A Nice Thing

This doesn’t happen very often, so I wanted to share.

I currently have a friend that, due to some circumstances that shall remain vague, I am sometimes constrained from saying certain uncomfortable things to. This is part of my overwhelming stress at the moment — nothing is more crazy-making within me than to feel a thing, know a thing, see a thing, and be utterly constrained from communicating about the thing. The situation will change, eventually, but it is what it is now, and Al-Anon Al-Anon Al-Anon in the meantime.

One of the things I am often constrained from talking about is race. Not race in a general sense, and not race in a nice white liberal “racism is bad” sense. But my particular brand of anti-racism, which for many white people is considered radical and extreme (though I would note that for many non-white people I am pretty goddamn tame) leaves a pretty big gulf between me and her. She says a thing she doesn’t consider to be racist, I want to have a confrontational discussion about the racist thing she just said, but can’t, because (stuff that shall remain vague) constrains me from having conversations that might lead to considerable tensions. In the rest of my life, I would either confront or avoid, because I choose not to have racist stuff in my life (when that is a choice I can make). But in this situation, I can’t do that. So there is no confrontation, no avoiding, and just a lot of simmering.

My friend — let’s call her Swan — has a side job that requires an occasionally huge output of effort. It’s physically and emotionally taxing, and requires her to pretty much consistently get right in the middle of people’s worst moments and biggest issues. It’s a pretty cool side job, honestly, and the financial and emotional payout can sometimes be really good, and it gives her a chance to learn a really neat trade. But sometimes it’s draining and horrible as hell.

Swan had a job recently, and it both did and did not go well. The thing she was actually there for went swimmingly. But being there for the thing required her to be in the middle of a family that was disintegrating rapidly and viciously. She got an eyeful of several abusive relationships, which inevitably includes the abusive relationship itself and the people surrounding and watching who get infected by the sickness of abuse, too. It was just a home full of people beaten down into severe low-functioning. Swan had to be there all day, and what’s worse, had to focus on her task. She wasn’t there to fix the abuse, to help the people get the resources they need to make good decisions. Now, Swan is the kind of person that if she ran into these same people in a department store bathroom, she would sit on the bathroom floor with them all day talking and hugging and helping them. But because she was there to perform a very certain task that took honestly all her focus and energy, she had no ability to offer help with all the other horror.

When I asked her how it went, she began spouting off some racist crap. Her clients were African-American, but what she dealt with that day didn’t have anything to do with race. Poverty, mental illness, domestic abuse, and drug addiction are not racial problems. There is a statistical disproportionality, in that these things can become more severe in people of certain races because institutional racism creates barriers to the kind of resources that can ameliorate or solve these problems. And there is a disproportionality of thought, in that most of us (white or not) consider these to be problems that afflict certain races more as a result of their race. That last bit may or may not be outwardly stated, but it’s definitely there. Quick word association: welfare mother. What color of woman were you thinking of? What kind of qualities does she have? What kind of person is she? What is the look on her face, in your imagination? The way she speaks? The kind of thoughts in her head? If I say “white welfare mother,” is the color of the woman in your imagination the only thing that changes?

So, despite the fact that what Swan witnessed wasn’t race-specific, her mind made that racist click, and it became more than a story about people in a really fucked-up home: it was black people in a fucked-up black home, acting in a black way. When she spouted off at me, I said nothing, gave her a very low and uninterested “mm.” My bear just left the room in the middle of her talking. Later that night, Bear and I raged a bit about that kind of goddamn racism and how much we hate hearing it/seeing it/having it around us, especially when it comes from people we otherwise like, because it makes us not like them anymore.

The next day, apropos of nothing, Swan apologized to me for the stuff she’d said. She referred to what had come out of her mouth as racist, and threw in an obligated white person “I’m not really racist,” which I don’t appreciate or think is genuine, because I think we’re all racist and we’d all do well to start from that basic admission when we deal with race. But she sounded sort of shocked that she had said such racist things even though she “wasn’t racist,” so I understood that perhaps it was partly her understanding of herself as “not racist” that led her to realize she needed to apologize. Swan went on to explain how hard and horrible the day was, how many abusive things she saw and could do nothing about, and how at the end of it all she just ended up spouting off some vile stuff. She then went on to talk about coming to grips with what you can and what you can’t do, understanding when you can help and when you can’t, and what help can actually accomplish. She talked about having given her client one nice moment, but in the overflowing bucket of abuse that is her life, she can’t actually count on that moment necessarily meaning much. But still, it was her moment, and that’s what she chose to give, and that was all she could do.

I so rarely experience a person — especially a liberal white person — recognizing their own racism after it has spilled out, and admitting that racism is what it was, and that it was wrong. Usually I am faced with either knowing this person will never recognize (or admit) why what they said or did was racist as fuck, or that they may recognize or admit it, but only after I make the decision to engage in a very frustrating conversation. And even then, they may only recognize or admit it when they’re around me — because I have set a very clear boundary of “shit don’t fly” — and go ahead and stay racist as fuck in the company of other white folk. It was extremely refreshing to hear Swan sort out her own thoughts, put all the racist knee-jerk reaction on the table, and it made me think a little bit more about how something extremely traumatic can cause a white person to jump on the racism train.

I think if Swan had been able to approach those people in a different capacity, and had been able to address and work on the things she had seen that horrified her, the racist button might not have gotten pushed, or pushed as hard. She had no control whatsoever over her surroundings, and the sickness that was pulsing around her. That’s the kind of thing that can cause, or activate, PTSD. So naturally, this is a time for your brain to start building walls and defenses to keep you from getting hurt. That’s what your brain is built to do. And when your brain is working on survival mode, it’s not working on progressive social consciousness mode. It’s grasping at whatever is available to help you in that moment. When you are safe, later, and can decompress and think things over, your higher brain functions can kick in and start dissecting in a more complicated, nuanced manner. But when your fear response starts, you’re pretty much nothing but monkey brain, and monkey brain shits on your anti-racist radicalism.

I think Swan ended up in an extremely ego-dystonic situation. Swan is a person who will help just about anybody, and will help them until she is broke and starving and sleep-deprived. This is a really important part of her self-image. And to have that kind of self-image, you also have to have an internalized belief that people can be helped. That help makes a difference, that help is worth something, that help can make the world a better place. And then Swan found herself in a place where she could offer no help, where help was useless and worthless.

So, something’s gotta give. Either Swan has to change something very fundamental to her personality and structure — help is good, help should be given, help makes a difference — or she has to change her outside circumstances in such a way that justifies why she is not giving help. So she ends up with: these people are beyond help. These people are just too ghetto to help. Later, once she’d gotten out of the situation and had some time to think and feel, she stopped talking about race and started talking about what you can and cannot do for a person, and coming to grips with only being able to help so much at any given time and place.

This says, to me, two things about Swan:

1. When push comes to shove, her self-identification as a helping person and her belief in a just world is more crucial to her fundamental concept of herself than being anti-racist
2. Swan has grown up white in a racist country that considers racist stereotyping of non-white people a legitimate, workable, and acceptable way to dehumanize others, thus effectively segregating yourself from their lives, concerns, and needs

I think number 1 can’t live very long without number 2. Swan bears some responsibility for making anti-racism an important enough part of her identity that when her monkey brain gets activated and her ego-dystonic behavior gets triggered, racism isn’t her fallback to temporarily or permanently resolve the issue. Swan bears that responsibility because she is an adult who has the cognitive reasoning skills to make moral and ethical decisions. But Swan didn’t choose to be born the color she is in this country and in this time. The racist stereotypes she fell back to did not grow organically in her head; they were put there, and conditioned with time and use and exposure and role models. That racism was there to fall back on, to help her disassociate herself from a painful situation, because she grew up in a racist country that will not condemn her too harshly, or at all, for using racism as a coping mechanism. In fact, it’s more likely that somebody will become apoplectic at me for this post than that Swan would be taken to task for racism.

Let me put that last point a little more plainly. Swan would experience more grief by choosing an anti-racist way to cope than by choosing a racist way. There is a great benefit to being racist if you’re white — mainly, everybody you know will agree with the shit that comes out of your mouth, no matter how vile –  and a big disincentive to be anti-racist. And it’s that same racism that has privileged her to live a life where anti-racism does not have to be as core a value to her as helping others. I could get into something about being a woman in a sexist country, and exactly how helping others becomes such a core value, but I’ll just leave it there.

Later, when Swan had calmed down, she experienced one of the consequences of racism in this country. She realized that, though she doesn’t consider herself to be racist, and though she knows racism is wrong, when she got scared she got racist. Which means her racism is in there, hidden and lurking and waiting, and she did not know enough or think enough or understand enough to stop it. Which is really scary to a white person. To white people, there is no greater insult than being called a racist. It’s our (extremely disingenous) equivalent of “nigger.” It’s just the worst thing you can be called, and brings up all sorts of conflicting terror. White people live in a world where there are two truths we cannot reconcile: we are superior (because we are white), and we are not racist (because racism is bad, and the superior cannot be bad). These things can’t live together, unless they are never critically addressed. So when they are, to attack one attacks the other. To say we are racist is to say we are not good, and the entire fundamental structure of our society and personalities and internalized worldview says that we are good. To say we are racist reduces us to caricatures we have learned to revile and mock (sound familiar?). To say we are racist imbues us with qualities that are ordinarily defined as not-white: uneducated, irrational, unenlightened, stupid, inferior, unfair, hostile. To say we are racist strips away the protection of being white, makes us effectively not white at all. And, if we are honest with ourselves (and it is very scary to be honest) makes us realize how so many of the qualities we considered inherent to our personality are actually inherent to our whiteness. That can be an earth-rocking realization, that racism is pretty much in your every cell, all up in every little thing that you ever thought was you and separate from all that.

But this is also a great place to start, if you don’t let yourself get sucked into the white guilt pit of privilege (because that’s what white guilt is — trying to have your anti-racism credentials and your paralyzed cowardly inaction, too). Because once you realize racism is in every part of you, there is something you get to do that white people normally don’t: you can get FUCKING ANGRY. You didn’t ask for this. You didn’t want it. And now you’re goddamn crippled with it. And this gives white people something they otherwise didn’t have and had no idea how to get: a connection, an empathy, an understanding with non-white people. The first big wall of segregation drops, as non-white people stop being aliens who move in circles you will never know about. You get to live in the same world with them, because now you know what it means to be angry at living with a thing you never asked for. I had a professor that used to say: “Racism is like water, and we’re all fish.” That is, we’re all breathing the same shit in our lungs. The water whites have been drinking isn’t anymore palatable, and we’ve had to make real jackasses of ourselves to convince ourselves it is.

I keep meaning to write a post on offensive language and offensive talk, but every time I put it off for another few days, something else happens that makes me think of it in a new way, like this episode with Swan. So I’m going to keep putting it off for now and see what else comes out of the woodwork.