Coming home

It’s an odd place to stand, between white and non-white worlds. I would never say I have stood in a black person’s shoes, or those of any other racialized minority. I don’t believe a white person can have that experience. But in 2006, I came back to my hometown of Peterborough and found myself doing exactly that, living between worlds, holding a certain in-between space for my biracial daughter, who was now far from her Haitian family in Quebec.

I’m not like my white relatives who have been here their whole lives, and yet I belong here too. My life experience has changed me forever, that is certain, and at times I feel very much like an outsider here. I have lived in big cities, and I know how much racism is there. People who want to judge my community don’t get far with me. When they use the words ‘racist rednecks’, I feel my eyes narrow, readying to defend “my people”, and yet most of “my” people find me a little disconcerting.

Methuselah Tree, USA

I feel like whiteness is this big tree, and I come from one branch, this rural British farming limb, but I’ve fallen off my limb and bounced through so many layers during my fall, knocking my head off dozens of other limbs of other trees as I fell, until finally I’ve landed at the foot of this white tree. I walk around under it, inspecting its bark, looking at the branch I fell from, and remarking how strong the tree is. Its leaves still protect me; an umbrella of white privilege shelters me, regardless of the branch I fell from. It is always trying to stay ahead of the other trees, spreading out towards the sun and rain to capture as much as possible, and its enormous size helps it maintain its established place in the forest.


But I can see that big tree. No one can tell me it doesn’t exist, even if others only see a few branches around them. And no one can tell me my branch is not distinct either, because my fall has painfully reminded me of my differences.

Photo of tree from http://www.imgbase.info/images/safe-wallpapers/anime/

anime_scenery/20021_anime_scenery.jpg

I’m feeling centred in my own ethnicity for the first time in decades. It’s a good place to be. I have embraced my own origins and that makes me more secure. Being in a community surrounded by First Nations communities, I am learning a lot now from indigenous-descent peoples about decolonization, about being a settler on Turtle Island. This is sure to help me think about how my powerful white tree can share this land more equitably with the other trees.

The woods in autumn. Photo from
http://www.jogjis.com/wallpaper/1024x819/
summer-end-forest-trees-11337.html

Now I want to shake my white tree and see if others are ready for a change of perspective!

Post-colonial love

If I am most honest, I’ve probably encountered the deepest veins of racism and ethnocentrism in myself in my relationships with non-white men, and their families and circles of friends. It is no secret that my eldest daughter is a bi-racial child and that I lived for several years with her father, a Haitian Québécois, during the 14 years I lived in Montreal. In fact, I have dated men from several different ethno-racial backgrounds, just as I have had friends and colleagues from so many different parts of the world. It’s not difficult in places like Toronto or Montreal to lose yourself in a non-white world. Especially when you want to lose your whiteness, and escape its endless monotony.

I remember when my daughter was born, how visible I suddenly became. Whenever we went for a walk or a subway ride, young white women would stop me in the street and moon over her. “Oh, I want a brown baby like her, she is so beautiful!” Yes, she was a beautiful child, and I enjoyed the attention for a time, I was a proud mother. After a while though, I started to feel angered by the attention, and I would avoid slowing down when walking in public to discourage people from connecting with me. I wanted to distance myself from desires like that, a longing that seemed so shallow and racist. I was adamant that this was not the intention of my mixed race relationship, to have a pretty brown baby, for the sake of being different. I loved her father, and that was all there was to it.

People say foolish things, horrible things, like ‘once you go black, you never go back’. I had such a heart-breaking experience when that relationship ended, I never went back to black. In fact I ran from black men for some time, and had to come to terms with the racism that installed itself in me after I was left with a 3-year old child and no support. My family’s warnings about having a relationship with a black man came back to haunt me, even if I rejected the racist assumptions they were based on. “Be careful, he might be marrying you for citizenship” they whispered at the beginning, even though he had been a Canadian citizen since he was an adolescent! Or the coworker who glowered when I told her I was a single mother. “Another fatherless black child!” I shared life on the margins with someone who had been discriminated against his whole life, and I ended up feeling some of the same sting of the whip intended for him.

But I did get over it and eventually I came to terms with how we both got caught up in a story bounded by systemic racism and scripted by colonial history. A post-colonial love story, some might say. At one point, a feminist filmmaker in Montreal wanted desperately for me to tell my story for her film, but I knew there was no way I could ever tell that story without enflaming anti-black racist tendencies in white audiences, and even though she called and pleaded for me to share what I’d been through, I never did. I had buried it and wanted it left that way. Even my own family knows very little about what happened back then in the mid 90’s.

I have no intention of detailing it all now either, only the parts where I came to terms with my own racism, or some part of it, as I don’t know if we ever find it all. What I do know is what I saw and experienced being close to that black man, and his family and friends, and to other people of other races and cultures. The racial profiling by Montreal police when we would be stopped for no reason when driving together. The poverty I went through because he couldn’t find work, his ego laid low by years of underemployment. The mental health problems that surfaced from a childhood crushed by forces of globalization and post-colonialism, leaving Haitian families to survive by whatever means necessary. I might have been able to describe what racism looked like before this relationship, but now I knew what it felt like.

The truth is, I didn’t quite believe him when he first told me all the things police had done to him, randomly picking up his brother and him as teenagers, giving them a beating “just in case they deserved it”: it’s hard to believe in things that don’t happen to you. When he didn’t find a job after being laid off, and started a doomed business in Haiti that ended up destroying our relationship, I was angry with him, not the systemic racism that left him short of options: despite his gifted ability for math, his high school principal refused to allow him back into university level math after some behavioural problems, and he gave up on his dream of becoming an engineer. And when we went to Haiti to start the business, I had never had such a totalizing experience of being white and privileged, a ‘déjà vu’ experience, as if I was in some old movie from the Deep South: “Yes Ma’am, anything you like Ma’am”.

White colonialism is so old and so dissolved into the fabric of North American life now, that we are hard-pressed to connect its legacy to ourselves any more, but that day that Haitian boy looked up at me as he cleaned the floors of our Port-au-Prince store, an educated boy in a white dress shirt and pants, down on all fours, with an expression that told me he would do anything to please me, that day I felt it hit me in my heavy, white bones. That moment is still so fresh in my mind, it could be yesterday, or 300 years ago when the whole imperial European expansionism project was just gathering steam and African slaves were the norm. I was so upset, I had to run out of the store to shake it off. But heavy white bones don’t shake off so easily.

It was several years later before I came to terms with our cultural differences around money. At the time, everyone in Haiti seemed so corrupt to me, and money would never pool in one place there for long. It would be licked away like the rain disappears into the dry desert sands. The magouille or “maneuvering” of money in order to get what you wanted, wetting palms for every government service you sought, the constant outstretched hands from neighbours, it was exhausting for me, emotionally and financially. I longed for more secure footing, where things had a fixed price and money could fix a problem. It fueled some racist, or at least discriminatory, feelings in me that I had to work to overcome. Now I see the depths of communalism in Haitian monetary values, and in my partner’s way of sharing whatever resource came his way. My own values, which I thought were very socialist-minded, stood out in stark relief and my individualist culture came roaring into view.

So I guess I would like to find some way to encourage rural white people to learn, here, where they are, but the truth is I learned so much when I was off in other places, in relationships with other people from other cultures and races who just don’t live here in any sizable numbers. I feel like giving up, like I have to admit some terrible secret – that it is true, you have to have deep experiences inside other cultural contexts before you can really see the hidden racism lurking in our white culture, and in our inner world that is programmed by that culture.

I feel like I have just sabotaged my own research.

But then again, perhaps I have just peeled another layer off the white onion.

You're a racist!

When I was pregnant with my first baby, I was in the midst of a very heated conflict between a local black community agency and the white mainstream agencies who partnered with them to deliver services to black youth in the neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grace (NDG), Montreal. NDG has a historically rooted black community and middle-class English-speaking Black families tended to live there, or in the West Island. Racial integration was the norm and my daughter was always surrounded by other biracial children at school, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t problems.

I remember sitting at a community roundtable with 5 or 6 other organizations, my big belly unmistakably announcing “baby!”, when a rep from the black community leveled a charge that my team was racist. I took it very personally, like an attack on my own integrity. I didn’t understand. This man had known me for years. He knew the father of my child was black. How could he do this to me in front of all my peers?

Of course it was strategic, not personal. My agency, the YMCA, had numerous well-funded youth programs full of young black participants, while their agency was fighting for survival. His attack was part of his hope that the community would help draw government resources to his agency, not to the Y. I can’t say I blame him, their organization was at stake, but it made for one explosive argument in the alley that afternoon! I have had so many experiences of either being told I’m a racist, catching my own racism, or watching other whites experience this, that I don’t react so emotionally now. I don’t like it, it never feels good, but I can usually stop and take in some of what the other person is saying. I try to stop my desire to flee, ask questions, learn from what they are saying and feeling, or decide that what they are saying is really about another issue that we need to explore.

But I know that many white people don’t feel this way when their actions are questioned. Calling a white person a racist is a sure way to send them right off their rails. Fight or flight, you can be sure to get a reaction. It is an unthinkable position. No civilized white person is racist (just the rural rednecks)! I think this is what white society programs into whites: “You’re better than others, therefore you should always be one step ahead of them with a greater consciousness, a more sophisticated world view, the right view.” But I try to actively deprogram my whiteness. That’s what it means to be an anti-racist white to me; actively watching my self, reflecting on my actions, listening to what others have to say. Sometimes I can’t do it all in the moment, when tension is high. I go away and process it, try to continue the discussion another time when I am more aware.

I have found racism and ethnocentrism in myself (and continue to find it) and I see it in others around me, all the time. Not because I’m in Peterborough and there are a lot of rednecks up here, but because we are white, and we are constantly moving inside our own white consciousness. With two-thirds of the Peterborough population declaring British ancestry, and only 3 percent from visible minority/racialized communities, we have few opportunities to interact with people who would challenge our subtle and not so subtle biases, the words we use, and the actions we take.

I expect to keep discovering my own biases for the rest of my life.