The Dream of Safety

In 1984, James Baldwin wrote an essay for Essence, “On Being White… And Other Lies”. I urge you to chew on the whole thing again and again and again - because James Baldwin, sigh, what a BRAIN!

Quite convincingly, Baldwin argues the construct of “whiteness” or “being white” was chosen deliberately by European immigrants in order to participate in and benefit from America’s racial hierarchy.* As such, those of us who identify as white, or who were raised as such, are left bereft of any moral authority.

America became white - the people who, as they claim, "settled" the country became white - because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation… By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy… And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defined themselves… Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety.

The Dream

of

Safety**

And, because the Universe is amazing, that night I had a dream. I woke up the next morning at 3:30 am with vivid, full color recall.

My dream involved an Arabic woman working security at a used clothing store in some American dreamscape city. As she pawed through my bag she found my notebook with quotes from antiracist writers I have been devouring lately. She held the spiral bound pages in her hand and flipped through them - reading my notes with each flip. The notebook was black with dark purple pages and I had written my notes in an ink she could only read with her black light flashlight. (Naturally, because it is a dream, she has a blacklight flashlight for such an eventuality.)

In my dream I felt myself debating whether I should engage in small talk about my scribbles. “What do you think about this?”

She didn’t skip a beat. “I have been living this my whole life.”

Can I make a joke about this? Sure, be human Corinna. “That is what every BIPOC person tells me.”

She continued flipping through and reading through my notes.

Can I can this? Will she take it the wrong way? Will it come across as insincere or demeaning? Is this just white guilt? I take a breath. “I am sorry, I want to own my part in this.”

She smiled at me and I woke up feeling light.

And yet.

I lay in the dark room, listening to the snuffling of a sleeping dog and deep breaths of a slumbering husband, and thought about my need to crack a joke. A joke which diminished and reframed her delicate share. A joke that normalized her lived experience.

Warm and cozy in soft sheets, I lay there and felt sick to my stomach. The dark haired woman in my dream shared something with me and I laughed at her pain.

White fragility? Perhaps.

Baldwin might say my joke debased my humanity because I treated her as not me. I was speaking from my whiteness, my complicity in a system that pervades every aspect of our culture.

To which I shout from all rooftops everywhere. No need for a blacklight here.

I AM SORRY.

I WANT TO OWN MY PART IN THIS.

When I worked at Zingermans I took the Giving Great Service class. We practiced the five steps of handling a customer complaint, namely: 1) Acknowledge 2) Sincerely Apologize 3) Take action 4) Thank them 5) Document

“Oh wow, I’m so sorry. Let me replace that cold latte. Thank you for telling me.” The instructor noted that sometimes participants would have difficulty on the second step. People were not thrilled to take responsibility by apologizing for something they didn’t do. Someone else made the latte/cut the pastrami wrong/forgot to include the brownie in your to-go order/etc. The instructor then shared the apology was for the ZCOB (Zingermans Community of Businesses) that we represented AND the upsetness of the customer - not an admission of personal culpability we would need to feel guilty over. Thank you Calvinism.

I see you White guilt.

So, to tie this all together.

I have absorbed racist conditioning and benefit from racist systems. This is part of my inheritance.

I can yell at the rain, or…

I can do something about it.

* Vilified as anarchists, many European immigrants who pushed back against the status quo were deported and punished by the American Government.

** Here are a few quotes from my notebook.

Howard Zinn spoke about the construction of whiteness in 1963. “It seems to be the hardest thing in the world to convince ourselves that once we’ve noted skin color, facial features and hair texture, we have exhausted the subject of race - that everything beyond that is in our heads, put there by others and kept there by ourselves, and all of the brutal material consequences of centuries, from lynchings to patronizing friendship, were spun from an original thread of falsehood.” (pg 178, Howard Zinn On Race)

Edgar Villanueva writes in his great book, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, “White people have to grieve the guilt that accompanies whiteness. You cannot and must not opt out of whiteness. You have to grapple with the messiness of the privilege. You have to come and collect your people.

Settlers and their descendants have to grieve the lives of their ancestors, the culture that made their acts of domination and exploitation even imaginable, possible and acceptable. What confused, numbed, dissociated hell it must have been, on a deep level, even if they enjoyed benefits on other levels… Generations down the line must grieve the culture of the present, which perpetuates the colonizer mindset of domination and exploitation.” (pp 113-114)

And finally, I will round this out with a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates in his clarion essay in The Atlantic in 2014, “The Case for Reparations.”

“To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.”