Not My Idea of Whiteness
By Anastasia Higginbotham
When my daughter was four, I wrote her a book called “How Our Ariel Was Born.” She had just started asking me about why my skin wasn’t the same color as hers, and since I was no longer with her Black biological father, and was co-raising her with a white man she called “daddy” but who didn’t live with us, writing a children’s book seemed the easiest way to open up discussion on some complex topics. I included definitions of a “biological father” and a “daddy” and different constitutions of family. I thought of this home-made book while reading Higginbotham’s Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.
Higginbotham, like me and like Delia, is white, and she too found herself taken with Toni Morrison’s 1993 quote in an interview with Charlie Rose: “White people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it.” For readers of this book who are not white, I hope that perhaps this book offers some hope — that there are white people engaged in antiracist work, and who do understand that the onus of doing the work is on them. And, as James Baldwin wrote in Letter From a Region in My Mind, “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
Toni Morrison interviewed by Charlie Rose.
“If you can only be tall because someone is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
We’ve chosen to respond to Morrison with this Good Trouble For Kids initiative. Higginbotham also recognized it was on her to do something, and this little book tackles quite a lot. I love that the background of this book is like a brown paperbag. It strikes me as a metaphor for how much “white space” surrounds us, even literally on the page. You can extend this metaphor pretty far out: Without the black typescript, all you have is an empty white page; black typescript thus defines the page, much as Blackness can be seen to define America. And, of course, you can flip the metaphor in dangerous ways, as has historically been done. Perhaps the brown background offers another metaphorical option for broaching race, especially in light of how rapidly demographics are shifting across the US. (Brookings predicts we will be a majority non-white population by 2045).
I like Higginbotham’s insistence that it is necessary to “engage with whiteness in order to dismantle white supremacy.” I also like Higginbotham’s choice of engagement: a children’s book. It is an acknowledgment that this process of antiracism needs to start at the very youngest ages. And I love that Higginbotham states that whites involved in this movement are fighting for their own liberation. This is also so in-line with what Morrison expresses above. Discussions of race as a social construct have to focus as much on whiteness as Blackness. And, again citing Morrison, once you remove that construct, what are you left with? What kind of human are you?
Higginbotham hits a lot of notes:
White people turning a blind eye to racism and just continuing on in their own bubbles;
Dangers of saying “we don’t see color” (when people of color desire nothing more than to be seen!)
American history of targeting of Blacks: police surveillance, redlining, etc.
School to prison pipeline (I highly recommend reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for a much more extensive discussion of this topic)
Legacies of wealth/ reparations
Need for whites to confront racism, even in their own families.
That last one comes up often on social media. I think it is time to move past the idea that there are three things you can’t talk about at the dinner table: politics, religion, and money. If we don’t talk about those things, we are actually evading big cultural truths. The personal is political, and race is inherently political and personal. However, there are times that “calling in” may have more impact than calling out. Marissa Hallo Tafura, a Boulder, CO activist involved with Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) – shared the following about “calling in” versus “calling out”:
“Calling in positions us laterally with others, rather than in a hierarchical position, or as someone more knowledgeable. It sends the message that I know I still have a lot of my own work to do. It's not about showing that I'm "one of the good ones" but about demonstrating a desire to be in relationship around issues that often feel messy and personally challenging. Kenneth Hardy's Validate/Challenge/Request approach is often helpful.
Validate is where you acknowledge where someone may be coming from. Often times we're able to acknowledge a shared experience, like growing up evading race consciousness. Validate is where you're building some kind of connection (sorta empathy?).
Challenge is when you introduce information (data, narrative, or whatever might be most likely to "move" that particular person). You can sort of intersperse some validation into this piece but always come back to the truth you learned, the new perspective. When it comes to race, amplify and center BIPOC.
Request is the part where you ask someone to do differently. It might be asking them to use different language, attend a training, diversify their media diet. It's an actionable step. It can be helpful if it's something that they could do with you or others so there's some accountability. Sometimes it's ongoing or sometimes it's a one-time thing.
A lot of times people assume calling in happens privately. Other times people assume it happens publicly. There may be some people in your life who will get defensive if you call them in at the dinner table. If they're more moveable in private, you might go that direction. We have to weigh whether there's great harm in letting a comment live in that space, with other family members around and sometimes kids…
Calling-in in racial justice work is expected of White people with other White people. It's inappropriate to expect BIPOC to call White people in. That centers White feelings.
There are times when it's appropriate for White people to call out, such as overt white supremacists. When it comes to community organizing, there can be some calling in, but a lot of it moves towards calling out. Leadership is supposed to be accountable to the community.”
I highly recommend finding out if your community has a local SURJ chapter. Their work is grounded in the need to “undermine white support for white supremacy and to help build a racially-just society.” Alicia Garza, co-founder of BLM and Special Projects Director at the National Domestic Worker Alliance, puts it succinctly:
“WE NEED YOU DEFECTING FROM WHITE SUPREMACY AND CHANGING THE NARRATIVE OF WHITE SUPREMACY BY BREAKING WHITE SILENCE.”
Higginbotham’s final message of “You can be white without signing on to whiteness” speaks exactly to this. Whites are obligated to not sign on to what whiteness has entailed in the past, even as we must recognize that it is impossible to walk away from our whiteness and the privilege that comes with it.
Higginbotham doesn’t shy away from tackling hard topics. I particularly was moved that she pointed out the hypocrisy of some whites focusing solely on looting during some of the protests, instead of addressing the underlying forces responsible for the protests in the first place.
The great James Baldwin addressed this back in 1968. This 1968 interview in Esquire magazine includes these still incredibly pertinent questions and answers:
Let's talk about the average citizen, the white man who lives on Eighty-ninth Street and Riverside Drive, what should he be doing?
It depends on what he feels. It he feels he wants to save his country, he should be talking to his neighbors and talking to his children, He shouldn't, by the way, be talking to me.
Is there any action he can take? Pressure on the local government?
Pressure on his landlord, pressure on the local government, pressure wherever he cane exert pressure. Pressure, above all, on the real estate lobby. Pressure on the educational system. Make them change textbooks so that his children and my children will be taught something of the truth about our history. It is run now for the profit motive, and nothing else.
What about the white suburbanite who fled the city, while making sure the blacks stayed there? What does he have to do now?
If he wants to save his city, perhaps he should consider moving back. They're his cities, too. Or just ask himself why he left. I know why he left. He's got a certain amount of money and certain future, a car, two cars, you know, scrubbed children, a scrubbed wife, and he wants to preserve all that. And he doesn't understand that in his attempt to preserve it he's going to destroy it.
I’m in full agreement with Higginbotham’s definition of liberation = love and freedom. Good Trouble For Kids also strives to be an initiative advocating the motto that Knowledge is Power. It is my personal hope that more and more white people — like me, like Delia, like Anastasia Higginbotham — will realize that the onus is on us to change, to speak out. And the process of change, of personal transformation, can be painful. As Higginbotham says, “opening sometimes feels like breaking.” But there can be blessings from a broken heart. As Leonard Cohen so beautifully put it in Anthem, that’s how the light gets in.