white privilege: i could never earn the life i lead

Last week, when I talked to my mom on the phone, she told me she thinks there are too many foreigners in the country. She told me she had this thought when she was at work at the grocery store in our area, and saw a Latino woman paying with food stamps. She said she thought that immigrants haven't paid enough into the financial safety net provided by the government to take advantage of it. [I'm paraphrasing.] And yet, she claimed, it's not as though she were prejudiced. (The area I grew up in is overwhelmingly white-- I only ever met about ten black people before I came to Pittsburgh.)

Over the course of two hours, I attempted to explain the many holes in that argument and thought process. I hoped I'd done a good job, knowing there was no way I'd been thorough enough in my response to her prejudices. I tried to explain that part of the problem is that she IS prejudiced, and worse, she's in denial about it/doesn't understand what a prejudice actually is. That is the real enabler of this fucked up system, far more so than the handful of racists that walk around screeching "white power". I hoped that enough of my response would stick to have a lasting effect.

I talked to her a few days later, and I got my answer. Imagine my disappointment when she told me that this week at work, she kept thinking of how proud she was of me for studying social justice and majoring in social work, and having the motivation to work though my biases. Of course part of my lecture stuck with her, it brought up serious emotions, as lots of conversations about race do. But instead of taking that emotional energy to examine her biases and motivations for making illogical assumptions about people who are different (in behavior as well as appearance), she took that emotional energy and focused it on me, and being proud of what I chose to do with my life. HEADDESK. I did try to explain exactly that to her, but I don't think she understood. I don't think she's going to examine her misplaced fears or prejudices. I still don't think she understands what a prejudice really is.

My feelings about this are obviously pretty complicated. First, I loathe to admit, I felt ungrateful for pushing aside her pride in me. It's nice when people are proud of you, but that is the opposite of the point in this case. White people don'tt study social justice (an ever-evolving definition, from "people" as being defined solely by white, property owning men-- to a rejection of the gender binary and advocating for racial equality) for a pat on the back for being such stellar humanitarians. Honestly I feel like that's a given, but I feel like being thorough here: I doubt that many white people cultivate an interest in social justice for exactly that reason, but I acknowledge that excess congratulations can be a powerful distraction from the shit that's actually important. Especially since part of the experience of advocacy for diverified perspective for a white person is understanding that your view of "what's actually important" is seriously fucked. Or at least incredibly biased in itself, and so pretty much self-defeating. A big part of checking white privilege is learning how to listen without interrupting to beg forgiveness. IT'S NOT ABOUT FORGIVENESS. It's about what comes after that.

There are so many articles written about the complicated set of feelings I'm trying to describe here. I'm writing about this because it is so textbook. From the outside, these counteracting sets of biases effect each other in a very predictable way. But it's so frustrating, over and over again.

Troy Davis, I'm sorry that your very personal, individual experience of life and death has to be the focal point for debating forces so much larger than yourself. I am lucky, and nothing else, that my death will probably not be about race, it'll be about me and who I was as a person. I'm sorry that your death was an acceptable sacrifice to appease the sorrow of the white family of a cop who died wrongfully. I am speaking in the language of forgiveness because I don't know what comes after this.