On the Journey to White Shame

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 — 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’s words from so long ago would resonate as powerfully today. Written in response to her growing awareness that, in America, to be loved by “white” meant she could not love “black,” 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 — those based on denial, silence, privilege, and blood — have not allowed us to see black bodies as fully human, as mattering at all.

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 “supposed to be”) 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’t fall in line with the social arrangement. I was told as a child that there were “blacks” and there were “niggers.” 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 “working like a nigger for my room and board” and the tragedies that befall white “nigger fuckers.”

But I was certain I wasn’t racist.

Neither was my father who told me to call bluejays “niggerbirds” because they hog all the bird feed. Neither was my scout leader who told me that black kids can’t swim because “their bodies are different from ours.” Neither was my pastor who didn’t have a word to say from the pulpit as the KKK protested one Sunday on the sidewalk of our church grounds (they weren’t 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, “but she’s a nigger.”

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’t help but think in “black”;they were the race-baiters. For we shameless whites, we couldn’t be “racist,” because we thought of racism as a moral failure, and the shameless can never be guilty of such things. We weren’t racist; they were.

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