A Brief History of Personal Racism/Anti-racism

Before I start, let me invite you to think about your own racial autobiography. The GCORR has this checklist to get you thinking, but I’d also recommend reading through Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack if you haven’t before, or watching Peggy McIntosh’s TED talk, if that’s more your speed. Do both, though. It can be really, really helpful to realize the amount of diversity you’ve been exposed to over the course of your life and, if you’re white, to recognize how your privilege plays into that.

To the surprise of everyone I talk to, I’m from Caldwell County, North Carolina. People are surprised because they don’t think I have enough of an accent to come from furniture country deep in the foothills, but believe me, I know how to pronounce Appalachian and I have just as much of an aversion to final g’s when I speak as the rest of us do. But being from the particular end of Caldwell County that I’m from, growing up in the 90’s and 00’s, I didn’t have much experience with people of other races until I went to college.

This isn’t to say that I only knew white people. In sixth grade, when we were practicing filling out the student information section on our End of Grade tests, I remember balking at the idea that anyone in my class would have to fill in a bubble other than Caucasian. I insisted that my two Asian classmates were white. I can’t for the life of me remember what my teacher said in response, but honestly, sixth grade was the first time I realized that not everyone in the world was white. I had traveled around the Sun twelve times before I understood that race was a thing.

Now, again, this was the early 2000s. We were very big on being colorblind back then, very insistent that if we just declared everyone equal, they would be. I mean, we had achieved MLK’s dream, hadn’t we? And I kept that viewpoint for most of my middle school, high school, and, let’s be honest, college years. The two Black people in my graduating class were brothers, but sandwiched in between them during graduation was my so-white-she-gets-freckles-in-the-sun friend, Jessie. We laughed about it. We didn’t talk about how all the Hispanic kids hung out together or how we had a “redneck hall” that was exactly as white as you expected it to be. I lived in a meritocratic world, so to me, for much of my early life, talent was what mattered. Race was just a secondary characteristic, as far as I was concerned.

But it was a whole other world at Carolina. Suddenly, I had Black and Brown friends from band or from class. My core friendships were still white, but I had a Jewish friend and I had Black friends that I could say hello to when we walked past each other on the quad, so I felt very, very worldly by the end of my first year.

Actually, let’s back up. I need to talk about Camp Joy.

Camp Joy was a non-denominational (so, Southern Baptist) Christian overnight camp that I worked at for eight weeks each summer, starting the summer after freshman year of high school. The camp director, after my first summer, was Black, and his mixed race family worked on camp staff, which was great, because we had a diverse group of kids who came to camp each week. For many campers, camp was free, or at a reduced rate, because a plurality if not a majority of the campers were recommended to the camp through DSS. I will forever and always be so deeply torn about my experience with Camp Joy.

On the one hand, these summers have been a perpetual blessing in my life. I keep up with former campers and with fellow camp counselors on facebook and I am often so, so proud of the people we have become. My leadership skills, my gifts and graces for ministry, all of these things were first truly recognized at this camp. And while I remained oblivious to the racial dynamics at play at camp, I learned a bit about Black culture during my time at Camp Joy and I truly and deeply value the way my world expanded while I was at camp. On the other hand, the Purity Movement was EVERYWHERE at camp. I learned that the only thing I ever had to be ashamed about [as a white girl] was my body and the way it caused boys and men to sin, and that is a difficult thing to unlearn.

So at Carolina, I went from summer camp friendships with mostly lower class Black and Brown people to friendships with Black and Brown people who were smart enough and lucky enough to make it into UNC. My experience with Black culture shifted. Instead of being stubbornly who they were, which is how most of my campers and fellow counselors experienced their Blackness, most of my Black friends in college would code switch. (If that’s a new term for you, NPR has a podcast by the same name for you to binge.) Again, I fell into that myth of meritocracy. We’re all the same if we’re at the same ability level now. Your background doesn’t impact who you are. All that matters is what you’re doing now.

It was 2011 before the bubble of this worldview burst for me. I was working at another summer camp, this time at the planetarium, and one of my fellow camp staff pulled me aside. We had been trading off dealing with a kindergarten camper who needed a little more attention than most, due to his tendency to get a little bitey with other campers, and I had followed her lead in talking to him. “Now, Mr. Paige,” I said, sitting down with him just as she had done. “I know I’m not talkin’ to you again about how we can’t be bitin’ our friends, right?” After a few minutes minutes of talking and a few more minutes of quiet time away from the group, I sent him back to his room and we went on with the rest of our day, answering calls on the walkies and floating from camp session to camp session.

Now, I hadn’t thought twice about what I did, with my coworker sitting behind the main camp desk and listening the whole time. In fact, I felt a little bit of pride, having picked up a new, effective disciplinary style. There was no more biting for the rest of the day. But, as my coworker explained to me after the pickup line had ebbed down to a trickle, the problem was that my fellow camp staffer was Black and I had mimicked her method, right down to the accent and mannerisms. It was cultural appropriation at best, but really, it was mocking. It took me years to pick apart why, but this, really, was the first time that I was called out on something racist that I’d done, simply because I didn’t think that race mattered.

Now, I spent years in that uncomfortable space, realizing that race does, in fact matter, and that claiming that you don’t see race is actually just something that white people get to do that has no real impact on the world, without really know what to do with this information. I started to learn that you didn’t have to put on a Klan hood in order to do something racist and that I had implicit biases. All of this was happening on a personal level as we re-elected our first Black president and as the Black Lives Matter movement began on a national level, and it was also happening when something very particular was taking over the internet: tumblr.

I found tumblr because of Welcome to Night Vale, and that was particularly fortuitous, because if it had been through the Harry Potter or Supernatural fandoms, I would have seen more slash fics and less POC/LGBTQIA educational posts. I learned that I need to diversify my timelines and the other media I consumed. I learned the word woke (ah, 2014) and I learned that there were so. many. ways. to discriminate against others, even without intending to. I did a ton of informal learning just by listening to people on the internet who had different life experiences from me, especially different racial experiences.

My more formal education about race came during seminary, when I went to Wesley in Washington, DC, in the fall of 2016. I mean, I knew enough about racial dynamics to recommend that my Science and Religion program at Edinburgh incorporate more thinkers of color (because BOY, if you want to see a bunch of white men talk about philosophy and religion, you can’t do much better than studying Science and Religion as a field—and I thought physics was bad!), but outside of that, I had no real tools for learning going further in my learning.

At Wesley, though, I had more Black classmates and professors than I had ever had in my life. I’ll never forget having Dr. Beverly Mitchell for my introduction to philosophy for theology class, a class I resented having to take since I had already taken Philosophy of Time and thought that that should count. Dr. Mitchell taught me about questioning the philosophy that I took for granted, how to read theologians generously but not without critique, and how to notice all of the ideas at play. Anti-racist work was woven throughout each of these lessons. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I learned from my classmates, really listening to their experiences for the first time. I read and read and read so many thinkers who were not white, who didn’t have anything like my background. I absorbed all of this information, feeling like a sponge, not knowing that it was actually a lifeline. Engaging with Black and Brown people’s words, thoughts, sermons, music, art of all kinds, experiences, all of it kept me human. I learned so much about being like Jesus just by being around people who were not like me. I learned, too, to see how so many of the systems that have shepherded me through my life, including the church, were built with racism in mind. What had been a self-righteous awareness that race existed grew into a complex understanding that the past and present of race and racism in this country alone was an immense thing to grapple with, but grapple with it I must. I’m glad to be past seminary in many ways, but I’m so grateful for this astounding work of learning and reshaping God did within me during these years, years when it would have been so easy to disengage from the hurts of others and retreat to places of quiet, white comfort.

In the year and couple months since seminary, I’ve continued to grow, continued to hone my understanding of racism in this world. I’ve struggled with how to teach others, how to share this life-giving information with others. I’ve felt myself called over and over again to compassion for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, called to guide others on the journey from comfortable white colorblindness to something more like the truth. I long for a world where we can celebrate the joy that comes from glorious diversity that humanity contains, and though the dominance of white supremacy dampens that joy, it’s never completely gone. The Maker of All Things made us to be different from one another not so that we would forever be in conflict, but so that we might learn to recognize holiness outside of ourselves. There is holiness bursting through everywhere in this world and where there is holiness, there is joy. I hold out hope that we’ll all be able to see it and live into it one day.

I invite y’all to think through your own racial autobiography. There’s so much that I’ve left out here: Black authors that have changed my life, the march in DC where the pain, strength, and hope of Indigenous people crept into my heart and made a home, friends who have been patient with me and struggled with me, my trip to South Africa, settling into my Appalachian heritage while also learning that my experience is such a narrow slice of it. I’m sure your stories are just as complex, but sit down and start thinking about what your story is anyway. Reflection, in the right amount, is good for the soul.