I woke up this week with a question on my mental screen. Am I really who I say I am, or am I a phony? I’m not racist. How did I learn that? Certainly not in school where everyone was white, and not on the neighborhood streets where I grew up in NYC, and not from any lectures from my parents. No, I learned how not to be racist from the very ones I was supposed to fear—black-skinned people.
While having my haircut yesterday, I tried to articulate what my latest book, WHITEOUT is about without this belly-deep fear that I was actually a social snob and even racist myself. Obviously racism, alongside many other -isms, is deeply embedded in the culture I live in, even in Alabama where I lived for a brief time.
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I learned to love and live free of racism from Dinah, a black-skinned laundress and her daughter Lou, and sometimes a visiting cousin. They showed me how to love myself without guilt, and how to be loved, how to be free. They did not care what color my skin was or wasn’t. I played wildly and freely running about the basement, playing hide and seek around the luggage and storage items of wealthy white people.
I learned not to be racist from black people! From them, too, I learned how to be white without shame or fear, how to be free and beloved at once. How to look at myself without shame or judgment. I learned how not to be racist from the race I was expected to hate and fear and reject. Dinah and Lou taught me not to be racist, without doing a thing but being themselves. They were the way I learned NOT to be judgmental of blacks OR whites. I learned to love people as human beings without noticing or reacting to their skin color. It might be analogous to Jungian psychology insisting on self-love as the base of being able to love others as you love yourself.
I learned how to love myself and whoever my neighbor turned out to be from the very ones I was trained to hate and fear.
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