Nothing looks the same anymore.  Last week I worked up the courage to pick up my copy of White Fragility by Robin Diangelo.  My friend Vivian insisted I buy it over the summer.  Demand for the book was so great, I waited weeks to get it.  Then I procrastinated reading.  Now, I can only read about a page or two each day.  I respect the writing.  I just hate what I’m reading.

I never thought of myself as racist.  I like all people.  In my young adulthood I had friends from all across the rainbow.  I went on dates with blacks, hispanics, Asians.  Today, my cafe has a sign out front proclaiming Hate has no home here.  

But Vivian captured my interest a few years back when she delivered a talk telling the story of suffering through a miscarriage.  Vivian’s an educated, accomplished black woman.  Like me, she’s passionate about good food and self-care, and stays deeply connected with her family.  And while I would have dismissed a miscarriage as a stroke of bad luck, her story unraveled all the racial factors at work in this nation — systemic inequality in the health care system, the continuous, low-grade stress caused by racism —  that would statistically increase the odds by a margin of two to one* that as a white woman, I would carry my babies to full term.  And as a black woman, she would not.  

Vivian’s story worried me, but I was thankful to focus on my own victim niche:  that of the disenfranchised poor country girl working to save the family farm.  That issue, I assumed, made me free of the race issue.  I wasn’t displacing a black person, after all.  There are hardly any blacks around here.  I could hang my sign against hatred, encourage my kids to celebrate the rainbow, then absolve myself of further responsibility.

But George Floyd’s killing unsettled me.  At the start of Covid we welcomed Corey, Saoirse’s biracial boyfriend, into our home.  Life circumstances conspired against him in such a way that he needed a place to land for a while to finish his education, build up his savings and gain work experience.  So we gave him the guest bedroom, and we’ve grown to care about him as one of our own. And it has been this maternal fear that gnaws at me, this fear that someone will treat this person I love badly, that the same low-grade stresses that can lead to miscarriage could (and likely are) interfering with Corey’s future.  And so Vivan urges me to buy White Fragility.

And that’s when I have to start confronting the racial patterns that have constructed my own life.  “The way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for white people to understand it,” writes Diangelo.  Like most Americans, I’ve learned to think of it as the thing that ignorant white supremacists, eager to maintain control over society, engage in.  It’s immoral.  It’s fear-based.  But it’s more subtle, more insidious, than that.  It’s about what opportunities and resources are available, where we perceive them, whether we feel worthy to seize them.  It’s about the tacit decisions we make, the advice we give, the jokes we tell, the things that go unsaid, the dreams we view as attainable or impossible.

The richest, most powerful, most successful people  in this nation are nearly  all white.  The people who choose the TV shows, which books get published, which music is produced, which films get made, essentially which stories get told, are nearly all white.  In 2016-7, teachers in this nation were 82 percent white.  Full-time college professors were 84 percent white.

It took a lot of grit to come back to a struggling family farm and build a life and a business.  But how much easier has it been for me because my community welcomed me, because I knew lots of stories of people before me, who look like me, who have been successful; because the socioeconomic forces in my life gave me a fantastic tailwind?

To be honest, all these thoughts make me feel sick to my stomach.  I am not only trying to wrap my head around the forces Corey and Vivian contend with; I am in something of an identity crisis.  The achievements I thought were my own may not be.  The successes we’ve enjoyed as a family may not be our own successes.

Bob and I take our coffee out to one of the ponds in the state land each morning during the week and study the changing colors — the crystal blue skies, the bright reds and flaming oranges of the sugar maples, the bold yellows of the goldenrods, the deep purples of the New England asters.  And we sit there, deconstructing our lives:  how much of “us” is what got “us” here?  Who cannot spend a morning gazing at clear water in the crisp autumn air because of countless factors, many of which link back to the color of their skin?  What are we supposed to do with this information? How do we do the right thing?  What is the right thing?

As we work through our own existential crisis, Saoirse and Corey go out on Thursday nights to rehearse with The Theater Project to perform an outdoor staged reading of Kenneth Jones’  Alabama Story.  The play is inspired by white librarian Emily Reed who, sixty years ago, added a children’s book to the Montgomery Alabama library system, The Rabbits’ Wedding, about a black bunny and a white bunny who get married.  The book incites the fury of a segregationist State Senator, and the play is about the librarian holding her ground.  Saoirse and Corey play the parts of  Lily and Joshua, two childhood friends who are reunited in adulthood, a black man and a white woman, who once shared a kiss as children.

This past Sunday, we drive down with Mom and Dad to sit out on the lawn of the Methodist church to watch the performance.  And again, I’m struck by the whiteness of it all:  the white playwright telling the story of a white librarian dedicated to the protection of literature, even in the face of segregation.  Here it is once more, we whites telling the story.  But still, I’m moved by how many people in this pro-Trump rural white community are intent on putting on this play, and on coming to sit out on the lawn this September afternoon, and using their white voices to challenge racism.  Over on the corner of the lawn is a #SayTheirNames exhibit — images of the black people killed by police this past year.  

Saoirse and Corey are beautiful to watch.  Bob is so moved, he launches his normally reserved body from his lawn chair at the end of the performance, grabs Corey and wraps him into a proud hug — a startling sight in this socially distanced venue.  I hang back to talk with Corey’s mom, whose eyes are justifiably swimming with pride, before making my way up to congratulate the two of them.  

But we can’t go home yet.  I move over to the exhibit, moving my lips to shape each name behind my mask, and walk around it, gazing at each face, imagining what funny things they may have said in this lifetime, what gifts they had, what contributions we’ve lost as a nation.  And I look out at the raging late September colors in this little upstate New York village, and I’m struck with pain to think about how much color is still missing, how much more should be here.  I’m reminded of that line Clarence says from It’s a Wonderful Life: 

One man’s life touches so many others, when he’s not there, it leaves an awfully big hole.

And I have no language, no understanding, to lend to what I’m feeling.  I only know that I’m crying with this horrendous sense of loss.  Bob finds me and we cling to each other there on the lawn, both of us in tears for what’s not here that we can’t identify, what’s not changed that we still don’t know how to change, what’s not fixed that we desperately want to fix.

We go home, eat supper, and I climb up to bed and pick up White Fragility again.  The only thing I know to do is keep going, keep reading, keep thinking, keep learning, keep working through this, one page at a time.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3664339/