Confronting My Whiteness

Confronting My Whiteness

By

Phoenix Hocking

I am a seventy-one year old white woman.  A widow.  I live alone. 

My last black friend was in seventh grade. 

I don’t even remember her name now; that sort of detail has long been relegated to the misty well of time.  We hung out together, along with a lot of other kids.  I grew up mostly in Santa Barbara, where racism wasn’t particularly overt, though as I think back on it, I’m quite sure it was there. 

My friend, I’ll call her Stephanie for some reason known only to sub-conscious, invited me to a sleep-over at her house.  She invited about 5 or 6 of us, I think.  When I asked my mother if I could go, she said no.  Why?  Because Stephanie was black.

I wanted to know what that had to do with it.  She didn’t really have an answer.  Just that black people were different, they smelled funny, they weren’t “safe.”  It made no sense to me then, and makes no sense to me now.  But I was in seventh grade, so I didn’t go.  I think Stephanie and I kind of drew apart after that.  I don’t recall if I told her the real reason Mom wouldn’t allow me to go to her house.  I probably made up some excuse.
Later, in my older teen years, a friend of mine started dating a black man.  Mom just sniffed at that saying, "the only reason she's dating a black man is because she can't get a white one." 

Back then, we didn’t call it being “racist.”  We called it being “prejudiced.”  Same thing, of course.  And Mom would deny to her dying day that she was “prejudiced.”  But as I look back, I see that she was firmly in the “separate but equal” camp. 

She hired black women as housekeepers and babysitters, though I truly don’t remember any of them.  She would tell us the story of when she saw her first black man.  She grew up in southern Missouri, and black people were not allowed in town.  But one of the porters from the train was in town, and Mom ran all the way home, thinking the “boogeyman” was coming to get her.  She told the story of how one of her black babysitters took my fair-haired sister to her black church.  Since Penny knew no church hymns, she broke into “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” and sang it all the way through.  Of course, Mom had to use her best “black” accent to tell that one, and we all laughed.

Santa Barbara was more Hispanic than black then.  Maybe still is.  So I went to school with kids of all colors and never really thought too much about it.  After Stephanie, I don’t think I made any real effort to get to know black kids.  But then, we moved around a lot, so I didn’t have many friends anyway, and the ones I did have were white. 

Enter the civil rights years.  I was just a teenager then.  I watched it on television and was horrified by what I saw.  But I lived in Santa Barbara.  Things like that didn’t happen here.  If there was racism, I never saw it.  How blind I was!

Fast forward to my working years.  I worked in a lot of different industries, and I can probably count on the fingers of one hand how many black people I worked with.  It wasn’t a conscious thing on my part; it’s just how things turned out.  Again, I never thought much about it.  It’s just the way it was.

And then, there was church.  Now, we weren’t church goers when I was growing up.  I didn’t become a semi-regular church goer until long into my adulthood.  As I look back, though, the churches I attended were predominately white.  Still are.  It’s not that black people were excluded; they just didn’t seem to attend.  And again, I never really thought much about it, though I would occasionally lament how our churches seemed to be “lily white,” and where were the people of color?  I never got a satisfactory answer.  But I never sought out a more diverse church either.  I was comfortable where I was, and having a diverse congregation seemed pretty far down the list of what I was looking for in a church. 

And so, here I am.  A seventy-one year old white woman, living in a predominately white apartment complex in a predominately white little town. For years, I watched black people being abused on television, from the vicious dogs in Alabama, to black children being spat upon as they tried to go to school, to Rodney King, to Trayvon Martin, to George Floyd.  And it was all horrible.  It made me sick to my stomach.  It made no sense to hate someone just because their skin had more melanin than mine. 

I have told myself for years that I am not a racist.  I tell myself I am not prejudiced.  I believe in equal justice for all.  I approved of Colin Kaepernick kneeling to protest police brutality.  I approve of peaceful protest.  I abhor the violence I see around me. 

But I have to ask myself:  isn’t that all rather shallow?  I can believe anything I want to, but what am I actually doing about it?

To this day, the only black people I know are the ones who are related to me, mostly through adoption.  My great-niece has a black child.  My brother has adopted black children.  And that’s it.  Where are my black friends?  The answer is, I don’t have any.  And I don’t have any black friends because I don’t know any black people outside of my family. 

So, short of rushing out and grabbing the first black person I see and asking them to be my friend, where do I go with this? 

I find myself confronting my own racism more often.  I have attitudes I would never have thought to be racist, but I now see that they are.  I caught myself being slightly surprised when a black woman used the word “significantly” in a television commercial.  I ask myself, when did I last go see a movie that featured mostly black actors?  Do I watch television shows with mostly black actors?  Do I still have an “us and them” mentality? 

In the current protests I hear people shouting, “Say their names!”  And it shames me that I don’t know their names.    After over 400 years of oppression, I could probably only name as many people as I could count on my two hands.  And they’re just the recent ones. 

Do I really only know history through the lens of my whiteness?  Or has my view of black people been shaped by what I saw in the movies?  Gone with the Wind, Song of the South, Showboat, Shirley Temple.  All depict black people as being fairly content with their lot in life, even as they fought the civil war.  It wasn’t until the tv-series Roots came out that I even got a glimmer of what slavery was really like.  I knew the numbers, I knew the history, but it didn’t really touch me, safe in my whiteness.  Yes, it was horrible.  Those times were awful.  But that was then and this is now and such things don’t happen anymore.  How very wrong I was.

The Bible tells us that faith without works is dead.  I submit that belief without action is useless.  But what can I do?

Why aren’t I out there joining the protests?  The shameful truth is, I am afraid.  I never used to be afraid of the police.  Now, I am.  I see the police nonchalantly push an elderly white man to the ground and then walk past as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk.  I see the police taking their batons to foreign journalists who are doing nothing except documenting what is going on.  I see the police ripping the face mask off a protester and shooting pepper spray in his face.  I see them shooting people in the back, or killing them in their own bedrooms.  What chance do I have when the rubber bullets start flying and the tear gas rains down?  I cannot run.  I’m not capable of it.

If I cannot stand in the streets and shout “Black lives matter!” I can shout on paper.  I can confront my own racism and recognize my own white privilege.  I can lobby for my church to be more inclusive in practice and not just in words.  I can volunteer to work on election day.  I can vote for people who speak of peace, and dignity, and inclusion, and reject those who only hate and divide.

Mostly, I can continue to confront myself, to see myself for who I am, and to challenge my beliefs.  I can begin to recognize racism when it stares me in the face, instead of brushing it off.  And I can hold out the hand of friendship to those who fight this struggle on a daily basis. 

I see you.  I hear you.  I stand with you.

A Sermon for Pentecost Sunday 2020 amid Covid-19 and civil unrest

Sunday, May 31, 2020 – 10:22 a.m. – 73 degrees

Today is Pentecost Sunday.  It is the day we celebrate the “birth” of the church.  It is supposed to be a joyous occasion.  I ask you, how can we celebrate when around us our neighbors of color are being murdered before our eyes? 

How can we celebrate when over 100,000 people have died from Covid-19, while Trump plays politics on Twitter?

People of color are being murdered, while Trump advocates violence from the safety of the White House.  People are dying from a deadly disease, while Trump urges states to reopen, in the hopes of saving his presidency.

Our country is in the midst of a pandemic of violence, but this pandemic is not new.  It does not attack the body.  It attacks the soul. 

This country has a long, long history of systemic racism.  From slavery, to the civil rights movement, to the “We shall overcome” songs of the sixties, to the internment of Japanese Americans during the war, to the demonization of the Irish, and the Chinese, and Native Americans, to watching a black man be murdered on television by a white police officer, we seem to be stuck in a never-ending circle of hate.

What is wrong with us?  Why do we continue to allow such things to happen?

I’m a white woman.  I mean, look at me.  I’m just about as white as you can get.  And with my skin color comes privilege.  I’ll tell you a story…

A few years ago I was running an errand, delivering groceries to a posh neighborhood in Montecito.  I was given the gate code, and the code for the front door, but I didn’t know there was a house alarm as well.  When I entered, the alarm began to go off, and I didn’t have the codes to turn it off.  Well, what could I do?  I just continued to bring the groceries in the house.  Just about the time I finished, I saw the faces of two white police officers looking over the fence.  I let them in through the gate, showed them my paperwork, and all was well.  How different might that encounter have been if I had been a young black man on the same mission?  It might have ended very differently.

I cannot begin to speak from the experience of a person of color, and what it must feel like to be afraid every time you leave the house.  I don’t know how it feels to be watched whenever I go into a store, or to have people cross the street to avoid me, or to have someone call the police on me because I’ve asked someone to leash up their dog.  I don’t know those things.  I cannot truly comprehend the rage, fear, and sorrow that people of color must live with every day.

But I do know this:  This has to stop.  It has to stop here, and it has to stop now.

But how?  It seems we are fighting the same fight over and over and over again. 

Now, I’m not here to give you a “peace and love will conquer all” speech.  While I believe that may be true, I also know that peace and love are not passive.  They are active, they are vibrant, and they are powerful. Standing around singing “kumbya” doesn’t accomplish much expect to make us white folks feel better.  Love must be active to be useful.

The Quakers talk about being “in the power of the Lord.”  So, I ask you, who is in the power of the Lord now?  The white supremacists who have co-opted the outrage of the community of the people of color, inciting violence?  Or the black people who surrounded and protected a white police officer when he became separated from his unit?  Who was in the power of the Lord back in the sixties?  The governor of Alabama who unleashed the fury of the National Guard, or Martin Luther King, Jr., who joined arms with people of all colors to walk across that bridge in Selma?  Who was in the power of the Lord when people in India had their own government beat them for the crime of getting salt, or Gandhi who begged for peace and went on a hunger strike?

Who is in the power of the Lord now?  Trump, who calls protestors “thugs” and threatens to unleash the dogs on them? Or the white police officers who are kneeling in silent solidarity with their black constituents?   

I watched a few church services on the internet today, and I was dismayed at how many went on as if this were simply an ordinary Pentecost Sunday.  It’s not. The fire you see on television is not Holy fire.  It is the fire of people who just can’t take it anymore.  I ask you:  Would Jesus have settled for three songs and a sermon today?  I think not. 

The church MUST not be silent.  WE must not be silent.  To be silent is to be complicit, and it is just that complicity that has brought us to this terrible, terrible place.   

So, I ask you, I beg you…stand up!  Let your voice be counted!  Let the cry of ENOUGH!  Be heard throughout the land!  Not with violence, but with the active voice of love.  You cannot counteract violence and hatred with more violence and hatred.  True change can only be achieved through peaceful means. 

If you are black, stand up!  If you are brown, stand up!  If you are white…speak up! Speak up and say NO, this is NOT okay, and I will not be silent in the face of injustice any longer. 

If you are a person of color, I say this to you today:  I see you.  I hear you.  I will stand with you. 

And let all the people say Amen.