CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER WHITE PERSON, Part 1: Finding

 

CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER WHITE PERSON, Part 1:  FINDING

A note about Finding:

I've been writing this, my fourth blog post for the last 2 months.  I write 3 or 4 days a week for several hours at a time.  And still, this hasn't been posted till very recently.  And it's short!  Why?

My intention was to finally write some things out of my life.  To pass through a process of finding, naming, and metabolizing that would allow me to let some of this racialized trauma out of my body and make space for a better me.  

But it took a lot more words than I thought it would take.

I thought this was going to be 3 posts.  

Its now in the vicinity of 12.  

I guess I have a lot I need to say. 

Thanks for being here with me while I lay it all out.

-Tara

 

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GESTATION

So I've been in a space of deep gestation over these quarantine months.

And I've realized that part of what I need is to heal from the racially traumatic experiences I've had over the course of my life.  And if I am honest with myself, these have been the subject of my curiosity for years upon years-  understanding WHY these hypocritical, dissonant, dishonest and contradictory experiences have happened to me over the 44 years of my life, and with some of the people of whom I loved and admired the most.

 

 

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POLITICAL

I've always been told I was "political," like my very presence cause in other people the need to reassess the fairness of something, even if for only a second. Or perhaps that my brownness somehow automatically caused unacknowledged strain on the white people around me.  This was my experience growing up.

I now know that even with some of my closest friends and allies, there was secretly a conversation going on in their brains about me that they would never recognize... one that would occupy them and influence tiny choices by them in relation to me. These unseen, unrecognized conversations with themselves had no context in our home lives, and these conversations had no where specific to live in our school-focused realities, (because of course, in the 80's and 90's, we lived in a "post-racial" time.)

(Haaaaaa.)  

As kids, we didn't know why we felt these mixed feelings about race or origin, or queerness, or gender presentation, or ableism lifted up as perfection.  Nor did we know how or from whom to ask for help in understanding it.

I've been remembering my life through a lens of what I know now about white supremacy in our culture, and how the white cis-hetero male construct I grew up in shaped the life I had, deeply and irrevocably.  

 

 

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THE GIRL I USED TO BE

Okay I'll be honest, I've not just been thinking on this, I've also been crying for the girl I used to be.  I’ve been trying to remember the creator I thought I was, when I still knew who I was; before my life's energy switched to lifting the load of racist influence off my life, like a dump truck filled with the refuse of a wrecked mobile home.

Bits and pieces of me were pulled out from the refuse.

But it's hard to find anything that wasn't broken. 

The insulation of belonging yanked away, and the stinging fact that I have experienced this in AT LEAST 80% of the white educational, professional and community theatre settings in which I have existed over the last 4 decades.... these hurts collectively keep me in constant reconsideration of my well-being, of my goodness, of my rightness, of my belongingness. 

 

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THE SCENT OF SELF-DENIAL

Am I handling this matter in a healthy way?  Am I being honest with myself or am I driving towards disastrous effects denying what I actually feel?  How do I put all of the data together and make sense of it?  

I am not separate from the environment in which I swim.  I drink it the water too.  I have to question my own experiences as rigorously as as I question the things I see outside of myself.  

I am repeatedly tasked in my life to put myself ABOVE the white supremacy in which I am steeped.

Having realized quite late in life that I was steeped in MANY poisonous layers of complicated white supremacy, I now know the scent of self-denial in the same way that an alcoholic knows the scent of her body when she's had enough to drink. We both know when that next sip is giving in. 

It is an addiction. 

It is what I have known, and what I have lived, and what I have been taught. 

It is what flowed as love and culture through my home-life in childhood. 

I AM addicted to white supremacy. I don't like it, but I am reflexively too comfortable with it.

 

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FREEDOM MUST CONSTANTLY BE UNCOVERED 

Tracking this ghost down in my life has felt like the most unfulfilling scavenger hunt imaginable.  (Great, all the pieces lead me here, there you fucking are, white supremacy... AGAIN.)

(God damn, I would *really* like a new bad guy, Scooby Gang.)

One might say that the insulation of thinking I fit in white spaces was keeping me in a punishing environment, and that I am better to be free of it. I would agree, except that I'm not free of white supremacy.

Each day I find myself newly disappointed by white friends who are great allies in *many* public spaces, but when challenged directly to use grace and calm to defend black and brown lives, they pivot the conversation to easier topics, leaving me alone in that chat room, alone waving my little flag. 

It's horrifically ironic how often I find myself in that little room alone.  White people name white supremacy only when it's to their benefit.  But even with an actual brown person in the room, they miss the point of being in unity with other people.  They'll dominate the conversation, or pivot to avoid or support points that I make.  They'll make the choice when the convo is over.  

Again, I'm left with me and my little brown flag, at their disposal. 

So no, I am not free of white supremacy, even amongst allies. 

But lets get to the real disappointment. 

As now deceased Congressman John Lewis said, freedom is not a state to attain and afterwards become content. 

Freedom is an act. 

According to this definition, Freedom must constantly be uncovered.  

But my whole existence thus far has been spent looking for, unconsciously, the end of a struggle for freedom from white domination.  A domination which has never, and likely will never, come.  

This is a hard pill to swallow. 

 

 

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COUNTERFEIT CURRENCY

 

I was raised white. 

I was surrounded by white culture in the most typical lower middle class scenario possible. 

I THOUGHT I WAS REALLY BETTER THAN MOST because, well goddamn, that was the general culture around me.  

The message of my childhood culture was that you had to claim to be confident ESPECIALLY when you didn’t know what to do, or else you'd be bullied out of your goddamn mind by others around you.  

It's an abusive environment, really.  An extremity of bullying and abuse passed off as culture. 

(Resmaa Menaken explains a lot about this phenomena in his book, "My Grandmother's Hands."  If you have a second, WS, I really recommend you check it out. But like, get a snack first maybe. Or even better, go drink some water.)  

You think that your uncle who works in corporate/government service settings is as punishing and demanding for no reason? You that his expectations that you be who he and the family wants you to be 'or-you-don't-matter' is a random family trait?  

Nah, this stuff comes from somewhere.  

This act of 'freeing myself' has become counterfeit currency.  Could I *ever* free myself when you’re in every food I eat and in every suck of air I take?  

All I know is that I'm sick to death of having to come back to you again and again like a kid with a weak bladder asking for a bathroom pass...

 

 

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YOU MUST ALWAYS FIGHT

Growing up surrounded by white folks as I did, I didn't have the seed of knowledge that would make me ready for the endlessness of it all.  All the white folks think this shit is gonna get "cleared up" by voting in another white millionaire.  Either party.  Still, all you.

The overwhelming reality is that this shit is just how it is: if you are black or brown in America, you must always fight... and you must not look for it to end. 

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DONE

In order for me to persist in all this adversity, this life of mine needs to patch up some of these holes where the energy leaks out.

 My life needs to be more sustainable.  

I can't do the work I do to free myself from WS and still handle a host more of miscellaneous white mistakes, thus having to repeatedly justify my choices.  

It's like Lent, WS.  I'm giving you up, for like, Lent. Except we won't pick up again afterwards.  

I'm fasting, is that better?  I'm not taking any more food to nourish the WS that you keep in me and I'm giving up your fat phobia, your productivity demands, your insistence that my well being is secondary in all things.  I'm giving up your competitiveness, your need to be right, and your beauty standards.  

When I'm done with those, I'm giving up your male dominated normatives in the workplace and holding my questions to myself.  I'm giving up second guessing my really well honed instincts about where folks are coming from, explaining myself to folks more than twice, trying to educate, and well, Facebook in general.

I'm giving up your expectations for my family, their education and what is important for them to know, your ideas about what is smart and what is not, and all those judgements about children and how they don't know what they're talking about.  

And when all that is done, White Supremacy, when I've sussed out what I don't want in my world,  and learned to replace those questions with answers that fit my life, I'll be done with white theatre.

And that's when you'll want to run. 

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(To be continued in CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER WHITE PERSON, Part 2:  Naming )

T a r a - I n - W h i t e r l a n d