@olan

This summer, my physical therapist and I bonded over our mutual contempt for our now former president. As she kneaded my muscles, the topic of race came up, as it was the peak of the George Floyd protests popping up all over the country.

She said, “My brother-in-law, (ironically a cop), used to be very racist, but he changed.” This was intriguing to me, so I asked how that happened, a twinge of hope creeping into my heart that he might have the secret key to help solve our national shame.


She said, “My sister decided that they were going to have a Fresh Air Fund kid stay with them.” For those who don’t know, the Fresh Air Fund arranges for kids who live in cities to spend a few weeks in the summer with suburban families who are often, but not always white. The kids are typically Black or Hispanic, and are introduced to typical suburban summer activities like day camps, swimming, and the family vacation etc. Ideally, the Fresh Air kids are paired with suburban children of similar ages.


My PT said that his experience of actually getting to know a person of color transformed him. He began to know a real person, not a cardboard emblem of what his parents, the media, and the greater society told him about Black people. Black people became real human beings with real thoughts and feelings just like his. This child became one of his own, and returned to them subsequent summers until he was out of school.


So here I am posting an epic-length post that I feel fairly certain that you won’t care about either. That’s OK. I am lately gripped with a need to communicate, to be seen and known. To be known by others, and by you, who view me as a cardboard cutout of a silly and cruel, and oblivious white woman, that you seemingly despise. I do this only for myself and my growth as a human being. To show that I am in fact, real flesh and blood. But the bottom line is I’m done with the back-and-forth derision, I’m done with the spreadsheet-keeping that causes conflict between us. It does nothing to promote better relations between white people and people of color.
 

Because I realize that conflict, that derision is getting us nowhere. That viewing each other as cardboard representations of real live people is a dead-end street and does not promote the transformation that will be required to create true equality in this country. And that is “us” in the 2 Peas sense, but also the “us” of the larger society.


I reviewed past posts of mine that I saw were filled with derision toward you. Derision that was a defense I erected at feeling criticized. Derision that I am now ashamed of and offer a genuine apology to you.

I’ve been analyzing my habitual reactions to your posts to figure out why I felt criticized, why I found them such personal button-pushers. The pattern seemed to be that you started a thread or reacted to existing threads, linking articles (helpful and thoughtful articles that in a post the other day, you said you did not care that I had that reaction to them.) But then came a dig, then came derision. Derision for what we women of 2 Peas are, where we are in our journey.


So how was I interpreting your posts? The best analogy I could come up with is the analogy of a toddler learning to walk. We don’t punish them when they fall down and their walking skills fall short of perfection.

We, the women of 2 Peas, are mostly white, mostly economically comfortable and have been safely ensconced in our white privilege for our entire lives. We are where we are in our individual journeys of understanding, acknowledging, and acting, ranging from fairly woke to never gonna get there.


I get your message. Kind of. “Wake up white people!” you exhort. But then in the next breath, after inviting us to join you, we fall up short and earn your derision. Jump, you say and in the next breath, you say, that’s not high enough. This is what is known as a double-bind. Double-binds make people feel crazy and paralyzed. It sometimes may take me a while to figure out that a double-bind has become part of communication with another, but when I do, I’m out. I don’t do double-binds. They are harmful to me and it is my right as a human being not to engage in unhealthy ways of communicating.


The reality is, each of us has the human right to grow at an intellectual, a psychological and a moral rate at our own pace. And this leaves us open to criticism from Black people who will say this is the cop out of white privilege. But I will use a phrase I detest, because it seems apt. It is what it is.
Wishing we are more enlightened than we are is an admirable goal, but we are where we are and getting there may be a life's work, and is definitely not subject to someone else's ideas of what is acceptable.

I will read the Black history I want to read on my own timetable, I will choose the Black authors that resonate with me, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the “white lady in the suburb book club” books that sprang up in the aftermath of the flurry of murders and other aggressions of Black people by cops in the spring and summer. I will read them slowly, savor them, let the unfamiliar messages permeate my body, let myself try to feel an infinitesimal amount of the rage and despair that I will never truly understand, as I do not have that history in my DNA.


I will will myself to comprehend the extreme level of frustration and rage evidenced by the writer James Baldwin in Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book “Begin Again” which describes how he saw all the promises of change coming out of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s deflate into apathy as white people regrouped and retreated back into their protection of The American Lie that Black people are unequal to white people.


I will delight in the poetry and prose of Ross Gay who in his “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” delivers the whimsy, the heartbreaking sweetness, and the sudden gut punch that comes from experiences living life as a Black man.


Now to address the comments you’ve posted. The thread in which we discussed white women’s roles during the days of slave-owning and I suppose, post-slavery, I asserted that white women of that time who lived within that system did not have the power to dictate, criticize, or make substantive changes in the perverted system of slavery. You listed some references that asserted that indeed, women weren’t just innocent bystanders in a horrific system. I saw your response, and wanted to respond but life got in the way (yes, white privilege) and I never responded. I should have responded, but I didn't. My apologies. It is frustrating to have knowledge you want to convey seemingly ignored and overlooked.



I suppose that one can always find the example that differs from the norm, and you did, in spades. Thanks for the information. I learned something. It gave me much to reflect upon.


However, in doing some additional reflection up this, it seems to me that beyond the (peano, sit down and shut up warning ahead) examples you came up with, that another insidious role that white women played in the South was the myth that sprang up like a poisoned fruit. The myth of the white woman, the precious, pure flower of the South needing protection from the marauding and raping Black man, in the form of the hangman's noose wielded by men who "needed" to protect her. The idea that nothing more than the flick of her finger meant that Emmett Till (and countless others like him) would be left swinging from a tree, victim of a system built on lies.


So, where are we? We are all real people, trying to muddle through our human weaknesses and shortcomings on the way to hopefully becoming better people working for a more just world.
We are more complex, my joyous, more angry, more tender than a cardboard cutout.

If you have made it this far, thanks for reading.