Sirens and Whiteness

Storm on the Rhine (M.A.Reilly, 2019)

I.

Night has come on and Basel has grown quiet. In the distant, a siren sounds—familiar across all of Europe, and my mind calls forth images from old black and white movies set in WWII. The iconic siren sounding there too.

Dev told me before we arrived that I had to be out in the city at 3 a.m.

“There’s no noise. It’s completely quiet.”

He is right. This city is quiet, save the occasional siren.


II.

Two weeks ago DNA test results were returned, identifying my genetic makeup. I expected to be 100% Irish thinking that because I was born there, I must be Irish. I learned that I am just a smudge more than 50% Irish/Welsh/Scottish. The remainder is:English, Greek, Southern Italian, and Balkan. At the top of the read out, it proclaimed I was 100% European.

Each time I come back to Europe I realize how far away I am from being European, regardless of what DNA results state. Culture is determined by lived experience, not biology.

III.

In the United States where I have lived since I was two, the myth of genetic superiority has once again reared its ugly head with the rise of #MAGA enthusiasts. Before we left to come here, a white man driving a Suburban in Oakland NJ cursed at my son because he was taking too long to exit a parking lot. In the car with him sat his white wife and two white kids. He told Devon to get the f**k out of his country and to go back to China.  Dev is Korean-American, an immigrant like me.  His words hurt my son although Dev says he really has come to expect it of white people. You do not need to be in the south of the USA to experience racism. Dev has known this since he started school.

IV.

Contrary to the rhetoric of white nationalists in the USA and Europe, there is nothing superior about any race. Thinking so leads to genocide and hasn’t history shown this.

Sirens are sounding now and I wonder if white folks are listening and more so will we have the conviction, the courage to stand up and speak out against the racism and privilege that causes so much harm?  Will we honor the obligation to speak directly to our families, friends, neighbors whose sense of privilege is acted upon daily?

Our silence is our complicity.

Reading George Yancy's Backlash: How To Be a White Anti-Racist Racist

Dr. Yancy

The book group I belong to read Dr. George Yancy's Backlash: What Happens When we Talk Honestly about Racism in America this past month--an important book about the challenges and needs for white people in America to understand that their whiteness overtly and covertly privileges them as it undermines African-Americans and other people of color. The book, Yancy says is intended as a gift.  I found it to be a tough, yet necessary, gift to receive. 

Yancy articulates clearly, to be white is to be racist.  To accept that definition of self is to accept the gift Yancy offers.  He states:

"Imagine the impact that the acceptance of this gift might have on you, white reader, and the world; imagine Anderson Cooper telling the world that, 'I, too, am racist. And while not part of the KKK, I, too, perpetuate white supremacy because I benefit from a white racist systemic structure to which I’m embedded and in terms of which Black people and people of color suffer.' That is the scary work to be done. That is what Dear White America asked of white readers" (p. 13). 

Yancy gift is to help us be (other)wise.

There are nine women in my book group and the majority of us have been meeting monthly to discuss books for the last 19 months. Last night, all of us were present, save one member. We represent multiple races and religions and we cross several decades in age. The majority of us are white, including me. All of us, save one, would describe ourselves as liberal or progressive.

Yancy asks, "How does one speak truth when what you have to say is in some sense not even hearable"(p.7)?  This question feels pivotal. Juergen Habermas in his communication theory said that hegemony prevails when there is no metalanguage.  How do we begin to understand without a metalanguage that allows us to see and critique our own privilege and the cost of that privilege?  I best learn in relationship to other.  For me, my Korean child, Devon has helped me to better understand the privilege I wield simply because I am perceived and known as white. It is one thing to understand matters of race and racism intellectually and it is quite another matter to grasp how my own racial privilege causes other people, such as my son, both pain and harm. 

Matters of race, since Devon, have been highly personal. At six-years-of age--the first year Devon went to public school he returned home in early September when the weather was still summer-warm and asked for his red winter coat.

"Why do you want that?" I asked.
"I'm going to wear it on the bus and zip it way up so that the big boys stop calling me, Chink."

In the space of a few days on an ordinary school bus in the North East of the United States, my son had learned that he needed to disappear, to literally hide his face in an attempt to quiet those mean white boys.

One of the myths in America is that we are less racist in the New York City area. I learned this was not true each and every year Devon spent at school. I shared the story of the red coat with the other white moms who walked their children to the bus stop as I did each morning. They had no experience to hear what I was saying. Their whiteness dismissed the story of the red coat immediately. Their whiteness said, 'boys will be boys. Teasing is normal.' They offered up stories that were not parallel, yet they thought them to be. Finally, one said in an attempt to unruffle the feathers I had ruffled for we were all white and connected, "but he's so light-skinned. It's like he's almost white."

That's a small glimpse of the America Yancy is writing about. Yancy might describe the reactions of my white neighbors as being sutured. Specifically he defines this as "the process whereby white people engage in forms of closure, forms of protection from various challenges to the ways in which whiteness is seen as the norm, its unremarkable everydayness, its value assumptions, and the many ways in which it’s guilty about producing distorted knowledge about itself...Moreover, to be sutured within the context of white identity is indicative of 'the narrative authority' of the white self that seals itself off from 'otherness'" (p. 105). 

When I confront my own normative behavior my first reaction is often to deny what I am seeing, hearing. I think, "It couldn't be that..." Being sutured--parsing together protective language so that I do not need to confront my own racist ideologies is what keeps whiteness as the norm. 

I work daily, sometimes minute-by-minute, to name and respond to the white privilege that informs my perspectives, beliefs, and actions. For example, I am learning patience. My son and I were in Europe a few years ago and he said to me quite angrily, "I'm so embarrassed by you. You're so impatient with people.You spoke to the waitress as if she wouldn't understand you, as if she was a child."

My whiteness has taught me to expect to go first, to be immediately understood, to expect to not be kept waiting. These beliefs are of course irrational and yet I have been frontlined in so many ways throughout my life that being first and privileged feels normal. Being better than others feels normal and those not speaking English I understood as being inferior (by the way the waitress more than likely spoke several languages as opposed to my one language). Now, when I grow impatient and my sense of self is aggrandized, I halt so that I might better recognize the underlying narrative I have been telling myself and I stop it. I recognize that my going first, my assumed superiority has always meant that someone else would need to wait, be assumed to be known and in doing all of this, be harmed by me. 

No more.

I felt such shame when Devon confronted me. At first I was just surprised. Then I concocted a number of sutured stories to rewrite the narrative so that he would be merely mistaken. None of this sat well.  Lessons I also learned as a child, alongside my whiteness, left me uncomfortable.  And so, then I got quiet and began the process of owning and then changing my behavior. 

I think this work of being a white anti-racist racist requires time to dwell in self awareness and hear the narratives I tell myself so that I might better unearth the inherent racism in those narratives. How do I do this? How do I un-suture the normative sense of a white self I have? Engagement with other helps me to hear these sutured narratives better.  Books like Yancy's allow me to have a secondary discourse to use as I interrogate my own assumptions and false-truths. 

Some un-suturing I have been doing includes: 

1. My whiteness does not mean I am a soothsayer. I don't know the bigness of you.
2. My whiteness distorts my understanding of you. The stories about you I have learned are always incomplete, are often wrong, and are told sometimes to falsely protect me from my own incompleteness. 
3. My whiteness does not give me permission to impose my will on anyone. 
4. My whiteness leaves me partially blind. What is it that I am not seeing?
5. My whiteness leaves me without an adequate language to hear the lies I retell myself. What language from you might I borrow?
6. My whiteness leaves me impatient.
7. My whiteness affords me privileges I can no longer bear as I know each privilege afforded to me harms, maims, and cuts you.
8. My whiteness does not allow me to be quiet in the face of overt and subtle racism from other white people. To be quiet is not being polite even though it feels that way. It is being complicit.
9. My whiteness does not make me exceptional, regardless of what I have learned.
10. My whiteness comes with assumptions that are often false, especially about other.
11. My whiteness (in)forms the stories I tell myself as truths. These are stories. Not truths.
12. My whiteness often keeps me from feeling.
13. My whiteness often keeps me from wonder.
14. My whiteness and the narratives that accompany being white need to be troubled, un-sutured, exposed.

To become (other)wise is a way of being in the world. I seek to live in the middle of things and not rely on prescribed beginnings and endings to tidy the messiness of this lived life. Some longings that have emerged as I un-suture my whiteness include:

1. I long to be honest.
2. I long to be whole.
3. I long to know wonder.
4. I long to love and be loved.
5. I long to be graced by other, (in)formed by other.
6. I long to break through the narratives of whiteness and merely be. 
7. I long to be humble.
8. I long to not know and unknow.
9. I long to be vulnerable.
10. I long to be (other)wise.

How Did Your Neighbors Vote? White Racism in Your Backyard

The Distance Between (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

I live in New Jersey, a supposedly Blue state.  But here's the more refined truth.  I live in a town where my neighbors cast votes--the majority in each of the nine polling sites-- for Donald Trump. On every measure possible, in each polling area (there are nine), the majority of my neighbors voted for Trump and with it--white ideological hatred.

I live in Ringwood, NJ, a largely white suburb of New York City--a town that is a mix of blue-collar and professionals. And here's an important truth: well before this election, I had firsthand knowledge that this community reeks of racism and equally appalling: the lemming factor. Lemmings are little rodents that blindly follow each other off cliffs. Being polite by saying nothing in the face of racist and misogynistic speech and actions, allows for such ideology to be seen as normal and to become normal. It teaches our children very, very early that it is permissible to hurt and hate others because of perceived differences. It shows our children who, other, is. That's what the lemming factor creates. It is not only white nationalists we might fear. More so, it is the white majority's silence on matters of equality and decency that is far deadlier. By following along, lemming-like, the appalling behaviors become normalized and grave harm is done.


II.

In the suburbs, many of us don't talk about race or racism especially if you are white and I am. More than a decade ago my son, a beautiful Korean child, started first grade here. He would learn about racism those early days of school in Ringwood, at the tender age of six. We all would.

It was early September and warm when he came home from school and asked, Mommy, where is my red coat?  He had been to school for just a few days. The red coat was a snow parka and as it was well past 80 degrees, I naturally wondered why he wanted to wear it. My son had never been to school in our town.  He went to a progressive preschool and kindergarten and this was our first encounter with the local public school.

My son told his dad and me, "I'm going to pull the zipper all the way up and disappear." He said this as only a six-year-old can. He said this as if such a thing would be a solution, rather than a horror. My beautiful boy was going to hide his face and disappear.


III.

It seemed that some of the older, white boys on the school bus, those ignorant, mean white children, had already learned how to spew racist crap. They made my son's trip each day to first grade a misery until we put a stop by removing our son from the public schools in town. These children called him racist slurs, thinking he was Chinese. They let him know how different he was from them and how that difference--what he fundamentally was--was wrong. Their hatred was a viable, living thing that pulsed and grew with the silence of others. These sad boys didn't give up as they were committed to harming. The bus driver kept driving and the other children on the bus did what white children are taught to do: they kept quiet and bore witness to a six year old being abused and learned how to blame the victim. That's a main lesson taught in white suburbia.

And what about my neighbors?  You know them. Those moms who walk their kids to the bus stop each morning, a cup of coffee in hand. You see them waving as the bus departs. Their faces full of bright smiles and hope. Well, I spoke up immediately to the moms at the end of my street after the bus had left and they mostly dismissed what I told them. They dismissed what I said as if it such actions were nothing more than a nuisance. One neighbor told me that she was surprised the boys would act like that as my son was almost white. Another quickly said it wasn't about race. She explained how her white son had been made fun of because he was shorter than the others, and that's how some people just were.  The rest of the white women? They just stayed quiet as white people do. That day marked a defining moment for me. I would be quiet no more.


IV.

Rob and I thought we had made a tragic error moving to this town and now I know differently. This morning the election results in our county show that this misery my son learned at the hands of a group of white boys and the silence of other whites, could have been found in any of the towns where there exists a majority of white people. The voting results make concrete numerically the hatred that simmers here. If we are brave enough to look closely at the demographic evidence from this election, I suspect we will see similar voting patterns wherever large clusters of white people reside.

This is a hard truth to say out loud. But how else might we interpret this election? White people voted yesterday overwhelmingly for both a bigot and a misogynist who was endorsed by the KKK.

Yes, the KKK.


V.

This is the breakdown in my town (from here):


                         Turnout Percentage      Clinton            Trump          LaRiva            Stein        Johnson
Ringwood 1       70.84%                         301                 389                  1                    5               23
Ringwood 2       71.13%                         296                 349                  0                   15              14
Ringwood 3       71.05%                         253                 296                  0                   11              22
Ringwood 4       66.98%                         311                 577                  2                   15              14
Ringwood 5       67.36%                         331                 392                  1                   10              18
Ringwood 6       70.09%                         303                 312                  0                    9               16
Ringwood 7       63.96%                         275                 323                  0                    8                7
Ringwood 8       70.19%                         254                 359                  1                    6               10
Ringwood 9       68.9%                           252                 336                  0                    6               20


I live in the 9th polling area where nearly 70 percent of registered voters turned out to vote. 336 of my neighbors voted for the Trump-Pence ticket and 278 did not.  If we alone were deciding this election, the Trump-Pence ticket would have won. That's sobering.

I imagine some of my neighbors who voted for Trump-Pence might offer different reasons for why they cast their vote as they did. Perhaps some were fervent anti-abortionists. Perhaps others couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton. But underneath those reasons, my neighbors had to be able to hold in their hands the KKK endorsement Trump and Pence received. They had to have been okay with that. Their vote shows they condoned Trump's wall-building, race-baiting, derogatory comments about women, and banning Muslims due to their faith. No matter what they told themselves as they cast that vote, they had to have made peace with all of that. For it is impossible to dismiss the hate-rhetoric that has been a signature of the Trump-Pence ticket.

Whereas their vote makes them complicit to the ugly ideology that is Trump, I know that my silence makes me equally so. To remain silent in the presence of racist ideology in whatever form it takes, is to condone that hatred. To be silent when the guy next store spews some ugly misogynist jokes is to condone the hatred of women. To listen silently to a neighbor down the street spew racist gossip that isolates one from the group is to approve of that hatred. To listen and not denounce the lies being told about Muslims, being told about Jews, being told about whomever is other is to condone and agree with the falsehoods being stated.

Our silence gives permission for hate to grow.


VI.

Early this morning as we listened to the announcement that Trump had won, I confessed to my son that the results scared me. During the election, each time Trump railed about the Chinese or South Koreans, I worried for my son's safe-being. Having lost Rob earlier this year, I know how quickly a life can end. I know how quickly and decidedly harm can occur.  The thought that some of my neighbors might embrace the violence as they have embraced this racist ticket alarms me.

But what worries me more is that there is a part of me that wants to be silent, that wants to not trouble the waters.

I want to believe that my silence might protect my son. Just writing this here makes me feel vulnerable especially in light of the crazy Trump followers we have all seen displayed. But I know better. The issues of race, gender, and economic inequality will not be settled by the voices of minority groups alone no matter how bravely they speak out. They cannot and should not shoulder this misery. White people must rise up and be vocal in our local neighborhoods with our neighbors. We must say that hating others, whomever other is, is wrong all the time without exception.  

There are no exceptions. 

We must fight for integration everywhere: on our blocks, at our schools, in our houses of worship. It is in joining other, that other can become neighbor, friend. I urge you to be vocal and take action. The cost of our silence is far too much for others to bear.

I am starting where I live.  How about you?

  

Imperialism, Whiteness, The Republican Contenders and Me

Whiteness (M.A. Reilly 2014)

I.

In the foreword to Everyday White People Confront Racial and Social Injustice, Paul Gorksi offers this sobering insight about being White,

"...on subjects like White entitlement and bigotry, I am well groomed. When it comes to deflecting responsibility and exerting White supremacy implicitly or to participating actively and unapologetically in a hyperracist corporate-consumer capitalism even as I pretend to despise it, my family, teachers, caches, and others equipped me with an impressive spectrum of expertise and skills" (ix).

Gorski outlines three shifts in consciousness related to how racism is often situated by Whites. The first shift is from understanding racism as only an interpersonal matter to understanding it as an institutional matter. Racism is bigger than matters related to individuals. I think here of that insipid 1971 Coca-Cola ad from my youth about teaching the whole world to sing (in perfect harmony). Yes, such sentiment felt somewhat good--against the then recent race riots and the continuous shipping of young men to Vietnam, but it largely deflected attention and responsibility from more pervasive manners of racial and economic injustices that remained present, rooted--regardless of relationships and the notion of harmony.

The next shift Gorski references is from understanding racism as an institutional matter to understanding it as a by-product of imperialism.  Recently Rob and I have been recalling the many posters we were required to make in response to elementary school assignments. You may have memories of these too. These were geography assignments that had us gluing cotton balls, coffee beans, and pennies to poster boards to indicate the 'by-products' of other countries--most often those located in the Southern hemisphere.

I can still recall gluing a copper penny within the lines that signified Chile. At the time I was gluing that bit of copper to the map, the copper industry in Chile was undergoing a change in ownership. In 1971 when Coca-Cola was teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony, the newly elected Allende government in Chile was exercising its rights to nationalize copper mining. Up to that time, the mines had been owned and operated exclusively by North American mining companies. President Allende said,

This is maybe the most important act since our independence declaration, because it entitles a modification to the political constitution that accentuates and gives strength to the national feeling of our country…to nationalize and preserve for the state our country’s basic richness (from here).  

Preserving a nation's national richness would not be accepted without response.  And response came in the form of General Augusto Pinochet who assumed power in Chile following a United States-backed coup d'état in 1973 (ironically 9/11) when he overthrew President Allende and ended civilian rule. Pinochet would rule as a dictator for 17 years and his economic policies would be informed by neoliberal economic advisers, dubbed the Chicago Boys, because they had been educated at the University of Chicago under the influence of Milton Friedman. The Pinochet-dictatorship created favorable policies for foreign trade by privatizing state-controlled industries and social security, restricting labor unions, opening global trade markets, slashing government support of public education and providing government funding for private education companies to put in place for-profit schools. (Does this not seem familiar?) Yet none of that history was part of the "geography" lessons learned. Those early lessons ignored the many ways U.S. covert operatives serve corporate interests. We learned that American political, military and corporate actions that were not hidden were allowable and preferable. These acts against others were considered benign and often situated as being good for others. I'm reminded here of a speech given by Edward Said (1993) in which he explains that sense of American specialness.  He said,

so influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of the United States culture, politics and history. But the connection between imperial politics and culture in North America, and in particular in the United States, is astonishingly direct (York University, 1993, from here).

Imperialistic power are often the policies of empires and they always require racial, gender, and economic imbalances. Michael Doyle, the historian defines empire as

a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire (as quoted by Edward Said at York University, 1993).

The last shift in consciousness for Gorski is more personal, more of the moment. This is the shift that stays with me the most, connects me most directly to racism.  He writes that it is in understanding racism as a global act of imperialism that is reinforced by White privilege and consumerism. Gorski understands how his daily acts of consumerism make him complicit in the exploitation of disenfranchised communities. Again, I think here of Said who explains that even though the age of direct colonialism is over, the influence of empire remains.  He said,

imperialism lingers where it often has been in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as its specific political, ideological, economic and social practices (York University, 1993). 

Consumerism and White privilege are expressions of political, ideological, economic, and social practices. The way I live via the the entitlements I am afforded and to some degree still covet are actions that reify racism and allow the "economic top" 20 percent of Americans to live lives well beyond the rest of us on the planet.

II.

I was thinking about the difficulty that living White and privileged produces as I viewed the Republican debate this past week. I was wondering whether the public outcry via Ferguson and the many Occupy Wall Street movements might prompt at least one question about economic and racial justice. Did none of those Facebookers want to ask about race? Economic injustices? After hearing the presidential contenders volley Tough on Isis utterances and the many ways they would defund Planned Parenthood for what felt like more than the first hour, I began to doubt if the more pressing matters of privilege and race would be discussed.  Apart from asking Ben Carson, the only Black candidate, in the closing minute of the debate what he would do to heal America's racial divides and a quick response before the cut-to-commercial from Scott Walker about police brutality, this debate was mute about matters of poverty, economic injustice and race.

D.D. Guttenplan in The Nation summarizes the importance of this when he writes,

One of the reasons elections matter is because they hold up a mirror to the kind of country we are—and the kind of country we want to be. On tonight’s evidence America (or at least that portion of America represented by the Ohio GOP’s invited audience) is a country that applauds a bully, fears all foreigners, knows that the system is rigged to favor the rich—and will fight to the death to keep it that way.

One might think to look to the government to help move the country from maintaining at all costs security and wealth for the few to seeking economic and racial justice for the many.  But that does not seem likely. We seem hell-bent on sacrificing our selves or at the very least, our neighbors, in order to keep consuming what we can ill afford.

Why do we do this?  How can we stop this behavior?

III.

Earlier this year I was making a piece of art (see below) and I wasn't necessarily sure as to why I combined the image with the quote from Deleuze and Guattari.  Now my understanding is more certain, better coded.

1950s (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

White privilege as expressed as consumerism abhors being in the middle of things. By necessity,
privilege is a top-down view.  Being in the middle of something requires a very different way of seeing and being. Eliminating the middle is in many ways a way to maintain injustice.

And perhaps this middle space is one I need to remind myself to occupy more frequently.  Being in the middle affords me and you a space where we can be more critical of our lives and the effect those lived lives have on others and ourselves.