Relearning sight

For the vast majority of us, racism is not an intentional act. We don’t mean to hurt people. We don’t want to hurt people.

I think of all the times people facing micro-aggressions are asked to prove it or are told they are perceiving it incorrectly. That’s not gaslighting on the part of white people. It’s that we don’t face life like that. Life shouldn’t be like that and therefore we can’t believe that it is. We’ve been trained to see the world a certain way. We must actively seek out other versions of our full world in order to see a different story when faced with the same facts.

My mother was good at planting the seeds for this way of seeing different stories. When I wanted things to be yes or no, she always turned it over and showed me other sides leaving things without an answer. But it was Jane Elliott who gave me the key to being willing to look for myself. Jane was a speaker at my college. This short, white woman was here to talk about race, and she got it in a way I was too scared to get it. I was scared that if I accidently acted in a racist way, it meant I was stupid. I didn’t think I was stupid so I would rather not open my mouth and prove I was.

Jane showed me that my beliefs didn’t prove I was stupid. In fact, they proved I was extremely smart. I learned what the world around me had taught me and I was able to apply it. I was able to take the subtle messages around me and interpret from them what I was supposed to understand without being explicitly told.

She held up a map—a standard flat map that was a bit old but was completely recognizable. What this map was teaching me was that America is the center of the world—the most important part. This map isn’t fact. It’s a construction that portrays the world as the maker sees it and then passes along that interpretation. Why is North up? Why is Greenland the size of Africa? Why, on this map, was India split in two--each half on a different edge of the paper? The people of India must get very tired jumping from one side of the map to the other. It’s impossible to accurately portray a round object on a flat surface so some distortion is necessary. But the distortion of this portrayal centered me—a white person living in America. I was being taught to see myself as the most important. As I sat there with insight dawning that I was not the center of world I was having flashbacks to laughing at the children portrayed in The King and I for thinking that Siam (now Thailand) was the center of the world.

The news media is getting better but continues to show black men as criminals and white men as achievers. White women are much more visible in the newsroom now but were not when I was a child. Instead we were visible in cooking shows. I had learned that black people were threatening and dangerous—not because I was stupid but specifically because I was smart and had learned the lessons my culture was teaching me. In turn, I was (and still am) portraying and passing along that culture in full. The map that hangs in my daughter’s room no longer splits India in two but isn’t otherwise any better than the one that hung in my room.

We’re not trying to be racist. But there is so much here we don’t see and we are not taught. We are told it’s ‘not necessary’ or ‘too radical.’ And while it’s becoming less difficult, different stories are still too hard to find. Even when we find them, they are not centered—they are placed as the deviant or exception to the rule. Last year my daughter took African American US History as her history requirement. This was amazing in that first, it was available, and second, the school district had finally approved it as a legitimate course so she could take it and fulfill graduation requirements. But the “standard” US History class was still about the white view. The AP US History class, which rightfully attracted students demonstrating academic achievement, didn’t include any of the history my daughter was taught. While the African American history class was an improvement it fully demonstrates the vast amount of progress we still need to make.

While racism may not be an intentional act, overcoming it must be. Realistically, it will always be because the act of seeking a different point of view and another story will always be worthwhile and bring us information we did not know. We can also pass along those learnings and change the shape of understanding.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to find a new map.