Tom DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade
Tom DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History
Tom DeWolf is a descendent of slave-traders. In 2001, he was approached by a 10th-cousin who was making a documentary about the modern legacy of the slave trade, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. Katrina Browne was gathering a group of cousins, all descended from the slave-trading DeWolf's. They would tour the family mansion in Rhode Island, the family castle in Ghana, the family plantation in Cuba; they would meet for round tables with historians and African and African-American community leaders along the way. Tom DeWolf agreed to join the group. It sounded interesting, he thought, although he was somewhat ambivalent about how all this affected him.
In many ways, the book is a basic primer on a number of topics: how deeply slavery was intertwined into the foundations of the U.S. economy; how dirty Jefferson's hands were with slavery*; how the African side of the Triangle Trade worked; how pervasive the legacy of slavery still is**; what the basics of the idea of reparations is actually about. If you need a primer in those topics, then this book will give you a hint at all that. (But not much more than a hint, because those are big topics.)
But the real worth in this book was the documentation of one guy learning to recognize his institutionalized racism and white privilege. DeWolf went into this project thinking that slavery was something that was very bad, very sad, and very long ago. He ended up learning that sad-bad-long-ago is a diversionary sleight-of-hand.
There are a lot of classic moments in here. I especially like the documentation of his attempts to get cookies for occasionally noticing and caring about racism, and his confusion about why he can't find anyone willing to give them to him. (DeWolf was merely confused about that; some of the cousins are outraged. They're being good when they didn't have to! They deserve cookies!!)
For myself, I started learning to see my white privilege because I was hearing in stereo many of the incidents in the school-integration memoirs. I'd hear it once through white, wow-SHE'S-a-bit-paranoid ears, and again through queer, isn't-that-the-way-it-ALWAYS-happens ears. Two completely opposite reactions, right on top of each other, over and over again.*** After enough of that hearing-in-stereo, I started to wonder if, hey, maybe I was being just like one of those "progressive", but-not-so-helpful straights whom I despise so much? And wouldn't it really SUCK to be one of them? Maybe when people of color bitch about progressive whites, maybe they have a point. And maybe I should listen.
Hearing-in-stereo shows up in the book: some of the women catch on to white privilege faster than the men do, but their attempts to explain it to the men---"No, look, this aspect of institutionalized racism is JUST LIKE patriarchy!"---meet exactly the sort of resistance you would expect. Male privilege, unsurprisingly, seemed as fantasy-land-imaginary to most of the men in the group as white privilege did.
That inability to perceive one's own privilege becomes a bit more visible for DeWolf when he discovers his wealthy cousins are unable to see their class privilege. One of the cousins insists that going to Harvard wasn't privilege; he worked hard to get into Harvard. The others all agree with him; anyone can go to Harvard if they apply themselves. DeWolf, an Oregon Ducks grad whose parents went to night school, can not believe his ears. Eventually someone starts a roll call around the table, and everyone but DeWolf names an Ivy League alma mater. Many of the cousins add the footnote that they were the third or fourth generation at their Ivy League school. And then they all congratulated themselves, again, on having gotten into those schools by the sweat of their own brows.
DeWolf does learn to see that his life and worldview has been extraordinarily sheltered by white privilege, but it's a tricksy, slippery knowledge. It's easy to slide back into forgetting. He worries that after a few years, he'll find that he has slid back into his nice, white, comfortable life, and all this will have become just an interesting travelogue.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happened. He went back to his nice County Council job in his nice, white city of Bend, and he quite thoroughly forgot. Oh, sure, if you asked him, he'd say that he remembered, but was he acting like he remembered? Not so much.
What I find stunning is what made him remember again: he got caught on the sharp end of a sexual harassment investigation. It seems that all those years ago, when he called his coworker the next morning and said, "Hey, I was drunk, I don't know what I was thinking, I didn't mean anything by it, are we good?" and she replied, "Sure, we're good," and then he promptly forgot about it---? Well, that ability to believe that his intent mattered more than his actions; the ability to solicit an on-cue "Sure, that's okay," for something that really wasn't okay; the ability to walk away from the whole mess and never give it another thought: that's the very essence of privilege.
Later, when the sexual-harrassment investigation grew from the single initial complainant to multiple complainants, women he could barely remember but whom he had given excellent reason to remember him...
That was a penny-drop indeed. Privilege might be nice and comfortable for a while, and it might let you believe that you are a good and innocent person, but that belief is a lie. And the next thing you know, you're no longer the basically decent guy who sometimes goes a little too far but never beyond anything that can't be patched up with a casual you-know-I-didn't-mean-it and handshake in the morning. No, you've become the asshole who screwed over several women's lives, and who couldn't even be bothered to notice doing it. And here's the kicker: you didn't even become that guy; you were that guy all along. Congratulations.
White/straight/male/cisgender/ableist/class/Christian/colonial privilege is not just an advantage, like the name signifies, but it's also a curse. It makes it hard for you to notice---even when people are trying their damnedest to help you notice---that you're not the person you had intended to be. And we're not talking about a small slippage, like sometimes feeling tired and overwhelmed and saying snippy things to someone you care about, but big, ought-to-be-impossible-to-ignore slippage. Which, somehow, is very easy to ignore.
One of the other things that DeWolf points out about privilege, something he learned from an African-American man who was facing up to his own homophobia and sexism, is that lacking privilege in one area can very easily hinder you from taking responsibility for the privileges you do possess. It's easy to get so caught up in how you are oppressed, and not have any attention left over to notice how you are an oppressor.**** Or to think that being one gets you off the hook for the other. There's a reason I tried to name all the major privileges I could think of in the lead of the previous paragraph: I don't have three of those privileges, but I do have the other five. (And probably more I don't know to see yet.) It would be very silly of me to pretend that not having those three gets me off the hook for being responsible for my actions with respect to those five. Years from now, I don't want to wake up to my own personal nightmare, like DeWolf did. (Or rather, wake up to any more a nightmare than I've already set up for myself.) To be the person I want to be, I have to think about myself with respect to those five.
So there you are: one guy's memoir of learning to see institutionalized racism, the privilege he gets from it, and the way that privilege has damaged his attempts to be a decent human being; plus bonus material on the history and economics of slavery and modern racism; plus some first attempts at figuring out how to become a better ancestor than his ancestors were.
Being a good ancestor to the future: I want that, too.
* More than you likely know: when the U.S. slave trade was outlawed in 1808, Jefferson appointed a DeWolf to oversee customs inspections in Bristol, the major slave-trading port.
** A figure from the Reparations Coordinating Committee: "In 1865, the gross black wealth in the U.S. was less than 1%. By the end of the twentieth century, the gross black wealth in the U.S. still hovered around 1%."
*** The early bits of Warriors Don't Cry was difficult for me to read because it was triggery for the marriage battles of 2004. I am ashamed to say that it was a relief to me when Beals got to the part with the violent mobs, dynamite, and the 101st Airborne, because none of that was tripping circuits in my brain that made my hands shake.
Another example of things-I-hear-in-stereo is MLK Jr.'s frustration with moderate whites. Swap "moderate whites" with " supportive straights", and I am so there.
**** Many of the white feminist pundits currently shilling for Senator Clinton are making seethe with anger and embarrassment. Sexism. Isn't. The. Only. Social. Issue. And my god, women, but you've had a long history of treating women of color like so much dirty laundry and not like your sisters, so you are in NO POSITION to judge anyone for not trusting your anti-racist bona fides now.
Tom DeWolf is a descendent of slave-traders. In 2001, he was approached by a 10th-cousin who was making a documentary about the modern legacy of the slave trade, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. Katrina Browne was gathering a group of cousins, all descended from the slave-trading DeWolf's. They would tour the family mansion in Rhode Island, the family castle in Ghana, the family plantation in Cuba; they would meet for round tables with historians and African and African-American community leaders along the way. Tom DeWolf agreed to join the group. It sounded interesting, he thought, although he was somewhat ambivalent about how all this affected him.
In many ways, the book is a basic primer on a number of topics: how deeply slavery was intertwined into the foundations of the U.S. economy; how dirty Jefferson's hands were with slavery*; how the African side of the Triangle Trade worked; how pervasive the legacy of slavery still is**; what the basics of the idea of reparations is actually about. If you need a primer in those topics, then this book will give you a hint at all that. (But not much more than a hint, because those are big topics.)
But the real worth in this book was the documentation of one guy learning to recognize his institutionalized racism and white privilege. DeWolf went into this project thinking that slavery was something that was very bad, very sad, and very long ago. He ended up learning that sad-bad-long-ago is a diversionary sleight-of-hand.
There are a lot of classic moments in here. I especially like the documentation of his attempts to get cookies for occasionally noticing and caring about racism, and his confusion about why he can't find anyone willing to give them to him. (DeWolf was merely confused about that; some of the cousins are outraged. They're being good when they didn't have to! They deserve cookies!!)
For myself, I started learning to see my white privilege because I was hearing in stereo many of the incidents in the school-integration memoirs. I'd hear it once through white, wow-SHE'S-a-bit-paranoid ears, and again through queer, isn't-that-the-way-it-ALWAYS-happens ears. Two completely opposite reactions, right on top of each other, over and over again.*** After enough of that hearing-in-stereo, I started to wonder if, hey, maybe I was being just like one of those "progressive", but-not-so-helpful straights whom I despise so much? And wouldn't it really SUCK to be one of them? Maybe when people of color bitch about progressive whites, maybe they have a point. And maybe I should listen.
Hearing-in-stereo shows up in the book: some of the women catch on to white privilege faster than the men do, but their attempts to explain it to the men---"No, look, this aspect of institutionalized racism is JUST LIKE patriarchy!"---meet exactly the sort of resistance you would expect. Male privilege, unsurprisingly, seemed as fantasy-land-imaginary to most of the men in the group as white privilege did.
That inability to perceive one's own privilege becomes a bit more visible for DeWolf when he discovers his wealthy cousins are unable to see their class privilege. One of the cousins insists that going to Harvard wasn't privilege; he worked hard to get into Harvard. The others all agree with him; anyone can go to Harvard if they apply themselves. DeWolf, an Oregon Ducks grad whose parents went to night school, can not believe his ears. Eventually someone starts a roll call around the table, and everyone but DeWolf names an Ivy League alma mater. Many of the cousins add the footnote that they were the third or fourth generation at their Ivy League school. And then they all congratulated themselves, again, on having gotten into those schools by the sweat of their own brows.
DeWolf does learn to see that his life and worldview has been extraordinarily sheltered by white privilege, but it's a tricksy, slippery knowledge. It's easy to slide back into forgetting. He worries that after a few years, he'll find that he has slid back into his nice, white, comfortable life, and all this will have become just an interesting travelogue.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happened. He went back to his nice County Council job in his nice, white city of Bend, and he quite thoroughly forgot. Oh, sure, if you asked him, he'd say that he remembered, but was he acting like he remembered? Not so much.
What I find stunning is what made him remember again: he got caught on the sharp end of a sexual harassment investigation. It seems that all those years ago, when he called his coworker the next morning and said, "Hey, I was drunk, I don't know what I was thinking, I didn't mean anything by it, are we good?" and she replied, "Sure, we're good," and then he promptly forgot about it---? Well, that ability to believe that his intent mattered more than his actions; the ability to solicit an on-cue "Sure, that's okay," for something that really wasn't okay; the ability to walk away from the whole mess and never give it another thought: that's the very essence of privilege.
Later, when the sexual-harrassment investigation grew from the single initial complainant to multiple complainants, women he could barely remember but whom he had given excellent reason to remember him...
That was a penny-drop indeed. Privilege might be nice and comfortable for a while, and it might let you believe that you are a good and innocent person, but that belief is a lie. And the next thing you know, you're no longer the basically decent guy who sometimes goes a little too far but never beyond anything that can't be patched up with a casual you-know-I-didn't-mean-it and handshake in the morning. No, you've become the asshole who screwed over several women's lives, and who couldn't even be bothered to notice doing it. And here's the kicker: you didn't even become that guy; you were that guy all along. Congratulations.
White/straight/male/cisgender/ableist/class/Christian/colonial privilege is not just an advantage, like the name signifies, but it's also a curse. It makes it hard for you to notice---even when people are trying their damnedest to help you notice---that you're not the person you had intended to be. And we're not talking about a small slippage, like sometimes feeling tired and overwhelmed and saying snippy things to someone you care about, but big, ought-to-be-impossible-to-ignore slippage. Which, somehow, is very easy to ignore.
One of the other things that DeWolf points out about privilege, something he learned from an African-American man who was facing up to his own homophobia and sexism, is that lacking privilege in one area can very easily hinder you from taking responsibility for the privileges you do possess. It's easy to get so caught up in how you are oppressed, and not have any attention left over to notice how you are an oppressor.**** Or to think that being one gets you off the hook for the other. There's a reason I tried to name all the major privileges I could think of in the lead of the previous paragraph: I don't have three of those privileges, but I do have the other five. (And probably more I don't know to see yet.) It would be very silly of me to pretend that not having those three gets me off the hook for being responsible for my actions with respect to those five. Years from now, I don't want to wake up to my own personal nightmare, like DeWolf did. (Or rather, wake up to any more a nightmare than I've already set up for myself.) To be the person I want to be, I have to think about myself with respect to those five.
So there you are: one guy's memoir of learning to see institutionalized racism, the privilege he gets from it, and the way that privilege has damaged his attempts to be a decent human being; plus bonus material on the history and economics of slavery and modern racism; plus some first attempts at figuring out how to become a better ancestor than his ancestors were.
Being a good ancestor to the future: I want that, too.
* More than you likely know: when the U.S. slave trade was outlawed in 1808, Jefferson appointed a DeWolf to oversee customs inspections in Bristol, the major slave-trading port.
** A figure from the Reparations Coordinating Committee: "In 1865, the gross black wealth in the U.S. was less than 1%. By the end of the twentieth century, the gross black wealth in the U.S. still hovered around 1%."
*** The early bits of Warriors Don't Cry was difficult for me to read because it was triggery for the marriage battles of 2004. I am ashamed to say that it was a relief to me when Beals got to the part with the violent mobs, dynamite, and the 101st Airborne, because none of that was tripping circuits in my brain that made my hands shake.
Another example of things-I-hear-in-stereo is MLK Jr.'s frustration with moderate whites. Swap "moderate whites" with " supportive straights", and I am so there.
**** Many of the white feminist pundits currently shilling for Senator Clinton are making seethe with anger and embarrassment. Sexism. Isn't. The. Only. Social. Issue. And my god, women, but you've had a long history of treating women of color like so much dirty laundry and not like your sisters, so you are in NO POSITION to judge anyone for not trusting your anti-racist bona fides now.