For the first month of grad seminars, I’ve made occasional use of my fairly deep understanding of the issues of race and ethnicity, in contributing to conversations at which I’m a total newbie, like conversations on gender. For instance, I might use race by analogy to see if it might shed light on a gender problem.
But the other day, something gave me some pause in my (all-white) seminar on war and gender. A book we were discussing on the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which had a running theme of African-American women’s experiences within the WAC, felt somehow wrong to me: the black women in the story were heroic and unchanging in a way the white women weren’t, and so I asked.
Invoking my newcomer/outsider status, I bluntly asked if white guilt is debilitating within the department, or the university at large. By debilitating, I meant that it prevents people from being free to think clearly. Everybody awkwardly waited for the professor to field that one, which she did, and in the affirmative.
Which gives me pause about invoking race for the future. White guilt can be a bludgeon and an obstacle to racial healing. White guilt developed, I’ve come to understand, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, when real healing and unity began to devolve into the politics of scarcity and institutional access.
I consider myself fairly free from white guilt—not in the sense that I have discharged whatever duties may befall to owners of white privilege—but in the smaller sense that I am no longer ashamed of being white when race is the elephant in the room.
It’s been a long-term growth for me, not the least of which relates to my twelve years at a numerically majority-African American church. I know who I am, and know what I’ve earned, and what has come to me for free, and I’ve dedicated the bulk of my adult life (I’m in my mid-thirties) to bringing racial healing to one particular congregation. I’ve been called names by black people and white people alike, and I just don’t care. Which is to say: if someone tries to bludgeon me with white guilt, it doesn’t really impress me.
That’s not to boast. A better man would have reached this stage years ahead of me. It’s a reflection of how much heart and pain I’ve put into the matter, and nothing more.
But it gives me pause to realize many of my white colleagues in the university may be subject to crippling fears whenever race comes up.
As a Christian who believes that some healing is instantaneous and some healing is a process, I must think twice before invoking race again. It could easily stifle people’s creativity and, more importantly, short-circuit their thinking about race. People don’t like to brush up against the same electric fence that has shocked them in the past, and if you zap people in a place they’re inclined to protect, they might learn to avoid the topic altogether.
And that’s not where hope lies.
