I recently attended a dear friend’s 50th birthday party and it was one of the most memorable nights I have had in years. This friend is a white woman with a multiracial family, and her friend and professional groups are reflective of the diversity in her family.
As a 50-something-year-old Black woman living in Maine, it is rare that I am in social settings with a significant number of middle-aged Black folks. While it is no longer uncommon for me to be in racially diverse settings in Maine, more times than not I am one of the older people in the group. Often the oldest. Which is what made my friend’s party extra special—I spent the evening engaged in conversations with people who are my peers. Middle-aged Black professionals, the majority of whom were transplants to Maine like me. It was a perfect night to celebrate an amazing woman’s 50th year of life and for being in community with like-minded people.
My last piece, questioning whether white women have changed, brought in a lot of interesting comments. The most common response, from white women who are inclined to read my work and share anti-racist values, is that they apparently spend little time around white women who are unlike them—followed of course in popularity by the inevitable “not me!” responses.
While I understand the responses and I believe them to be sincere, the uncomfortable truth is that many white women don’t have an analysis around race and class. Ultimately, a sizable number of them vote against their self-interest, instead choosing to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy.
The other uncomfortable truth is that too many of us—the collective us—live in silos that represent our values. We stay in those safe spaces (online and in the offline world) of like-minded people and thus those silos are so comfortable that most of us choose to never leave them. Or, at least, people choose to not engage with people outside of their silos on a deeper level for fear of rocking the boat.
Unfortunately, it is those silos and the false belief that we have no personal power to disrupt the beliefs of others that keeps us tethered to the status quo. Our silos are also bolstered by technology that makes its easy for us to only interact with people who share our beliefs and see others as bots or ignoramuses.
Friends, none of this is good for our collective future.
Prior to moving to Maine 22 years ago, most of my close friends were Black and brown people. Yes, I was married to a white man but the balance in my life was in having social circles that reflected my racial and cultural background. Moving to Maine shifted things. At that time, there weren’t enough Black and brown folks here to keep my primary social circle racially in line with me. I was forced to expand my circles, lest I become a hermit. This was ramped up when my marriage ended nine years ago in my early 40s.
When my marriage ended, I had few friends in Maine. The ones I had were all connected to my married life: the couple people, the folks from mom groups, etc.—most of whom were still married. Almost all were white. The other people I knew were through my work—again, almost all white. This meant building a community of my own not based on my work or marital status.
In building my community, I have spent a great deal of time with people who aren’t like me at all. One of the first social groups I connected to when I moved out of the family house and to the barrier island that I have called home since 2015, was a group of folks I would refer to as the upper working class. A group of white folks who primarily held blue-collar jobs or owned small businesses who were not particularly well-read. Few of them had attended a four-year college and even fewer held graduate degrees. Most couldn’t fully grasp the scope of my work, which eventually led to the end of the friendships years later. But in the four or five years that we were close, I learned a lot about white folks who weren’t bad people but who leaned right. On the surface, one might ask, how did a Black woman who leads a regional anti-racism organization end up in such a social circle? Believe it or not, music and cheesy books.
Almost everyone in my now-former friend group had an extensive knowledge of music and love for all kinds of music. Several also liked to read, reading what some would refer to as lowbrow fare, which is my not-so-secret comfort activity. I love reading books that are the literary equivalent of junk food, and I love music.
While I have a serious collection of books on race and all things race-related, I also get down with the Colleen Hoover books and similar types of reading.
The reason I am sharing this story is because in my time with these folks, we did start having serious conversations on race and I started recommending books and resources to learn more about race. Our conversations even over drinks did start to veer into the political and racial, and while the connections did end, it was an opportunity to plant seeds.
Too many white women tell me they can’t change minds, and maybe that’s the problem. You expect to have a few conversations and see sudden change but honestly that is as realistic as working out at the gym for a month and reducing your eating and expecting a new body that will last. It ain’t happening.
For most people, shifting long-held cultural values is a journey; it’s about meeting people where they are and knowing that your job isn’t to change their mind. In fact, the way most white folks approach conversations with white people who are not aligned with them is very much rooted in cultural whiteness and lacks compassion and the ability to hold discomfort. It’s a perpetuation of the inhumanity that often defines whiteness, instead of connecting on what you do share and building the connection so that trust is formed. It’s about choosing to exit your silo and accepting that others aren’t like you but knowing you can model a different way of being.
As white-bodied people, you hold a power to be in spaces and places that I can never enter. You can say and suggest things that, if I were to say them, would be met with resistance. Yet when you choose to not deal with “those” white people, you are abdicating your duty as a white anti-racist and instead choosing comfort whether you consciously are aware of it or not.
Look, friends, if a Black girl from the South Side of Chicago could move to Maine and start conversations on race in the early aughts and go on to become the director of one of the oldest anti-racism organizations in the United States, you can move outside of your silo of comfort and reach out to folks or get to know folks whose values are not necessarily yours. The thing is, that 53% of white women who voted for Trump is never going to change unless you and those like you decide that your fellow white sisters and other people are worth working with.
I am probably going to lose some readers and patrons over this, but it’s not enough to follow the work of Black and brown women and think that’s going to create change. You can read all the blogs and books, you can listen to all the podcasts, you can support all the Substacks and Patreons of BIPOC folks, you can like and amplify our work all over social media, but—while that is important—you also need to put some skin in the game. You need to be willing to be uncomfortable and, at times, make others uncomfortable. You need to embody the knowledge that you have received from folks like me. In most cases, nothing you do or any of the risks you take will ever match the risks that we people of color take or that other people (like LGBTQ+ folks) who deviate too far from the status quo take.
In my 21 years of doing this work, I have received death threats, I have been verbally accosted, I have been called the N-word more times than I care to tally up. I have been posted on some of the vilest white nationalist platforms. I have had my physical safety threatened and I have been stalked to the point of having to travel with private security for my own safety. I have had my livelihood threatened.
I have also lost relationships because of this work, so I understand not wanting to ruffle feathers in personal circles. But for people of color who do this work, we show up, knowing our very lives are at risk. I have long accepted that there is a real possibility that an unhinged racist could take my life. Yet I haven’t backed down, not even when white folks unfollow or decided they are moving on because their interests have changed.
I stay because I stand on the shoulders of people who have lost their lives to advance the cause of Black humanity and racial equity. I stay because my paternal grandparents and family including my dearly departed father picked cotton in the fields of Arkansas, dreaming that their descendants might have a better life. I stay because I dream of a world where my four beautiful grandchildren will never know the sting of being seen as “other” and never have vile racist terms thrown at them by a white person. I stay because of the white people I have known who have labored with me and at times put themselves between me and harm. I have stayed despite the weathering in my body and stress-related ailments, I understand that change comes at a cost, but it is better to die on my feet than on my knees groveling for my humanity in a world that was never designed for me.
So, if you are still reading, I ask you to consider what you might give up to move us forward as a society and to consider letting a little discomfort settle in as you enter conversations and spaces that folks like me rarely can.
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Image by Nico Smit vis Unsplash
