My friend Lillian and her friend are starting a website called Time to Do Better, and Lillian asked me to write something about being white. Why is it easier to write when something is "assigned"?
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I’m not being facetious. A favorite thinker of mine, a man whose work one of those humanity-saving teachers asked me to read, is Paulo Freire, a teacher who worked with adult students living in poverty in Brazil. Freire posits that in an oppressive system, both the oppressed and the oppressors are dehumanized. In other words, when we passively accept or actively participate in the dehumanization of others, we make monsters of ourselves. We become less human.
As a white American, I occupy a space in the oppressor class. That doesn’t mean that I’m never presented with obstacles. Living with unearned privilege does not mean living without pain. It just means, for example, that I’m not afraid that I’m going to be killed if I get pulled over for a broken tail light because my reaching for my license and registration is mistaken for my reaching for my gun.
Another one of those teachers who was concerned with my humanity asked me to read the work of literary giant James Baldwin. In the biographical notes that open his collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explains, “I love America more than any country in the world, and, for exactly this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Word.
The United States became a global superpower largely because folks who came to be known as white people deployed white supremacy for their economic and political gain. America may have been founded on the ideals of liberty and justice for all, but it was also founded on a lack of integrity because they didn’t really mean “all.”
European immigrants with the capital and chutzpa to “own” land used physical and emotional violence to force African and indigenous people to work for free and other, poorer European immigrants to work for very little, harvesting a product that made the “landowners” very wealthy. As the wealth of those who thought that they could also “own” humans accumulated, they became increasingly afraid of losing that wealth and therefore increasingly determined to quash any efforts by the people producing it to claim some of it for themselves. Thus came the campaign to codify “whiteness,” both legally and in the court of public opinion. African and indigenous people – already coping with the trauma of having their homes, languages, and traditional ways of life stolen from them – lost any hope of organizing in solidarity with the poor but now “white” people toiling alongside them who had chosen – out of economic and religious desperation, to be sure, but chosen nonetheless – to come to what we call America. In claiming their “whiteness,” those poor European immigrants, exploited though they may have been, at least had the legal rights to “own” themselves and their children.
And as time went on, “white” folks established a growing number of protections and opportunities for themselves. Like, for example, in 2018, white police officers – the professional descendants of slave patrols – can kill people of color with almost guaranteed impunity.
My own ancestors didn’t think they owned any humans. My dad’s ancestors came from Ireland during the famine about a decade before the American Civil War. My dad actually moved back to Ireland to marry my mom, and there they had Michael, Johnny, and Conor, my three older brothers; they came back to the US in the 1980s and had me and my little brother Neil.
That our ancestors were in Ireland when “whiteness” became a thing doesn’t change the fact that we live now in a country that was built for “white” folks like us.
My brothers and I grew up in a fairly quiet collar suburb on the southwest side of Chicago. We lived frugally, I thought, but all of us kids went to Catholic school and we never let two years go by without a family trip home to Ireland.
The first indication I saw that this country wasn’t built for everyone came when I was in high school. Before my family had moved back to the States, Conor, at nine weeks old, had contracted meningitis, which severely damaged his brain and left him with profound disabilities. As he approached age 21, my parents discovered that unless we were willing to send him off to live in an assisted living facility, he was going to be summarily exited from the public school system with no place to go and no right to any further public services in our state. At the time, Illinois was ranked 51st in the nation for services for adults with disabilities, behind all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
My mom, looking at having to quit the part-time job she went to when he was at school, sought out training in political advocacy so she could learn to lobby our representatives on Conor’s behalf. With her new-found comrades, she also worked to keep closed a state mental institution that was notorious in the disability community for abuse and neglect, and she enlisted 15-year-old me to collect petitions from my friends at school.
Looking back, I can see how daily life with Conor – who needs to be fed and dressed, who wears diapers and doesn’t speak or otherwise communicate but makes seemingly random loud noises, who drools constantly, and who has frequent seizures – instilled in me the understanding that all people’s dignity and humanity must be respected and preserved no matter the efforts involved. If I let my brother sit in his own shitty diaper, for example, what does that say about me, about my dignity and humanity?
In his graceful, unconventional teaching style, Conor taught me how to communicate with people in power as a proxy for him, and even more importantly, he taught me that people in power would, if they could, ignore his rights. Ableism and racism aren’t the same, but understanding the former, I think, increased my chances of being willing to understand the latter.
Eventually I became a teacher, too. But thankfully, I didn’t stop getting taught.
Jamarrio sat in the front row in my third period class. One day early in the year, we were reading from the first chapter of Night, Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, when I noticed Jamarrio throwing his book down and laying his head on the desk. For some lucky reason, instead of telling him, “Head up, hun,” my go-to gentle admonition, I crouched down and whispered, “What’s up?”
“I can’t read this,” he told me. I figured that he was having difficulty reading the text, and I “knew” that I needed to respond in a way that would de-escalate his frustration and prevent the situation from turning into an issue of defiance.
Before I could respond, though, he continued, “These people are going to be killed. They can’t stop it, and no one is going to stand up for them. I’m not reading it.” I was stunned into silence. Not a lack of skill nor discipline, the reason he “couldn’t read” this book was the depth of his empathy for the victims of the Holocaust and his unwillingness to be another complicit witness to their story.
Guiltily, I realized that I had made the racist assumption that as a black teenage boy he must be a struggling reader. I had narrowly avoided reducing him to a negative stereotype; he had saved me from myself by letting me in on his emotional experience, gently teaching me that he was a fully complex human being just like me.
Countless studies demonstrate that the descendants of European immigrants in the US, rich or poor, continue to benefit politically and economically from the idea of whiteness, even when we’re not particularly powerful or wealthy.
There is, after all, lingering political power in being descended from a human legally affirmed as human rather than from a human legally made property. Look at how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted in 2013, making it demonstrably harder for the descendants of Africans to participate in the US democracy.
There is, after all, lingering economic power in being descended from a human who was allowed to own himself (if not herself) rather than from a human who was legally owned. Look at redlining, the deliberate racial segregation of Chicago starting in the 1930s, which created the ghettoes where the descendants of Africans continue to live without the public resources allocated through the higher property taxes of historically white neighborhoods.
White folks in the US have resources afforded us by the European immigrants who used white supremacy to establish the way we do things in this country, and we bear the pain, whether we feel it or remain numb to it, of having our dehumanization – and the dehumanization of people of color – normalized.
Having power – or not having power – isn’t what makes us human. But having power and using it to dehumanize others, or having power and not using it to defend those without it from dehumanization, makes us monstrous.
