Me and White Supremacy: Day 16 Journal Questions
I’m leading a group discussion circle on “Me and White Supremacy” by Layla F. Saad. I’m taking the journaling challenge daily throughout February even though I’m not white. If you happen to be white, why not take the challenge? If I can do it, you can do it too.
Day 16 Questions (from the text):
1. How is your worldview a white-centered one?
2. How have you reacted when whiteness or you as a white person are not centered in spaces and conversations?
3. How have you judged BIPOC when they do not measure up to whitecentered standards?
4. How have you centered yourself as a person with white privilege in nonwhite spaces and conversations?
5. What are you beginning to understand about how white centering affects BIPOC?
In week 3 we’ve reached the section on allyship. As this section by definition cannot apply to me personally, I will share some observations that may be helpful for my allies and would-be allies.
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Why did we have to wait until well into the 21st century to get brown bandages?
I’ve gone on at length in previous days about my internalized racism. In case you missed it, see days one, five, and twelve. So there are lots of ways my worldview has been a white-centered one. I spent the majority of my life adopting the white gaze, and seeing everything, including myself, through it.
But the fact that I never even questioned or thought about why bandages didn’t match my skin speaks volumes. And apparently no one else did either, until 2014, when a Black-owned company called Tru-Colour finally did something about it. A second Black-owned company called Browndages followed suit four years later.
Even then, it took the genericized market leader for bandages two more years and the death of George Floyd to follow suit. At least it appears they were performing more than optical allyship when they did this.
Have you ever questioned the color of band-aids? What else are we not questioning? This is what Saad means when she says that white centering is mostly invisible, like a fish swimming in water or like the air we breathe. It happens all around us in ways we don’t even think to think about, unless like salmon we fight the current and swim upstream. Our culture centers white norms so often that they become more like a backdrop to our experience than a part of it.
I once witnessed my best friend as he was working with his then 7-year-old daughter on a “Frozen” coloring book. On the page in front of her was an outline of Elsa. As they were talking, without breaking cadence, he picked a dark brown crayon out of the box, colored Elsa in, and then just as nonchalantly put the crayon back.
This might seem like not that big a deal to you, or you may be taken aback and quick to point out that Elsa is not brown. But that’s kinda the point: my friend saw a chance to remind his white kid that “sometimes skin is brown”, in a way that seemed incidental to her. They were not talking about race, or even skin color, it was just an opportunity that he took to de-center whiteness. And if she had questioned him on it (which she didn’t), then there’s another opportunity to dive deeper on the topic. Knowing how to spot those opportunities means first learning to recognize how white norms are at the center of our experiences by default, then swimming against the stream.
White-centered values and interests take center stage with such regularity that when those norms are openly disrupted or challenged, peculiar things start to happen:
“When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression” — anonymous
In yesterday’s entry, I mentioned that those with white privilege would need to give something up in order for true equality to be achieved for those who are non-white.
Notice that I didn’t say that those with white privilege would need to give something up in order for those who are non-white to achieve dominance over white people.
It’s important to reiterate the aim here is justice and equality, not retaliation and dominance. It seems silly to need to even mention this, but no one working on behalf of racial equity wants to see anyone dominated by anyone else (at least no one I care to associate with, and if they think differently it’s my duty and yours to inform them that that isn’t the definition of equity).
Yet this mass delusion of “great replacement” has gained a strong traction in this country, and a lot of whites have swallowed these lies hook, line, sinker, and pole. Many will claim white people are “the true oppressed” when racial justice advocates attempt to tip the scales to a more balanced state that is representative of actual equality. I never thought I’d see the day, but now that we’re here I can’t say I’m surprised. An appetite for power is the fastest short cut to distortion of the truth.
The antidote to white centering therefore must be a conscious effort to see it so that you can resist it. And this is only achieved through practice. Through the kind of mindfulness regarding race that brings forth brown Elsas and brown bandages.
In simpler terms — we’d all do well to liken ourselves to salmon.
