Waking Up White Read online

  more praise for waking up white

  “Waking Up White is a brutally honest, unflinching exploration of race and personal identity, told with heart by a truly gifted storyteller. Much as Irving’s family sought to shield her from the contours of the nation’s racial drama, far too many white Americans continue to do the same. For their sakes, and ours, let’s hope Irving’s words spark even more truth-telling. They certainly have the power to do so.”

  —Tim Wise

  author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

  “Waking Up White is engaging, challenging, and action-oriented! It’s a must read for anyone exploring issues of racism, power, privilege, and leadership.”

  —Eddie Moore Jr.

  founder of the White Privilege Conference

  “Waking Up White is a wake-up call for white people who want to consciously contribute to racial justice rather than unconsciously perpetuate patterns of racism. With honesty and humility, Debby Irving shares her own story of transformation—a journey of opening herself to learning about the realities of racism and the unintended impacts of white privilege. By confronting her own fears and mistakes, she gleans many useful lessons and tips that can help move others from confusion and avoidance to constructive engagement, authentic connection, and courageous action.”

  —Terry Keleher

  Thought Leadership and Practice Specialist, Race Forward

  “Debby Irving’s Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race is a courageous, insightful, and critical contribution to awareness of race in the United States. A virtual one-woman Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Debby’s journey from an ‘aha’ instant to consciousness is a journey for all Americans.”

  —Thomas Shapiro

  author of The Hidden Cost of Being African American

  and Director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy

  Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race

  Copyright © 2014 by Debby Irving

  Elephant Room Press

  Cambridge, MA

  Minor corrections were made to the text in July 2018.

  Fifty percent of profits will go to charities addressing issues of racial inequity.

  Some names and locations have been changed to protect privacy.

  Cover photo by Ed Crabtree, Winchester, Massachusetts, December 27, 1962.

  Used by permission.

  Cover design: Brad Norr, Brad Norr Design

  Page design: Zan Ceeley, Trio Bookworks

  Debby is available for keynotes, discussion forums, book talks, and book group discussions via Skype or in person.

  Visit debbyirving.com to contact her.

  Discounts for bulk purchases by nonprofits, schools, corporations, or other organizations may be available. Write to [email protected] to inquire.

  Aside from brief passages in a published review, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including all technologies known or later developed, without written permission from the publisher.

  For reprint permission, write to [email protected].

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013958088

  ISBN, print: 978-0-9913313-0-7

  ISBN, ebook: 978-0-9913313-1-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

  — James Baldwin

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHILDHOOD IN WHITE

  1 WHAT WASN’T SAID

  2 FAMILY VALUES

  3 RACE VERSUS CLASS

  4 OPTIMISM

  5 WITHIN THE WALLS

  MIDLIFE WAKE-UP CALLS

  6 FROM CONFUSION TO SHOCK

  7 THE GI BILL

  8 RACIAL CATEGORIES

  9 WHITE SUPERIORITY

  10 THE MELTING POT

  11 HEADWINDS AND TAILWINDS

  WHY DIDN’T I WAKE UP SOONER?

  12 ICEBERGS

  13 INVISIBILITY

  14 ZAP!

  15 THE WHOLE STORY

  16 LOGOS AND STEREOTYPES

  RETHINKING KEY CONCEPTS

  17 MY GOOD PEOPLE

  18 COLOR-BLIND

  19 MY GOOD LUCK

  20 MY ROBIN HOOD SYNDROME

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF TOSSING AND TURNING

  21 STRADDLING TWO WORLDS

  22 WHY DO I ALWAYS END UP WITH WHITE PEOPLE?

  23 DIVERSITY TRAINING

  24 EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT; EVERYONE BELONGS

  25 BELONGING

  26 SURVIVING VERSUS THRIVING

  27 LIVING INTO EXPECTATIONS

  28 I AM THE ELEPHANT

  LEAVING MY COMFORT ZONE

  29 INTENT AND IMPACT

  30 FEELINGS AND THE CULTURE OF NICENESS

  31 COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS

  32 GETTING OVER MYSELF

  33 PERCEPTION AND FEAR

  INNER WORK

  34 BECOMING MULTICULTURAL

  35 IF ONLY YOU’D BE MORE LIKE ME

  36 THE DOMINANT WHITE CULTURE

  37 BOXES AND LADDERS

  38 THE RUGGED INDIVIDUAL

  39 EQUALITY STARTS WITH EQUITY

  40 BULL IN A CHINA SHOP

  OUTER WORK

  41 FROM BYSTANDER TO ALLY

  42 SOLIDARITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

  43 FROM TOLERANCE TO ENGAGEMENT

  44 LISTENING

  45 NORMALIZING RACE TALK

  RECLAIMING MY HUMANITY

  46 WHOLE AGAIN

  TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  INTRODUCTION

  NOT SO LONG AGO, if someone had called me a racist, I would have kicked and screamed in protest. “But I’m a good person!” I would have insisted. “I don’t see color! I don’t have a racist bone in my body!” I would have felt insulted and misunderstood and stomped off to lick my wounds. That’s because I thought being a racist meant not liking people of color or being a name-calling bigot.

  For years I struggled silently to understand race and racism. I had no way to make sense of debates in the media about whether the white guy was “being a racist” or the black guy was “playing the race card.” I wanted close friends of color but kept ending up with white people as my closest friends. When I was with a person of color, I felt an inexplicable tension and a fear that I might say or do something offensive or embarrassing. When white people made blatantly racist jokes or remarks, I felt upset but had no idea what to do or say. I didn’t understand why, if laws supporting slavery, segregation, and discrimination had been abolished, lifestyles still looked so different across color lines. Most confusing were unwanted racist thoughts that made me feel like a jerk. I felt too embarrassed to admit any of this, which prevented me from going in search of answers.

  It turns out, stumbling block number 1 was that I didn’t think I had a race, so I never thought to look within myself for answers. The way I understood it, race was for other people, brown- and black-skinned people. Don’t get me wrong—if you put a census form in my hand, I would know to check “white” or “Caucasian.” It’s more that I thought all those other categories, like Asian, African American, American Indian, and Latino, were the real races. I thought white was the raceless race—just plain, normal, the one against which all others were measured.

  What I’ve learned is that thinking myself raceless allowed for a distorted frame of reference built on faulty beliefs. For instance, I used to believe:

  Race is all about biological differences.

  I can help people of color by teaching them to be more like me.

  Racism is about bigots who make snarky comments
and commit intentionally cruel acts against people of color.

  Culture and ethnicity are only for people of other races and from other countries.

  If the cause of racial inequity were understood, it would be solved by now.

  If these beliefs sound familiar to you, you are not alone. I’ve met hundreds of white people across America who share not only these beliefs but the same feelings of race-related confusion and anxiety I experienced. This widespread phenomenon of white people wanting to guard themselves against appearing stupid, racist, or radical has resulted in an epidemic of silence from people who care deeply about justice and love for their fellow human beings. I believe most white people would take a stand against racism if only they knew how, or even imagined they had a role.

  In the state that is somewhere between fear and indifference lies an opportunity to awaken to the intuitive voice that says, “Something’s not right.” “What is going on here?” “I wish I could make a difference.” In my experience, learning to listen to that voice is slowly but surely rewiring my intuition, breaking down walls that kept me from parts of myself, and expanding my capacity to seek truths, no matter how painful they may be. Learning about racism has settled inner conflicts and is allowing me to step out of my comfort zone with both strength and vulnerability in all parts of my life. Racism holds all of us captive in ways white people rarely imagine.

  As my white husband said to me recently, “It couldn’t have happened to a whiter person.” And if I, a middle-aged white woman raised in the suburbs, can wake up to my whiteness, any white person can. Waking up white has been an unexpected journey that’s required me to dig back into childhood memories to recall when, how, and why I developed such distorted ideas about race, racism, and the dominant culture in which I soaked. Like the memoir by the guy who loses two hundred pounds or the woman who overcomes alcohol addiction, my story of transformation is an intimate one. In order to convey racism’s ability to shape beliefs, values, behaviors, and ideas, I share personal and often humiliating stories, as well as thoughts I spent decades not admitting, not even to myself.

  As I unpack my own white experience in the pages ahead, I have no pretense that I speak for all white Americans, not even my four white siblings. Never before have I been so keenly aware of how individual our cultural experiences and perspectives are. That said, all Americans live within the context of one dominant culture, the one brought to this country by white Anglo settlers. Exploring one’s relationship to that culture is where the waking-up process begins.

  For white readers I’ve included short prompts and exercises at the end of each chapter to help you explore the themes in depth and in relation to your own experience. To get the most out of them, I suggest using a journal and taking the time to write out your thoughts. I’ve found the act of writing to be a great excavator of buried thoughts and feelings.

  My waking-up process has been built largely on the collective wisdom from people of color throughout the centuries who’ve risked lives, jobs, and reputations in an effort to convey the experience of racism. It can be infuriating, therefore, to have the voice of a white person suddenly get through to another white person. For this reason, throughout the book I’ve included the voices and perspectives of people of color to highlight the many ways they have tried to motivate white people to consider the effects of racism.

  I can think of no bigger misstep in American history than the invention and perpetuation of the idea of white superiority. It allows white children to believe they are exceptional and entitled while allowing children of color to believe they are inferior and less deserving. Neither is true; both distort and stunt development. Racism crushes spirits, incites divisiveness, and justifies the estrangement of entire groups of individuals who, like all humans, come into the world full of goodness, with a desire to connect, and with boundless capacity to learn and grow. Unless adults understand racism, they will, as I did, unknowingly teach it to their children.

  No one alive today created this mess, but everyone alive today has the power to work on undoing it. Four hundred years since its inception, American racism is all twisted up in our cultural fabric. But there’s a loophole: people are not born racist. Racism is taught, and racism is learned. Understanding how and why our beliefs developed along racial lines holds the promise of healing, liberation, and the unleashing of America’s vast human potential.

  Racism is not the unsolvable, mysterious tug-of-war I once thought. There is an explanation for how America got so tangled up with racism. Ironically racism, the great divider, is also one of the most vital links we share, a massive social dysfunction in which we all play a role. Perhaps the greatest irony for me has been the discovery that after all these years of trying to connect with people I was taught to see as different and less-than, I’ve learned that the way to start is to connect with parts of myself lost in the process of learning to be white. I invite you to use my story to uncover your own, so that you too can discover your power to make the world a more humane place to live, work, and thrive.

  Thank you for reading.

  CHILDHOOD IN WHITE

  A man’s character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.

  —Frederick Douglass

  1 WHAT WASN’T SAID

  Lessons my mother couldn’t teach me.

  “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ALL THE INDIANS?” I asked my mother on a Friday morning ride home from the library. I was five years old.

  The library’s main draw for me had always been a large, colorful mural located high on the lobby wall. It featured three feathered and fringed Indians standing with four colonial men on a lush, green lakeshore. The colonists didn’t hold much interest, perhaps because these were images familiar to me, a white New England girl with colonial ancestors. The dark-skinned Indians and their “exotic” dress, on the other hand, took my breath away. The highlight of my library excursions was sitting in a chair and gazing up at the Indians on the wall as my mother chatted with the librarian checking out our family’s weekly reading supply.

  About a year earlier, my mother, amused by my interest, had suggested I check out some books about Indian life. Lying on my bedroom floor back at home, I had pored over the images. Colorful illustrations of teepees clustered close together, horses being ridden bareback, and food being cooked over the campfire added to my romanticized imaginings of the Indian life. Children and grown-ups appeared to live in an intergenerational world in which boundaries between work and play blurred. Whittling, gardening, cooking over the fire, canoeing, and fishing—these were enough for me. I wanted to be an Indian. I collected little plastic Indian figures, teepees, and horses. For Halloween my mother made me an outfit as close to the one in the mural as she could.

  Eventually, my infatuation led to curiosity. If I had descended from colonists, there must be kids who’d descended from Indians, right? I wondered if there was a place I could go meet them, which is what led me that Friday morning to ask the simple question, “Whatever happened to all the Indians?”

  “Oh, those poor Indians,” my mother said, sagging a little as she shook her head with something that looked like sadness.

  “Why? What happened?” I turned in my seat, alarmed.

  “They drank too much,” she answered. My heart sank. “They were lovely people,” she said, “who became dangerous when they drank liquor.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. Dangerous? This would have been the last word I would have applied to my horseback-riding, nature-loving friends. “Dangerous from drinking?” I asked.

  “Yes, it’s so sad. They just couldn’t handle it, and it ruined them really.”

  This made no sense to me. My parents drank liquor. Some friends and family drank quite a bit actually. How could something like liquor bring down an entire people? People who loved grass and trees and lakes and horses, the stuff I loved?

  I must have pressed her for more because my mother, who along with my father sought to p
rotect my siblings and me from anything upsetting, went on to tell a tale in vivid detail about children hiding under a staircase, in pitch blackness, trying to escape the ravages of their local friendly Indian now on a drunken rampage, ax in hand. They were all murdered.

  “Well, what happened to the Indian?” I asked, my heart beating in my chest.

  She paused, thinking. “You know, I don’t know,” my mother answered sincerely. We both went silent.

  I never questioned this narrative’s truth or fullness despite its dissonance with the peaceful images in my books. My mother, full of kindness and empathy, told it to me. I don’t question that she believed it. She told me a version of a story as she had heard it from someone else, who also likely believed it. I had no other, more complete historical context in which to place this story about a nearly extinguished culture now neatly tucked away on isolated reservations I didn’t know existed. I had minimal knowledge of how Native peoples had long flourished in their own cultures before white Europeans decimated them with theirs. It makes me wonder how many lies and half-truths I’ve swallowed and in turn inadvertently passed along in my lifetime.

  Stereotypes, I’ve learned, are not so much incorrect as incomplete. It’s true that alcohol was a factor in the waning of indigenous people. But there’s infinitely more to the story. What my mother didn’t tell me was that the white colonists had purposefully introduced alcohol to Native Americans, using it to weaken, subdue, and coerce them into signing over land and rights. She didn’t explain how disease brought by our ancestors had infected and killed Indian men, women, and children, in some cases killing 90 percent of a Native nation’s population. Nor did she tell me that those who survived disease found themselves in dehumanizing federal programs designed by white men to “civilize” Indians, separating them from one another and stripping them of the languages, customs, beliefs, and human bonds that had held them together for centuries.

  She didn’t help me understand what it might have felt like, for people as attached to their families and homes as I was to mine, to be torn from theirs. She didn’t turn and gently ask me to imagine what it might be like to lose nine out of ten of my closest friends and family. She didn’t tell me that today indigenous people use words like “invaders” and “terrorists” and “genocide” to describe the Pilgrims and their actions. She didn’t explain that the English coming to America was part of a larger historical pattern of white Europeans invading countries, exploiting resources, and “civilizing” people they considered to be savages, all in an entangled quest to dominate through Christianity and capitalism. She couldn’t tell me any of these things because she herself had never learned them.