Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
It took a broken heart to teach me that guilty white liberals aren't the solution to America's racial strife, but part of the problem.
Feb 17, 2000 | When I was about 6, at the moral and political apex of the civil rights movement, my liberal, Irish Catholic father told me a story that changed my life: Dark-haired Irish folk like him and me, he said, were black Irish, the offspring of seafaring Moors from Africa who mixed with fair-skinned Celts in Ireland long ago. His kinky anthropology lesson was meant to show that racism isn't just wrong, it's stupid: That person you think you hate may well be kin. And I believed him.
I grew up adoring black people, even though I didn't know any, except from TV. Mine was one of those 1960s middle-class families brought to social conscience by television. We watched in horror as white sheriffs fire-hosed black protesters in the South; in awe, even reverence, as Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers made nonviolence a spiritual and political practice.
To a devout Catholic girl -- I grew up reading the lives of the saints, wanting to be a nun or a missionary -- the civil rights movement was the struggle of good and evil written quite literally in black and white, a story from the pages of my saints books come to life. Wanting so desperately to be good, choosing sides was easy. I was good; I was black Irish; I was not white, not really.
It would take me 30 years, two careers, motherhood and a broken heart to accept the obvious: I am white, sort of. (Though the new census, which allows people to mark more than one box, intrigues me, because it might make for a more complicated racial reckoning.) But I became white just in time to become a minority in California, so strangely, little has changed for me: I'm still watching a mulatto country trying to eradicate some racial boundaries and hierarchies while enforcing certain others. Even more confusing, today I find that the vocal racial purists are as likely to be black, Latino or Asian as white. Each group has at least one thing in common, though: Our rhetoric about race can't even come close to capturing our mixed-up reality.
What's most amazing is how much our black and white racial paradigm -- victim vs. victimizer, the patron and the patronized -- still prevails. And yet it's an outdated script, reducing Asians, Latinos and the growing number of multiracial Americans either to bit players in our national drama or a vast army of victims (an identity most non-white Americans viscerally reject). But many of us cling to the paradigm, because we have no other way of envisioning racial relationships. I know that I myself clung way too long to a black-white, good-evil motif, obsessed with the possibility of racial retribution and redemption more than justice.
I was a type, a stereotype even, and a walking paradox: a civil rights do-gooder motivated by racial animus against my group -- in short, a self-hating white person. Not all Caucasians in the struggle are the same, but over the years I ran across a lot of me. And the fact that mixed-up white folk are the most likely to get involved with civil rights work results in a deformed political culture, one in which there is little white participation in our national conversation about race beyond the right-wing scapegoating of a Pat Buchanan and the masochistic piety of guilty Mumia cultists on the left. Meanwhile, the coming white minority is getting little help in developing a language for its changing and legitimate concerns.
It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but after an adulthood spent believing I was part of the solution to racial strife, I finally came to admit I was part of the problem.
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