By Cydney Gillis
For The Herald
It’s taken two long years for me to admit it, but I give up: Donald Trump is president. I am horrified at the racism he has unleashed in this country, and right here in Everett, but I’m standing down from the fight for now to consider the reflection I have seen of myself as an activist in the resistance.
It is the image of an educated white liberal who is clueless to her own part in white supremacy.
I first glimpsed this reflection last June at an activists conference in Portland, Oregon, organized by Indivisible, a national resistance group that I joined shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. With almost no people of color in attendance, I found myself in a roomful of other middle-aged white women talking over each other in entitled tones that politely screamed, “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
I suddenly saw what my own sense of entitlement looks like in action. It wasn’t pretty. Nor was the sentiment that one woman shared at the end of a session devoted to racial justice. In the same entitled tone, this woman told the session’s black presenter that, growing up, she had been taught to treat all people the same, regardless of color. That is, she adorned the speaker with her enlightened agreement.
Audible groans rose in the room. Far from being part of the solution, this belief — that I am a nice, color-blind person and therefore not part of the problem — is a key self-deception that inoculates whites from confronting their own unintended racism, says Robin DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Race.”
DiAngelo spoke in Everett at the Conference on Race held this April by the Communities of Color Coalition. What I learned from her talk, in my own words, is that racism is like alcoholism: You can’t do anything about it until you admit you’ve got a problem. And it turns out that white progressives can be the worst drunks in the room because we’ll fight dirty to deny that our whiteness matters.
White people who think they are color blind are dangerously naïve that they have never actually practiced color-blindness, DiAngelo said, but well-meaning white progressives are the most toxic to people of color on a daily basis: Believing that they are enlightened, they can be arrogant or highly defensive at any suggestion they hold a racist view. Deniers will insist there are people of color in their family, DiAngelo said, or that they have or had a job in a diverse environment, the Peace Corps, for example.
Racism doesn’t have to be intentional, DiAngelo said; this is a myth that perpetuates the problem. By the age of 3 or 4, she said, research shows that children of every color can distinguish the advantage that whites have, but white people are raised to be functionally illiterate on racism and blind to their own color. But, “If I cannot tell you what it means to be white, I cannot hold what it means not to be white,” she said.
Seen in this way, anti-racist whites don’t need to go to a rally and yell at people who know that they are white supremacists. We should be working to recognize and harass the unconscious racism of our own whiteness.
Case in point: I work in a law office and was at the front desk one day helping a distraught woman. She was telling me her boyfriend was violent and that she was scared he was stalking her when the front door opened and in walked a black man wearing a flat-brimmed ball cap and a white down jacket puffed out to the size of the Michelin Man.
My mind flashed, “The boyfriend. A gang member!” The man said hi to me, and I instantly saw he was a courier who usually wore a shirt and slacks. It was the exact same guy I talked to every day. I was shaken for days by my racist perception.
Case in point: I volunteered to be a panelist at the recent Students of Color Career Conference at Everett Community College. As we introduced ourselves to each other before our session, one panelist with a Spanish accent told me that she is a conductor.
“A musical conductor?” I asked her. Yes, a musical conductor; Paula Madrigal, conductor of the Ballard Civic Orchestra.
During the panel, Madrigal asked the students to describe what a conductor looks like. “A man,” someone said. “A white man with gray hair,” Madrigal replied. I turned red in a whiteness alert: Only moments before, I had questioned whether Madrigal understood the word “conductor” in describing her own profession.
A Seattle case in point: Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders had just finished congratulating Seattle on its progressiveness at Westlake Park on Aug. 30, 2016, when two Black Lives Matter activists took the stage and microphone to demand a moment of silence for the second anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man shot by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri.
Liberal Seattle wasn’t having it – the crowd answered in a swift howl of boos and jeers that, make no mistake, was extremely racist.
“You guys are full of bullshit with your Black Lives Matter,” one woman yelled.
This is white progressive toxicity.
If you want to take a stand against hate by facing off at a white nationalist rally, go ahead, knock yourself out (or let the Proud Boys do it for you). But DiAngelo is right: To get to the beating heart of racism — why a liberal white woman would panic when a black man comes into the room or why white progressives would boo Black Lives Matter — white people need to study and confront our socialization and assumptions at every step.
We cannot help end racism until we recognize and stand up to the Proud Boys inside us.
Cydney Gillis is a former journalist living in Everett.
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