Willful Forgetting

In the 2017 podcast series Seeing White (season 2 of Scene on Radio), Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at Rutgers University and frequent guest on the show, unpacks the phrase willful forgetting.

Concerning racial realities in America, the term refers to the phenomena of white America putting out of its consciousness our history of racial oppression and terror. The term struck a deep chord with me because I recognize willful forgetting in my work with clients as well as my own story.

On a Saturday afternoon, at age seven, I worked up my nerve to tell my mom about a form of abuse that was happening to me. I remember the knot in my stomach and the laundry basket of unfolded clothes I carried into the living room so I had something to focus on rather than look her in the eyes. For years I believed abuse stopped the next day. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I realized it was four months, a eternity for a first-grader, between our conversation and an event that delivered me.

That’s willful forgetting—when we remember reality in a way that creates the emotional distance we need from a truth we are incapable of holding.

What if the only way white America can end our willful forgetting of our country’s racial history is by confronting the natural, willful forgetting we’ve done with our own stories?

What if the very narratives we turn away from as a nation are the ones that could lead us back to our own?

Join me in exploring Harriet Jacob’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (available for free on Hoopla). Penned in the 1850’s and published in 1861, Jacobs was the first woman to author a fugitive slave narrative in the United States. At a time when state laws in the South made it a crime to teach the enslaved reading and writing, she used her words to reveal the awful truth of American slavery.

In her story you will see your story and that will enable you to more clearly see the stories of those around you.

Sign up for a 90-minute virtual group discussions (FREE for first time guests of my online membership community, Between Touches):

• Monday, September 28th 1:30pm-3:00pm MST

• Wednesday, September 30th 8:30am-10:00am MST

Benefit of Betrayal

In an April episode of the On Being podcast, Vietnamese poet Ocean Vuong eloquently describes the conundrum of being the child of an immigrant in America:

The great crisis of the first and second generation is the first generation made it here, and to live at all is such a privilege that they’re happy, and even encourage you to put your head down: work, fade away, get your meals, and live a quiet life. And I think the second generation, the great conundrum there, the great paradox, is that they want to be seen. They want to make something. And what a better way to make something and feel yourself with agency than to be an artist? So, so many of us immigrant children end up betraying our parents in order to subversively achieve our parents’ dreams.

There is growth and freedom for all of us in considering how our desire to be more seen in our stories meant leaving our parents and family culture. Vuong words offer us a way to reframe that betrayal as actually entering into our parents’ dreams for us, whether they see it that way or not.

Join my online group on Tuesday, July 28th, from 6:00-7:30 pm MST discussing two fabulous movies (The Big Sick & The Farewell) that explore the immigrant experience and what it has to offer all of us in understanding how we leave our family systems in order to enter into a truer life than our parents were able to give us.

Hurting Everyone

Last year, when I read this excerpt from Daniel Hill’s book White Awake, I didn’t disagree but I also didn’t understand.

White supremacy attacks the humanity of every living being. It attacks the personhood of people of color by promoting a hateful view that they are sub-human. It attacks the personhood of white people by promoting a hateful view that they are super-human. The enemy is not each other. It is the system of white supremacy and the evil one who leverages it for destructive purposes. We all need to have our humanity restored and re-calibrated to what and who God says we are. 

Last month, an experience in my “white” son’s life taught me, on a visceral level as a mother, how dangerous white supremacy is for all of us.

If you were to put our family of four on a racial spectrum it would look like this:

Previously not understanding the danger racism is for everyone, I naively worried more about my daughter, since she looks more Asian, than my son. She was the focus of my efforts to educate through documentaries, movies and news articles. But last month that changed.

In June, my kids tagged along with me to an apartment complex where I coordinated a church group moving a family into their new apartment. It was in an affordable housing complex in what is, for Denver, a diverse part of town.

After an hour of sticking around the big group, my son floated off with another boy he’d just met to the basketball courts. Twenty minutes later, he returned telling me about how an older, black teenager had flashed him the gun in his waistband as he stepped onto the court to play. My son was adamant that it was a warning for him alone because he looks white. Wisely, he was slow to exit the scene so as not to alarm the teenager or look like a snitch and after a few minutes made an excuse about being hungry and wanting to get something to eat. His new friend followed him back to our picnic.

You could tell my son’s story in a way that makes it about the danger of “rough” neighborhoods, the availability of guns in the “ghetto”, territorial gang behavior, or violent tendencies in black communities. But what if it’s really about America’s history of redlining communities of color, safety for black bodies when first responders aren’t allies, communal protection under oppression and how racism breeds fear of white bodies in black communities?

Though it took several hours after we were home for the adrenaline to leave my body, my version isn’t one of a black thug with a gun endangering my son’s life. That young man is also another woman’s son who in his efforts to feel safe, yields something that is more effective than a 911 call. I’m relieved for both my son and that young man, whose face I never saw, that nothing happened that day.

Being white in America today equates to privilege, power and wealth which means we experience only a fraction of the trauma communities of color face daily, but it does not make us safe from nor invincible against the dangers of racism.

Not Exempt, Not Enough

I am not yet confident enough to explain what it means to be anti-racist, but I’m starting to understand what it is not.

I lived outside the US for 17 years.

That’s not enough.

I didn’t vote for Trump.

That’s not enough.

I married a person of color.

That’s not enough.

I’m raising biracial children.

That’s not enough.

I even read Austin Channing Brown’s book I’m Still Here before it was on the New York Time’s Best Seller list.

Even that’s not enough.

I have a feeling that being anti-racist isn’t what I do outwardly but more about what I do when white supremacy manifests itself through me.

A few months ago I was in a room with beautiful people (talking about diversity and equity no less) and a colleague handed me a piece of paper that he later took back because of a printing error.

“Indian giver,” I called him jokingly.

My Native American colleague sitting besides me instantly gasped and confusion, terror and panic flooded me. It took only a few minutes in a short conversation with her to understand the magnitude of what I had said, but it took days for the shame to dissipate.

I left that encounter horrified that it had never occurred to me that the term was derogatory. I was tempted to believe that had been an unfortunate exception in how I communicate around people of color, but I know it wasn’t. I grew up in a small town outside Austin and I’ve said that phrase hundreds of times. It was just the first time I’d had gracious help interpreting it.

I am not exempt from being racist.

And I’d like to think that was a one time event, a singular blemish on my heart to love all people but this weekend reminded me it wasn’t.

Saturday, I was with a community of church volunteers helping a black client move into her new apartment. At one point she told us we could leave the mattresses in her living room and her kids would help her move them later. Before I could blink, the sentence, “You have plenty of slave labor if you need it,” began rolling off my lips. I caught myself mid sentence. Again, horror, terror and panic came. I don’t know if anyone heard me in the crowded, chattering room but I heard myself.

And I’m still wrestling with the shame.

I’m a social worker for God’s sake. I married a person of color. I raise biracial children. I’m hardly even American. I know better.

None of that is enough. None of that makes me exempt.

White supremacy is in me. It’s in my language, my frames of reference, my lens. It’s the reason I get a large tax return as a homeowner. It’s everywhere. It’s in my DNA.

How do I purge my very DNA?

I’m still answering this question but I know part of the process will include asking the pastor of the church and the mom we were all helping if they heard the first half of my sentence. It’ll involve repair.

But I’m not ready to do that yet. I’m waiting a few days for my shame to dissipate and my courage to build. It’ll take a few days before I approach them so that I’m ready to care for them instead of inviting them to care for me.

I am not exempt from being racist. I wonder if any of us are.