I was surprised to find that this pre-Obama account of just such an experience was still available online, but here it is:
Confessions of a former self-hating white person
I was about 6, at the moral and political apex of the civil rights movement, when my liberal, Irish Catholic father told me a story that changed my life: Dark-haired Irish folk like him and me, he said, were black Irish, the offspring of seafaring Moors from Africa who mixed with fair-skinned Celts in Ireland long ago.
His kinky anthropology lesson was meant to show that racism isn’t just wrong, it’s stupid: That person you think you hate may well be kin. And I believed him.
I grew up adoring black people, even though I didn’t know any, except from TV.
Mine was one of those 1960s middle-class families brought to social conscience by television. We watched in horror as white sheriffs fire-hosed black protesters in the South; in awe, even reverence, as Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers made nonviolence a spiritual and political practice.
To a devout Catholic girl — I grew up reading the lives of the saints, wanting to be a nun or a missionary — the civil rights movement was the struggle of good and evil written quite literally in black and white, a story from the pages of my saints books come to life.
Wanting so desperately to be good, choosing sides was easy. I was good; I was black Irish; I was not white, not
really.
It would take me 30 years, two careers, motherhood and a broken heart to accept the obvious: I am white, sort of. (Though the new census, which allows people to mark more than one box, intrigues me, because it might make for a more complicated racial reckoning.)
But I became white just in time to become a minority in California, so strangely, little has changed for me: I’m still watching a mulatto country trying to eradicate some racial boundaries and hierarchies while enforcing certain others.
Even more confusing, today I find that the vocal racial purists are as likely to be black, Latino or Asian as white. Each group has at least one thing in common, though: Our rhetoric about race can’t even come close to capturing our mixed-up reality.
What’s most amazing is how much our black and white racial paradigm — victim vs. victimizer, the patron and the patronized — still prevails. And yet it’s an outdated script, reducing Asians, Latinos and the growing number of multiracial Americans either to bit players in our national drama or a vast army of victims (an identity most non-white Americans viscerally reject).
But many of us cling to the paradigm, because we have no other way of envisioning racial relationships. I know that I myself clung way too long to a black-white, good-evil motif, obsessed with the possibility of racial retribution and redemption more than justice.
I was a type, a stereotype even, and a walking paradox: a civil rights do-gooder motivated by racial animus against my group — in short, a self-hating white person. Not all Caucasians in the struggle are the same, but over the years I ran across a lot of me. And the fact that mixed-up white folk are the most likely to get involved with civil rights work results in a deformed political culture, one in which there is little white participation in our national conversation about race beyond the right-wing scapegoating of a Pat Buchanan and the masochistic piety of guilty Mumia cultists on the left.
Meanwhile, the coming white minority is getting little help in developing a language for its changing and legitimate concerns.
It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but after an adulthood spent believing I was part of the solution to racial strife, I finally came to admit I was part of the problem.
My views on race were an odd fusion of early childhood Catholicism and adolescent rebellion. I was a misfit in my extended family, whose working-class Irish racism clashed with my college-educated father’s tolerance.
Plus, we all suffered from the Irish Catholic dysfunction Frank McCourt has made a cliché, but set on Long Island, not in Limerick: alcoholism, bad fortune and early death, borne with stoicism, denial, love badly expressed and more alcohol. I grew up and, especially after my mother died, exiled myself from my ignoble heritage, and all the loss.
But it wasn’t until my father died, too, about a dozen years ago, that I got the first useful clues about the source of my lifelong affinity with black people.
Hideously depressed, I started doing consulting work on poverty and race issues, going to work for a black-led anti-poverty group in Oakland, Calif., and after feeling like an outsider at every job I had ever had, I finally felt at home.
Now the cause of my comfort seems obvious: Black people have a cosmology of suffering, a culture that makes sense of injustice and misfortune.
White people in trouble are shit out of luck, stuck with a culture that acts like bad fortune is not just deserved, but contagious.
Every black person knows in their soul that life is deeply unfair, while a remarkable number of white people skate through most of their lives unscathed, unmarked, unaware of the stacked hand they’ve been dealt. And I have always hated them.
I think hate may have had more to do with my racial views than love, but for a long time that didn’t matter: I thrived in my new world. I grew up there.
After years working in white lefty organizations that only fed my ambivalence about success and achievement, I found myself surrounded by ambitious, accomplished peers, most of whom happened to be black. They liberated me to want more, do more, dress better and have more fun doing it.
I was shielded from white girl guilt because it was all in the service of a higher goal: civil rights, social justice, uplift of the poor.
Emotionally, what I got from my new world bordered on the hackneyed: damaged white person finds solace and redemption through warmer, darker folk. But that’s not it, exactly. I got a lot of nuts and bolts survival skills: silence instead of talking all the time. Strategy. Looking behind the surface of things. Patience and perseverance. Perspective. The long view.
It was my black friends, ironically, who focused me on how much my Irish family gave me, for instance, and jolted me out of my white self-pity and shame about what they didn’t.
It’s hard to believe now, but for a stretch of time — years even — I didn’t think about being white. Partly it’s that my friends were sane, kind people — a little nationalism here, some misguided Afrocentrism there — but mostly I was welcomed.
Occasionally, though, I found myself thinking about my lone black friend in high school, who was one of the lone blacks in our town, period. He was always being told by jerky classmates not to be hurt by racist comments, because “you’re one of the good ones.” No one ever said that to me, but they didn’t have to — I knew I was one of the good ones, and only occasionally felt the outsider.
In fact, the worst culture clash was crossing back, whenever I had to see my extended family. It almost got ugly a few years ago, when I travelled for a meeting on urban poverty to a city where my once favorite cousin, formerly a hippie and artist, is now a cop. I never call him when I go there, but this one time I do, and we meet — where else? — in a bar; the first of many, with his cop partner and the partner’s girlfriend. Suddenly they start telling racist jokes, but my cousin stops them, gallantly, like he’d protect another girl cousin from locker room jokes. “You can’t talk like that in front of my cousin,” he starts, but he runs out of words at their look of shock. They’re mystified, waiting for an explanation. What could possibly be the reason they can’t talk that way in front of me?
He jokes: “She’s married to a black man!”
“That’s right,” I agree calmly.
But now my cousin panics; the joke has bombed. Nobody is laughing.
“No she’s not! She just doesn’t like jokes like that; she never has, even when she was a kid.”
The other cop shuts up, chivalrous if contemptuous, but the girlfriend finishes the joke, testing me. And I glare at her with deep disgust. I hate these people and then I hate myself for hating them. I’m a self-hating white person in an Irish bar. My cousin’s racist friends are paying for my drinks. I have more than a few.
Finally they leave and my cousin and I begin a kind of ritual lament: What happened to our family? Boy, did a lot of people die! Why did everybody drink so much? I tell him how I’ve always felt like an outcast, too smart, too awkward, with a righteous liberal father and a mother who died too young; not quite part of the family. He’s not entirely surprised; I think we’ve been over it before, drunk and maudlin in some other bar, but I can’t really remember. He says what I think he always says: You’re my cuz. (Like a lot of white cops he talks black, throwing around “cuz” and “bro” and “blood” not even ironically anymore.) I love you, he continues. I’d do anything for you.
What I want him to do is not be racist, and I drunkenly try to accomplish this. He tells me he didn’t start out racist; working on the street made him that way. I explain to him exactly the kind of work I do — the writing about welfare and poverty and urban education, the friends I have of every race — like I’m confessing to some double life. I say that if he lived in my world he’d see things differently: I have black friends — get this! — who are smarter than me. They have nicer homes. Their kids are better behaved than mine.
He says if I lived in his world I’d see things differently too. He sees black drug dealers, wife beaters, killers. Drunk and distraught, I finish with my trump: “My black friends are incredible people. They would do anything for me. And they have better families than we do!” He really can’t believe this; he has a hunch it could be true. At about 5 a.m. we stagger back to my hotel and I pass out.
He calls me the next morning, thoughtfully, to make sure I wake up in time for my meeting with my black friends to talk about racism and poverty. He tells me he loves me. But the next time I see him, a few months later, at a family reunion right after the O.J. Simpson acquittal, it’s clear something has changed between us. The acquittal has most of my family furious, with that white sense of vulnerability and grievance the O.J. verdict catalyzed nationally. Somebody notes darkly that white prosecutor Marcia Clark is dating black prosecutor Christopher Darden.
“You must love that,” my cousin sneers at me. And there it is: that old racial fear, that the civil rights movement was just a cover for black men to run off with white women, finally spoken aloud.
And he was right: By that time I was involved with a black man, somebody I’d met through my work.
When I started in the field I was married, and I would chuckle when black female colleagues jokingly complained about the white women in our work who dated black. They weren’t talking about me. I had a husband, and he was white (Jewish, for the record, which my ex didn’t consider white, but my black friends mostly did).
But once I was divorced, as I got deeper into the work — meeting a lot of great young professionals, forming new organizations, traveling and socializing — it seems inevitable that I’d wind up with someone black.
I didn’t mean to; we were colleagues, then casual friends and then suddenly it was more than that. He pursued me; at first, I resisted. I say that not out of pride but to explain why, after a few months, I was shocked when he confessed that our relationship could of course never go anywhere, because I was white. He wasn’t proposing ending it; just giving me a heads up that it could never be permanent, or even terribly public. Furious, I ended it, then took him back, and the drama went on for over a year.
