What the Black Lives Matter Movement Has Taught Me About My Whiteness
The other week as my husband and I were driving home from running errands, I was shocked to see, along a lengthy section of the main street of our northern New Jersey town, that someone had plunked down yard signs in the strip of grass between sidewalk and street—yard signs like you'd see for a political candidate, but these were for a company I’ll call Company X: Come and work at Company X and get a $2000 bonus!
Sign after sign after sign—there must have been more than 200, slicked-up cousins of those "Earn $$$$ at home" signs you see on telephone poles. What the hell? Since when does a for-profit company get to do a thing like that? The town owns that strip of land; surely my progressive little town hadn’t blessed this sales pitch by a company widely believed to exploit its workers? And what about my blessing, as a taxpayer? Wasn't I, too, part owner of that grassy strip?
When we got home, I told our 18-year-old daughter what we'd seen and asked if she wanted to come with me to take down some of the signs. Feeling righteous, we lugged home 26. Or rather, I was feeling righteous, as I always do when picking up litter. My daughter, while agreeing that the signs were problematic, thought we might be stealing.
Not sure what to do with them, we stashed the signs in our garage and headed out for a walk to talk it over. As we neared the corner, a police car drove by. Too late, it clicked: We could ask the police!
Trying to guess which way the cruiser had gone, I went in one direction and sent my daughter in another. Eventually, we found ourselves together as the officer pulled up, rolled down his window, and looked at me expectantly. I asked him if he'd seen the signs and were they legal? He'd seen them, yes, but no, he didn't know. So I asked him: What if I took some—would that be legal? He understood exactly what I was saying—that my question wasn't hypothetical, that I actually had already taken some. And he said in that case, I should be careful, because if the town had given permission, that would be theft, or “criminal mischief.” Really, he said, I should reach out to the town and find out if the signs were supposed to be there. He wouldn’t want me getting in trouble.
He was Black. If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m white. I sought him out, literally running after him, because he was a police officer, and I wasn't sure if I'd committed a crime, and I thought a police officer would be the perfect person to ask. Who better to let me off the hook?
Every breath a white person living in 21st-century America takes is enhanced by white privilege. In other words, my whole life: from the houses I’ve lived in to the schools I attended, to the activities my daughter has participated in, to my expectation that my local police are there, as the saying goes, to protect and serve me, to literally the very air that enters my lungs, since white people—benefitting from a centuries-old system of economic and political advantage—are vastly more likely to live in areas with better air quality than people of color.
Though this level of white privilege isn't exactly invisible, it permeates so deep that you have to be looking for it to see it. And some white people (not to pigeonhole older white people, but TBH older white people, but also lots of other white people as well), they're just never going to see it. Still, there are things white people do every day—activities and actions—that bring privilege to the fore. Extra white privilege. The things where you could ask yourself “What would happen if a Black person were doing this?” and the answer could be anything from “Lots of Black people wouldn’t even risk doing that,” to “They could be killed.”
My sign removal was one of these things. I felt entitled to take the signs, to take my daughter to take the signs. I felt entitled—again, knowing that I might have committed a crime—to seek out a police officer and tell him what I'd done. I felt entitled to ask my daughter to email our village president and ask if the signs had been placed with permission. It turns out they hadn't. The village president said thank you for bringing them to her attention, and thank you for taking some down. Even if she’d wanted them up, though, I don't think I'd have gotten in trouble. I’m a (generally) law-abiding middle-aged property-owner mom. And above all, I'm white. The system was designed to work for me.
Another example: During the coronavirus quarantine, my husband, daughter, and I have spent a lot of time in our backyard. We love our backyard and have done many things to improve it in the 15 years we've lived here. But in recent weeks I've come to wish it had more shade, and I was thrilled the morning I realized there's a way to make that happen: plant a tree. So whereas we used to spend our daily walks and bike rides looking at people's houses, we've now started looking at people's trees. And when we see one we like, we take pictures.
As in, pausing in the street to take a picture of a stranger's yard. As in, walking into the yard to get a close-up of the bark. As in, gently pulling on a branch to get the leaves to face the camera better. Each time we’ve done this, I’ve found myself hoping the homeowner will come out to see what we're doing. I imagine the neighborly little scene: "Please forgive us for trespassing, but we're thinking about planting a tree and this one is so great!" It pleases me to imagine their pleasure on behalf of their tree, as though we're giving them a gift.
Would a Black person trespass on a stranger's property and imagine that the stranger would consider it a gift? Exactly. This is not deep thinking. You don't have to have a grasp of systemic racism and structural inequities to see and understand the double standard. It's right there. I trespassed, I stole, I expected no consequences. I didn’t have to worry that someone would call the police on me; I basically called the police on myself. I didn’t have to spend one second thinking that that officer might handcuff me, punch me, pummel me with a baton, force me to the ground, shoot me, kill me.
I knew I was taking liberties, and I took them. We all know when we take liberties, and for myself, I’m deciding that from now on when I take one, I’m also going to take three additional actions.
Number one: Check myself. “Hey, you just did a thing you get to do with impunity because you’re white.” Number two: Go home and Google “Black person police [fill in the blank with whatever thing I just did].” Googling “Black person police trespassing yard,” I find the story of Michael Hayes, a real-estate investor who was peering into a Memphis home he was interested in buying when the lady next door didn’t like his account of why he was there and called the police. Coincidentally, I also find the story of Zayd Atkinson, a university student in Colorado who was picking up trash—just like me with the Company X signs, except Atkinson was outside his own home—when a police officer decided he didn’t belong and pulled a gun on him.
I’d never heard of Michael Hayes or Zayd Atkinson, but it’s meaningful to know their stories—and to never forget that behind them are untold numbers of other Black people whose stories didn’t make it to Google, who didn’t have the police called on them or a gun pulled on them but were “only” harassed.
Even more meaningful, though, is my number three: Do something that advances anti-racism. Give money to groups that are working to reverse gerrymandering and protect voting rights (up first for me: allontheline.org). Research the police in my town—who they’re arresting; their policies for and records of use-of-force and officer misconduct; their budget. Go to a Community Coalition on Race meeting, instead of just feeling mildly smug about living in a town that has them. Learn all the local restaurants that are Black-owned, and support them with my business.
And talk talk talk talk talk to other white people about race and privilege: what we believe, what confuses us, what we don’t understand, what we don’t agree on, what makes us squirm. In the wake of the Company X signs, my family talked about them in terms of race. The western end of our town leads to a series of ever whiter and wealthier towns; the eastern end leads to Newark, whose population is about 50 percent Black. The signs had been placed at the Newark end of town. That offended me the way military recruitment in this country offends me; it felt predatory toward Black and brown people. My husband saw that, but he also saw that, in the pandemic economy, a $2000 signing bonus could have meant the difference between shelter and eviction. What gave white me the right to decide who got to see the signs? What if my action had kept a Black parent from work that could have saved their family?
This was not the first time my family has talked about race. It wasn’t the first time I’d recognized my white privilege. But as it did for the rest of the country, the killing of George Floyd changed things for me. Until I watched a Black man slowly die at the hand of a white man who looked as though he were just whiling away the day, being abstractly aware of my privilege seemed like enough. Being a magazine editor who worked on stories about racial disparities in healthcare and generational wealth seemed like enough. Being outraged—by racially motivated murders, by the prison system’s warehousing of Black men, by the racist application of the death penalty, by the continued display of Confederate flags, by the NFL’s treatment of Colin Kaepernick, by politicians’ dog-whistle rhetoric—that, too, seemed like enough. It doesn’t seem that way anymore. If the Black Lives Matter movement has shown me anything, it’s that being is not the same as doing.
It comes down to this: I can’t get rid of my whiteness. I’m white in a white-built, white-focused system that’s been centuries in the making and can’t be dismantled overnight; even if it could be, we’d still be living with the lingering effects of systemic racism for a long, long time. So privilege is part of the package. But I can do things that mitigate my privilege, the kind of things that, day by day, help with the dismantling. I’m talking about meaningful actions; posting a black square or sharing memes or wearing a solidarity T-shirt is absolutely not enough.
My ultimate goal is for these actions to become habit. Because of course it’s not just about the liberties white people take, it’s about the liberties we have without having to lift a finger. This includes the liberty to turn away, as I have turned away, from things that are painful to contemplate. It includes the liberty to be incurious, as I have too often been with regard to racial injustice, though I prize curiosity as among the greatest virtues. I have not been curious enough to fully educate myself. I have known but not bothered to really know. Really knowing means seeing, and feeling, that I am part of the problem. As a white person, it’s so easy to feel like race is something you’re on the outside looking in on, something you can dip into and out of at will. But my whole life is embedded in race.
And so now as I, finally, do what white people must do—because it is just too plainly wrong and unfair not to, because it is my job—as I become more awake to the omnipresence of my privilege and my part in perpetuating it, I see that waking up is not enough. We have to wake up and get up. Get up and get to work.
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