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.