identity – Stone Soup NH

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.

There exists in psychology a concept named the Johari Window. This model (shown above) describes “selves” based on what we know about ourselves and what others know about us (either because we told them or they figured it out.) The model is about individuals in general, but I keep wanting to apply it to white[i] individuals who want to be part of dismantling racism. In this context:

Open Self–that which we and others know about–could be the “I’m not a racist”, “I don’t see color”, or “I read Baldwin” face we give to the world. It’s important to note that this isn’t necessary a lie or a cover… it just isn’t all there is to the story.

Blind self could also be blind spots… those things you don’t know about yourself but others see. Maybe the cheer-filled overcompensation when you make a point of saying hi to the only Black person at the party solely because you want them to feel welcome and worry they might not. (Saying “hi” is fine, and striking up a conversation as you would with any person, but grinning like a fool while you do so might convey something besides ease to the person you are greeting.) Or it could be a little flinch when a large Black man in casual weekend wear gets onto an elevator with you alone. You might not be aware of it, but chances are pretty good he’ll notice.

Hidden self is the material you are aware of, but do not let show. It could be that you still hear your beloved uncle’s voice using a nasty racial slur when you pass a group of boisterous youth on the street, or that you kind of think maybe cops should be worried in neighborhoods of color and have a right to protect themselves though you don’t say so out loud, or that you decided to buy that house you loved and could afford even though the realtor told you with a wink that only “the right sort of people” were shown homes in that neighborhood.

Unknown self is what lives in each of us unseen by anyone. This could be all the undiscovered messages about whiteness and how they shape who we are in the world and with others. Through experience, personal refection, and relationship some of this hidden material can be brought into one of the other three selves. We’ll never know all the details of that dream that unsettled us or left us feeling whole when we woke, but we can learn more about what we’ve been told about race, what we made of it, and how we behave based on that understanding.

So, being human, we all have all of these selves. No one (at least no one I’ll work with for long) is asking us to not have areas of which we are ashamed or unaware. We are asked, however, to take responsibility for seeing each of these areas more clearly so we can then address what requires attention.

In my experience noticing how my open and hidden selves do (or don’t) align gives me information I need to be more consistent with myself. This, I’ve observed, seems to increase the authenticity with which I meet the world. Moving beyond that, believing (and being grateful for) feedback about how I’m Doing Whiteness (mostly from POC) gives me insight into my blind self which enables me to move that content from my blind self to my open or hidden self. This also increases my authenticity in my relationships. We have less ability to explore and integrate the unknown self intentionally, but I’m betting that working on the other three is a good way to start.

image: 2.bp.blogspot.com/-fP8sevs0xBo/UVQYpshKSCI/AAAAAAAAAw8/e8pya-PNsz4/s1600/Johari+Window.jpg

[i] Standard disclaimer: White, Black, and POC used here for readability only. None of these are quantifiable human attributes, but point to socially created and supported racial identities which cause no end of mischief and which, therefore, we need words to talk about.