Am I a Racist?

I don’t recall what I said at dinner to aggravate her so badly, but one night Kate called me a racist and stormed off. I now know why: I had reacted the way that white people do when they face the accusation: I was defensive, I said I had never treated people of color badly, that I had given money I couldn’t afford for many long years to organizations like the NAACP. There was no way I could be called a racist.

Yet she was insistent. I thought she was being unreasonable.

But then recently we had another talk. We were discussing places to which we wanted to travel. Nancy and Kate had been to Singapore and Vietnam a couple of summers ago and have been talking about going back to Asia as well as to Cuba. I’m proud of Kate for her love of travel and curiosity about other places.

I ventured what I considered an innocent thought: I didn’t really want to travel to those places because I just didn’t have any interest in Asian, or, for that matter, African or South American cultures. Whatever it meant, I had been educated in European culture, and, if I ever went anywhere again (unlikely given my health), it would be to the Baltics or Scandinavia or one last trip to Scotland before I died.

Kate didn’t stomp off that time. But she insisted that I was being a racist. I didn’t see it; I’m simply interested in European culture, I said. The discussion was left there.

I went back to my condo that night and thought about it. Just because I was more interested in European culture didn’t make me a racist, did it? But the more I thought about it, the more uncertain I became.

Why wasn’t I interested in Asian, African or South American culture? Was it simply the same as my aversion to soccer—that I didn’t grow up with it and so didn’t understand it and didn’t appreciate it?

But there’s a difference. I am an athlete, or was. I appreciate all human athletic endeavor, provided that I understand it. I’ve spent years watching Kate’s soccer games, and I just don’t like the sport. But I don’t like watching golf, either, or race car driving, which are quintessentially American white sports. I’m allowed not to enjoy a sport.**

But a complete aversion to certain cultures? As I thought about it, I began to see that the concept of racism can be extended beyond simply mistreating people of color. It can be an unwillingness to engage in and understand their way of life and the art and especially the literature (my field, after all) that it produces. I’m not actively mistreating anyone, but I am implicitly dismissing their cultures, even if not diminishing or dismissing them. It is a kind of racism.

Then I sat down and read the new big thing, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin Diangelo. Actually it’s not that new, having appeared in 2018.

I won’t restate the premises. Read it yourself. (But please don’t, as appears to have happened via the worst kind of irony, call Black-owned bookstores in an attempt to give them business and then berate them for not having it in stock.)

The bottom line, as I understand it, is that we have all bought into a binary: racist = bad, not racist = good. So as soon as we are told that we’re behaving as a racist, we white people go all to pieces because we don’t want to be Bad. We’re fragile. That attitude requires a person of color to abandon the pain that we have no doubt unintentionally have caused them and attend to our hurt feelings. Their very real distress is lost in ours.

Our problem is leaping to our own defense and talk talk talking rather than listening to the trials that people of color face. In November 2018, in Bellevue, WA, Byron Ragland was sitting in a yogurt shop waiting to supervise a parent-child outing, a place he was legally required to be, when police arrived and told him to “move along.” When asked his reaction to the incident, he shrugged and said, “It’s just another Wednesday.” What, I wondered? He faces that kind of struggle and humiliation every day, here in the progressive northwest? I began to see the scope of the problem.

We have to stop. We have to own up to 400 years of, first, enslaving Black people (I know, I know, YOU didn’t do it) and then (now here we go) quietly acquiescing in Jim Crow tactics and their recent progeny, most prominently the horrific misbehavior of white cops. And we have casually, silently acquiesced in the unjust and mass incarceration of Black people, then blamed them for poor family structures. Every day, whether we are cognizant of it or not, we are bathed, soaked, coddled in white privilege.

My behavior with Kate fit into the binary. I didn’t treat people of color badly (in fact went out of my way to behave civilly); I gave to organizations like the NAACP; I signed petitions.

But I swam in my world of white privilege like a fish, unaware of the water (yeah, that’s a cliché, but I’m trying to make it simple). I never disclaimed it; I took my graduate assistantships and my law school admission and my law firm and corporate jobs absolutely without a thought except relief, because I was so bad at it.

At my first law firm, at SAS Institute, at AIG, I never even saw a person of color, except for a couple in subservient positions, and a couple of women at AIG who worked in claims. (We did have one Black legal intern, who was far too qualified to take a job with us.)

We’re in a bubble on Bainbridge Island. We’re all white. There are some Hispanics, who come here to work but mainly live across the bridge in Kitsap County proper in less privileged neighborhoods. We have a few Black people; Kate’s class had several biracial kids. There are Asians. As far as I know, the kids treat each other well. This senior class has been especially a well-behaved class that way.

I’m especially never in a situation in which a person of color is treated badly, partly because so few live here and those who do aren’t usually mistreated by our generally enlightened populace? So what are we supposed to do here?

There was an ad in the Sunday New York Times two weeks ago. A Black consultant said that he had been called by any number of white CEO’s who asked, but what can I do? And he laid out a long list of tasks, most importantly hiring more Black people, mentoring, and promoting them. There were, of course, any number of other tasks to perform.

None of which I am in a position to undertake. I’m retired, powerless and voiceless by my own choice. But I promise I am going to seek out ways to kill off the systemic racism in this country. I have nothing else to do with the rest of my life.

Here’s one thing, unlikely to happen but I wish it would. If I’m driving along and I see that a white cop has pulled over a person of color, I’m going to stop, take out my phone, and record the proceedings. It’s the least I can do.

What else can I do in this white bubble? For one thing, drop the false binary and quit being defensive. If I’ve been a racist, so be it. So have most other white Americans. It’s time to get to work on that, if nothing else.

**For the record, I still think soccer is a horrible bore. But that’s a matter of sports, not racism. I love baseball, which is more and more a Latinx’s game, and rightly so. Any number of people commented how the Latin teams in the World Baseball Classic actually treated the game as fun, something to enjoy rather than something to grind out day by day, which attitude white Calvinist Americans view with approval. Why not have fun? It’s a game.