A Perspective Different Than Yours
Returning to school after summer break is, as a social occasion, dependably awkward. This was true for me as a teenager, and it is true for me as an adult who has worked in a high school for almost 20 years. August inservice means suddenly interacting with dozens of people, using social skills that have essentially lain dormant for two months. Occasionally, socializing is forced by way of an icebreaker (a term which, in education, has been supplanted by the not-less cringey “optimistic opener”). I remember an optimistic opener some years ago that required folks to write down their super power, and then walk around and share it with three other people. For my super power, I wrote vulnerability.
Now, I was never a comics kid and I’ve probably watched 2.5 movies that are associated with the MCU, but even I know that “vulnerability” is a crappy superpower. Nobody ever brought down an all-powerful tyrant hellbent on world domination by having big feelings, or by being open about weaknesses. What would the costume look like?
In any case, it’s what I’ve got. And I don’t try to hide it.
Six or so years ago, when I was still in the classroom, I decided I wanted to kick off the year with vulnerability. I mean, it’s awkward in the beginning anyway, so why not lean into it with my students? I was teaching five sections of AP Language and Composition, and I think it was week two when I introduced the topic of rhetorical analysis, and developing a critical lens through looking at the ways in which implicit bias creeps into language, thoughts, and actions in insidious, invisible ways. Part of developing a critical lens, I explained, is learning to recognize bias, and label it, and make choices about how we are going to allow it to affect us.
To illustrate this concept, I prompted my students to take an implicit association test, which essentially leads you through a series of word and picture associations that have to be clicked through quickly in order to uncover implicit biases that you might have, depending on which test you decide to take. For example, the “age” test tells you whether you have more positive feelings about young people vs. older people. The “gender-career” test tells you if you associate certain careers with certain genders. I wanted to model the test (both to show them how it worked and to model the kind of vulnerability I expected of them), so I let them choose the test they wanted me to take, and I took it live, on the overhead, right in front of them. I did this for five straight periods.
My first period chose the White/Black test for me. I took it, fully confident that racism hadn’t touched me–I was a completely open-minded White person, and I looked forward to having the data to back me up. This is not what happened. When I very publicly clicked the big “show results” button, my implicit bias was laid bare: I had a strong preference for White people over Black people. A heavy, indeed awkward silence permeated the classroom. I wasn’t prepared for this, and neither were my students.
Some time passed before one of my students sheepishly raised their hand and asked the question that diffused the tension: “When you grew up, did you know any Black people?” I am still floored by the compassion contained in this question. And it immediately brought to mind three distinct experiences in my life.
I grew up naive about race, and sheltered from racial diversity. I belonged to a middle class family who lived in an affluent section of Northeast Portland, and the boundaries of where I could and couldn’t go were clear. By the time I was a teenager, there always loomed the threat of gang violence on streets and neighborhoods that weren’t very far from mine, at least geographically: Killingsworth, Holiday Park, Alberta. A large public housing development called Columbia Villa, a short distance away, was the site of a heavily reported murder case in the late 80’s, and thanks to pervasive evening news segments and conversations amongst neighbors, I internalized a low-burning anxiety about people who didn’t look, or live, like me.
Around 1988, my stepsister–who is Black–moved in with us. Since she was just a couple years older than me, and I wasn’t close with my biological brother, she felt like a real older sibling. She was smart and funny, and we developed a pretty strong bond in a relatively short time. I loved having her around, and particularly looked forward to her friends coming over. They were hilarious, and always took time to joke around with me, ask me how I was doing, and how school was going. “It sucks,” I would say. “I’m in middle school.”
A few months after moving in with us, my stepsister started bringing a new friend over to our house, and it was obvious from the start that my mom didn’t like him. My mom and my stepfather had terse, hushed discussions about this new friend possibly being a gang member (my mom was certain he was), and whether or not having him around was dangerous (my mom was certain it was). The friend’s visits were infrequent and secretive. I remember a few occasions where my stepsister would come home, confirm that I was the only one there, and then usher her friend into her bedroom, immediately shutting the door behind them. I don’t remember ever seeing him leave.
One morning, my mom went into my stepsister’s room, and made a discovery: The friend had been living there–evidenced by a makeshift bed set up on the floor next to a few pieces of mismatched luggage. My mom became furious in a way I had never seen before, and issued an ultimatum: Either the friend never set foot in our house again, or my stepsister would be moving out. This was an uncharacteristic response for my mom, whose parenting style skewed communicative rather than punitive. From her perspective though, it was a safety issue, and a risk not worth taking. I never found out if her suspicions about gang affiliation were accurate, but I am fairly certain that they were at least partially based on the fact that my stepsister’s friend was a Black male from NE Portland in the late ‘80s. And if my mom jumped to this conclusion, deep down so did I.
My identity in high school revolved around skateboarding, music, and graffiti. In 10th grade I was suspended for two weeks for tagging an entire boys bathroom at my school. The same day I received my suspension, there was a fight at my school that resulted in one student knocking out several of another student’s teeth. Like most fights at my high school involving Black kids, this one was rumored to be gang-related. But unlike most fights, this one involved the star forward on our basketball team (the student not sent to the hospital with a broken mouth). Kids started talking, and more pieces of the story gradually gave shape to the “official” narrative: Because we needed him to play in an important game that weekend, this student only got a detention for fighting.
I began my two-week suspension very much feeling like the victim. Why did I get such a heavy penalty, while the basketball player got a slap on the wrist? Full of righteous rage, I wrote a long editorial and submitted it to the school newspaper. It didn’t get published, but the journalism teacher encouraged me to join the newspaper staff. I was proud of myself for speaking up.
This experience, I’ve always felt, was formative. It is also full of holes. For one, I was a kid, and had an inflated idea of justice as it pertained to me--a privileged White boy. I’ve told this story dozens of times, and race is never really a part of my retelling. In my story, I am the oppressed character, fighting to have a voice (first through graffiti, then through editorials). The other characters in the story are either the ones who perpetuate senseless brutality in the halls of high schools or the “system” that protects violence and punishes virtuous activism. Upon reflection, I’m not really sure if the fight happened, or if the kids existed. The story, on the other hand, has endured.
Both of these experiences–middle school with my stepsister and getting suspended in high school–were unique in that they formed my identity in ways that I was absolutely not aware of at the time. They were experiences that invited me to think about the role of my race in how I navigated, and responded to, racial situations. And yet I was unable to do so, because I didn’t have to.
In some ways, I didn’t discover I was White until I moved to Japan at the age of 29 with my wife and two-year old son. Kanazawa is a traditional Japanese town of about 500,000, and I could go weeks without seeing another White person. The stories I used to tell about my experience with overt racism took place in Kanazawa. It is where one time, at the produce market, an elderly Japanese lady smacked my hand with an eggplant to prevent me taking the last cucumber, uttering a racist phrase in Japanese (presumably not knowing I understood her). It is where I was shoved on a narrow path by two people, almost sending me and my bike careening down a steep hillside into a river. Here was the proof that I knew what racism felt like.
But these incidents were outliers, and easy to talk about. I remember telling these stories to some of my Japanese colleagues at work, or to the one or two Japanese friends I had made. They were sympathetic, and said things like “oh that’s just old people” or “they’re really traditional and remember the war” and we’d all bond over how horrible and jerky and racist some people were, and we weren’t those people.
Looking back, though, these weren’t the important, life-changing incidents I thought they were. What mattered, instead, were all the dull, constant ways that I experienced racism each day that I never found a way to talk about. Like when I was stared at, but not engaged with, at the grocery store. Continuously. Or the fact that the seats on either side of me on the train or the bus were always empty, because people would rather stand than sit next to me. Every day. And I would tell myself “whatever, it’s fine. It’s just going to be like this.” And I’d sweep it under the rug. But months rolled by, and the rug got pretty lumpy, and while I got pretty good at brushing these incidents off, they added up, and led to the loneliest, most isolated feelings I’d ever felt.
Here, in Japan, I was stripped of Whiteness in a way that forced me to pay attention. I had a glimpse at what it meant to be highly visible, and yet invisible. I was White but was no longer benefitting from the normalization of White racial identity.
And then I got to leave it.
I think back to all of the people who existed around my periphery whom I had denied a racial identity by simply not thinking about race–mine or theirs. And in so doing, I had centered my experience and my perspective as the normal one, the victimized one, the righteous one, the enlightened one, etc. My perspective had always been narrow, because I didn’t make a conscious effort to challenge it.
Now, I try to challenge my perspective by remembering that it is a perspective shaped by how I’ve moved through the world, in my skin, with my experiences. And it is both incredibly powerful and incredibly limited—a dangerous combination, yes: But it is also an invitation to learn more, listen more, and feel more.