Disclaimer: 1 This piece is not intended to be an exhaustive conversation on race or an authoritative guide on how to solve the racial tensions that exist in our society; in fact I don’t believe either of those things is possible. Race is a challenging topic on which I certainly do not consider myself to be an expert. What I offer here is an attempt to work through some of the thoughts and emotions that have recently been on my heart. As a white woman, I can offer you only the perspective of a white woman with a particular set of experiences.2 I hope, like Saint Ignatius, you enter into this reading presuming my good intention even if my words or understanding fall short.
Where is God at work in my life?These three questions frame the Ignatian examen, a reflective prayer created by Saint Ignatius that challenges us to discern God’s presence in our lives and in doing so, ask how next to embrace and live out our call. When I taught at Xavier College Prep in Palm Desert, CA,3 the entire student body paused for three minutes each day after lunch to silently reflect on these questions. And while this intentional conscious practice of the examen has not carried over into my life beyond Xavier, the questions are always floating in the back of my mind, permanently coloring the way I think about my life and the world.
How have I responded to God’s presence in my life?
How am I being called to respond now?
It is this subconscious absorption of the examen that motivates my post today. I hope to walk through my recent series of muddled thoughts on race, privilege, and kinship through the lens of the examen’s first and last questions.
Where is God at work in my life?
In Ignatian Spirituality, emotions are important indicators of God’s presence. The encounters I will share below are ones that have left an emotional footprint on my heart. They continue to push to the front of my consciousness, unwilling to be forgotten, and as such, my faith compels me to believe they should not be ignored.
Recently, I’ve felt inundated by a series of images, writings, and conversations that have challenged me to imagine what it might be like to be black in America. Being a white teacher in a classroom of primarily black students means that bumping up against the reality of a life that is not mine is a daily occurrence. And of course, the proximity of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Black History Month to one another on the calendar makes conversations about race more prevalent this time of year, but it’s certainly possible to walk through these moments without allowing yourself to truly be affected by them.
I cannot (and will not) discuss every single one of these moments below in detail, but I do want to highlight a handful of encounters that haven’t been so easy to push aside. Something about these moments invites me to sit with them, to further discern what God is saying to me.
Encounter #1: The Sunday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, my best friend texted me a link to an article about graphic designer Daniel Rarela who created a series of “memes” in honor of the holiday. In an effort to prevent what he called the “whitewashing” of MLK, Rarela superimposed quotes from MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail over a variety of images -- some dating back to the Civil Rights Era, some from more recent #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations. His intention, he explained, was to “shatter the false image of a Martin Luther King who everyone loved, who never got arrested, was universally popular and made zero privileged people uncomfortable enough to want to kill him.”
I hung Rarela’s images around my classroom the next day and invited my students to finish the sentence “Right now I feel…” after they had time to silently engage with the photos. As they so often do, my high school seniors turned the tables on me, asking me how I felt after viewing the images. I explained that I felt challenged in particular by MLK’s condemnation of the white moderate, who (as can be seen in the image) “prefers a negative peace (the absence of tension) to a positive peace (the presence of justice).” I shared with my students my very real fear that although I like to think of myself as one of the “good white people,” deep down I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if I’m doing enough. I don’t know if I’m going about it in the right way. I don’t know if my desire to be liked by others leads me to seek the absence of tension rather than the presence of justice.
Encounter #2: After weeks of keeping it in my Netflix queue, I finally decided to watch Dear White People… And while I could write page after page on my reactions to the show, there was one particular moment that affected me on an visceral level. The show, for those who are unfamiliar, follows members of the black student unions at fictional Ivy League school Winchester University as they try to decide how to respond to a blackface party on campus. In the closing minutes of “Chapter V”, Reggie, a recognized leader in the campus’s black community, finds himself in a disagreement with his white friend who said the word “n****” while singing along to a song at a party. The disagreement escalates and spreads beyond the two students until the cops are called. Upon arrival, they immediately zero in on Reggie, asking him if he is a student at the university, and even after both he and several other students (at least one of them white) confirm his enrollment, the officer asks him to show him his student ID. When Reggie refuses, the officer pulls his gun.
This moment, the visible fear that encompasses every fiber of his being, the look on Reggie’s face as he stares into the barrel of the officer’s gun, knowing his life could end in an instant, is something I cannot shake. And I can’t erase the image of a weeping Reggie with his back to his dorm room door, broken and scared, his life forever changed. I have never known this fear. I will never know this fear, but I know that many others do and will.
Encounter #3: The Friday following Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I accompanied our entire senior class to a talk given by Nikole Hannah-Jones, MacArthur fellow and investigative reporter for The New York Times Magazine. Hannah-Jones has written extensively on the racial segregation that exists in our public school system today and how this segregation damages all students, but black and brown students in particular. The longer black (and brown) students remain in segregated schools, the further they fall behind their white peers academically. Intentional racial integration of schools, Hannah-Jones argues, is the only thing that has been proven to decrease the disturbing racial achievement gap that exists in our country. As evidence for this, she cites the fact that when mandated school integration was at its peak in 1988, the racial achievement gap in the United States was at its lowest point ever. As schools have rapidly resegregated, the achievement gap has followed suit - white students continue to pull ahead, black and brown students to fall behind. 4 The reason for this is simple, Hannah-Jones says. Being around white kids gets you what white kids get: more experienced teachers, higher teacher retention rates, more funding, a wider array of class choices, more field trips and extra-curricular activities, the list goes on and on.
As Hannah-Jones described the the struggles and deficits that primarily black and brown schools face, I couldn’t help but notice that the school she was describing sounded an awful lot like Saint Martin (where I currently teach). I was struck by the uneasy feeling that although we believe as a staff that we are offering our black students (and others) a better educational option than their local public schools, our classroom demographics aren’t much different. We are not offering our students an integrated learning environment. I struggled once again with MLK’s notion of the white moderate - are we doing enough? Are we seeking justice in the most effective ways?
Encounter #4: I experienced this final moment just a few days ago when I watched the most recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy. This is not a normal part of my weekly routine (I’m not sure I’ve watched a full episode of Grey’s since Season 1), but again, I believe this was God at work in my life. For those who didn’t see the episode, the staff at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital are charged with treating a young black boy named Eric who was shot by police trying to enter his own home. Having lost his house keys, police spot 12 year-old Eric climbing through a window of his own home and when he reaches for his cell phone, they shoot him. And while this story line in and of itself is horrifying and speaks volumes about the fear America carries of young black men, the scene that brought me to tears was one that followed. Faced with the reality of Eric’s fate, Dr. Miranda Bailey and her husband Ben decide they must have “the talk” with their 13 year-old son Tuck. This talk is not the one most of us received as teenagers.
In the scene that follows (you can watch it here), a frightened Tuck repeats the following words back to his parents while his hands sit on the back of his head: “I am William George Bailey Johnson. I am 13 years old and I have nothing to harm you.” The scene continues as Bailey and Ben say to their son, “If your white friends are saying things and mouthing off, know that you cannot.” In this moment, my reaction was once again visceral. The stark difference of what it means to grow up white and not black in America was on full display. Never have my parents sat me down and told me what to do if I am pulled over or detained by police. Never have I considered the possibility that any run in with police (of which I’ve had none) wouldn’t end with me using the fact that I’m a young, pretty white woman to my advantage. Never once have I thought that I could end up dead. This is a reality that is not mine. But this is the world that many of the young men and women than I love live in each and every day.
All of these intensely emotional encounters have lead me to the next question of the examen:
How am I called to respond now?
But before I wrestle this final question of the examen, let me give some context.
I am a 30 year-old white woman who grew up in Hudson, Ohio, a town I jokingly call “the whitest suburb in the state of Ohio” but which does, in all actuality, fall into the category of “super zipcode.”5 When I left Hudson at age 18, I attended the University of Notre Dame, a school that, although it provided me with a myriad of life changing experiences for which I will always be grateful, cannot boast to have placed me into classrooms with students whose lives before they arrived in South Bend were much different from my own.
What I can (and want) to say, however, is that I carry a deep love for the black young men and women I’ve taught over the years both in Baltimore and now in Cleveland. What I do know is that teaching these young men and women has forced me to examine my perception of the world and confront my own privilege. What I do know is that teaching black young men and women has irrevocably changed me for the better: it has expanded my compassion and has forced me to think critically about how “real” my reality is.
So where do I go from here? How am I being called to respond?
I can no longer stay silent. I feel called to use what I’ve learned about my own privilege to help others see theirs. I feel called to use this same privilege to project the voices of my students into places their voices don’t normally reach. Their witness has transformed me and I pray it will do the same for others.
In Between the World and Me (a must read for any and every one), author Ta-Naheisi Coates writes that “the fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts.”
I don’t share this quote to perpetuate the myth of the white savior.6 Although we (white Americans) may be responsible for creating the need for liberation, I do not to any degree believe that white Americans alone can “fix” our culture’s brokenness when it comes to race. I share Coates’s quote here because I believe it speaks to the notion of kinship that lies at the heart of the Catholic faith. He challenges all of us - white, black, brown, etc. - to see each and every human being as our brother or sister, to acknowledge our unavoidable kinship and to work together to create the world God had in mind when she created us.7
To me this quote affirms my belief that white Americans cannot pretend that conversations about race are not about us. White Americans cannot pretend that the so-called “problem of race” is out of our hands. We have to have this conversation. We have to enter in to the messiness of this world. Our nation can’t move forward without it.
I plan, in the next few weeks, to start this conversation. I hope you’ll join me.
1 It should be acknowledged right off the bat, that I’ve borrowed this title from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?↩
2 I am indebted to my fellow Restless Heart, Dave Gregory, for writing about his particular experiences first. You can check out his thoughts here.↩
3 For more on that, check out my first Restless Hearts post.↩
4 For further reading on this topic, check out the Hannah-Jones article “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.”↩
5 This metric, created by the American Enterprise Institute, ranks zip codes based on their per capita income and college graduation rates. Those termed “Super Zips” fall in the 95th to 99th percentile. Basically this means that I grew up in one of the most elite suburbs in the country (translation: white).↩
6 The best, and most challenging, description I’ve read about the white savior complex can be found here.
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7 For more on kinship and why it matters, check out the greatest book of all time (in this writer’s opinion): Tattoos on the Heart by Father Greg Boyle, SJ.↩
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