What It Means to be White

Published on Diversity-Threads.com

Think of the quintessential all-American individual. Are they white? Are they male? Are they wearing plain colored clothing, maybe with a collar, jeans, and a pair of crisp white shoes? Think along the lines of Leave it to Beaver or the classic Archie comics.

Think of the epitome of an American neighborhood. Do you see white picket fences? Tall oak and maple trees providing canopies to a shady street, lined with sedans, SUVs and minivans? Probably a town called Jamestown, Springfield, Jonesville, or Fairview, right?

Why is this the default? And when we think about helping others, why do we spend time trying to fit them into this mold? When we go into urban neighborhoods, and we tell them how they're supposed to be renovated, we're imposing our own ideals of the American neighborhood on others.

I'm not going to lie, I love the idea of those kinds of neighborhoods and cities. I love the neo-Bohemian/quasi-industrial mix of fabrics, structures and buildings that create the modern hipster neighborhoods. As I write this, I find myself sitting at Literati Coffee - a shop on the second level of the hipster’s paradise embodied in a local bookstore. There's exposed brick lining one wall, strings of painted light bulbs hanging from the ceiling above the shop's children's section of books, and creaky hardwood floors. Opposing the brick, the wall with windows has dozens of handwritten messages from the store's numerous guest authors that have shared their ideas and knowledge with the patrons, hungry for the chai tea lattes, vegan peanut butter cookies, and the wisdom soon to be dispersed throughout the room.

I absolutely love it here. Every book feels like it has been hand picked to be in that exact location at that exact moment. Spread throughout the shelves of books are laminated sheets of paper - handwritten reviews and recommendations from the employees of the shop. Everything has a personal touch to it, and you feel welcomed, invited, wanted. If you're feeling particularly inspired, you can walk down the staircase to the basement, sit at the antique typewriter and leave a thought or two on the machine that doesn't have a backspace, and won't let you erase your mistakes. Many of these thoughts are posted on the wall above the typewriter, and the ones that are even more enlightening have been hand-painted on the brick facade of the building. If I could live in this store, I would. The store's success is a testament to the many others who share a similar interest and desire for a place like this. 

Contrarily, there are many more others that don't. Their dreams are different, their desires are different, their quintessence is different. Not necessarily worse or better. Just different.

And yet, I am describing a very narrow view of what I believe is the perfect setting for an afternoon of leisure and learning - one that is solely my own. And I have an extremely limited perspective, magnified by my privileged upbringing and having, only on extremely rare occasions, been forced to step outside of my unearned comfort zone. I've been reading an extremely interesting book by Ibram X. Kendi, titled How to be an Antiracist. In it, Kendi speaks to three approaches to identifying race: Segregation, Assimilation, and Antiracism. We can all (most of us; there are still evil people out there) agree that Segregation is bad. But it wasn't until this book that I fully realized that Assimilation can be equally harmful. I learned a few years ago, when I first started teaching at Ypsilanti Community High School - a school with a 54% white and 32% black population - that many of the non-standard names that Minorities give their children stem from the understanding that their last names are not from their own heritage. Their last names are given to many of them by the slave owners that owned their ancestors. Because of this, they take ownership of giving their children first names that uniquely resonate with their own heritage, and not the slave owners of just a few generations ago.

When I first started my teaching career, I would find myself correcting my students’ grammar on a regular basis. I had decided that words like “finna” instead of “gonna” were incorrect, extending words was incorrect, and many other examples of culturally appropriated language were things that I felt needed adjustments. I learned later, long after these moments had passed, that I was imposing my culture on others, convinced that my understanding of language was above others’. Language is fluid, though. Even dictionary definitions are manipulated by the understanding of the masses. Words change, dialects change, meanings change, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I was a modern grammar Nazi, stripping value from the daily utterances of my students, and deeming it unworthy of validation.

When we go into these urban neighborhoods - even before the gentrification process is complete - when we take ownership of it, we are taking away their culture. We are unilaterally deciding that the choices and decisions that they have made for their own communities is of a lesser quality than what we can bring in for them. I believe that this is often as bad as taking away an individual's last name. The question then becomes: If we have an earnest desire to help others, and not force out their identity in the process, how do we engage in that process? I don’t have a good answer to this question, and I think that’s a good thing. If nothing else, I think the best thing we can do is sit down with those communities we want to work with, and simply listen. It’s an easy enough task, and yet one I believe is the most often taken for granted.

One of my good friends and colleagues, Kaitlin Bove, sent me an article titled Whites Only: SURJ And The Caucasian Invasion Of Racial Justice Spaces. Within three paragraphs, I felt uncomfortable, because it was calling me out for so many of the things that I have done and taken for granted in my own desires to do my part to fight racism and sexism. My initial reaction was that this was too strongly opinionated of an article, that it used verbiage too pointed, and would turn off other white people that needed to hear it. I kept reading it, and later on, it called me out on my own discomfort. And one quote in particular resonated with me, as it was a perfect summation of one of my biggest inner-battles with my role in all of the social justice and equality discussions that I've been engaging in recently:

"An ally should be personally gaining NOTHING through their activism. In fact, if you are an ally, you should be losing things through your activism: space, voice, recognition, validation, identity, and ego."

When I reflect on my own personal struggles, triumphs, and engagements in my life, I realize that very seldomly will I do anything completely selflessly (one could even make the philosophical argument that we can't ever do anything 100% selflessly). Even if it's so that I can make myself feel better at the end of the day, almost everything I do in life, I do for my own benefit, if not indirectly in some way. As Kaitlin put it, "it's human nature to horde. We are all dragons."

This is the part where I think most of us lose our desire. I know this is the part that I struggle with most, because it goes against everything I have learned throughout my life. We cannot do this for ourselves. And that's hard. That sucks. And that goes directly against the current of the male/white privilege river. I read recently that "your first thought is how society taught you to think. Your second thought is who you are as a person." And because Male/White privilege teaches us that we are at the top of the food chain, we often don't have to worry about whatever that second thought may be.

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This power struggle has been encapsulated recently by a poignant event in the Wind Band world. Larry Clark, a prolific, accomplished composer, was recently outed as not only writing under the pseudonym, "Keiko Yamada," a young, female, Japanese composer that he conjured up out of thin air, he even gave her a biography and statistical information to further pull the wool over directors' eyes. In all actuality, he was outed in 2016, but because the fallout was minimal, he didn't really do much to make amends for his previous actions.

All of this came to a screeching halt a little less than a week ago. Because of a few viral posts, outrage grew fast and furiously, causing an uproar across social media. Within the first 48 hours, Larry's presentation slot at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago, Illinois in December was revoked. He wrote a thinly-veiled advertisement for his own publishing company disguised as an apology*, with no details as to how he would move forward to rectify his past wrongdoings.

*Yes, this is my own opinion.

The reaction was equally grandiose: Hundreds of reactions both defending him, and holding his feet to the fire. There were several people that not only denounced the whistleblowers, but they stated that they would act in direct opposition to those negatively affected, because they decided the offenses weren't valid and wanted to further support Larry. Within the last 24 hours, due to the unrelenting pressure, voices of dissatisfaction, and protest, apologies and plans-of-action have been written and posted both by Larry, and Carl Fischer LLC, the company that originally enabled his works written under the pseudonym to be sold.

The people that are so quick to come to Larry's defenses, I believe, are the same people that horde the power. They’re the ones who clutch their pearls at the thought of someone of another demographic standing alongside the aggrandized white men who have historically looked down from their pedestals for so long. Many of us (White Men) will never fully admit it though. No, that would be acknowledging that we have previously used our status to our advantage, and done nothing to fix the inequalities that have plagued our profession for so long. If I can sit on my elevated side of the see-saw while everyone else is bunched together on the ground on the other side, why should I invite any of them to cross the fulcrum so that the balance may work less in my favor? Sure, I can offer advice and maybe the occasional favor to them, but that’s only as long as my position at the high end of the see-saw isn't impacted.

Carl Fischer LLC and Larry Clark have since stated that they are financially committed to the efforts of diverse programming, and are actively working to replace all music distributed as having been written by the fictional composer. Time will tell if these are empty words, or if we will see real, meaningful change. I want to believe these are more than words, and that they are doing this as a morally conscious means to right a historical wrong. Unfortunately, the cynic in me believes that they will only go as far as they can go if it still benefits them in some way, financially or otherwise, and isn’t an inconvenience to them.

I just hope I'm wrong.