Why I Deleted a Story on Medium
Poor timing, radioactive language and what my Black friends are saying
Earlier this weekend I dumped a story which was heartfelt, well-intended and written for all the right reasons.
In several days it made more money than most of all my other articles lately, but for reasons I’m not comfortable about.
The title, about being Lucky and Privileged as insults, landed precisely at the time when white privilege has become a massively hot topic. While it’s always terribly important, it’s now a maelstrom. For damned good reasons, all of which I support wholeheartedly. We are in sore need of a revolution.
My article, however, had little to do with the incidents which have captured the national conversation. It was written a while back to discuss how another Medium writer’s piece about travel brought up issues around how petty jealousy and hate demean us. I used the term privilege- but not in the same sense the word is now being used.
Yet the piece, as happens at times, landed squarely in the middle of that debate. And no matter what I wrote to clarify that my article was in no way a response to current events, it was read by some folks as a defensive treatise to just that.
I spent over an hour composing an explanation to one reader who called me on the carpet, albeit gently, (for which I am grateful) about being a bit tone-deaf about white privilege. I realized after I penned my respectful response, then trying putting an explanation to Dear Reader in the article, that it was a lost cause.
The more words you throw at an issue, the more you try to explain yourself, the deeper the grave you dig. The more words you write, the more words others may take out of context and use against you in the winner take all, lose/lose game of I’m right and you’re wrong.
As to my Lucky/Privileged piece, my sole intent was to pull back the canvas on the bad habit of being jealous about perceived advantages, true or untrue, between any two human beings about just about anything. Usually dumb shit like body type or weight loss or things that have nothing to do with the firestorm that currently engulfs the term privilege.
Self-hate and jealousy make everyone an enemy, deserved or not. That was my point.
No matter what I said, wrote, or explained, that article was going to be a flashpoint for people looking to point out defense of white privilege. This is how we go blind, deaf and dumb with each other.
Lots of white folks seem so terrified of being called racist that they seem to be looking for any place to put blame, as long as they don’t wear the label. If I read a story and shriek racist! that does not somehow absolve me of the guilt. If anything, if you and I understand psychology, then we are projecting onto others what we are terrified to acknowledge in ourselves. We are a racist society, America was built on it. We own it, like it or not, our comfort be damned. You and I don’t get to hijack our Black friends, spouses, adopted kids or anything else in the wholesale hope of being redeemed due to proximity. Not going to happen.
Given what’s happening right now, I am not at all surprised that a piece that spoke to privilege of any kind would be swiftly hijacked to mean something that would never occur to me. If the readers had taken the time to really comb through the prose they would have seen several very carefully and respectfully-worded paragraphs repeatedly stating that the article was not about white privilege. Most won’t, because that takes real work and understanding. People are on edge, and as a result, my distinct impression is that some are also walking around with a dog whistle around their necks.
Anything to avoid owning the part you and I as white folks play in where things are today.
Not saying that this particular commenter was. It’s what I’m watching, not just on Medium.
There was no way that I could salvage a badly-timed article with terminology that was now radioactive.
I appreciated the kind words of those who heard me at the very high level at which I intended that article, to invite us to rise above jealousy, hate, and blame and instead find ways to work together. It was about the human race. Not race. However, it was a fool’s errand to leave the piece on the system, as it would simply incite more people to rage about something that I neither intended nor said.
As I have several friends, Black women, who are experiencing a lot more pain than usual right now, I check in with them. These are difficult calls.
Because these people are immensely dear to me, and I am allowed to be in touch (not all of us are), I am going to translate here some of the messaging I’ve been hearing. It was critical for my growth and I hope it helps others.
From those talks:
It’s difficult. Not their problem, because they live with difficult 24/7.
Difficult because right now my only job is to listen without judgment, or prejudice. To not ask my Black friends to absolve me, or somehow wave a fairy wand over my head and say “you’re not a racist,” so that I can toddle off in the comfort of my white skin, the boo-boo kissed, all better now.
Not only is that not going to happen, they don’t owe us that. We have comfort that community will never enjoy. Always have, always will. It’s not our Black friends’ job to soothe our troubled souls about the nature of race relations in America, a state of anxiety in which all of them live full time.
Yet we seem to expect the Black community to tell us that it’s going to be okay, not to worry. Their worry never dissipates, but ours can. Their 24/7 anxiety settled in like a bad fog centuries ago and it has never lifted. They are the collective sponge that has absorbed the occasional pain and discomfort that white people have expressed. Then, like taking communion, we walk off feeling much better now. The Black community absorbs the pain, the responsibility for downloading our discomfort onto their shoulders.
Those of us who have been sexually assaulted know that feeling. When you take that 24/7 anxiety, then add skin color on top of it, then add the terror of worrying about your Black friends’ safety, then add the monotony of be careful be careful be careful be careful repeated endlessly to spouses, children, cousins, parents who dare to leave the house, you might have an inkling of what it’s like. You might. But not really.
Because most of us white folks can turn the spigot of bigots off. They can’t. The phrase “safety of their own homes” doesn’t apply here. When you and I as white folks lock the door, there is at least some sense that it will remain so. If the police show up, their presence will be announced with a knock, not the door being battered in and bullets flying.
No. When we call our friends, let’s not seek to be soothed, or comforted, or forgiven for being white. Let’s not look for a brand on the forehead proving we’re not racist. There is no book you and I can read that will convey a certificate that you and I can hang on a wall that proves that we’re not racist, or by virtue of claiming Black friends, we’re not complicit. We all are.
Denial of that is difficult. Not their problem. Systemic genocide and abuse happens in other countries, right? We’re the good guys, right? Too many still can’t say genocide and America in the same sentence because we cannot own what we have done to our own Indigenous peoples, call it what it is, and then look with clear eyes at what we continue to do.
The victor writes history. With that sacred right, he has the option to, if you will forgive the term, whitewash much of the truth.
We can weep. We can feel pain and weep. And we can learn to sit with it. It’s not okay now, it never was okay. Our job is to fucking sit with it. Listen. Don’t dodge, justify, say there there, make excuses, or talk about riots as though that was a brand new thing. As though we’re suddenly surprised that there are riots, and what on earth is the matter with people?
My Black friends tell me that their white buddies are begging to be told that I’m not like all the others. That because I have Black friends that means I’m different. I’m not like all those other guys.
Problem is that we are all “those other guys.”
As one friend said with real vehemence, white friends are calling as though this is the right time to join the conversation. To this she said, “So you wait until riots to suddenly grow a conscience?”
Hard to hear. Because she’s right. That so many of us have not had a conscience, because growing one means to be uncomfortable, is part of how we got where we are today.
There’s nothing you can do to absolve yourself of being white. The problem is being complicit. Ignorant. Surprised. Uninvolved. In complete and utter denial.
You can learn to sit with the deep discomfort, the pain, the crack in the world of your comfort. Or you can, as my friend pointed out, pick up the remote, and go remote from the pain. Take a walk, shake it off, which a Black man can’t do if he wants to wander a park to clear his mind.
Maybe you can write about that. Not, as one commenter wrote me yesterday, that “there is no such thing as white entitlement.”
To that, young lady, I would offer this:
I call my Black friends because I have got to hear them. It is immensely painful. To that, tough fucking shit. Because what is on occasion painful to me, and other white people, is a way of life for them. It’s simply a matter of degree.
When you and I stop leaning into the quiet, soft couch cushions of white privilege and understand at the cellular level what the Black world is like by listening, hearing, hurting and sitting with it, perhaps there might form some dents in the dense walls of our denial.
Until then, I might suggest that we stop calling our Black friends and asking what we can do. We might have been doing something all along. The same way male buddies don’t intercede when one decides to rape. If we see what is wrong and do nothing because it’s inconvenient, or takes too much time away from our fucking latte, or whatever the excuse may be, you and I are complicit.
There are things all of us can do, could have been doing all along. To that I offer:
Pick something. Anything. But please, let’s don’t ask our Black friends to give us the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval from a Black Person. Not their job. It’s our job to learn, to understand, and to sit with the deep, awful discomfort.
It’s about damned time we learned what that was like.
Written with heartfelt respect for those who have been kind enough to share their feelings, observations and thoughts. I hope I heard you correctly and I hope I represented your words as you intended. You know who you are.
Be careful out there.
