All my ancestors lived lives benefiting from a position of privilege that comes with having that white, Christian look about them.

And we hate that word, don’t we? Privilege. People bristle, they recoil, they ready their refrains of hard work and that good ol’ American dream. It’s like we’re afraid that admitting privilege takes away from any struggles we may have. But you cannot look at the world — really, truly see the world — and not notice the varying degrees of not just luck, but actual possibilities doled out. And it’s not just random chance, some sad twist of fate. For so many, there are institutionalized walls and historical foundations limiting some while uplifting others. We just don’t want to think about it because it would force us to recognize the ugly side of history. It would make us acknowledge our own complicity in that sordid past and complex present.

But if there’s one thing I’ve been thinking about lately, looking at the world and its many, many failings, it’s this: what the world needs now isn’t just love, it’s not just empathy; it’s education.

Earlier this year, I picked up a 600-page tome by Ibram X. Kendi called Stamped from the Beginning. I have been struggling with the pervasive ugliness of racism in our country, now out and proud in new and frightening ways. I was drawn to this book because I wanted a better understanding of how racism can still be so prevalent. Because it seemed so obvious to me: don’t hate people just because they look different than you.

I grew up in a home, a culture, a community that was and still is predominantly white. My parents never had to sit down and talk about racism, they never had to give us the “everyone deserves love” speech. It was a non-issue. In school, racism was talked about in an almost clinical way. We reviewed history in a “over-and-done-with” kind of approach. And going to a Christian university in the heart of Utah, studying English, it’s easy to live in a very whitewashed world where that perspective just didn’t matter.

So it was pretty easy to not be racist, but it was also far too easy to not think about racism. I didn’t have to think about why there weren’t more POCs at my school, at my college. I didn’t have to wonder why what was so easy for me wasn’t made available to others. In so many ways, I merely coasted down a slick path that had been paved for me by generations of a middle class. And it’s embarrassing to look back at my life and realize the little biases I had, the opinions ingrained in me as I looked down at the world from a hill I didn’t even want to realize I was standing on.

Well, maybe they just don’t work hard enough. Maybe if they had better values.

It’s funny the things that creep in even when you think you’re above it. It’s sad how little context was given in the construction of my world view. Everything was from a white perspective; and if not outright racist, it was biased. And it was only when I was confronted by the ugly, terrifying, shocking side of racism — the violence, the language, the truly disturbing way humans can see other humans as less than — that I realized there was a bigger problem than just bad luck at play.

So it was pretty easy to not be racist, but it was also far too easy to not think about racism.

I started caring more. I started reading more. I started watching more. I wanted to understand how people could be so ignorant, how they could just assume since slavery was over racism was too. And it has been, in a word, educational.

So many times in this book I would stop and turn to my husband: “Did you know this?” “Have you heard this?” “Were you taught this?” Again and again and again, it was no. Because we don’t talk about it. And that’s an active choice.

Someone once told me the best way to end racism is to stop talking about racism. He was white, which matters. We like to think color doesn’t matter. Because he doesn’t have to talk about it; he doesn’t have to think about it. There isn’t a system stacked against him so what is there to discuss?

But racism exists. Prejudice prevails. What’s more, it’s been commodified. It has been priced out and packaged. Throughout history, entire industries and parties were looking for ways to sell racism. This book highlighted those motivations with a straightforward approach, paragraphs darting from one sad fact to the next.

There wasn’t a lot of pathos, no emotional build up behind stories. Just bullet points on a racist dogma that has prevailed since the first white man decided to make a buck selling a Black African. Why not say they were bred to be laborers? Why not pretend we’re doing them a favor introducing them to western culture? And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the fact that the bible sort of said Black people are cursed.

It’s nasty seeing the way people spun the “truth.” It’s gross seeing how one little lie, one generalization, one seconded opinion could burgeon into such an accepted prejudice.

When we watch documentaries we don’t agree with, on veganism or global warming, we automatically assume there’s an angle, that someone is trying to make us believe their truth for this or that reason. When we see studies showing wine is or is not healthy, we’re quick to question who’s paying for it, what motivation they may have for swinging public opinion one way or the other. But somehow the idea of racist thought stemming from that same tendency to slant…it’s unrealistic.

Africans were uncultured. They were already enslaving each other. They were sexually deviant. They did benefit from white influence. Slavery ended and they still were lazy, criminal, immoral.

These racist thoughts have reverberated through an echo chamber of white exceptionalism, whitewashed history, white supremacy. We might not be so pointed about it now. We might believe we’re not even racist. We have Black friends! But we still stack the deck to keep other races from winning. Through legal language, economic review, scientific research, social studies…people have found ways to justify racism all while pretending to be woke.

We free slaves but we institutionalize biases to keep them from voting, to keep them from owning land. We say segregation is bad, but we don’t bus white kids to Black neighborhoods; we send Black kids to white schools because it’s “better” education. We’re careful to not say we target people based on race, but we put more cops in Black neighborhoods which leads to more arrests in Black neighborhoods which perpetuates an idea that there must be more crime in Black neighborhoods so there should be more cops and there will be more arrests, etc.

There’s a bias there. You can try and explain it away, to brush it off, even to justify it. But you can’t pretend it’s not there, that there isn’t a discrepancy between how we treat persons of color versus white people.

Even that language: we lump everyone else together because somehow, someway white became the baseline.

When I told a friend I was reading this book, he was immediately suspicious. “Did a Black person write it?” As if that means there would be a slant, a bias, an ulterior motive for the “Black man” to prove his point. And it may be true — but why aren’t we anticipating the same self-serving slant when it is a white man writing history?

More often than not, we just assume they are right, they are superior. This is ingrained in our psyche, not even directly. But we emphasize in subtle ways that the white man, because they have achieved so much, is operating on a higher plane and everyone else has to prove themselves first to get to their level.

We lump everyone else together because somehow, someway white became the baseline.

I think about it so much as a woman — the unfairness of men insisting their work is better, it’s more important, it’s more lasting. And if it seems that way, it’s only because men had a head start on controlling the narrative. After all, history is written by the winners.

Considering my background in English, this has been a continuous source of frustration. Men created the cannon. Men’s work has been picked by men to somehow represent the entire world. Even the women allowed in to the literary circle are time and again accused of plagiarizing their stuff or having help (Mary Shelly, Jane Austen). Men’s fiction is automatically seen as literary; women’s is deemed “chick lit.” C. S. Lewis is a master; J. K. Rowling is a children’s book author. This is because we are working from a place that presumes men are better and women, if they are good, are exceptions. But even more damning is the whitewashing of American history and education.

Abraham Lincoln said some pretty racist things. Frankly, he was kind of a dick. I believe this because the Black author highlighted unsavory quotes, letters, stories that were never covered in my AP history class. Instead, we paint him as the Great Emancipator, the savior of the Black people. We don’t leave room for nuance, for conversation. When you have a 45-minute class to teach the history of America, you have to cherry pick what you tell. So maybe it’s easier to say Abraham Lincoln is good and ghettos were due solely to broken Black families and America entered a post-racial world once they managed to elect a Black president.

I loved this book not because it was some “gotcha” moment for white men everywhere, but because it rounded out an oversimplified insistence on American exceptionalism. It highlighted an ugly side of history spent insisting Black people had done it to themselves.

It was well understood that by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority. If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. …if you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. — Carter G. Woodson

There was a part in this book where the author explores part of W. E. B. Du Bois’ influence at the turn of the 19th century. When white people saw this exceptional man, they saw just that: an exception. The author wrote, “As more Blacks broke free from the discriminatory barriers, society could find more ways to ignore the barriers themselves, and could even argue that something else was holding Black people back. With every Black first, the blame shifted to those Black people who failed to break away. If some could break away, the logic went, then all could, if they just worked hard enough.”

And there’s the rub.

When white men do something great, it’s seen as well, of course; when they do something bad, it’s an exception. For Black people it is the opposite. And that is a bias rooted in American culture. A great lie still perpetuating racist thought today.

Think about the Parkland shooter. He was mentally ill.

But Michael Brown? He was a thug, a beast, an animal. He was asking for it.

We believe Black people struggle still not because of institutionalized racism, but because they just aren’t trying hard enough. It’s a lie, malignant in its reach. We don’t want to see the hand we had — our ancestors had — in carving out this treacherous path of mistreatment and misinformation. For whatever reason, we don’t want to empathize with the impossibility of a situation we can’t comprehend.

I watched Step the other night, a documentary featuring three high school seniors in Baltimore trying to get into college. It is such a good film — uplifting, humbling, hopeful.

I watched The Kalief Browder Story, a six-part documentary series about a 16-year-old in the Bronx accused of stealing a backpack. He spent three years in Riker’s prison while his case was delayed, most of it in solitary confinement. He was just a kid. And he killed himself when he couldn’t see how it could get better.

I watched Mudbound on Netflix. I sat through the grisly movie about police brutality in the 1960s in Detroit. I saw 13th. Fruitvale Station. I Am Not Your Negro. And I did this because I cannot understand how people think it’s a non-issue. I cannot comprehend how people can be so callous towards racist thought and bias and action. I struggle to understand how mostly good people can still insist it is Black people who are getting in their own way.

There is more white outrage over athletes kneeling during an anthem than there was over the deaths of Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner. There is a military presence at every Black Lives Matter protest, but Philadelphia can ransack their city in celebration of a Superbowl win while the world makes jokes on Twitter. People actually cited their right to free speech as they marched on Charlottesville chanting Nazi refrains. Their statues and their flags are more important than an entire people asking to be heard. The #BlackLivesMatter is answered with #AllLivesMatter. If there is Black pride then why can’t you have white pride? You still have pretty white models singing the N-word backstage at the Victoria Secret show, still co-opting “ghetto” culture as they “make” cornrows happen, as they “make” wigs happen. Black women in movies and shows are maids and slaves and sidekicks. People ask for more representation in media and HBO responds with a show about a world where the Confederates won the war.

It’s disturbing to me, the flippant way we disregard racism. I say “we” because, still, my world is so, so white. I feel such shame and disgust at the way we want to pretend it doesn’t matter anymore. But reading these books, watching these films, seeing these stories — it forced me to confront the ugliest parts of humanity and to see how the seeds sowed in slavery are still being reaped today.

There was an interesting article from Janaya Khan reflecting on the starkly different reaction people have to the grassroot efforts of the Parkland survivors versus Black youth efforts, including Black Lives Matter. It’s a complex discussion but they said something very important:

“We are not facing the real issue of what this country has done in constructing assumptions about race so deeply held as to be scarcely acknowledged…. There is always this societal narrative when it comes to the killing or persecution of black people that we somehow did something to deserve it. The widely held belief that black people “deserve it” is so pervasive that it doesn’t ever need to be said.”

And maybe we should just think about that more often. To not get defensive, not bristle as if being “privileged” robs you of your struggle. But just sit in the discomfort and see it from another perspective. To catch ourselves in our own lies, the subtle way we try and justify the things we see, the things we cannot understand if we do not first try.

In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. — Harry Blackmum

We cannot censor our past. It is ingrained in our habits, our biases, our priorities, our perspectives. It is not as simple as changing the channel or upping the settings on Vidangel to censor the ugly parts. Sometimes we have to sit in the pain of the world and see our hand in it. Sit through the guilt and ugliness and see ourselves there, see the history of that conspiracy.

People who brush off hashtags or movements, who say racism would go away if we just didn’t talk about it — they aren’t getting it. There is a history to every trend, every cause. And everyone, especially the privileged majority, should reflect on their complicity.

I wish we talked more about the hard stuff. I wish we weren’t so blinded by this American exceptionalism we use to teach and talk about history. We need to study the ugliness behind choices and moments to understand what got us here.

Life is too short to bask in assumptions.

It’s time to read up. And I definitely recommend starting with a book from a different perspective. Something like Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning.