Learning about Racism in America

A few years ago, I became very frustrated trying to explain male privilege to some of my guy friends. Most often, I’d start by talking about the difference between a woman walking home in the dark versus a man walking home in the dark. I’d explain why a woman might seem a little uncomfortable walking past them in the dark. A common response was, “But I didn’t do anything!”

“It’s not about you,” I said. “This gets to be about her.”

I found the “I didn’t do it!” reaction frustrating, because to me it was completely beside the point. To me, it feels obvious that this gets to be about women. It gets to be about the people at risk.

My favorite class in divinity school was “Black Women and Divinity.” In it, we learned about womanism and healing, about forgiveness (pros and cons) and celebration, the earth and our connection to it. I took it because I did not have even the slightest handle on what it meant to be black in America. As a student of American literature and history as well as a person who lived in America, that seemed like an oversight.

I loved the class, and I also found it profoundly stressful. Nearly every day after class, I went into the bathroom to cry. One of the things I cried about was the “I didn’t do it!” feeling. I had it. My classmates would talk about violence, about privilege, about racism, and I would sit there and think, “but it wasn’t me!” It gave me so much empathy for the men I’d been talking to. But having been on the other side of that conversation, I knew that was the least helpful response. It was a natural beginning point, but it wasn’t a good destination.

Early on in the class I was talking to a peer from Puerto Rico, and I said, “I don’t know how to talk in this class.”

She said, “Then listen.”

I found listening strenuous. I found listening without defensiveness almost impossible. I cried in the bathroom every day after class because the process of dismantling my defenses was agonizing and also because it was absolutely necessary.

I found, as I listened, that it was me. Worse, it is still me.

One day after class I began talking to one of the girls who I’d arranged to study with—only realizing several sentences into the conversation that this was not that girl. I’d mixed her up with another woman of color in the class. I knew by the look on her face that I had made her day—even her life—worse. I could tell she was angry, and that she felt dehumanized, I could tell this was a pattern in her life, and I was one person in a long line who had done this to her.

I think there are people, probably a lot of people I love, who would say that I imagined that reaction or, if I didn’t, it was an overreaction. But I think for her this wasn’t about an isolated incident, it was about a past of not being seen as herself but as the color of her skin. It was about a whole history of not being seen.

I realized, standing in front of her, that I’d messed up, and I couldn’t fix it. The only thing I could do was change.

There’s a story in my faith tradition of a group of people fleeing in front of an invading army. Their king (who is demonstrably the worst), “commanded them that all the men should leave their wives and their children, and flee before the [army]. Now there were many that would not leave them, but had rather stay and perish with them. And the rest left their wives and their children and fled” (Mosiah 19:11-12).

Some stayed, but a lot left their families. They fled in fear, and only later, safe in the forest, did they come to themselves. They saw what they’d done, and you can feel in the text how their souls sank, how they despised themselves. They swore they would return, and if their wives and children were dead, they would seek revenge and die too.

Their wives and children were still alive, but the story doesn’t tell us about the reunion that happened when the men returned. The narrator leaves it to our imagination. Did their wives take them back? Did their children forgive them? Did they manage to forgive themselves?

Two years later, the army came again. The threat was the same, but this time, the men “fought for their lives, and for their wives, and for their children; therefore they exerted themselves and like dragons did they fight” (Mosiah 20:11). They fought for their wives and children, therefore they fought like dragons. They had changed. They’d made a mistake before—a despicable, awful mistake—and then they changed. They became the type of people who would go to their death for the people they loved.

Repentance isn’t saying sorry (although, personally, I also find the word helpful), it’s changing. It’s that agonizing process of seeing wrong, of looking with clear eyes at the ways we’ve hurt people, and choosing to return to them and fix what we can. It’s promising that next time we will be better, and then it’s being better next time. And it’s something we can do, even when we’ve done or been part of truly awful things.

This is what I want to do in the context of race relations in this country, which are so bent out of shape and awful. The authors of the Book of Mormon would call them “the wicked traditions of our fathers.” In an academic context, I would call it intergenerational trauma. Racism is pain passed from one generation to another and from one people to another. It is a way that we fail ourselves and each other over and over again. Healing from that is repentance.

I want to be better next time, but I still don’t really know how. So, for now I’m remembering the advice of my friend, way back at the beginning of my degree. I don’t know what to say, so I’m trying to listen. I still find listening strenuous. I still find looking with clear eyes agonizing. I still think it’s absolutely necessary.