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resonantMy mother and my teachers and my Sunday School leaders taught me that the way we deal with racial differences is never, ever to talk about them.
My mother and my teachers and my Sunday School leaders were all good, liberal, white Southerners, and in those days, when good, liberal, white Southerners wanted to teach their children that everyone was equal in human dignity, the way they did it was to teach their children to play a game called, "Let's pretend we're all alike."
A certain amount of anxiety was communicated with that lesson. No one ever outright said that if you mention the ways people are different, something awful might happen, but that was the message I got, just the same.
Now, I grew up in North Carolina, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was absorbing these lessons, awful things were happening. Race riots were happening. Hell, lynchings were still happening. I wasn't aware of any of these things, but the adults were afraid of them, and their fear colored the way I learned that lesson.
("Let's pretend we're all alike" was a new approach to race. What my mother had learned from her parents was that there were two kinds of people: real people, regular people, like her, and those other people, who weren't quite people at all. Oh, it was important to show charity to them and not call them by that nasty word, but it wasn't really necessary to consider what they wanted when making a decision, and their children couldn't play with regular children because it just wasn't right. In that context, I have to say that "Let's pretend we're all alike" was an improvement.)
The problem, of course, is that in practice, "Let's pretend we're all alike" means, "Let's pretend everyone is white like me." Or, worse yet, "Let's pretend that the parts of your experience that are different from mine just aren't important, or even real."
And because we got the message imbued with all that unspoken anxiety, white people who play this game will protect the game. We'll try, with increasing nervousness, to move the conversation away from areas of difference, because if we draw attention to ways you're different from me, this is wrong and dangerous and may cause awful things to happen.
I came to the Midwest for college, and the dorm matched me up with an African-American Chicagoan for a roommate. We had a million things in common -- I mean, vampire novels alone could have kept us in conversation for months -- so the "Let's pretend we're all alike" game didn't work out too badly at first. But I still remember the day, about eight months into our first year together, when she made a sly little joke about the difference in our races. It was a revelation to me. We could talk about this! We could joke about this! It wouldn't suddenly make us hate each other! It wouldn't "create tensions" that would eventually (magically, without anyone making a decision to assault anyone) "explode into violence"! Nothing awful would happen at all!
In online discussions of race, when people say, "I'm colorblind. I don't see race," sometimes there's something frantic about it, an underlying fear. And I always wonder whether here, too, is a white person whose good, liberal parents taught them that the only safe thing to do with race was pretend it didn't exist.
My mother and my teachers and my Sunday School leaders were all good, liberal, white Southerners, and in those days, when good, liberal, white Southerners wanted to teach their children that everyone was equal in human dignity, the way they did it was to teach their children to play a game called, "Let's pretend we're all alike."
A certain amount of anxiety was communicated with that lesson. No one ever outright said that if you mention the ways people are different, something awful might happen, but that was the message I got, just the same.
Now, I grew up in North Carolina, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was absorbing these lessons, awful things were happening. Race riots were happening. Hell, lynchings were still happening. I wasn't aware of any of these things, but the adults were afraid of them, and their fear colored the way I learned that lesson.
("Let's pretend we're all alike" was a new approach to race. What my mother had learned from her parents was that there were two kinds of people: real people, regular people, like her, and those other people, who weren't quite people at all. Oh, it was important to show charity to them and not call them by that nasty word, but it wasn't really necessary to consider what they wanted when making a decision, and their children couldn't play with regular children because it just wasn't right. In that context, I have to say that "Let's pretend we're all alike" was an improvement.)
The problem, of course, is that in practice, "Let's pretend we're all alike" means, "Let's pretend everyone is white like me." Or, worse yet, "Let's pretend that the parts of your experience that are different from mine just aren't important, or even real."
And because we got the message imbued with all that unspoken anxiety, white people who play this game will protect the game. We'll try, with increasing nervousness, to move the conversation away from areas of difference, because if we draw attention to ways you're different from me, this is wrong and dangerous and may cause awful things to happen.
I came to the Midwest for college, and the dorm matched me up with an African-American Chicagoan for a roommate. We had a million things in common -- I mean, vampire novels alone could have kept us in conversation for months -- so the "Let's pretend we're all alike" game didn't work out too badly at first. But I still remember the day, about eight months into our first year together, when she made a sly little joke about the difference in our races. It was a revelation to me. We could talk about this! We could joke about this! It wouldn't suddenly make us hate each other! It wouldn't "create tensions" that would eventually (magically, without anyone making a decision to assault anyone) "explode into violence"! Nothing awful would happen at all!
In online discussions of race, when people say, "I'm colorblind. I don't see race," sometimes there's something frantic about it, an underlying fear. And I always wonder whether here, too, is a white person whose good, liberal parents taught them that the only safe thing to do with race was pretend it didn't exist.