BENEATH THE SKYLINE

GROWING UP WHITE

Deborah Good

"Hey, y’all. Did you see Deborah crossing them up out there?" We were in the women’s locker room of Wilson Senior High School, and Six—who earned her name because of her intimidating 6’2" frame—was talking about me. "I think she needs a ghetto name," she said. "From now on, we’re going to call you Big D."

Whenever I turn on the radio at home in Washington, D.C., and hear "Go Go," a breed of music similar to hip-hop and birthed in our nation’s capital, it takes me back to the Wilson gymnasium where I played on our school basketball team with Six, Ursula, Kamina, and others. As we warmed up, the rhythm and groove made the air vibrate and made the stands feel a little less empty. (For some reason most fans started showing up after our games were almost over, in time for the boys’ opening.)

I was in tenth grade that year and played guard. A yellow school bus took us all around the city for games against other D.C. public schools. And though the talk on the basketball court was sometimes hostile, the locker room after the games was usually a place of laughter and acceptance.

Big D. The name stuck for the rest of the season. We all loved the name, but we also knew it was mostly a joke. Big D was, after all, a small, shy, white girl.

I grew up white in a predominantly African-American city. Playing basketball my tenth-grade year, I occasionally found myself in a crowded gym where, except for my dad who often watched from the bleachers, my skin was far lighter than that of anyone else in the place.

Today, as I walk around the city of Philadelphia, shop for groceries, catch the bus—my pale skin still glowing white—I find I carry the burden of history on my conscience and try not to deteriorate under its weight.

In a color-blind society, the color of my skin would be irrelevant. I would blend in with the coffee-like, rich-earth-like colors of the rest of the world. But in a society fraught with racial inequality, my white skin has painful and complicated meaning. For me, it means shame. It means benefits. It means things like "oppressor" and "yuppie" and "naïve." It means a tangle of privileges and challenges that I feel I must name and then try to live with responsibly. How am I to live conscientiously with white skin in a society scarred by racism?

Over the years, I have been taught that having white skin has privileged me while having darker skin has made life unjustly difficult for three quarters of the world, including my D.C. public school classmates. In many ways, I have seen this to be true. In her book White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh lists a number of these privileges. I can go shopping without being followed. I can buy Band-Aids and assume they will be close to the color of my skin. I can look for an apartment without worrying that my skin color will cause the landlords to question my financial reliability. Whereas most people of color in this country are forced to think daily about their race, I could go entire months, if I wanted to, without thinking once about the fact that I am white.

But white privilege is only half the story. At a conference I recently attended, a young white woman stood and asked, "Is it a privilege that my descendants were slaveholders and murderers? Is it a privilege to belong to a race that has historically found its meaning in power and wealth?"

I had a history teacher in high school who believed whites were evil by nature. I remember sitting in her class, feeling small and pale, fighting the idea that I was a racist merely because I had white skin. In the end, Ms. Green’s class taught me more about racial consciousness than any class before or since. I discovered that having white skin is not only a list of privileges. It is also an immense burden.

I want to talk about this burden. I want to talk about the ways in which growing up white is hard—disadvantageous even. I realize this sounds backward in a society that privileges my skin color. I am certainly not asking for sympathy. I am merely asking myself and many others to face the gnarled meaning of our white skin. I believe it is essential for those of us who are white to examine the wounds we carry because of our skin color, to face our guilt, and to heal as best we can. This needs to happen before a more racially just society is possible.

What could possibly be difficult about belonging to the most privileged race in the world? In short, the shame of it. While my African-American classmates found pieces of themselves in Alex Haley’s Roots and in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, I knew I couldn’t claim such a proud history. I descended instead from a race of conquerors, slayers of Native Americans, slave traders, and plantation owners. I live knowing that people of my race hold most of the world’s power and wealth—and are not being very good stewards of them. I am the "blue-eyed devil" Malcolm X speaks of in his autobiography. This is a heavy skin to wear.

As a white American, I also don’t have a deep sense of belonging to a "people." In school, I locked arms with my classmates and teachers and sang "We Shall Overcome" with all my heart, but I was always, at some level, an outsider. When I go to a local coffee shop for an evening of spoken word poetry, an art form that has become a powerful outlet for African-American voices, I am mostly an observer. Sincere as I may be, I can’t share in the common experience of being black in America.

With the possible exception of my Mennonite people-web, whose members build community by singing hymns and telling stories of a persecuted past, white folks just don’t do identity in the same way as I have observed our African-American brothers and sisters experiencing it. My skin color gives me no proud heritage on which to build my life, and it has no cultural community tied to it.

Finally, I find that one of my greatest challenges as a white person of privilege is my desire to share the causes of the oppressed. "I choose to identify with the underprivileged," writes Martin Luther King Jr. "I choose to identify with the poor. . . . I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity." I want to say the same thing, but how can I ever identify with the underprivileged when I have so little sense of being oppressed myself?

I worry that my life of choosing to identify with the underprivileged will be misunderstood, that it might be disempowering to those for whom I want the opposite. I worry that my good intentions might in the end cause greater harm. And I worry that my white skin is, in part, to blame.

A few days ago, I was crossing the street and noticed the bumper sticker on a parked car to my left: "F—— Racism," it shouted at passersby. If only it were that easy, I thought to myself. If only sporting bumper stickers and T-shirts were enough to make us antiracist, our history innocent, and our world a better place. Instead, the issues are complex. Injustices and misunderstandings continue. White folks stumble and tiptoe, African-Americans wait, organize, or yell out in anger, and all who don’t consider themselves "black" or "white" struggle to find their place in the dialogue.

I know I have greatly simplified the story. We live tangled in a complicated social structure which is not composed of powerful whites and oppressed "minorities." People of all colors are found scattered throughout our hierarchies of power. More Latinos live in the United States than African-Americans, yet too often we talk about race as a black and white issue. Arabs face perhaps the most blatant racism in North America in the post-9-11 era. And powerful currents of economic injustice and globalization run beneath it all.

In the end, the world is composed of people of all colors, each seeking survival and identity in small and big ways. May we all keep on walking, healing, and, wherever possible, locking arms to sing, "We shall overcome. We shall overcome some day."

—Deborah Good was born and raised in Washington, D.C., graduated from Eastern Mennonite University in 2002, and currently works as an intern at The Other Side magazine (www.theotherside.org) in Philadelphia . She can be reached at deborahagood@hotmail.com. She sees her column’s name, "Beneath the Skyline," as "sayingsomething about me: I’m a city girl. And I see the city beneath the skyline, where real people are just trying to pay the rent, where real people are hurting and homeless and imprisoned, and where folks like me are stumbling around, trying to make sense of it all."