Some more thoughts on racism
Oct 23, 2002 Adoption
I’ve been reading adoption books lately. Some of them are straight-forward how to books: You Too Can Get a Baby in 90 Days or Less! (OK, I made that title up but that’s how some of them sound to me.) But my favorites are essays and autobiographical books. I’m especially interested in reading about families’ experiences with transracial adoption. From what I can tell, most good white liberals like me go into feeling like they can be colorblind and then they realize that colorblindness is, in itself, a form of racism.
When I was at the shelter, I was always happy to do community trainings. One day my co-worker (who is Latina) was supposed to give a training at a women’s studies class but she had to go to court with a client so I filled in for her. I walked in to the class and saw that the panel was entirely made up of women of color. Oops. This was going to be tougher than I thought. I knew the talk was supposed to be on race and I assumed it was going to be on our policies at shelter but actually it was about “how racism has affected me.” You can imagine my consternation seeing as how the only racism that affects me is my own.
I panicked. As I sat there waiting for my turn to talk, I frantically tried to figure out what in the hell I was going to say. Could I squeeze out a little anti-semitic story? No, that wasn’t going to fly. Could I get away with talking about the shelter anyway? No, this was about personal stuff. Ummm, maybe I could fake a fainting spell? Then I heard the professor introduce me. I walked up to the front of the room, looked out at the multicultural (but mostly white) room, took a deep breath and talked about my white privilege and how I was constantly working on my own racism.
Part of my racism was not recognizing that I was a racist. After all, I thought, I treated everyone the same. I didn’t notice people’s color. Well, I pretended not to. In fact, I was so not racist that I was extra nice to people who were darker than me. Wasn’t I just a fabulous not-racist person??? It wasn’t until I started working at a childcare site where out of 75 kids, only 4 were white (and out of 6 teachers, only 2 of us were white) did I realize how racist I was. These kids weren’t colorblind; they knew they were black. And my “polite” commitment not to notice this was just as racist as Sally and Johnny’s “I’m OK and you’re black!” form of racism. (By the way, that link is freaking hilarious so go click it!)
Overcoming racism is a process. The first part of the process is admitting you have a problem. Me, I’ve got a problem. The next part of the process is saying, “I’m willing to look like an idiot. I’m willing to see that I’m an idiot.” Ignorance can be overcome to a point but ultimately we have to realize that people get to define their own experiences; we can’t do that for them. We have to be comfortable putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations. We have to challenge our own assumptions. And we need to let other people challenge our assumptions because they just might know what they’re talking about.
At the childcare site, I let the kids teach me what race meant to them. I saw the inadequacy of the kinds of anti-bias art projects I had used with white kids in my care in this setting. They were designed to promote racial awareness and the black kids were plenty aware. This made our little exercises with crayola’s new “multicultural” (many shades of brown) paints redundant and condescending. The kids in my care knew all about my white privilege so I let them explain things to me and I listened listened listened. Then I went to a very kind and patient (black) co-teacher and asked him questions.
When I started at the shelter, I noticed that in the institutional feminist community (as opposed to the community made up of personal relationships) at that time in that place, we loved people of color when they were doing cool colorful things. Like wearing braids or gorgeous ethnic skirts. But let them start doing things that were more Black than African-American (hairstyles were a biggie) and us white feminists got nervous. We liked our black people to be more like Sweet Honey in the Rock (singing all those nice spirituals because we could all agree that slavery was bad) than like Sister Souljah (who didn’t seem to appreciate all that white liberals were trying to do for her people). I think (hope) that the riot grrl movement and the younger feminists coming up are much more racially aware, at least they seem to be to this old feminist fogie.
Back to adoption. The best I can do is keep learning and never assume that now that I’m all enlightened, I get to sit back and reflect on how not racist I am. I appreciate that even the statement “We would be willing to adopt a black child” is rife with latent racism (the undertone is “aren’t we grand?”). I know that in some ways — ways we can’t predict — we will be woefully inadequate to the task but the great thing is that we can get more adequate once we’re there. I don’t think you can really prepare yourself to raise a child of another culture until you’re in the middle of it and you say, “Oh jeez, I think we could use some help in this area.” There are lots of resources in my town; we’ll avail ourselves of them all and hope that love — while unfortunately not all-powerful — will ease the way a little.
October 23rd, 2002 at 11:10 am
Fantastic entry, echoing many thoughts and processes I’ve been going through myself these last few months. Not the adoption stuff, but the racism/feminism stuff. I think back to my earnest and well-meaning college days and cringe…
October 23rd, 2002 at 5:34 pm
Excellent entry, Dawn. These are a lot of things I’ve been thinking about lately. It was very difficult and uncomfortable with facing my own racism. But facing it and naming it allows one to grow.
Sometimes I just love the internet. And that link is hilarious. I know those people…
October 24th, 2002 at 10:22 pm
Dawn, this is such an awesome, thoughtful entry — I have been musing over it for 2 days now.
March 31st, 2003 at 4:10 pm
How long have youve been getting teased? I’ve been getting teased all of my life. I am 14 years old