Forty-four
Looking back through old emails with my mother from 2006, I was struck by how cooperative she was being, or was trying to be, at the time. She said she was ready to go to counseling, ready to do whatever was necessary to help me through that rough time. I was complaining about not getting interviews and jobs while my white colleagues did. My mother was upset on my behalf and asked if I should contact the ACLU.
My parents tried to meet me halfway during my journey, but that was the problem: I didn’t want to meet halfway. I wanted to meet on my terms because I was too angry and hurt. I felt like I had lived my whole life by their terms and the terms of all our friends and family that wanted to protect my parents from the reality they’d created. I love my parents, and I know they love me, but I live on my own terms now.
Racism runs deep, even in people who don’t consider themselves racist. Any time I leveled that accusation against my parents they felt wrongfully attacked. But what else could you call it? Whiteness was protecting itself at my expense, and the racism lay in assuming that blackness and race were things my parents needed to be protected from. They should have known better, and maybe they did. Maintaining whiteness in the service of white supremacy turns people into cowards.
I don’t know where my parents fall on the spectrum of white racial identity development, but I don’t think they have integrated their whiteness into an awareness of structural racism. Or maybe, as with my racial identity, they knew about their role in upholding a society that grants them privilege but were never forced to confront it. I’ve learned that even when white people are forced to confront race and racism, it’s easy for them to turn way.
My brother Tom and his wife, Julie, live in a house near my parents and have two adorable sons. Their black Lab, Pepper, is rambunctious but better behaved than cake-stealing Knight. Tom has always been supportive of me and speaks out against white supremacy when family arguments arise. I hope his sons take advantage of his and Julie’s wisdom and grow up with a broader, more inclusive worldview than we did.
Years after the revelation, I wrote to Tom asking what he remembered from that day. I remembered that he was mostly quiet then, and though he expressed his unconditional support for me afterward, we had never talked about what happened.
“I drove with Mommy/Daddy from Pittsburgh to Princeton, sitting in the back seat, and I remember it being cold/snowy,” he wrote.
When we got closer to Princeton—maybe about an hour away—I remember the silence being broken by Mommy with a line along the lines of “there is something we need to tell you about Sarah.” The story started with something like “when we were in college before Daddy and I were dating or married, something happened” and I forget the rest of the story because I remember cutting off Mommy and saying “so Daddy is not Sarah’s real father?” She answered “no” and I remember feeling a bit betrayed by the secrecy and purposefully asked to be spared of additional details/explanation because I felt like I couldn’t trust it.
He wrote that it felt surreal because part of him already knew. For the rest of the ride, memories flooded back of moments when friends or other people asked if I was really his sister. Like Pat and I, he always brushed those questions off. Now, the tone and frequency of the questions suddenly made sense.
I remember feeling guilty in the moment because deep-down I didn’t believe her version of the story.… I also remember how resistant she was to any sort of probing or deeper questioning as if our curiosity to finally get to the actual truth was an affront to her somehow. So even in the moment of “there’s something we need to tell you about Sarah” the irony was that I still felt like we weren’t being told anything. Later—I also found out that it was your questioning and jolt that even brought the “truth” out into reality, and it made me realize that we would have been lied to forever if Mommy had her way.
Like Pat and I, part of Tom always knew the truth, but he could never say it. Now, we all felt betrayed and guilty. We’ve all given up on learning more from my parents. When I asked Tom if I could quote some of his letter in the memoir, he responded, “Whatever you need.”
My brother Patrick is now a Zen Buddhist priest at the Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon. The priests and practitioners in this community are almost exclusively white. Recently, the Zen Community of Oregon created a workshop series called Awakening to Whiteness, in which Buddhist practitioners examined the ways in which they were complicit in structural white supremacy. Portland is considered a kind of liberal mecca, especially for young people, but it is also the whitest major American city per capita. Oregon has a history of disenfranchising indigenous peoples. Patrick said it was a difficult, humbling experience but a valuable one. I practice Zen meditation and have been encouraged by more efforts in the community to engage in active anti-racism and highlight the contributions of priests and practitioners of color. White anti-racism must be intentional, not passive conversation and confrontation with the most uncomfortable parts of the self. It is an intervention I must constantly make as I face the ways I have upheld and continue to uphold white supremacy.
I don’t know where I fall on the black, biracial, or even the white identity development spectrum. I’ve come a long way from the lost, confused young woman who could not understand what she saw in the mirror and who relied on others to define her. There are times I still feel inauthentic and “too white,” and I have to remind myself that I, too, am valid. I know personal development does not follow a straight line and that anger, doubt, fear, acceptance, serenity, and love can exist in one body at the same time.
For a long time, I felt like a bundle of fragments, and I wanted to be whole. I wanted to be able to write a family history that answered all my questions and filled in all the blanks, but all I got were different versions of the past and an incomplete, unfulfilling present. By degrees the loss, the absences, became part of my foundation. Like any spectrum, it is in the breaking apart that we find beauty. And when the rainbow fades and things no longer make sense, we marshal that light and do it again.
Three weeks old, with my parents on my first visit to my grandparents’ house. Beaver, Pennsylvania, 1977. (COURTESY OF MARY MARTIN)
My dad teaches me to ride a bike. Flourtown, Pennsylvania, 1979. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
Four years old. My nightshirt says, “All Girls Are Important.” Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1982. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
Christmas-sweater photo with my brothers, Patrick and Thomas. Wexford, Pennsylvania, 1995. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
With my brothers after my dissertation defense. Princeton, New Jersey, 2007. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
With my former in-laws for an Igbo memorial celebration. London, United Kingdom, 2011.
With my aunt, Kathleen Dunn (my father’s sister), and my newborn nephew, Harrison Dunn. Wexford, Pennsylvania, 2015. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
My maternal grandfather in his U.S. Army uniform during the Korean War, approximately 1950. His family emigrated to the U.S. from Italy around 1920.
My maternal great-great-grandparents, Martin Zelenak and Anna Potochnak Zelenak, and their family. They were born in Austria-Hungary in the early 1880s and emigrated to the U.S. between 1905–1910. My great-grandmother, Anna Zelenak, is topmost. Beaver, Pennsylvania, around 1920.
Portrait of my maternal great-great grandmother (center row, second from right), my great aunt (center row, third from right), my great uncle (center row, far right), and their children. My great uncle was a Greek Orthodox priest and the brother of my great grandfather, Michael Mikedis. Michael Mikedis was born in Chios, Greece in 1895 and emigrated to the United States on his own in the 1920s. According to my grandmother, my great uncle’s family never visited the U.S., but they must have sent this photo, taken in Chios, Greece, around 1940.
About the Author
SARAH VALENTINE, PH.D, is a widely published author and translator whose interests include Russian literature, poetry, the mixed-race experience, mystery, horror,
true crime, folklore, and ghost stories. In 2013 she was Lannan Fellow and has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton, UCLA, UC-Riverside, and Northwestern University. When I Was White is her first Book. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Photographs
About the Author
Copyright
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
WHEN I WAS WHITE. Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Valentine. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
Lucille Clifton, “why some people be mad at me sometimes,” from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
Cover design by Rowen Davis
Cover photograph by Charlie Schuck / Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-14675-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-14676-2 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250146762
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First Edition: August 2019
When I Was White Page 24