It’s a journey of layers, understanding the impact of this Skin I’m In.
Though I’ll never call myself “woke”, I know I’m making progress when I bump into questions I can’t answer. Then I live next to them for a while. Sometimes the right knowledge will drop and a barrier will shatter and I will see more depth in the pattern. Glass shattered this week when I listened to an amazing podcast series on racial politics, Scene on Radio’s Seeing White. (The first of the 14 parts can be found here.)
The questions I’ve been holding recently concern Structural Racism. I’ve been studying on them and get it that, for example, a group of people kept from using the GI Bill and cheap mortgage rates after WWII are unlikely to be in the middle class a few generations later. I get it that African Americans have a harder time getting jobs and finding apartments. I know bias and/or racism means that African American, Native American, and Latinx people are in more danger at the hands of police than I am. I was not surprised by last month’s events in Charlottesville.
However, I did not grasp the concrete ways White people have been constructing racial identity to permit the violent exploitation of specific groups since the 1400s. I missed the unavoidable truth that the people we now call White created the idea of race identity so we could rationalize forcing other people to do our work for us, killing them, and stealing their homes. Whiteness exists for the purpose of supporting injustice. Whiteness isn’t a by-product of the problem, it is the problem.
Not sure how I missed this, but there it is.
Though we are all literal cousins to each other, a vile 600-year-old story has been woven around evolution based on where our ancestors went when (if) they left Africa. It is a story that holds each of us apart from our full humanity. For White people, our racial identity is the material composing the bars that exist to constrain our family members.
As Chenjerai Kumanyika (a collaborator on the Seeing White series) says at the end of Part 2, this makes “good whiteness” a contradiction. Accepting this and moving on, I’m just working out how to navigate over broken glass.
Stone Soup NH 
“However, I did not grasp the concrete ways White people have been constructing racial identity to permit the violent exploitation of specific groups since the 1400s. I missed the unavoidable truth that the people we now call White created the idea of race identity so we could rationalize forcing other people to do our work for us, killing them, and stealing their homes. Whiteness exists for the purpose of supporting injustice. Whiteness isn’t a by-product of the problem, it is the problem.”
If everyone was able to understand this, the world would be SO different. Thank you for sharing.
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