I Don't Know What to do With Good White People

[LiberalElite]

http://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-what-to-do-with-good-white-people-1671201391


This won't let me cut n' paste.

[SophieKoko]

1. This was beautifully written

I just hope people don't come away from it thinking that it's wrong to talk about these issues (yes, even if you are not black). I would rather have people discussing the news items that involve race than not talk about them at all. I would rather have people clumsily discuss these things than pull away from these issues completely.

[brer cat]

3. I agree.

Welcome to DU, SophieKoko.

[brer cat]

2. I have been so guilty of this.

I know that I sometimes come across as condescending even though my intentions were so good.

This is a "right-between-the eyes" hit:

"Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life."

This article deserves wide exposure.

[JEFF9K]

4. No problem cutting and pasting ...

1) Drag across text to select
2) Cntrl C
3) Cntrl V

I don't know what to do with good white people.

I've been surrounded by good white people my whole life. Good white people living in my neighborhood, who returned our dog when he got loose; good white teachers in elementary school who pushed books into my hands; good white professors at Stanford, a Bay Area bastion of goodwhiteness, who recommended me M.F.A. programs where I met good white writers, liberal enough for a Portlandia sketch.

I should be grateful for this. Who, in generations of my family, has ever been surrounded by so many good white people? My mother was born to sharecroppers in Louisiana; she used to measure her feet with a piece of string because they could not try on shoes in the store. She tells me of a white policeman who humiliated her mother by forcing her to empty her purse on the store counter just so he could watch her few coins spiral out.

...

[LiberalElite]

5. Thanks! -

I have the same difficulty with Huff Post.

[clydefrand]

6. How I grew up as a white in the south

I'm now 80 years old. I was raised in a small town in the mountains of Virginia. I don't recall race ever being discussed until I was about 18, then only once, between my dad and his brother. All I know was the whites lived in most of the town and the blacks in another section. Whites had their schools, the blacks had theirs. At the train station, the whites had their waiting room, the blacks had theirs. Blacks where not allowed in any of the white restaurants. Most stores (grocery, department, etc.)
allowed them. At our 1 movie theater, whites sat down stairs, the blacks in the balcony.
I grew knowing this was the way it was, and never thought to question why it was that way. I do know I was told to never go into the black neighborhood. There was only 1 black family in my part of town, and they had a boy about my age. I used to stop by his home (a converted chicken coop in an alley) and asked him to come out and we would play pitch for a while, or whatever.
Once I finished high school I joined the army. In basic training we had one of the first companies to include blacks.
There was 1 new to me. One weekend we had a 2 day leave. The black wanted to borrow $20. in case he needed it.
He was going to Chicago. Every one else told me I never see that 20 again. Well, come Sunday evening, I was handed the 20 by the returning black. No one ever told me again to not trust him. I only had a few occasions to work with blacks again while in the army. Many years later I did have occasion to work in a group where there were several blacks, this being in the 1990's. No problems with any of them.
So, even to this day, I have never had a problem with getting along with the blacks, and no, I've never gone out of my may to just make a friend that was black. This is just the way it has gone. Once the 'race' thing got started, I could never under stand why white were against the blacks.
I'm not bragging, I'm not complaining, but I still don't understand why race is still such a problem.

[1StrongBlackMan]

7. With all due respect ...

Once the 'race' thing got started, I could never under stand why white were against the blacks.

Consider whether the above, places you within the "good white people" group that the piece is talking about?

{Note: "the 'race' thing" has always been a matter of concern ... a "thing" ... for non-whites.}

[CTyankee]

11. dear god, I see this on my Facebook page and I'm ready to throw up...

If only "they" would only marry and be present in their children's lives, yadda yadda. I tell them they don't have a frickin' clue what it is like to live in poverty and racism and the chaos of hopelessness and despair. All they wanna do is preach to poor, nonwhite people (I guess poor white people don't exist). I just concluded a rant to one of them. I'm still mad...

[mnhtnbb]

8. Interesting piece.

I posted a response.

Here's what I wrote:

This is a very thought provoking essay. I do wonder, though, if sometimes rude behavior has nothing to do with the race or the sex of the person on the receiving end—as when you were cut by the white woman at the Orange County airport—and everything to do with the narcissism of the person displaying the rudeness. Why on earth would she apologize for "not seeing you" if she had really not seen you? Obviously, she did see you, felt guilty, didn't want you to think she was a racist, so she lied about "not seeing you". Her apology was all about her and comforting her own guilt at just being a rude person.

I would like to share an airport story with you. I am a white female Yankee. I was flying back from Hawaii through Dallas to North Carolina, where I now live. It was not long after 9/11 and there was new concern over bags left unattended. I arrived at my layover gate—very early in the morning—and no one else was there. Soon a middle aged black man walked in to the area, set his bags down, and walked away. He did not speak to me and he had put his bags several rows away. I waited a while, thinking he went to the men's room. I am forever telling my white husband not to walk away and leave his bags unattended when we fly together: I figure it's a male thing, nothing to do with race. About 15 minutes later he has not returned. I decide I'd better report the bags to someone. What if he's alone and sick in the men's room? So I find a gate agent and tell him. Soon security shows up. They do not take the bags away but stand there talking about them. Finally, a good 25 minutes after the man left his bags, he returns. There is quite a conversation—which I cannot hear—but he is not escorted away and they open his bags to look through them right there. And yes, when we finally board our flight almost two hours later, guess who's in the seat next to mine? We had quite a conversation—he knew I'd "reported him"—and I admitted doing so. Do you know what he'd done when he walked away and left his bags? Gone off to have breakfast. People do things all the time without thinking about the consequences. I didn't ask him why he didn't say something to me. Was it because he didn't want to ask a favor of a white woman? Did he think, because I was a woman—regardless of my color—that I wouldn't call security? Did it even cross his mind that he was putting his bags at risk? Or was he just a person from another era, not used to flying, not aware of new concerns about unattended bags, and just in need of some coffee and something to eat, trusting that his bags would be okay?

By the way, I am also forever admonishing my white husband NOT to cut people in line: at the airport, at the movies, anyplace where there's a line. He always says the same thing: "I didn't see them." And I always ask him, "how could you not see someone standing right in front of you?" He's not what I call other-focused when he's around crowds of other people; he's all about getting what he wants. It's possible that white woman at the Orange County airport was in the same mode.

[flamin lib]

9. All of us good white people should read this.

I'm 66 years old and grew up in South Texas on a small dirt farm. Mom was a bigot. An unapologetic unilateral all inclusive bigot. If your skin was brown you were a Meskin or Pepperbelly. If black, well, you can figure that one out without me typing it. Jews were Christ Killers and hid their tails inside their clothes. Catholics were pagans who worshiped Mary, not Jesus.

You get the picture.

So at 20 I find myself inducted into the Army. What an enlightening experience. Everybody was treated equally in basic training, which is to to say badly and with great disrespect. I met Jews without knowing it. I slept, ate and bathed with black and brown skin all around me. I occasionally opened my mouth and had words come out of it that embarrassed me and at the same time educated me. But on one occasion I learned a very important lesson that I carry with me today.

I was on guard duty with about 20 others who stood posts in 4 hour watches. I won the coveted post of roving patrol, driving a jeep with a companion all over the place from the Officer's housing area to all the other stationary posts. My first companion was a fellow Spec 4 and we had such a good time that we volunteered to take the patrol for the rest of the night. A little later the question origins came up and I asked, "Were are you from, boy?" Note the small b in boy as opposed to Boy. The jeep got very quiet and it wasn't until I retold the story back at the barracks that I found out what I had done.

Now, where I came from, the go-to word for people with dark skin was n*****r although there were other colorful epithets like speerchucker, but the word Boy was never used in this fashion. I think that's more of an Antebellum South attribution. When I used that word I honestly meant *young male person* but the man sharing the jeep was cut to the quick and didn't speak another word to me the rest of the night. I had no idea what I had done wrong and it pains me to this day that I hurt someone that I had formed a genuine affection for this badly.

My point in this story, other than a bit of cleansing through admission as a good white person, is that white people do not and cannot have a point of reference for the life and history of our brothers and sisters of color. No amount of getting to know people, of trying to understand the life experiences, of surrounding ourselves with people we respect can give us a perspective on generation upon generation of family history.

We not only do not know, we can't possibly know that we don't know.

[bobGandolf]

10. Thank You

A good read on Christmas Eve

[True Blue Door]

12. I don't know what to do with this.

Dissing "good white people" for trying to do the right thing from a position of privilege they didn't ask for and can never fully disavow...it seems almost like an act of privilege unto itself to cast such people as self-involved fools.

Are we now going to act like JFK and RFK were silly kids who only cared about civil rights because they liked the way it looked on them in the mirror? How about the white kid who died with his two black friends in the Mississippi swamp during the Freedom Rides?

Yes, they got the privilege of choosing their burden. But why is that a negative comment on them, that they choose to do what's right? Couldn't we equally wonder how many black people would be greedy Republican assholes if the GOP would just stop demonizing their entire race?

People are not characters in a TV show or a passion play. Every human being's love, hate, fear, and pain is real.