“Waking Up White” Week 2 – Confession
Main Themes, Chapter Summaries, and Small Group Questions
Main Themes:
- Colorblindness
- I’m a good person
- Confronting our racial oblivion / lack of awareness
- White people have the privilege and power to choose to confront racism or ignore
Chapter 12 – Icebergs: Debby Irving explains, “I have come to think of culture this way: culture is to a group as personality is to an individual. It’s a collective character that describes a set of beliefs and behaviors that identify the group.” Sociologist Kenneth Cushner explains culture by dividing an iceberg into two parts: the 10% above the waterline and the 90% below. Above the waterline are things we can see and hear: spoken language, body language, clothing, material possessions, job titles, foods and traditions, for instance. Below the waterline and invisible to the eye are the beliefs and values one adopts because they are the norms of one’s culture.”
“One of the basic beliefs I adopted was the idea that in America people failed or succeeded based on individual skill and effort. Therefore, logic told me, the people who succeeded most must have superior skill and have exerted extra effort… I assumed white people were in charge because they were more capable.”
“I began to see how racialized ideas get handed along like a relay torch. Ideas create outcomes that, if unexamined, reinforce old ideas – America’s oldest idea being that the white race rules. White folks don’t just control America’s institutions; they control the narrative. And the narrative, I believe, controls just about everything else.”
Chapter 13 – Invisibility: This chapter refers to three external resources: the gorilla blindness video, Peggy McIntosh’s “Invisible Knapsack”, and Diane Sawyer’s segment on ABC titled, “True Colors”. Using the example of the gorilla in the basketball video, Debby Irving asks, “What was I so busy keeping my eye on that I hadn’t noticed my white privilege? Keeping myself and my family fed, getting myself and my kids to where we needed to be on time, making sure there was enough money in the bank, paying the bills on time, keeping in touch with friends and family – these were the things that occupied my attention in a way that allowed the rest of the world and other people’s problem to remain background noise.”
“There is an interesting circularity to this learning. The more I understand the privilege side of the equation, the more I understand the discrimination side, and vice versa. Until I have a clear idea of what racial discrimination looks and feels like, I can’t imagine how the lack of it effects my life. Discrimination and privilege are the flip sides of the same coin… To really get racism, a white person must get both pieces. It’s not enough to feel empathy toward people on the downside; white people must also see themselves on the upside to understand that discrimination results from privilege. You can’t have one without the other.”
“Segregation enables avoidance, which enables denial, which creates an illusion that white privilege doesn’t exist. But just because I didn’t see my skin color advantage didn’t mean it didn’t exist.”
Chapter 14 – Zap!: “The fact that the playing field is not level means that life experiences are not merely different, but unequal and unfair. Not understanding this basic reality made me unaware of how people of color experience America, and more than that: it set me up to be skeptical and judgmental when a person of color tried to explain it. While friends and acquaintances of color bottled up accumulated racial pain, I maintained a degree of racial oblivion that made me a poor listener for their tender and charged words.”
“Rather than examining the source of social tension I felt around people of color, I retreated to my social comfort zone – other white people. While I had been conditioned not to see race at all, people of color had been conditioned not to bring up race to white people. The resulting elephant in the room helps maintain segregation, avoidance, and racially socialized behaviors.”
“Part of the power differential is that white people have the choice, the power, to ignore race and racism. I can choose not to learn the beliefs, customs, traditions, and values of racial groups other than my own. Not so for people of color, who can’t escape knowing what life looks like in White Land.”
“The worst part of the cycle of segregation and avoidance is that it happens at the institutional level, with the consequences ranging from social discomfort to lack of access to survival basics.”
“Oppression can be held in place by good, but ignorant, people.”
Chapter 17 – My Good People!: Debby Irving shares the quote from Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” She adds, “I did nothing, at least nothing with any real impact because I didn’t understand how racism worked. If you can’t see a problem for what it is, how can you step in and be a part of its solution, no matter how good a person you are?”
“As I became older and increasingly aware that others had so little, it felt less comfortable to have so much.”
“Seeing myself in a system with people as opposed to a sympathetic observer on the sidelines changed my relationship to the problem. I understood then that it was possible to be both a good person and complicit in a corrupt system. Once I saw myself as part of the system, I recognized myself as part of the problem.”
Chapter 18 – Color-blind: “Racism had remained an undiscussed topic among my closest circle of white friends and family. It’s not that we made a pact never to talk about it; it just never came up… Racism was simply not on our radar.”
“A young black woman explained, ‘I couldn’t believe it when I found out white people don’t talk about race every day. I thought everybody talked about race every day. Not talk about it? How can you not talk about it?’”
“Though it once felt polite to ignore a person of color’s race and just see all people as individuals, my former color-blind approach was actually allowing me to ignore my own part in the system of racism. Color-blindness, a philosophy that denies the way lives play out differently along racial line, actually maintains the very cycle of silence, ignorance, and denial that needs to be broken for racism to be dismantled.”
Chapter 20 – My Robin Hood Syndrome: The subtitle to this chapter is, “the audacity of thinking that I knew what was good for ‘others’”. Debby told the story about organizing a major event for “inner-city youth”. At that debriefing event, a black teenager stated, “Man, it was freaky. I have never seen so many white people in my life! I was scared!” Debby states, “The boy and I had had exact opposite perceptions of the evening. All I could see were the unfamiliar black faces; all he could see were the unfamiliar white ones. Where he felt the fear of an outsider, I felt the comfort of being an insider.”
Small Group Discussion Questions:
- What did you “wake up” to, or what stirred in you during the reading this week?
- Debby writes extensively about privilege and asks, “What was I so busy keeping my eye on that I hadn’t noticed my white privilege?” Similarly, what are you too busy with or too far away from to notice your privilege?
- Have you ever second-guessed another person’s experience when it comes to racism or some other form of discrimination or privilege? Please share an example.
- How does the idea of being “a good person,” “colorblindness,” and lack of proximity to people of color help to perpetuate systemic racism? What does our faith ask of us?
- At Grace LC or in our own lives, do we exhibit the Robin Hood syndrome and, if so, how does it affect the way we think about “the other”?
- Debby was very open and vulnerable about her failures including times when she was resistant. How have you been resistant? What mistakes have you made on this journey? What is helping you to keep open to learning?
