White People, We All Have the Virus of Racism
Black communities should not have to fight for us to be healed. This problem is ours.
I fear we Other the problem by thinking its some and not all of us who carry and spread racism through the culture. So we need to talk about our racism. Yes, our racism. Mine, yours, ours. It is the virus we’ve been exposed to all our lives. (read how Tim Wise writes about it). We could have caught it from everywhere we’ve ever been and everyone we’ve ever been around, seen or heard. I got mine from my grandfather, the largely white-washed history in the standard school curriculum, the stereotyped and tokenized depictions of Black people on 70’s and 80’s television shows, the ignorant jokes passed among peers growing up and the absence of Black families in my white, small-New-England-Town which left room for all that to go unquestioned.
We’ve learned a lot about how viruses work lately. And one thing we know is that we can and do spread them without knowing or acknowledging we have them. The cough I downplayed in early March could have done unknowable damage in the world because I wasn’t willing to acknowledge it as potentially dangerous. I whistled by that graveyard, coughing and feverish, so I could keep living the life I valued. Did you do that, too? Have you ever done that? Told yourself that you were fine in order to keep what you wanted to keep? Is that so different from not acknowledging your racism? Does it seem like it would change everything if you did acknowledge it? Do you assume that change would be bad?
I’m not trying to Out You or Blame You or make you Hate Yourself. I am trying to show you that racism is there in you. It shows up in beliefs, assumptions and rapid-fire memes, so swiftly flickering through the movie-reel of the mind that we don’t notice them, but they’ve left an impression. And they inform how we move through the world, where we go, who we befriend, how we speak to one another and how we value life on the whole. It’s quick, automatic and sometimes invisible. But it is there. And if we don’t acknowledge it, it goes unchallenged. We didn’t seek out racism just as most of us don’t seek out antioxidants in our food, we just absorb it as a biproduct of what we do seek; blueberries and comfort.
We need to take a long, compassionate look at our racism. Yes, compassionate. Compassion is the most effective balm in healing and racism is the most effective and catastrophic virus to ever infect humanity. It’s a poison in our being, a chasm keeping us — you, me and everyone we know — from our full and basic goodness. Racism is a virus and a genetic disorder and we usually have loads of compassion for both. And when we have or someone we know has a virus or a genetic disorder we care about that — we do not nurture the disease itself, we endeavor to nurture the whole person suffering with it.
The spectrum of racism
Racism is an ignorance at best and a hatred or worse, indifference in its most inflamed and empowered stages. A blatantly racist and violent person has a raging virus infecting their whole being. What would it feel like to have so much of one’s being allocated to hatred and violence for someone who is most assuredly not in their life? What a way to suffer! It would be like having a burning rash you believe is caused by celebrities. Such a suffering, caused by a group of people nowhere in your actual life, only in the way you hold them in your mind. And since you believe the problem is the celebrities, you will not attend to the rash. I would like to show people who suffer in this way their rash. And show them there is something they can do about it. And give them the right medicine and show them how the celebrities do not cause it, celebrities are simply human beings like themselves who have parents and children and struggles like all humans. The problem is not the celebrities, the problem is what they feel in themselves when they think about the celebrities but until they see and acknowledge that, the rash will burn and burn.
People with that large, loud version of racism are the most symptomatic and the most contagious. They are so ill with it that they will reject the compassionate medicine that could help them heal. Like a wounded animal — they will not allow you near. They, like highly contagious others, should be isolated until they are healed. The rest of us aren’t so symptomatic. Our disease might be more like a small itch from time to time. A headache here and there. It can be easy to miss or ignore and assume it’s not affecting anything. Like the headache I carry with me into bedtime with my kids. I assume and tell myself I’m present and fine but part of me is holding my head, keeping myself more still, more careful and less expressive. It does affect things. And my kids can feel that reserve and they know they need to be careful of me, too.
How about this: I don’t see color?
We have to own the racism we’ve accumulated. We have to look at it if we want to play any part in the healing of this poor suffering world, nation, community, self. We cannot allow it to be unseen while we assure ourselves and others that we are OK. I’ve heard some of my most large-hearted and enlightened friends say they “don’t see color,” which is absolutely NOT the same as not being racist. To “not see color” is bypassing. Bypassing the hard work of knowing that there are biases and assumptions that may affect how you think of and relate to another human whose skin color is not considered white.
We can be curious about the granular humanity of another white person, painting the picture of them in our minds with small brushes and nuanced colors — curious about what they think and feel about politics and sports and other people, about their life stories, where they’ve traveled, what art or books they enjoy, what music they listen to, who their parents are and where their ancestors are from. We assign to them a broad experience of humanity because we know we have one and since they look like us, we assume they have one, too. But what do we assume about non-white people? Do we confer that broad and detailed a curiosity for non-white people? Is the brush size the same? Do we have the same palette? Since they do not look like us, do we give in to the devilish habit of solving unknowing with assumption or avoidance because that level of unknowing is uncomfortable? We have to pay close attention because the devil is in the details. The virus of racism hides in small ways of thinking.
So what do we do?
If we see how racism shows up in our lives we can begin to heal it. If we heal our own, we can begin to heal the racism in our communities. If communities can heal their racism, they can heal a nation, if a nation heals its racism, it can heal the world. But we cannot really talk about the experience of racism if we do not talk about shame. If you aren’t willing to feel some shame, you won’t take the long compassionate look that’s required. We cannot change what we will not see. We will not see what we do not feel. And if we do not feel what is there, we are in denial, separated from ourselves. If we are separated from ourselves, we will perpetuate all the divides that are burning us all down.
White Guilt is real. And though it is feeble and disempowered, we tell ourselves that the guilt itself is proof of our goodness. I can plead guilty, pay the fine, appease the court and remain exactly who I am — likely to offend again. Only if I am ashamed of that for which i’m guilty will I be moved to change, be made deeper and more aware so that I can be different in a useful way. My white guilt is like an uncomfortable embarrassment that I try to ignore and since I’m white, I can. But that doesn’t make it better. It is as effective as sweeping the dust under the rug. That works for when I have company and want to appear like a tidy human. But it doesn’t work if what I value is a clean house. If what I value is a clean house, I will feel uncomfortable, ashamed of, the dust I’ve swept under the rug. And if I feel ashamed of it, I will clean it. Because it is easier, after all, to clean the house than it is to try to ignore the feeling of shame for its filth.
What we try to keep in denying our racism
What do we feel we would give up if we had to own that we have racism? We would give up the constructed idea that we are a Good Guy. That does not mean we become a bad guy. It means we open up space for our goodness to be intentional. To come from an examined and grounded self-awareness, not just the idea we want to have of our self. To acknowledge racism in us is to be aware of a way in which we could be harmful to others (and ourselves) and then to intend to be more skillful so we can reduce that chance. It is like wearing a mask in public for the coronavirus. In wearing the mask we aren’t relinquishing our health, we are making important the health of everyone. In not wearing the mask, we are defending our belief that we are healthy and putting our own notions of our health ahead of everyone’s actual health.
We give up the hiding place of white privilege. But the hiding place is as effective as my son’s, his hands over his eyes, facing the wall, in front of me. Sure, I pretend I cannot see him and that his hiding place is killer. Are we asking non-white people to pretend that, too? I fear we are. It would be easier not to hide than to ask everyone to buy into the effectiveness of our effort. And to not hide would necessarily expose us, not to the reality of being non-white in this world, we don’t avoid that by hiding. We expose ourselves to the discomfort we actually feel from it, the shame we feel from our impotence, the grief we feel because we witness, willingly or no, the suffering of other humans. We are never hiding from the world. We only think we are. We are only ever hiding from ourselves.
We may also give up the perceived ease in having no responsibility to change the world. But is it easy to feel that we can’t, therefore don’t have to change it? Is it easy to live in a world inflamed and suffering, where innocent humans bear impossible burdens and are killed because they don’t look like us? Is it actually so easy as to simply look away? It is not. Because to look away is to acknowledge there is something terrible from which we are looking away. Looking away does not endow us with innocence. It is in the looking away, the relinquishing of responsibility to Know and to Feel, that we become the complicit chorus quietly, impotently worrying in the background while those most inflamed and contagious with the virus of racism do their worst.
No longer complicit
This here may be the most important point I wish for you to take away. If we acknowledge the racism lurking in us — those of us with the mild or even asymptomatic forms of the virus — if we humble ourselves, allowing ourselves to feel the discomfort so we can heal it, we become better, more honest humans, and we are no longer complicit. If we stop hiding, we are no longer complicit. If we determine to do whatever we can to honor the humanity in all humans, to wear the dang mask, we are no longer complicit. If we are no longer complicit with the hatred and violence of those grotesquely ill with the virus of racism we leave them exposed and isolated. And maybe if they feel the full force of isolation, the separation they experience will show them their shame. That gnarly, infected, throbbing shame their hatred and violence attempts to outrun.
In short, if we are able to see our own racism, those most infected will have to see theirs and the shame and separation that accompanies it. And the only way we can be sure we are not siding with them is to take a long, compassionate look at how we are siding with them. Asymptomatic or on a ventilator, the antibodies are the same. We can spread this virus with a silent breath as easily as with an uncovered cough. We need to be very real with ourselves about that. And then we choose what to do, wear the mask, stop the spread, then offer the antibodies to others so that we can move ourselves and the willing others toward the healing that this weary world so desperately needs.
Now, let’s take up this work. No longer stand on the side lines, forcing non-white people to try to heal us of our own sickness. No longer stand cheering them on as they do the hopeless, impossible Sysiphean task of changing us. The virus of racism is in us so we are the ones who need to heal it. This is our fight.
