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Page 9
White female fragility and victimhood are the first two things that came to mind. But I didn’t have the time or energy to focus on that. In that moment, I was fighting for control of my son’s educational well-being and the narrative that was being spun already at four. I knew that from a research and intellectual perspective this stuff happened, but when you’re actually experiencing it, you are in survival mode. I knew that I needed to find teachers who understood young children’s social and emotional development and who also had a deeper awareness of how white supremacy reigns and manifests in preschool, where the rates of suspension and expulsion are greater than they are for youth in K–12.
Fortunately, I found a new preschool and teachers who got it. They comprehend the inherent danger in labeling young Black boys, and they also understand that didn’t have to adultify my four-year-old … that he is a young child, an evolving and not fully socialized human being just like his white peers in the new classroom. It’s not that he doesn’t still have tantrums and doesn’t need guidance. “They all have something to work on!” the new teachers exclaimed when I shared my now heightened concerns about the tantrums (based on the prior experiences in the old school).
As they spoke to me openly and explicitly about racial bias in schools, especially against Black boys, and talked from their personal experiences, I knew that I had potentially found some dream keepers—teachers with a deep awareness of how our racist, classist, sexist society works and whose express desire is to keep the hopes and dreams alive for all children through effective teaching, sharing, caring, and loving.
So no, I don’t think about that white teacher with the tears, or the school director whose anger I fueled because I pointed out the inherent violence in her description of my four-year-old as violent. I couldn’t give a damn. What this experience has taught me is that I will have to be vigilant for the rest of his school years, and I lament the fact that parents with less means don’t have the privilege of making choices that I do.
Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit, you can’t win for losing. I am suddenly Bunk Moreland from David Simon’s The Wire as I recount my friend’s story about her son to a woman who jolts me out of Bunk’s saying. Or is she locking me into it when she reminds me of the twelve-year-old black girls who were allegedly “evaluated” by their school nurse in a manner described to be like those who are strip-searched. The girls were said to be “hyper and giddy” when they exhibited too much laughter, too much joy, too much levity in their Binghamton, New York, middle school, so were then asked to strip down because joy is too much and the tantrums are violent and the skin is too dark and the blackness is unbearable.
Or, as Fred Moten has written in his description of blackness for Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffery O. G. Ogbar’s Keywords for African American Studies, “The analysis of our murderer, and of our murder, is so we can see we are not murdered. We survive. And then, as we catch a sudden glimpse of ourselves, we shudder. For we are shattered. Nothing survives. The nothingness we share is all that’s real. That’s what we come out to show. That showing is, or ought to be, our constant study.” Study, yes, but the life of it also remains a constant negotiation. Is the harassment of black children by grown people an inability to contain their irritation at our survival? What did Adrian Piper say? “Everything will be taken away.” And still we remain demanding a little R&R: Reparations and Reconstruction.
NOTES
1. Text Wondering what goes on in the imagination of the Asian boy who also attends this diverse preschool, I decide one possibility could be that he has been read “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” so many times his visual memory was assaulted.
Notes and Sources Response to a request for permission to use an illustration of a traditional image of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”:
Hi xxxx,
Thanks for sending on the text that you wanted xxxxx’s illustration of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” to accompany. We appreciate being able to read the article and found it very interesting. We have decided, however, that we would prefer not to have this illustration accompany that article.
We wish you the best of luck in finding an illustrator who will want their image used in this way—perhaps it will be easier to find an image available in the public domain.
Best wishes,
xxxx and xxxxxxx
2. Text I am suddenly flooded by a memory of all the doll tests done over the years based on psychologists Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll tests, the results of which were used in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka to show the adverse effect of racism on black children, but what about the adverse effects on white children?
Fact Check Yes.
Notes and Sources K. B. Clark, “Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development” (paper presented at the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950), as cited in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, footnote 11. Clark discusses the specific document cited in that footnote in his book Prejudice and the Child. That entire introductory chapter gives an excellent fine-grained overview of the exact submissions attorneys for the plaintiff made to the court. The historian of science John P. Jackson conducts a thorough review of the Clarks’ research and Kenneth’s testimony in the cases leading up to Brown in his book Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation. See Harvard law professor Lani Guinier’s article “From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma” for an examination of the “discontinuity between Brown’s early promise and its present reality”; Guinier includes a review of the role the Clarks’ research played in the case: “It is an open question whether any legal analysis, even one grounded in more rigorous social science research or employing a more balanced assessment of segregation’s causes and effects, could have accomplished the goals of the Brown attorneys or could now accomplish the massive tasks that still await us: to extirpate a complex system of relationships that have tortured this country from its earliest beginnings and then to refashion a new social and economic order in its place.”
3. Text Winkler’s argument is also supported by the work of psychologists Phyllis Katz and Jennifer Kofkin in their 1997 article “Race, Gender, and Young Children.” They followed black and white children …
Notes and Sources P. A. Katz and J. A. Kofkin, “Race, Gender, and Young Children”: “Some researchers have found that young children prefer same-race peers (Finkelstein & Haskins, 1983; Newman, Liss, & Sherman, 1983), although most report a preference for ethnic majority group members and a bias against dark skin colors (e.g., Jaffe, 1988; Porter, 1991; Spencer & Markstrom-Adams, 1990).” In S. S. Luthar et al., Developmental Psychopathology: Perspectives on Adjustment, Risk, and Disorder.
4. Text It’s difficult to be hopeful when even the “eye gaze patterns” of teachers in preschool tend to target black children, especially boys, at the sign of any disturbance in the classroom.
Notes and Sources A 2016 study by the Yale Child Center, “Do Early Educators’ Implicit Biases Regarding Sex and Race Relate to Behavior Expectations and Recommendations of Preschool Expulsions and Suspensions?”: “Our findings demonstrate that early education staff tend to observe more closely Blacks, and especially Black boys when challenging behaviors are expected. These findings are important to consider given that no behavioral challenges were present in the videos, suggesting, in part, that preschool teachers may hold differential expectations of challenging behaviors based on the race of the child…. Of note, these eye-tracking results closely corresponded with participants’ conscious appraisal of which child they felt required the most of their attention, with Black boys being endorsed as requiring the most attention by 42% of early education staff (68% more than expected by chance alone). Additionally, boys in general, were endorsed as requiring the most attention by 76% of early education staff (52% more than expected by chance alone), consistent with research showing that boys (regardless of race
) are at greater risk for classroom removal.”
5. Text When she removed her son from the school, his white teacher cried because there should be no consequences to the school staff’s reading of black boyhood as violent.
Notes and Sources Phillip Atiba Goff, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: “Because dehumanization involves the denial of full humanness to others (Haslam, 2006), one would expect a reduction of social considerations offered to humans for those who are dehumanized. This reduction violates one defining characteristic of children—being innocent and thus needing protection—rendering the category ‘children’ less essential and distinct from adults.”
6. Text Was I being ungenerous in my dismissal of the teacher’s feelings? She cried because emotionally she was sad about what was happening.
Notes and Sources Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: “Consequently, if we whites want to interrupt this system, we have to get racially uncomfortable and to be willing to examine the effects of our racial engagement. This includes not indulging in whatever reactions we have—anger, defensiveness, self-pity, and so forth—in a given cross-racial encounter without first reflecting on what is driving our reactions and how they will affect other people. Tears that are driven by white guilt are self-indulgent. When we are mired in guilt, we are narcissistic and ineffective; guilt functions as an excuse for inaction. Further, because we so seldom have authentic and sustained cross-racial relationships, our tears do not feel like solidarity to people of color we have not previously supported. Instead, our tears function as impotent reflexes that don’t lead to constructive action. We need to reflect on when we cry and when we don’t, and why.”
sound and fury
The gloom is
the off-white of white. Because white can’t know
what white knows. Where’s the life in that?
Where’s the right in that? Where’s the white in that?
At the bone of bone white breathes the fear of being,
the frustration of seeming unequal to white.
White portraits on white walls signal ownership of all,
even as white walls white in.1
And this is understandable, yes,
understandable because the culture claims white
is owed everything—a wealth of inheritance
a system insures. In each generation
the equation holds—and better than
before and indifferent to now and enough
and always and inevitably white.
This is what it means to wear a color and believe
its touch an embrace. Even without luck
or chance of birth the scaffolding has rungs
and legacy and the myth of meritocracy fixed in white.
That’s how white holds itself together
as the days hold so many white would not—
White is living within brick-and-mortar, walling off
all others’ loss, exhaustion, aggrieved
exposure, dispossessed despair—
in daylight white hardens its features.
Eyes, which hold all light, harden.
Jaws, closing down on justice,
harden into a fury that will not call
white to account even as for some
its pledge is cut out from under.
If people could just come clean about their lives,
even as poverty exists inside white walls,
and just being white is what’s working.
Who implies white could disown its own
even as white won’t strike its own structure.
Even as white won’t oust its own system.
All redress fuels nothing the second another
can be thrown out.
In daylight white’s right to righteous rage
doubles down on the supremacy
of white in our way.
NOTES
1. Text White portraits on white walls signal ownership of all, even as white walls white in.
Notes and Sources Abigail Cain, “How the White Cube Came to Dominate the Art World”: “But it wasn’t until the Third Reich took hold of the country during the 1930s that white became the standardized color for German gallery walls. ‘In England and France white only becomes a dominant wall colour in museums after the Second World War, so one is almost tempted to speak of the white cube as a Nazi invention,’ [Charlotte] Klonk said. ‘At the same time, the Nazis also mobilized the traditional connotation of white as a colour of purity, but this played no role when the flexible white exhibition container became the default mode for displaying art in the museum.’”
Elena Filipovic, “The Global White Cube”: “Particular to the white cube is that it operates under the pretense that its seeming invisibility allows the artwork best to speak; it seems blank, innocent, unspecific, insignificant. Ultimately, what makes a white cube a white cube is that, in our experience of it, ideology and form meet, and all without our noticing it. Years after Barr invoked the white cube as the hallmark of the MoMA’s exhibition spaces, Hitler approved of its use for the interior of the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 1937, the Nazis’ first architectural project after coming to power. That monumental new building with its interior of vast well-lit gallery spaces, all white and windowless, opened with the exhibition Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition). The white container and sober display served to make the painted idyllic landscapes and bronze Aryan bodies on view seem natural and innocuous, despite the belligerent motives that underlay their selection and presentation. Driving home the point, the demonstration was doubly staged; Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung was the ‘acceptable,’ positive pendant to the somber, densely cluttered, and apparently disorganized show Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) that opened in a nearby archeological institute the following day. Thanks to such a contrast, the artworks in the former seemed all the more righteous and those in the latter all the more abhorrent. There is no denying the coincidence: When the aestheticization of politics reached terrifying proportions, the white cube was called in. New York and Munich, 1929 and 1937.”
big little lies
I’m speaking to a white friend about the class breakdown in the television series Big Little Lies. Economic stability or instability gets communicated by the size and location of the different characters’ homes. My friend and I live in similar houses, with comparable layouts and approximately the same square footage. This is, perhaps, why I make the careless mistake of putting us in the same class category as Reese Witherspoon’s character in the show. I say we are represented by the couple whose nice house doesn’t overlook anything—water, cliff, or any other natural wonder.
This claim hasn’t completely left my lips before I’m stalled by the thought that I have no inherited wealth; I didn’t have a choice about whether to work outside the home while raising my child as my friend did, and, and …1
I recant as quickly as I’d claimed the twinning based on the similarity of our homes’ layouts. It’s an odd error to have made, but my friend and I do have lives that look similar: both of us are writers with equivalent educational backgrounds, life traumas, and aspirations for ourselves and our families. We have known each other much of our adult lives, and perhaps affection and familiarity made me momentarily oblivious to our differences.
Our economic histories point in part to our racial histories—not that there aren’t individual blacks wealthier than my friend, but typically, even if we arrived in the same dorm room, we don’t actually wind up in the same place economically, since whites have a median net worth that is ten times that of blacks.2 Our different races have positioned us in the world in radically different ways—her wealth goes back to the Mayflower, and her white Anglo-Saxon positioning is how she explains many things about her life. My own immigration from a previously coloni
zed country, naturalized American citizenship, and status as a first-generation college-educated black woman account for much about me. Any attempt to erase these differences ultimately destabilizes us, because, despite our many connections, despite sitting across from each other, we have been pushed out of a structure from opposing ends through the doorway of our shared culture, to sit across from each other.3 I begin to remember all the turbulence and disturbances between us that contributed to the making of this moment of ease and comfort.
After my friend’s departure, I pick up my mistake like a snow globe and turn it over in my mind. My assumption reminds me of a comment made by a white man on a flight I took: “I don’t see color.” Like him, a lack of discomfort allowed me, for a nanosecond, to disregard history and the institutional structures put in place to predetermine that my friend and I can never slip on sameness.