Me and White Supremacy : Day 5 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 5 Questions (from the text):
Think back across your life, from childhood to where you are in your life now. In what ways have you consciously or subconsciously believed that you are better than BIPOC?
Don’t hide from this. This is the crux of white supremacy. Own it.
- — -
“You don’t act like other black people.”
Because of my white adjacent privilege from a very early age, I did in fact grow up honestly believing I was “better” than “all those other black people.” It was often even verbalized to me by well meaning white friends, parents of friends, friends of parents, and teachers. Each time it was given as though it were a compliment, and each time I accepted it as one — not realizing the damage it was doing to my self-esteem.
I remember one time at camp when I was about nine or ten, I was in a cabin with three other black kids. Looking back I now realize that the only three black kids my age were most likely intentionally placed in the same cabin as me, which I have some feelings about. The optimist in me wants to entertain that perhaps it was because they wanted us to feel “more at home” in a cabin amongst people we could likely relate to? But the realist in me thinks about the era in which this occurred and realizes that probably wasn’t the reason at all. Suffice it to say I did not relate well to these boys, and had no real vested interest in doing so.
I digress — all three of these boys were related — two brothers and one cousin. All of them from the inner city. One day I got into an argument with one of them, I don’t recall over what. At one point I tried to debase him by pointing out that he lived in “the city” whereas I “Had a nice house in a nice neighborhood”. I look back at that and cringe, It’s not a memory that I’m proud of.
In an interesting twist of fate, that very fall I my parents decided to stop sending me to private school. For the first time ever, there was more than one other black student in my class, and more than four POCs. The other black folks I encountered very quickly let me know how “white” I was, and they didn’t mean it as a compliment. So Ironically, here was the first real opportunity I had to connect with other black kids, and I wanted little to do with them, they wanted little to do with me. I was more than happy to cultivate friendships with the white kids in my class, like I had learned to do in previous years.
All of this was due to my own internalized sense of white superiority. I like to say if I, as a Black man can spot my own internalized racism/white superiority, I guarantee that anyone reading this can spot theirs. Unless you’ve spent years actively working to spot and counter these patterns of thought and action, they are there — trust me on this.
I want to say that we are almost not to blame. Even If we do not personally ascribe to the sentiments of white superiority on a conscious level, it’s important to remember that this is the default paradigm in western culture, and is both a historical precedent, and becoming more normalized in recent years. I say “almost” because once we are aware that our unconscious bias exists (and you now are) It is our shared responsibility to work to do better. And responsibility is much more useful than blame.
If the default culture of white superiority is a stream that flows downhill, we need to liken ourselves to salmon swimming upstream if we are to overcome it.
