Feb 2 #MRM Post

This past fall, a renewed fight for racial justice was brought to the light in the United States with the shooting death of Mike Brown in Ferguson and the choking death of Eric Garner; as well as many others that followed. In the US, there has always been a fight for racial justice, but for the first time in my life, it was a central discussion across the globe. There were protests and discussions and media attention to the oppression that occurs on a daily basis. I was able to share my story and speak my truth and have others join in. I felt truly heard, as our collective voices came together. I am a social justice educator, who works in student affairs, so these conversations were not new to me. But for once, I wasn’t the only one talking, I wasn’t the only saying, these things still happen, these things still matter. It’s a strange thing to be both black and white during this reawakening of a fight for racial justice. Two things happened that created a canyon of dissonance for me.

Like many, I used social media to engage others and share my voice. Not surprisingly, I had a lot of family members disagree with the “politics” of what I was saying. Most of those family members were my white family members. As someone who grew up in a white community, with my white family, I can say that I was socialized white. However, I can’t pass as white and so even though I was socialized white, I knew that I was not white and faced many instances of discrimination growing up, including a period in middle school where I was the only person of color and was called a nigger on a daily basis. So while I was socialized white, I also knew that I wasn’t white; so my identity was always a question for me.

The first incident took the form of a private Facebook message from a white relative, asking me to please stop posting about Ferguson because it hurt their feelings. The best way to end racism, in their opinion, was to stop talking about it. My daily posts were just a constant reminder and only made things worse for this relative. I had no problem checking my relative on their white privilege. I explained that to ask me to stop posting was to ask me to stop being me. That I posted things that were true to my lived experience and they happened to me, and countless others, all the time; that racism is indeed over and that we do need to talk about. I felt sad and alone, but not surprised, that my white family could not bear witness to what I was experiencing and ask how they could support me.

The second thing that occurred was when I shared the facebook message with a black colleague. After I recounted my story, the colleague paraphrased Peggy McIntosh and said “you can’t trust a white person.” In that moment, I was dumbfounded. I am a believer in holding multiple truths, but I could not wrap my brain around that idea. I’ve read Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack; I use it in trainings and I understand the context in which Ms. McIntosh explains that idea. Yet, I was coming from a place of raw, heightened, emotion, a place I had been for months, and all I could think was; “that’s not true”.

For that statement to be my truth, that would mean I couldn’t trust, and therefore, love, my family. I couldn’t trust the people who raised me and loved me. I couldn’t trust the world in which I was raised. My world was instantly divided, quite literally, into black and white. I didn’t know how to reconcile my lived experiences as a person of color growing up in a white family. Even as I write this blog post, I still can’t wrap my brain around how the two pieces of my identity fit together. The black and the white of me are/were so opposing that I don’t know how they ever worked together.

If I couldn’t hold the two together, I had to ask myself, “what am I giving up when I declare myself a person of color”? Does this mean that I’m only black? To declare myself a person of color erases my family, erases the life I grew up in. Yet, I know that I would never declare myself white because I do not see myself as white. To not see myself as white has/is a confusing part of growing up biracial. If I’m not white, what is my connection to my family? To have to make a choice between my white family or my black identity feels impossible.

I have embraced my biracial identity, through my many years of turmoil and growth; because it let me hold multiple truths; to be a person of color and still feel connected to the people who loved and nurtured me. To be biracial, in a fight for racial justice, sometimes means defending whiteness, and excusing hurtful messages from family. To be biracial, in a fight for racial justice, means fighting for my right to not live in fear for my life and working to undo the system of oppression. 

Yet, in this time and place, I struggle with the “and” of these statements and can only hold the “or”. For me, to be biracial, in a fight for racial justice, seems like an impossible choice; either way I lose part of my identity.