As a Xennial White Woman, I am obligated to write about white privilege. My generation grew up post Civil Rights Movement. We grew up with Sesame Street, Different Strokes, Dr. Huxtable and Oprah. As a white woman with friends from varied ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds, I once called myself color blind, because I did not personally see or experience racism.
Born in 1977 on a morning supposedly graced by a late spring snow and seven rainbows I am a quintessential Xennial Woman. We ate organic before it was hip and I could watch 30 minutes of TV before being sent outside to play (unsupervised). And, my mom brought home the very first Mac, so she could write her doctorate.
I attended a magnet school (public) for international and ESL students, so my classmates were actually pretty diverse given the whiteness of Boulder. My fourth and fifth-grade teachers proudly attended the Peace Circles leading up to the shutdown of the Rocky Flats Nuclear plant. My classmates were either the children of hippies or professors (sometimes not a mutually exclusive state), with names like Rainbow, Forest, and Destiny.
My 7th-grade teacher had a composting toilet. And my school held "Diversity Days." As a university freshman, I recall sitting in a philosophy class where a student who grew up in D.C. professed that CU Boulder "was too white." I proudly claimed that "Boulder might be white, but we are colorblind." No one even whispered a word of surprise or discontent at this statement.
I am part of the complicit generation.I Once Was Blind But Now I Can See
In 2010 I happened to be watching CNN when a program with Anderson Cooper came on. A studied recently been released on perceptions of race in kindergarten-aged children. If you haven't seen the show go watch it. Now . The frightening take away from the show is that white kindergartners have the luxury of being colorblind. At age 5 they are already recipients of white privilege. On the flip side, black kindergartners already know about race. Society does not give them the privilege of being ignorant about the implications of skin color.
Beauty is Only Skin Deep
But this is not the most depressing or significant takeaway from the study. The most terrible thing of all is that black and white kindergartners have already taken on societal norms that embrace white as beautiful and black as ugly. As a mother, this makes my heart break and my emotions rise up in anger and in sadness.
What kind of world do we live in that tells a child "white is beautiful, black is ugly?"Watching this show I had a breakthrough realization. I could no longer be colorblind. If a 5-year-old kid can't be colorblind, then as a responsible adult, I needed to make a change. As MJ said, " If you wanna make the world a better place, Take a look at yourself, and then make a change."
Racism Happens
In 2012, I married into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic family. My understanding progressed further. My in laws, despite experiencing atrocities and inequities in their life, definitely raised their children with the same ethic as Michelle Obama: "When they go low, we go high." At the same time, they live a strange dichotomy. As a Malagasy family, their ancestry is both mixed African and South East Asian, which means, for the most part, their skin is on a color wheel, closer to mocha than ebony. And so my family has the luck to experience both active racism with a side of "well-meaning" colorblindness.
When you live with racism, it is far from comforting to have one white person, often a friend, say to you "well you're not really black."The thing is, we live in a world and not just an American world, an Occidental, Western European influenced society, in which the status quo perpetuates that lighter is "better," but white is best. If you want to read some firsthand examples of active racism I recommend this thoughtful and eloquent piece on the very real experience of racism by Krista Tippet.
Ultimately, to claim "color blindness" or to deny your part in white privilege really doesn't do any of us any good, because there are millions of people each day, who still actively experience racism. It's a real thing. It's an active thing. And although it may never go 100% away, we need to make an active effort to end it, while also working to heal the wounds. We need internal medicine, not just band-aids.
Make An Effort, Not An Excuse
And so, I write this piece in the spirit of intersectionality. I acknowledge that each of us is unique, each of us has a different experience. Not one of us should judge another before trying to walk in her shoes. Most importantly, I acknowledge that I and that many of my white peers have been complicit in our experience of white privilege. No excuses.
I think this is one reason so many of us "white and color blind" felt shocked at the recoil experienced in the USA during and following the election of President Obama. In our effort to be color blind we completely discounted the experience of our Black American, Native American, Asian American, Central and South American, and immigrant sisters and brothers.
But we need to make an effort not to be complicit. We need to think about it and we need to talk about it. And we need to not remain silent if and when we see or hear racist things go down. We need to make an effort, not an excuse because it is the right thing to do.
The fact of the matter is that most white people in the United States (and Europe) live in primarily white neighborhoods. Our communities (for reasons we can debate another day) remain segregated. One reason we don't think racism exists is that we don't have the opportunity to see it in action.
Where we live and most importantly where we grow up, means we often benefit from white privilege simply by the luck of birth. This doesn't mean that there are not poor or disadvantaged white people. What it does mean, is that we don't all have the same experiences.
In the article by Tippet that I link to above, she describes an experience one day in a university course in which a white male student gripes about reading a book on Malcolm X, because he can't relate to it...
Think about the books that we read in high school and university. Most of them are by white male authors. How do you think people from other backgrounds relate to these books? This is, in fact, one of the major reason many universities created departments of Women's Studies.
Racism is Taught
As the study I mentioned earlier on highlights, racism is learned, it is taught. Babies are not racist. And if we raise our kids thoughtfully, neither are they. White parents, black parents, parents of all backgrounds should speak to their children about race. About the experience of race and about what it means to be a good person. We should build our children up, but not at the expense of others.
You probably saw this video of a Virginia dad and his beautiful, smart daughter last year, but just in case I will share it with you here: https://youtu.be/TlNilx1DSDM
My husband also asked that I share a story from our family. Earlier this summer, my husband asked my eldest son (his stepson) who he would marry when he grew up. Would he marry a white, black, Chinese or another kind of person? And our son answered, "I don't know, skin color isn't what is important, it's who the person is...and if I love them." He may only be 10, but he knows that beauty is only skin deep.
