I know it’s unfair to write about my racism without acknowledging that it came about largely because of the absence of Blacks, coupled with the piercing, indelible, unshakeable memory of my childhood friendship with one black girl, Carol Lee. It was that friendship, and the shame I felt when I chose to have my beach club party without her because the beach club barred blacks, that let me know there even was such a thing as racism—a phenomenon I did not know how to name, but whose impact stayed with me. I chose from privilege rather than from heart.
I do not say: “My best friend is black”—as if that assertion proved anything. One of my best friends really was black. Our connection happened over a few summers, and I haven’t seen Carol Lee in over 70 years. I tried to work Google-magic to find her and did find one image I thought might be my Carol Lee—in an obituary, alas. Nevertheless, my Carol Lee memory became a benchmark strong enough to serve as a plumb line against which I measured, and measure, my felt racism.
My “Racism” has quotation marks around racism, because I’m writing about my discernment process over some 80 years. My scenarios are wisps of personal memory that structure the grid of my learnings—bits and pieces that unfold in answer to my question: I’m not racist—or am I? I do not yet know the answer.
I intersperse some contemporary wisdom on the subject, everything in the context of my own direct experience. Racism is word that in 2020 is headlined all over the world and laid at our national doorstep as a call, I’d say from God, to examine and change our personal and national addiction to its practice. It’s time.
In 2019, I heard African-American, Isabelle Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, speak about the great migration of southern blacks to urban areas of the North and West, I was spellbound by the memoir-like flavor of her historical study. A whole people were forced to move en masse, because, although emancipated, they were denied adequate access to resources necessary for thriving in America.
The New York Times Magazine (7/19/2020) published Wilkerson’s article, “America’s Enduring Caste System” in which she imaged caste as the usher’s flashlight in a darkened theater silently guiding us to our assigned seats—assigned, but who bought the tickets? This is caste, not racism, according to Wilderson who writes: “The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept. With no universally agreed upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute.” (Italics mine.)
Anyone who has ever been in high school knows what caste feels like. Everyone is ranked. Everyone is hurt. No one forgets. It is the field in which the seeds of racism, and all other -isms, take root and grow.
Scene XVI. Dominus Flevit
One makes forced choices when trapped in a radically caste-enclosed and unjust system. I thought of Jesus, how he sweated and wept and groaned before he decided to head to Jerusalem to challenge the system of injustice that trapped his people. He shed tears over Jerusalem when he got there, telling his followers that the things that made for peace and justice and love were “hidden from their eyes.” Many thing were hid from my eyes. I too know so little, so very little about so many things. I was no Jesus. I had no larger vision. All I had was my ignorance, twinges of conscience, and a few tears of my own.
There is a church in Jerusalem marking the site where Jesus wept about all this systemic ignorance and the impending destruction of the Temple. There wasn’t much he could do—not much at all. The church is shaped like a teardrop. When I saw it in 2012, I wept for all I did not know, had not known, still don’t know. The church is called Dominus Flevit (The Lord Wept). It means a lot to me.
Scene XVII. A Wound of Privilege
I went to Smith College, partly because I was NOT going to go to Vassar like my maternal grandmother who’d graduated in the “class of aughty-aught". Also, because I loved Smith’s campus and living in houses—no dorms and no sororities with all that sisterly pain. Mostly, however, because my best friend, Annie, was going there too.
I knew it was a privilege to go to Smith, not because I knew I was privileged, but because my father groaned out loud about the “astronomical”tuition which in 1956 was absurdly low—below $10,000 in today's dollars.
Annie had to leave Smith after one year. Her scholarship money dwindled, and her father couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. Our hearts were broken. Impulsively, I told her my father would pay her room and board, but she said her father would be too proud to accept. We both were right.
Annie went on to graduate from the University of Connecticut with honors. We stayed friends of course, but there was an almost indiscernible crack inside me, like a slight fracture in a bone. What was it? Guilt? It was the fissure of privilege. I could spell that word correctly, but now I was learning to feel its power—the power to rent asunder, to hurt when it was supposed to help.
Despite my father’s money worries, we had wealth—not vast amounts of money but wealth, that invisible security blanket enjoyed by some and not others. It had to do with family security; it had to do with neighborhood, class and family assets; it had to do with privilege and the cruel habit of ranking that limited opportunity. It had to do with the same thing that forced those southern blacks to flee in order to survive. It had to do with something a friend recently said in the midst of her own severe lack of resources: “I’m super scared, but I know I’ll be okay because I have family with money to help—if I get less proud.”
I had wealth and Annie didn’t. The wealth gap had nothing to do with what I’d been brought up to value: work hard and you’ll get ahead. Oh no you won’t! Annie’s father had worked and struggled all his life. He was bright, had a PhD, and was principal of a school. My father worked on Madison Avenue, a business executive. I was learning about classism, a first cousin to racism, fertilizer of privilege, pollinator of all -isms.
Annie and I were white, yet our friendship was wounded by my privilege. We cried so hard—so very hard—when Annie left Smith and I stayed. My privilege bought me rank and a great education, but it sure did not buy me peace of mind, and it sure didn’t make me feel good.
At Smith I met my first Jew. I didn’t know what a Jew was. Now that is an hilarious statement. Really! It sounds absurdly anti-semitic now, but I didn’t know what that was. I’d heard of the Holocaust, but not really, if you know what I mean. As with Blacks, there were no Jews in my suburban town.
My sheltered ignorance was appalling, not my fault, and painful anyway. White as I was, I didn’t connect it with my privilege—yet.
I chose academics to make my mark. It did pay off. I studied like a fiend, got good grades, earned graduate degrees, and felt smarter than I really was. Okay, that’s not fair to me, but in college I didn’t yet know how to be fair to myself.
