{"id":279,"date":"2014-12-08T09:57:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T09:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/on-the-journey-to-white-shame.html"},"modified":"2015-04-29T20:41:07","modified_gmt":"2015-04-30T01:41:07","slug":"on-journey-to-white-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/on-journey-to-white-shame.html","title":{"rendered":"On the Journey to White Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
The human relations I valued most were held cheap by the world I lived in<\/i>.<\/span><\/div>\n


\nWhite lesbian Southern novelist and woman of letters Lillian Smith<\/a> wrote these words<\/a>(and those that follow in italics) in 1949, the same year my parents were born \u2014 one to white Catholic carpenters in Iowa, the other to white Protestant farmers and share croppers in central Louisiana. Growing up in north Louisiana in the 80s and 90s, I would never have imagined that Smith\u2019s words from so long ago would resonate as powerfully today. Written in response to her growing awareness that, in America, to be loved by \u201cwhite\u201d meant she could not love \u201cblack,\u201d they tell a tale of the two-ness of white life in America, its unreconciled bondage to a moral binary of guilt and shame reinforcing the way we saw the world then and continue to see the world, ourselves, and those around us now. If the notion that #blacklivesmatter teaches white Americans anything, it is that our white relationships \u2014 those based on denial, silence, privilege, and blood \u2014 have not allowed us to see black bodies as fully human, as mattering at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was brought up to reject race and racism, to uphold a sense of civic and social duty and to respect authorities, and to recognize the plight of black Americans as their failure to acquiesce to the way things are (and are \u201csupposed to be\u201d) in America. I was raised to feel guilty when I failed at upholding my duty to god, country, and family, and to shame those who seemingly didn\u2019t fall in line with the social arrangement. I was told as a child that there were \u201cblacks\u201d and there were \u201cniggers.\u201d That the latter existed at all in our minds was not my fault, nor that of my white family, friends, church, or teachers. I grew up not explicitly judging blacks by their skin color, while at the same time celebrating American might, southern pride with rebel flags, and sentimentally ingesting underground country music that told sad tales of \u201cworking like a nigger for my room and board<\/a>\u201d and the tragedies that befall white \u201cnigger fuckers<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I was certain I wasn\u2019t racist.<\/p>\n

Neither was my father who told me to call bluejays \u201cniggerbirds\u201d because they hog all the bird feed. Neither was my scout leader who told me that black kids can\u2019t swim because \u201ctheir bodies are different from ours.\u201d Neither was my pastor who didn\u2019t have a word to say from the pulpit as the KKK protested one Sunday on the sidewalk of our church grounds (they weren\u2019t protesting us, mind you, but felt comfortable enough to choose that location). Neither were my friends, who, in high school, upon hearing I was interested in a beautiful black classmate reminded me under hushed breath, \u201cbut she\u2019s a nigger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite these egregious, explicitly racist pastimes, we denied our racism under the cover of a self-evident arrogance attached to our white relationships and bloated sense of worth. The terrible irony, echoed recently by many white responses to Ferguson and protests nationwide, is that we protected ourselves through charges that they were the racists, responsible for their own condition, the ones that can\u2019t help but think in \u201cblack\u201d;they were the race-baiters. For we shameless whites, we couldn\u2019t be \u201cracist,\u201d because we thought of racism as a moral failure, and the shameless can never be guilty of such things. We weren\u2019t racist; they were.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The human relations I valued most were held cheap by the world I lived in. White lesbian Southern novelist and woman of letters Lillian Smith wrote these words(and those that follow in italics) in 1949, the same year my parents were born \u2014 one to white Catholic carpenters in Iowa, the other to white Protestant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nOn the Journey to White Shame<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The human relations I valued most were held cheap by the world I lived in. 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