The Journey of our Whiteness

A critical questionnaire that begs the question, and offers some answers

A short while ago I finished a questionnaire by fellow Medium writer Michelle Silverthorn. I found it not only instructive but also deeply revealing, and important enough to share with what I hope is going to be a broader and different audience. Those of us who do not seek out and read Black writers on Medium and elsewhere end up finding themselves, as is often the case, in an echo chamber.

Our whiteness and the “rightness” and normalcy of that whiteness is perpetuated and reinforced by what our parents introduce us to and surround us with, as well as what we read. Most of us never question this, nor are we taught to question this, despite the presence of great authors, speakers, entertainers of color and consequence. We are taught to marginalize without even knowing that we do so. Michelle created a questionnaire that I found both provocative and informative.

This is her original article:

As someone who speaks on these issues, Michelle has done plenty of work, and her questionnaire is part of that work. I present it here because of all the articles I keep seeing about white folks asking what they can do.

Well, that’s a good question. You might not be able to do much to change what’s happening this very minute (in order to feel less guilty, for example) but you sure can change the conversation going forward. The primary way is what we teach our kids, what we model, what we expose them to, and the life that we demonstrate.

Our journey begins with understanding how you and I continue to make choices, whether or not we realize it, by how we guide what our kids see, hear, experience. That is of course largely guided by what our parents did for us. I found this process very revealing.

Hence, her questionnaire:

• What were the races of your three best friends when you were nine?
• When you were 19?
• When you were 39?
• What about your first boss?
• Your last boss?
• Your wedding party?
• Your first crush?
• Your first mentor?
• Your favorite high school teacher?
• Your dentist?
• Your closest neighbor?
• What race is your child’s best friend?
• What about your child’s favorite author?
• Your favorite author?
• The star of your favorite movie?
• Your doctor?
• Your dentist?
• The president?

My answers are in her comments section. However, I added a few additional pieces: our clients, and our current closest friends, and I might also add, whom we dated. My dating life has long been as varied and colorful as my upbringing.

From her article:

What does it lead to? The average white American has 91 white friends and nine friends of color, including just one black friend. Seventy-five percent of white Americans have no friends of color at all. Seventy-five percent.

Her numbers point to what you and I consider normal.

Our choice of numbers of friends is highly individual. I have very few deep, close friends. Five, in fact, and of them, two are Black, one gay, one Hispanic. Being a deeply private person, I don’t socialize much at all, never have. But those with whom I talk regularly, people who have the deepest part of my heart, form a rich mix of colors, genders, backgrounds and sexual preferences. I don’t choose them because they are of color or other-gendered, the way you might adorn yourself with a pretty coat that you don and remove to impress people. I chose them because of who they are. Those friendships evolved organically because of how I live, who I hang around and the openness, or lack thereof, I have towards communities of color.

As it is for us all.

My personal journey, to which I owe my parents a deep vote of thanks, was anything but color blind. I cannot recall a time during my childhood that I did not have Black friends, did not have Black playmates, was not surrounded by Black people. My parents wanted Martin Luther King to run for President. Our family discussions were inclusive just as my childhood was inclusive. For my part, it’s uncomfortable if I don’t see faces of color in the room and in the stores and on the street. I realize that especially for my Boomer generation that isn’t particularly common, but in this regard my parents were uncommon. It would be difficult to express adequate thanks to my parents for this part of my education.

Being people of their generation, however, they did not socialize with Black people, we didn’t have Black folks over for dinner. It reminds me of Driving Miss Daisy, wherein Miss Daisy will attend a speech on civil rights while not having the slightest idea that her Black driver should by rights have been invited to attend with her. It just didn’t occur. He was left to listen to the speech on the car radio.

And still I haven’t done enough. I’m not sure I ever can.

Michelle and other Black writers are responding as best they can to the late-to-the-party questions from their white friends who want to know what they can do. My background and upbringing in no way forgives any lack of action or engagement on my part which leads to the kinds of situations we have today. Each of us can do much, much more, including ideas from this very thorough article:

For years I’ve worked in the diversity space. In that space, called supplier diversity, my role was to teach minorities, women, LGBT, disabled and other protected classes how to break the barriers of providing supplies and services to the Fortune 500.

Economic power is power in America, and for my part, one key way you earn a place at the table is to become economically viable as a group. For nearly two decades I taught seminars to up-and-coming entrepreneurs who hoped to expand their operations and grow. There are significant organizations which have been around for decades (such as https://nmsdc.org, https://www.wbenc.org/, https://www.nglcc.org/ and others) whose sole purpose is to certify and support businesses so that they can become part of the supply chain.

That means money. Money means being able to grow a business, hire more people, and grow communities. For my part, that is one of the key factors in changing the conversation around opportunity: create wealth. Where you can create wealth, you can begin to change education, poverty, housing, and a host of other issues which have plagued communities of color.

So if I can add my voice to what you and I can do, I might note that where you can buy Black, bank Black, and create economic value with and for the Black community, that offers terrific value.

Having money, wealth and the appearance of economic power does not change how society sees you, however, as any wealthy Black family can attest. Yesterday I read a story on Twitter about a large Black man, a gentleman of wealth in the music industry, who was shamed while waiting to board in first class by a white woman who kept telling him that it wasn’t his turn to board yet. Nowhere in America is our caste system so reinforced as in the boarding process. Having money in and if itself doesn’t change the conversation.

You can be the Black CEO of a massive American corporation and still be arrested or detained for Driving While Black. Red-faced apologies might ensue, but nothing has changed until society itself normalizes Black (and female and Hispanic and transgendered etc) faces on the top floor, the corner office, all the places of power and influence we are so chary about sharing.

You can be a Black police chief and be profiled:

Having an upbringing that normalizes color can make a massive difference. Until I took Michelle’s questionnaire, I had no idea just how much.

Even though my work in supplier diversity put me in constant contact with senior corporate executives of color, I was also well aware of those Supply Chain executives and Chief Diversity execs who had the title, but not the financial backing of their CEOs. As with so many white people with one Black friend, you and I may well be mirroring the American boardroom with one Black friend as a token gesture to diversity. But as with the CDO sans financial teeth to fully diversify management and senior management in a corporation, do we really give much agency to our Black friends, or do we trot out their existence as proof that we aren’t racists or don’t suffer from bias only when conditions get uncomfortable, as they are now?

Are they ornaments, or are they essential aspects of who we are, our quality of life? Do we allow them to define who and what we are and might become? If our Black friends/executives/politicians are still little more than superficial “evidence” of how far we’ve come, then I would point out that we as individuals have made little progress, any more than our major institutions.

I still remember the hair on my neck rising when I read this story four years ago:

This kind of blind bias is born of upbringings which simply cannot allow for excellence in communities of color. Confirmation bias makes us blind.

Every October (but for this year, sadly) I speak at a conference that celebrates the graduation of hundreds of Black PhDs. Some Hispanic and Asian, but mostly Black. This would have been my 18th year. Those annual experiences continue to normalize Black academic excellence for me. Outside the safety of where these young adults work as academics, however, the veracity of their credentials gets questioned the same way that Dr. Cross got dismissed as not being a “real doctor” on her Delta flight. This is what I wrote about the annual PhD conference:

The reason that what SREB is doing is so important is that kids of color stay in classes and colleges longer when their teachers are of color. When professors are of color. So SREB has dedicated itself to populating prestigious American Institutions with professors who reflect our changing demographics. That’s just one reason I speak there every year. The other is that those brilliant young adults ask for me back, which is by far the greatest compliment. I love being one of the few white faces in an ocean of Black brilliance. In an extremely small way, my programs on networking skills are adding value.

Drop in the ocean. But every single one of them counts.

Because this:

In 2002 I was in South Africa in Gaansbai, where I would dive with Great White sharks. My host, skipper Brian McFarland, had me join the couple for dinner. I was exposed repeatedly to racist and ignorant remarks that infuriated me. As their guest and being in another country, there are lines you cannot cross. Whatever I said was written off as vague, uninformed American liberalism. In a land where one of the world’s greatest leaders, Nelson Mandela, had risen to prominence, Mrs. McFarland’s comments that Blacks could “sing and dance but not much else” rankled me mightily. I didn’t belong there.

That visit ended badly, just as any attempt to change a righteous closed mind will end badly.

Kids’ minds are largely still open, which is why they’re so easy to twist. There’s a key scene in the movie 42 where a young white boy is sitting in the stands with his father, watching the great Jackie Robinson play in his rookie year. The boy, initially confused by screams of n — — r that rise around him in response to Robinson, shortly begins to scream the same epithet. Not his fault. He is simply modeling what his father and those around him demonstrate.

Precisely what I hear that Michelle is saying.

While I’m certainly somewhat aware of how my upbringing has guided not only my thinking but also my choice of friends, dating life and travel, I’ve never taken the time to really pick it apart and assess it until I took this questionnaire. I didn’t use the answers to justify who and what I am, but to better understand. The harder step is to ask what else I could have done, can still do.

We all have a piece of this. No matter how you and I fare on the answers to those questions, we all still have a piece going forward. It’s not about finding ways to feel better, to calm our discomfort. Discomfort by definition forces growth. We as a nation have never felt enough discomfort to do much of anything to change how well we live on the backs of our Black brothers and sisters, and their collective discomfort.

Your answers to her questionnaire, to my mind, give the lay of the land where you began. It can also point a way forward. But not unless you and I are willing to let go of the land we inhabit, which is on fire right now. As it should be. As it needs to be. As it has always been, but we don’t like looking at the bonfire we continue to allow to burn.

As along as we don’t like looking at, working with, standing next to, shopping with and eating in the same places as Black faces, it will always be a conflagration. For me, an all-white room isn’t normal. It’s downright uncomfortable. But until far more of us feel that way, far more of us function that way, far more of us take the risk to speak out and write about it, you and I have a great deal more work to do.

My thanks to Michelle for this excellent piece of work. I hope my fellow readers will pass her article and questionnaire along.