Me and White Supremacy Day #25: You and Your Family
This is the hardest day of the entire challenge. Layla F. Saad’s first question is, “How do you feel about speaking up about racism and white supremacist beliefs and actions to your family members?”
For me, the most difficult aspect of doing this is that I feel like some of my family members and I are speaking different languages.
Many years ago, I had a conflict with a family member when my brother and I told him that he absolutely had to stop using the less offensive of the two N-words. At first, he really didn’t understand why we were so insistent about it. He had been using it his whole life, he told us. Everyone around him had always used it too, and it was just the word you used to describe Black people. He didn’t mean it as an insult or a slur like the other, much much worse N-word, which he never used. It took a long time to convince him that while it was true that this word didn’t use to be a slur, its connotation had changed. Black people had reclaimed the word and could still use it to describe themselves, but as a white man, he absolutely could not use it anymore. It took repeated conversations where both my brother and I told him that to use this word would make him seem like a bigot, which we both knew he was not.
I don’t know if it was because we were younger, but my brother and I had seen the word’s meaning shift. We were actually quite shocked when we heard our family member use it, because we had both assumed he would know it was offensive. But our family member had not been privy to that shift, and so it came as a surprise to him. It took some convincing, but he did stop using it, and these days I don’t think it would even occur to him to say it.
I think the same thing is going on now on a much broader scale. There has been a major shift in the meaning of certain terms over the last few years, and anti-racist discourse includes a number of further terms whose meanings are not immediately obvious unless you actively take the time to learn them.
For example, a few years ago, when I heard the term “white supremacy,” I thought of the KKK or neo-Nazis. I thought of white supremacy as a fringe movement that participants deliberately chose to engage in for whatever messed-up reasons. I did not think of white supremacy as an all-encompassing systemic issue in the same way that I thought of the patriarchy as such. I thought that racism was solely about individual choices and actions, not as a system of privilege that you can be complicit in without realizing it.
Neither had I heard terms like white fragility, white silence, white exceptionalism, white centring. I learned these gradually as I started to see the need to engage in anti-racist work. But I work in a profession that not only encourages such professional development in this area, but where it is a daily part of my job. If I worked in a field where anti-racist work was not such an immediate consideration, I’m not sure that I would have realized the need to engage in it when I did.
I come from a family of intelligent, interesting, kind people. But many of my family members, like the person that my brother and I had to speak to years ago, have not realized that the discourse has shifted. To them, the term “white supremacy” still carries the same meaning it did a decade ago. Other, newer terms like “white fragility” are unfamiliar to them. This makes dialogue difficult. If I bring up something that makes me uncomfortable, I am currently the only person (or nearly the only person) in their lives who is saying these things. That makes it easy to dismiss what I am trying to get across. It creates a dynamic where I am viewed as a know-it-all who takes things too seriously and just wants to spoil everyone’s fun. Which is not at all my intention - I really just want to draw attention to things that are problematic - but that’s how it ends up playing out.
A couple of years ago, some relatives and I were eating lunch together, and somehow the conversation came around to how “Black people have weird names.” I immediately felt uncomfortable, but it took me a few minutes to work up the nerve to speak up. Finally, I said something about how this idea that Black people have weird names is based on a prejudiced assumption that the Queen’s English is somehow superior to African-American Vernacular English and therefore privileges traditionally white names as “better.” To which my relatives responded that “Regular names ARE better” and that “Black names are just weird.”
By this point I had a sick feeling in my stomach, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to say, “That’s racist, though.” But I knew that if I said that, the whole thing would blow up, feelings would be hurt, I would probably get told off, and it might even cause a family rift. So I didn’t say anything else. I slipped back into white silence to maintain my family’s white comfort. I still regret it.
So my relatives may not understand why I am doing this, and they may not see the need for it. I’m honestly not trying to ruin anyone’s day or upset anyone - as I’ve said many times before, I hate confrontation! I hate hurting people’s feelings and making people uncomfortable. But I am getting to the point where I can no longer live with myself if I just sit back and let these things slide. It’s not easy to do, and I wish it wasn’t necessary, but I don’t want to live in a world where unconscious biases that go unexamined cause real harm to BIPOC. I can’t just keep assuming that because I don’t behave in overtly racist ways, that I haven’t internalized any racist beliefs. I can’t say that I want to raise my daughter as an anti-racist if I don’t speak up about racist comments or actions when I witness them. I need to set a positive example for her and do better.