How I learned to become less defensive in conversations about race

About seven or eight years ago, my friend and former colleague Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews shared a clip from a Dave Chappelle standup routine that completely shifted my thinking about race and whiteness. 

In the clip, Chappelle talks about how, in the past, he used to tell a lot of jokes about white people. The camera flashes to a number of white people in the room laughing. Then Chappelle says this:

“When I say jokes about white people, don’t think for a second that I’m talking about you (more laughter). Don’t forget I almost had $50 million once. When you make enough money in America, they’ll pull back the curtain and introduce you to the real white people. You guys just think you’re white.”

You guys just think you’re white. Huh?

Now, most of the white people in the audience found this hilarious (as did I). But it also got me wondering what Chappelle really meant by this. 

My initial reaction was: I don’t just “think” I’m white. It’s not some idea in my head. I AM white. Just look at me!

Obviously, Chappelle was making a connection between being white and having a lot of money. And that if you’re white, but not super rich, then you somehow were being duped. But while I found his joke funny, I (and probably many of his white fans) didn’t quite understand it.

With this percolating in the back of my mind, a few months later I came across a quote from James Baldwin that also made me stop and scratch my head. 

“As long as you think you’re white there is no hope for you.” 

Now, when I first read this, I interpreted it as Baldwin saying “there’s no hope for white people”. Interpreting it this way made me immediately defensive and dismissive. How dare he so quickly dismiss me simply because of the color of my skin.

But then, I realized that I missed the key operating word that Baldwin uses - “think”. He wasn’t saying “as long as you’re white, there’s no hope for you,” as if the color of my skin immediately damned me to some dark future. He was saying “as long as you think you’re white.”

Just like Chappelle, Baldwin was pointing towards something deeper than skin color when it came to race and whiteness. That it also had something to do with what and how I thought.

This finally made me curious enough to start digging into the history of race and whiteness. Over time, I came to see that Chappelle was pointing to a truth as old as the idea of race itself - that race, and the corresponding identities of Black and White, were not some hardwired essential truth about who we are. The idea of race was literally invented 400 years ago by slaveholders, and developed over time into laws, structures and indeed our very consciousness, to do two things:

1) justify the brutal treatment of African slaves, by assigning them a “Black” racial identity that made them less than human and normalized their suffering, and 

2) ensure that Europeans colonists - many of whom were also poor and oppressed and living in servitude - didn’t make common cause with African slaves and rise up in rebellion, by teaching them to identify as “White” (which was defined as “not Black”) and see themselves as having more in common with the slaveholding elite than their African brethren.

Chapelle was simply referring to a modern-day version of this same origin story.

While learning this history was a bit mind-blowing, what it did for me was most important: it helped me create a tiny crack between my white racial identity and who I understood myself to really be. 

I started shifting from “I AM white” (i.e. it’s baked into my essential beingness) to “I was TAUGHT to be this thing called white”. I began to see how white people too have been raced into this system, and that while whiteness came with benefits it also came with costs (more on this soon). Rather than only being able to “look through” the lens of my whiteness as something that I inherently am, I started developing the ability to “look at” my whiteness as something that I have.

And what happened next was even more important. As I was able to put some distance between my “white” self and my true authentic self, talking about race and whiteness became so much less threatening. I could hang in there for the tough conversations. I could be more open to others’ perspectives. Because deep down I knew that Chappelle was right - when we talk about white people, we aren’t really talking about me, or at least the real me. We’re talking about the stuff I’ve been taught, and can therefore change. As I wrote in a previous post, I came to see that: 

“Whiteness is more than a skin color - it’s also a consciousness. While we can’t do anything about how we appear to the world, we can do something about how we think and show up in the world. This is entirely in our control, and is the source of our liberatory power.”

This minor shift in perspective had a huge impact on my ability to show up, listen and be open and curious. It also made me curious to understand how I’ve been impacted by internalizing a false set of beliefs about who I really am. What was I taught about what it means to be white (without even realizing I’ve been taught it)? Could some of this be limiting, or even harming, me? Could some of my experiences and struggles in life be better understood if I looked at them through this lens? And what does it look like to exercise my internal power to show up differently?

I will explore all of this and more in my next post!