Processing

I just linked to a new blog called Process, written by a white social worker who’s really trying to “get it,” identify white privilege and not let it turn her into, well, a privileged white jackass. Trying to see through the eyes of her clients, see how her life isn’t normal, natural, or earned, but the product of privilege, discrimination, and power.

I always dig stuff like this, but I especially liked the blog she has up just now, From Scratch. She systematically catalogues all the resources in her life that are only there because she has a family. If you’ve never thought about it, and most people never have, just about everything you have that’s useful in your life comes from your family. Even if you hate them, don’t get along, don’t speak, if you know how to drive, how to cook, how to speak to authority figures, how to brush your hair, how to do the dishes, how to balance your checkbook, chances are, you know those things because you had parents who taught them to you. Those aren’t things that come naturally as a part of the human condition, we don’t have a gene for finding the best deal on pants or separating the whites. We learn it from our caregivers. And if we don’t have caregivers, we don’t learn it, or have to learn it hard and repetitively, as adults.

It’s a sore spot with me. Always has been. Always will be, probably. It’s sore because it’s vulnerable, and never ceases to be. Not knowing how to do the things that other competent adults do is embarrassing enough. But it’s the look on other people’s faces that always got to me. “You never saw that movie?” “You never heard that band?” “You don’t know how to do this?” “You’ve never been to a museum?

Other people don’t understand, don’t realize how that feels, don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side, an alien pretending to be part of the human race. When they ask, “You mean you never…”, I can’t explain that in my mind, I’m asking, “Why did you…” How did you see that movie? How did you hear that band? How did you learn to do this? When? Who taught you? How did it go? Did you expect them to teach you? Did you thank them? Did you ask questions? Did you have to ask to be taught? But I can’t ask those questions. As deeply incomprehensible as it can be to other people to learn where the gaps in my knowledge are, as much as I cannot comprehend how their gaps were filled in, I am not about to reveal the depth of my ignorance. That not only do I not know how to do some perceived basic, regular thing, but that I don’t even understand how this knowledge comes about. That the idea of a parent sitting down and showing a child, patiently, how to do a thing, is as unsettling and inexplicable to me as French cinema. I may not know how to change a tire,  but I do know that I’ll never tell you that. And that’s one thing I know that you don’t. How to avoid looking like a cunt.

This was the major theme of my life my first year of college, at a small private university. There couldn’t be a worse place for a runaway to go than a private school. General company is awkward enough, but being around kids whose parents can afford private university is just galling. The standard goes way up, and instead of, “You mean you don’t know how to knit?” you get “You never went to Europe?” I was all alone that year, Mr. Flint at another school in another state, and without his perpetual overbearing guidance, I had no idea how to make friends. I was desperate for human interaction, but learned pretty quickly that I either had to lie or face that look of incredulous ignorance. Your father did what? You lived where? You’ve been on welfare? You still are? How are you paying for college? Loans? You have a job? You have two? And you’ve never been drunk?

I just stopped talking that year. I went through entire days where I never said a word, unless it was “Would you like a Coke with that?” Sometimes I did talk. Sometimes I lost my shit entirely and reduced a girl to tears in class because she was complaining how unfair it was that her parents wouldn’t fix her car after she crashed it, again. Or I would cuss out a professor who decided to show a movie instead of teach class, because “I pay your salary, and this is the mediocre shit I’m buying?”

Nobody asked, but if they had, I wouldn’t have been able to explain why I was so angry. I lived in a completely different world than them, the things that happened outside of their scope of understanding were highly personal, a different place, a different reality. I existed while I was on their turf, in a classroom, cursing and sneering and making them cry. Off campus, at my jobs, at the grocery store, on the bus, figuring out how to afford dental work, immunizations I’d never had, medical insurance I didn’t understand, that was another planet away. I remember so clearly the first time I went to pay an installment on my financial aid, and asked how to write a check. The student clerk working the counter sneered at me. “You mean you don’t know? Go ask your parents.” Last time I asked how to do anything. Instead I went to the grocery store and stood around the aisles, pretending to read magazines while I waited for somebody to pay with a check, so I could sneak up behind them and watch. Try explaining that to somebody who doesn’t even remember where and how they learned how to write a check. No, the best I could do was be smart enough in class to get away with calling them cunts right in front of the professor. Hey, that’s something I learned that you all never will, to say what I want and get away with it. Even if I still don’t know how to say what I need.

I learned over the years to just keep my mouth shut. Work hard, keep conversations impersonal, and you won’t get that look, that “how do you even exist?” look. I watched cop movies and imitated the faces and walks of bad-ass cops, because if you look like you know what you’re doing nobody really catches on that you don’t. And if you look mean and hard and scary, nobody dares give you any kind of goddamn look at all. The only person who still dared to give me that shit was Mr. Flint, because hey, that’s the kind of motherfucker I married. Overprivileged and insecure like a black hole. “You mean you never had French champagne? You mean you don’t know which fork to use? You mean you’ve never eaten lobster? You’ve never seen the opera? Jesus, Harriet, you’re from a bunch of trash, it’s amazing you’re functional at all.” Nice fellow, he was. I remember one year, with his family at Thanksgiving, they all burst into “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow,” and I just sat there smiling stupidly. I could tell them that the suffragettes sang that hymn when the 19th Amendment was ratified, but no, I could not sing it. They had caught me being abnormal. Afterwards Mr. Flint asked, “How do you not know that song?” I asked, “How do you?” trying to imply that, you know, somebody had had to teach him, and there’s no reason for him to assume somebody had taught me, or should have. Instead he just laughed and patted me on the head. “You married up,” he said.

I was prepared to spend the rest of my life like that. I didn’t know any better. I didn’t see any alternative. I was just always going to be a freak. Oh, you know, I’d managed to approximate class well enough. I worked hard, in private, on good diction, quiet laughter, small steps. I learned all the phrases you need to know to get by in a conversation you know nothing about, the small ways to pump people for information surreptitiously so you can parrot it back to them in new words that make it sound like, yes, I, too, know who the Beatles are, I, too, know what it’s like to go prom dress shopping, I, too, know what it’s like to go home when you get sick at school. I learned an intense and acute eye for detail, so I could watch other people, the way they talked, the way they moved, the things they talked about. I had all sorts of plans about what I was going to do with my life and who I was going to be, educated and powerful in fine suits with excellent elocution, and I would never, ever get that look again. Nobody would ever guess where I had come from.

My junior year, I finally took my belated “ethnic studies” course. I got lucky and ended up in the final class of one of the best professors they had, Tim Tyson, who soon quit to go off and be famous and awesome elsewhere. It was just an Intro to African-American Studies course, but it had a profound effect on me. Tyson loved nothing more than to really work the savage details; this wasn’t just a “and once upon a time there was slavery and now there’s not and hey isn’t that Martin Luther King a fine public speaker not like a Negro at all” course. I loved the class, I found it came to me naturally. I could memorize the dates and the names with no trouble at all, connect the dots like I was born to it. It was so easy I didn’t even consider that nobody else felt that way, that the other students were struggling hard, plodding through the material dully. I just thought it was an easy class.

One day, Professor Tyson got off on a tangent while talking about A. Philip Randolph, began describing a lynching that had occurred once upon a time. In detail. In severe detail. Detail about what was done to genitalia, about rape, about branding, the loss of tongues via rusty knives. He paused often, looking around, watching us, lowering his voice before he went on. I didn’t get it. What’s with the pauses, Tyson? Why the drama? And then, it finally clicked. I looked around me, that sea of white faces, the palpable horror on each one. The battle between a lifetime of cherished white ignorance and this vision of a new America. Some of the kids got it. You could see their privilege breaking as they understood that this had actually happened, that in some ways not too distant from them, these lynchings were why they were in college when the majority of their age group is not. Because their grandparents weren’t murdered in a ditch.

But most didn’t make the leap. Most were too horrified, couldn’t accept this as reality, as their reality, their country. It was an isolated incident. An exaggerated incident. And I mean it’s totally understandable because maybe he was looking at some woman wrong and you know at that time and place that wasn’t right so you can’t blame the white men for…

And it hit me. It was the same face. The same face I had always gotten. The “how could that happen” face. For once in my life, I felt like being an alien had put me ahead of the curve. I didn’t have to struggle to accept this material. I didn’t have to fight my own personal belief about the world to understand and believe, with no resistance whatsoever, that human beings do horrible things to each other. That the world is unfair. That there is no such thing as “rights”. Not the right to learn how to write checks, not the right to grow up in a home with a kitchen ceiling, not the right to not be mutilated because of the way you look, not the right to go your entire life unraped because there is no conceivable reason why you would be. There is no inherent human value. There should be, but there isn’t. And I knew that. I always have.

I ended up taking an extra year of school so I could major in African American Studies, because it was the first place I had felt at home. As I got into the advanced courses, my classes got less and less white, I got less and less “looks.” I could say, “My mother was a drug addict and my father was abusive and I ran away from home,” and nobody batted an eye, unless it was the other token white student in class, getting their ethnic studies credit. I could say, “My best friend in high school was raped seven times,” and, well, you know, who wasn’t? I could say, “I don’t know how to get health insurance ,” or, “I don’t know how to get my license,” or “I don’t know how to write a resume,” and you know what people would do? They’d help me. They’d know somebody who knew somebody, or have a website to show me, or know where the school department I needed was. By people I ought to stipulate that I mean African-American people, or those white people (usually professors) I knew who were also majoring or getting their masters in African-American studies.

Not to say that all African-Americans are salt of the earth and white people are all ass-clowns. But this is to say, if you’ve never thought really coherently about your privilege, thought about the things you know and have because you were born in the right time and place and for no other reason at all, then you are going to be an ass-clown. You probably have been, already, to somebody who needed your help but will never ask for it again, because now they know what a douchebag you are. If you haven’t considered how lucky you are to know how to buy stamps or pump gas, and that your ability to do these things is just that, luck, luck at having parents and a home, then you don’t really deserve those things. Which is not to say you’re not still going to have them. Because beyond luck, you have to understand that you live in a world where people have what they don’t deserve and haven’t earned, and you are one of those people.