Rhythm? No. Rhyme and reason ... some.

I thought I would develop some rhythm in the writing of this dissertation, and the blog that (sometimes) reflects it. Well, no. Real life keeps getting in the way. I recall with some humor the concluding words from the acknowledgments in a text written recently by someone on the faculty of my institution:

"Finally, I'm grateful to my family, who gladly leave me to my intellectual pursuits without complaint."

Okay, yes, it is a man who wrote that, white, of a certain generation. This sentence conjures up a whole (imaginary) world for me, of a person for whom laundry is done, food is acquired and cooked, a house is kept, children are raised ... and all that goes on outside the door of a closed office, in which this man has the leisure to cogitate, reflect, and write. For long stretches of time. In peace.

I don't live in that world.

In my world, there are the teenagers, the widowed mother with significant health issues who just moved closer by, and my beloved M., who has been slowly but surely moving into our house and winding deeper into our hearts, and who unintentionally tugs at the strings of my wanting-to-be-with.

I am grateful to my family, too ... though they do not typically leave me to my intellectual pursuits. Pursuit of laundry, shopping, and transportation, yes. Intellectual pursuits ... well, when we do talk about my work, I usually learn more than they do. So, it's a good thing I am not completely left to my own devices.

It is hard to write a bit here, think a bit there, edit and reorganize and try to hold onto a train of thought until my mind gets to the station. And yet, I can't stop with reflecting on the lack of male privilege in my life. Because there is plenty of white privilege, and the difficulties I have being a sandwich-generation full-time mom and lot-of-the-time daughter and part-time instructor while attempting to write a dissertation do not change that.

I sit in a house acquired through one of those they-had-no-right-give-her-a-mortgage loans; and I have been supported not only by my own efforts and employment but also by gifts and inheritances flowing through the gates of a white world. My mother has moved into an assisted living center where the nurses and administrators (in higher paying jobs) are for the most part white women, and the nurses' aides and housekeepers and hands-on care providers (in lower-paying jobs) are all women of color. The cost for this is paid for with money my dad made, profits generated in part by using underpaid Latino labor.

White privilege plays into all of my environment ... and I do see my complicity. But I can't stop with noticing. It's like housekeeping; you know you are going to keep making messes, just by living, and so you keep cleaning up, and you try to make a little less mess than you clean up.

I have been working for 15 years now on accepting that what I can do is good enough; becoming a working mother -- even with white privilege -- took a big bite out of my perfectionism right off the bat. I had to accept that I could not be the employee I wanted to be or the mother I wanted to be, if I was being both, and so if I wanted to be both, I had to accept the notion of "good enough." (I had some help in that department from Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I picked up for working mother tips, not realizing it would trick me into quitting my job and eventually going to seminary.)

Beginning to (try to) live into an anti-racist identity took a few more big bites out of the perfectionist cookie. You realize the original sin of whiteness: i.e., you are born into and grow up in systems that teach you (and help you internalize) your superiority, such that you think it's natural and inevitable. You realize that it is sheer grace that causes God and people of color to love you anyway, despite the ways you keep acting white (see Macon D's excellent and prolific blog at http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ and everything Tim Wise every wrote). You learn to forgive yourself so you don't get paralyzed with guilt, and you learn to be willing to risk being wrong -- even as you try your darnedest to do the right things right -- so you don't get paralyzed with fear.

You learn that partial and imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. And so you set yourself to write an anti-racist theology, even knowing that you will be making a part-time and imperfect effort that will not be the best, not even the best you could do, but it will be the best you can do, and that whatever you can do is worth doing.

My committee probably won't want the dissertation cover to read "Best That Could Be Done Under the Circumstances."

So, maybe I'll just acknowledge on my acknowledgments page my gratitude for everything that gets in the way of this project -- because every distraction reminds me what it's really about.

Having the courage to see the world, name what's not right, and take responsibility for doing something about it.

Of Bailouts and Reparations

I'm sure I'm not the only person looking at that number -- $700 billion -- and listening to the debate and wondering where the national will to responsibility comes from.

When I listen to the back-and-forth on the bailout, I can't help but think about the much-less-ballyhooed topic of reparations for African-Americans who are generationally disadvantaged and continue to be oppressed by the historical legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow, as well as racial prejudices in the present.

When the topic of reparations does come out, white resistance typically takes the form of such challenges as "I'm not responsible; I never owned slaves, and neither did my family." Or, "How could we ever figure out how much was owed to whom?" Or, "They would want too much; we as a nation would be bankrupted."

Hmm.

Consider the following, from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, making final appeal for the bailout: "This is a day of consequence for the American people. ... None of us is an island. We're all bound together in boom or bust."

Well. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it.

None of us is an island ... not white people, black people, or people of any other hue ... and we are all bound together, in boom or in bust.

So, given that we are all bound together, and given that $700 billion is a number we are willing to talk about as an estimate of the amount required to restore "faith" in a crumbling system that was established primarily by white people and that primarily benefits white people, maybe that will be a good (re)starting point when we do get around to that reparations discussion.

And that is a discussion we should have, because there is a besetting original sin in the US economy: that fact that it is constructed on the stolen life energy, blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved and exploited people of color -- from Africa, Mexico, and China, among other nations -- imported legally and illegally to do the dirty work of building a nation and its wealth.

Oh, to live in a Micah 6:8 world ...

Hiding the White Numbers

Many theorists on race have pointed out that the white race is the one that need not speak its name; this certainly pertains in the case of theology, where we can now find black theology, womanist theology, Latina/o theology, Latin American theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, African theology, Asian theology, queer theology, Native American theology ... a plethora that points out the obvious: anything without a label or hyphen is by definition a white theology.

But not a consciously white theology; not theology written from a perspective informed by a critical understanding of what it means to be white. Rather, before the critiques and constructions of marginalized communities, most theology was written by white (presumably straight) men who regarded their perspective as either objective or universal.

The advent of people of color and feminists and eventually lgbt people noted the falseness of that objectivity and universality. (Of course, the white feminists immediately got it wrong, too, thinking there was a universal female perspective and failing to realize white feminists could not speak for women of color, but that women of color needed to speak the learnings and visions of their own experience.)

Perhaps not too surprisingly, the U.S. government continues to do its part to render whiteness invisible ... conveniently also making white privilege more difficult to discern. For instance, the Census Bureau's Quick Facts web page on the United States as a whole notes that of the total number of business firms documented in 2002 (22,974,655), Hispanic persons own 6.8 percent of those firms, African-Americans own 5.2 percent, Asian persons own 4.8 percent, and indigenous peoples own .1 percent (i.e., one-tenth of a percent).

Conspicuously absent is the statistic for white ownership of business firms, which – based on the figures for other ethnicities – I would estimate at around 83 percent (a figure that might be rounded down somewhat for the inclusion of some Hispanics who might designate themselves as being white). And these are predominantly male owners, across all racial/ethnic category: the percentage of woman-owned firms, unparsed by race or ethnicity, is 28.2 percent.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also organizes its data in a way that renders whiteness invisible. Its Current Population Survey data on employment and income is tabulated for workforce totals and then presented in subsets for women, African Americans, Asian and Hispanic/Latino workers. Data for men and/or white people must be extrapolated. But even as one extrapolates from the data, one finds that the data is presented in such a way that it can only be used to estimate white workers or male workers, but not – for instance – white male workers.

There are changes afoot; many authors and bloggers and theologians and just plain folks are working to make whiteness more visible, in order to render it critique-able ... and ultimately, many of us hope, transformable.

White by the Numbers

Several months ago, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz challenged me to consider the question of what it would mean for white people to experience liberation from oppressing. That sent the chapter I was working on into a deeper place, which was a good thing.

I had been writing about Latina calls for liberation, and was about to document the white response so far. As I developed that section, I also began to address the question from Isasi-Diaz about liberation from oppressing, and as a result ended up with a 100+ page chapter, which I have now split into two chapters, one on Latina calls to liberation, and another on white liberation(s).

The chapter on Latina calls to liberation is about 25 pages. The white liberation chapter is about 80 pages. Hmmm. Maybe that's as it should be? Maybe that's what it looks like when white people do their own work? To be determined.

At the moment, I want to share a few numbers. One of the points of the chapter on white liberation is to illustrate the reality of white privilege (historical construction and present reality). Along the way, I did some research on white representation in certain job types. I was recalling a photocopied article I saw some years ago called "Blinded by the White," which noted the heavy preponderance of white people in positions that count, either by virtue of being highly salaried or societally powerful or both.

While the representation of women and men of color has risen in many positions, white people are still heavily over represented in the positions that count. We white folks represent about 66% of the (census) population. Hence, any position where we hold more than 66% of the jobs is a position where white people are overrepresented, in my simple way of thinking. So, here's what I found:

White representation in higher-salaried positions of power (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey 2007*)

Occupation	Percent held by whites	Males	Females
Chief executives	87	75	25
HR managers	78	30	70
Education administrators	79	36	64
Medical/health service managers	76	30	70
Property/real estate managers	79	50	50
Business/financial operations	76	44	56
Architecture/engineering	79	86	14
Lawyers	88	67	33
Magistrates	83	57	43
Education/training occupations	79	27	73
Post-secondary teachers	79	54	46
Health-care practitioners	76	26	74
Dentists	80	71	29
Pharmacists	75	47	53
Physicians/surgeons	72	70	30

By the numbers, white people still hold a preponderance of the positions that count, out of proportion to our presence in the population, from which I would argue we are able to maintain white-privileging control over the systems and institutions that shape our society, including business, legislative and judicial systems, property sales and management, education and health care. (Note that the percentages of non-white, non-male legislators was considered too small to be tabulated.)

Of course, not all white people are employed in positions that afford economic power and privilege. Whites represented 44 percent of the 37 million U.S. citizens living below the poverty line in 2006. The (historically constructed) sad thing about that is that most of the white people living in poverty think they have more in common with wealthy white people than they do people of color also dealing with poverty. And that keeps folks from banding together and working together to insist on change in an unjust reality.

Tim Wise put the point admirably his book, White Like Me:

"I am not claiming, nor do I believe, that all whites are well-off, or even particularly powerful. We live not only in a racialized society, but also a class system, a patriarchal system, and one in which other forms of advantage and disadvantage exist. These other forms of privilege mediate, but never fully eradicate, something like white privilege. … But despite the fact that white privilege plays out differently for different folks, depending on these other identities … whiteness matters and carries with it great advantage. … [A]lthough whites are often poor, their poverty does not alter the fact that relative to poor and working class persons of color, they typically have a leg up. No one privilege system trumps all others every time, but no matter the ways in which individual whites may face obstacles on the basis of nonracial factors, our race continues to elevate us over similarly situated persons of color." (ix-x)

More on all this later ... at the moment I have a honker of a chapter to get closer to done.

* Sources of data include "Household Data Annual Averages: Median Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers by Detailed Occupation and Sex," Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf. as well as personal calculations.

** Although women outnumber men in HR management positions, men are compensated more highly, earning a median weekly wage of $1581 compared to women’s $1073, as reported in “Median Weekly Earnings.” A similar discrepancy exists for education administration, where women hold 64 percent of the positions, but receive less compensation than men, $1371 to $960.

Goodbye, Randy Pausch

It's a rare thing for so many regular people to become aware of the death of another regular person.

Like millions of others, I was touched by Dr. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, given after his terminal diagnosis, and shared globally via the internet.

Read this for more from someone who knows ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120951287174854465.html?mod=null_topbox

I don't want to take anything away from this man's life, and there's little chance my comments will, since no one who knows me knows him or his family.

But there's a thought that came up over and over again, toward the end of the Last Lecture, and repeatedly during his Time Management lecture (which I watched, since he said he thought it was more important, and I was curious -- and yes, a bit of a procrastinator).

I felt the time pressure in his life, which was there before the terminal diagnosis. Some white anti-racist activists who have become aware of the way some of us put the to-do list before human relationships have experienced it as time oppression.

I think after the diagnosis the only time pressure he felt was to spend time with his family, and leave clear evidence behind for his children that he loved them.

White privilege helped him do that, as did the love and concern and resources he had earned. I can't ignore that. There's whiteness in our living, and in our dying.

How many men and women are dying and leaving partners and children behind and do not have the resources to leave anything but the shell of the body and the memories a mind and heart can hold?

I do not begrudge his widow and children a bit of what he was able to leave.

I just don't want us to forget the inequality that prevents everyone from having such a good death.

To Be an Ally

The Angry Black Woman called a carnival of bloggers to address being an ally against a form of oppression – racism as well as other –isms.

http://theangryblackwoman.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/allies-talking/

That’s reason enough to engage the question of what it means to be an ally, but the topic happens to run along with the last couple of posts, so there’s reason number two. But it’s reason number three that gets me off my duff and onto the keyboard: I want to sit back and read the responses. I don’t want to write, because I don’t want to expose my limited understanding; I don’t want to be imperfect. Perfectionism, of course, being one of the better ways whiteness has of paralyzing white people and keeping them out of the fray. (“If I talk about racism, my racism will show.” Does that fear ever go away?)

Back to ABW: she asks some good questions and wonders some good wonders. For instance, do white people listen less defensively to other white people talking about racism, compared to the defensiveness that crops up with people of color?

In my experience, the answer is there may be less defensiveness, but not much less. And there is often less listening. It’s almost like some white folks don’t want to listen to other white folks talk about racism, as if we can’t know what we’re talking about. The white person wants to hear about it from a person of color. Maybe sometimes there is more defensiveness, because the white person who wants information resents that there are white people who “get it.” And I’m well aware that my own response to another white person can shape the interchange; if I come across as “more anti-racist than thou,” I am not doing anyone any good.

Then ABW wondered, “Is it easier to understand oppression, to move past guilt and on to useful dialogue, etc., if the person explaining these things to you in-depth is a person like yourself? White or male or straight or Christian or whatever?”

I think the shapers of the quality of dialogue on such issues has more to do with the incoming attitude of those in dialogue, rather than the similarity of the persons in dialogue. If the person seeking information has an honest and humble seeking, and the person sharing information has an honest and humble sharing, with everyone understanding that the goal is the process of learning and growth. Otto Maduro describes knowledge as a "fragmentary, partisan, conjectural, and provisional reconstruction of reality." Our processes of learning are going to be equally fragmentary, partisan, conjectural, and provisional. We may as well accept that reality and stop trying to be whole-unto-ourselves, objective, certain for all time.

On the topic of guilt, I actually find guilt – like anger – useful, once you decide to engage its utility. Anger is a compass; it tells me when something is wrong. When I am mindful, it can point the way to what needs to be attended to. Guilt functions the same way. The feeling of guilt arises when I have done something that transgresses my value system. It tells me I have done something wrong. And, as with anger, when I am mindful, it can point the way to what needs to be attended to. The problem is we (white folks) often become paralyzed when we feel guilt; it is like we have stumbled into an emotional minefield. We are afraid to move, because we are afraid of doing something else wrong; every direction looks threatening. It is not uncommon for white people to live in relative isolation, without a community to help engage and examine the guilt; when this is the case, we have no one to learn with, and we do not learn, and we do not grow.

Another issue with guilt is that we white people can be afraid that if we admit to doing something wrong, we will have to change, either because we feel we must, or because whoever has perceived our guiltiness will tell us we have to. And our fear of the need to change means that, once again, our ability to learn and grow is stymied.

ABW asks us to engage “why this or that oppression and prejudice is wrong. Why they are allies. Why the usual excuses are not good enough. I figure allies probably know full well all the many and various arguments people throw up to make prejudice and oppression okay. Things that someone on the other side of the fence may not hear. Address those things and more besides.”

The primary “wrong” for me is racism, in part because I am white, I live in a racist society, and I don’t want to be racist; and in part because racism broke my heart when I was a child growing up in South Texas. Accordingly, I understand myself to be a white ally against racism, and for me this stance of being a white anti-racist is commingled with my identity as a Christian. Racism warps the identities of white people and people of color, and – as do other forms of oppression – defaces the image of God we are each created to embody. I believe God’s intent for humanity is that we are each to be able to live into fullness of life; racism mars our ability to live into that fullness of life. It privileges white people, some more than others, and oppresses people of color. In Christian terms, this dehumanization is sin: to be unearthed, eradicated, resisted, and ended.

There are personal considerations, too: the people of color I know and love, who can perhaps feel my love as more than just talk, because I try to walk the walk, and because I listen when they call me on my stuff … the deep appreciation I have for what I learn from people of color, in real life and in the academy, and the way it feels to struggle to do justice to/with what I learn, as opposed to appropriating outside of ethical relationship … the way my life is grounded by knowing the history of my family and of white people in South Texas, and the specifics of the legacy I am trying to undo. There’s more to this, but it's enough for now to say it boils down to love, honesty, respect, for what is real.

ABW clarifies that when she says allies, she’s “talking about any and every type. PoC can be (and should be) allies to other PoC, or to LGBTQ people if they are straight, or any number of other combinations.”

This relates to an interesting point for me: some people have asked me why my primary focus is not feminism or homophobia, given that I’m a lesbian. For some reason, the calling on my heart is much more about understanding how I am complicit in the oppression of others, and my whiteness (along with my US location and citizenship) is the primary means by which I am continually tempted into or labeled as being the oppressor. So, my focus is on moving from racist to anti-racist, and trying to understand this notion of being liberated from oppressing.

I don’t want to be an oppressor, in reality or by association; some of the ways I've learned to get closer to being liberated from being an oppressor is to (1) claim a just stance – in this case, being anti-racist, (2) and understand how oppression is constructed – through history, economics, culture – so that I can (3) do my part to deconstruct and end it.

I figure whatever I learn about stopping oppression is going to stand me in good stand if some man or straight person says to me, “I want to be an ally to the process of your liberation, because my liberation is tied up with yours.” (With thanks to my friend and fellow white ally, Sue Eagle, who ends her emails with this signature: “If you have come here to help us, you are wasting your time ... But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” -- Lilla Watson, Indigenous Australian activist)

There’s more to say; but that’s enough for an imperfect, fragmented, partisan, conjectural, and provisional construction of thought about being an ally. ;)

Liberation ... from Oppressing?

In the last couple of weeks I've gotten feedback from my committee on the first couple of chapters. They've pointed out that the history chapter goes on too long (which I knew) and that there's not enough on the construction of whiteness and how power and privilege gets attached to it (I sort of knew that, too).

But probably the most critical piece of feedback came -- not too surprisingly -- from my "external reader," i.e., the person on my committee who is not on the faculty of my program at SMU. I am honored to have Ada María Isasi-Díaz on my committee; I say "honored" because she is a very well-known Latina scholar, and also because my work is founded in significant part on a seminal essay she wrote on solidarity, which is now almost 25 years old.

In scholarly terms, that can be considered ancient history; and I'd probably get more traction in the academy with something more recent and cutting edge, but the simple fact of the matter is this essay is still relevant, for two reasons: it is one of the few pieces of liberation theology where someone who knows herself to be part of an oppressor class can find guidance, and 25 years after it was written, it still has not been taken seriously enough to have been responded to effectively, in the academy or in Christian churches.

More than ten years ago, now, when I was just beginning to find language and opportunity for an anti-racist commitment, identity and practice, I read this essay and it went straight into my heart. In it, Isasi-Díaz describes solidarity as a practice of mutuality based on common commitments, rather than commonalities. She speaks of the solidarity that forms among people experiencing oppression, and also of the solidarity that can form between the people experiencing oppression and those who participate in the oppressing, but who want to move out of that complicity. (The interested reader can find this essay in Isasi-Díaz's Mujerista Theology.)

Over the last ten years, as I learned about dismantling racism from the Damascus Road program's trainings, and from work in local churches and organizations, I found more and more connections between these bodies of knowledge and Isasi-Díaz's work on solidarity. I also found key learnings in Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he speaks of appropriate ways for people considered to be part of "oppressor classes" to work alongside those experiencing oppression.

Isasi-Díaz spoke of liberation as a process that begins with the cry of the oppressed. Freire spoke of trusting the agency of those experiencing oppression, trusting them to know what their liberation required. Damascus Road spoke of following the lead of people of color (which seemed to me a key expression of the trust Freire was talking about), and of always asking the question "who benefits?" and realizing that when there was not a clear benefit for people of color, then the status quo of benefit for white people was being maintained.

These tenets have shaped the structure of my dissertation, which begins with an orientation to the history of South Texas, and how white privilege was constructed alongside the disempowerment and disenfranchisement of Latina/o peoples. Next (in the chapter I am working on now), I follow Isasi-Díaz's dictum to begin with the cry of the oppressed, and I "hear" Latina/o voices expressing their reality today, which unfortunately is still clearly shaped by that history of oppression. My intent is to construct a theology that provides the rationale for and means of working with people of color -- particularly Latino/a people groups, in my project, based on my own experience and setting -- with the clear intent that that work benefit people of color.

And then in the feedback from Isasi-Díaz came a criticism of this basic orientation. In the email dialogue that followed, she wrote "I think it is not theoretically valid from the perspective of liberation theology/philosophy to construct your argument mainly around what you can do for the oppressed. The moral agency of the oppressed in the process of our liberation is very key. For me, if you work at dismantling white racism because it is important for your own liberation ... wow! That would be an enormous contribution ... we are always struggling to find ways of convincing those in power to understand that oppressing others is not in their (the oppressors') best interest ..."

As I reflect on these comments, I know she is right, and yet, following this lead is tricky, and white women's history in this regard is particularly troubling. To give history very short shrift, white women's energy for the abolitionist movement shifted to the suffragist movement when white women shifted their focus from justice for enslaved/formerly enslaved African Americans to justice for (white) women. Similarly, white women took their learnings from and energy for civil rights activism into a women's liberation movement, limited by the a false assumption that women had universal needs focused on gender oppression, to the exclusion of oppressions based on race, class or sexual orientation. In both cases, when white women got in touch with their own experiences of oppression, they moved into ways of thinking and acting that left the concerns of people of color out.

As a white woman, I'm nervous about a commitment to white liberation, even liberation from oppressing. I have been helped by and shaped by and -- I humbly believe -- transformed by a commitment to seeking that my actions materially benefit people of color, even as I am aware of my many failures in that regard. I believe that deliberately shifting one's allegiance to work that benefits people of color is a key means for undoing unconscious white superiority, and dismantling racist structures.

And yet, I know there is a truth, too, in what Isasi-Díaz is telling me. Truths don't always play nicely together; sometimes paradox is created because of the seeming conflict between truths.

True: White people can't liberate people of color; that is their work.

True: Racism is white people's problem, which has a negative impact on both people of color and white people. Because it is white people's problem, we have a responsibility for ending it. And yet, because we benefit from it, our thinking is often faulty, and we need the leadership and insight of people of color, and to be accountable to them for our work.

True: White people's work includes liberating ourselves from oppressing, and from believing in the inherent superiority of white people.

True: Seeking the benefit of people of color helps white people who want to work with people of color at dismantling institutional and systemic racism.

Somewhere among these truths lies a path. I am tempted to say "the path," but my instinct says I will simply find one among many. This is a good time to ask other white people what they know about these paths. And a good time to pray for insight and clarity.

Spirit, illumine this path.