The Privilege of Being a "Good Person"

I was sitting over lunch with my friend Vanessa at E'San in downtown Portland to have our first conversation about race. We both love Thai food. We've been friends for almost two years, but white lesbian woman (me) and Black straight woman (her), we'd never talked about it. IT. Because race is scary and uncomfortable for white people - for me. Why go there?

Vanessa's ancestors were enslaved. Sold. Separated from family. Owned as property. When she talks about it, my friend's body shakes. She is an anti-oppression trainer. She is gentle. She tells me: "The way oppression works is to prevent intimacy. If white people actually had relationships with people of color, racism couldn't stand." My throat hurts from trying not to cry. I have read stories before, about slavery, but this is my friend. I refuse to cry or interrupt or make it about me. I listen. It hurts to listen.

Later, after we've finished lunch, it starts to rain. I'm reaching for my coat and hear myself say "I just want to be a good person." I follow that thought and try to explain why this feeling is what makes talking about race so scary for me as a white woman. I live in a world where I don't have to acknowledge my race because I am  "no-race," the white one invented by slaveholders to keep my working class people from allying with enslaved Africans and Native Americans. And that's just on my mother's side.

Peggy McIntosh says "whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral." Among the things I never learned in my high school AP history class is that from 1790 to 1870 the US signed 371 treaties with indigenous nations and broke every treaty it signed. I live on stolen land, on property illegally taken from  people. I profit, today, from this thievery. On my father's side, I am German, the first generation in my father's family to be born in the United States, heir to the legacy of Hitler and the Holocaust. But I just want to be a good person.

Reading Peggy's essay, I start to list my white privileges, such as my student loans, the civil service job my father got me with the Navy, the privilege of not having to think about race unless I feel especially "brave". I make a list of privileges two sheets long and then I realize something. Being a good person, feeling morally "neutral" about my actions, my activism, what I try to see or fail to see, all of that "being good" is a privilege.

Robert Jensen says that whites fear losing our white centrality and the comfort of being in situations where our understanding defines the interactions. I ask myself: Am I willing to not be central? Am I willing to not be able to be "right"...or maybe even more important, to not be "good"?

I'm what Frances Kendall would call a well-meaning white woman, an ally wannabe. The question for me isn't just about listing the privileges I have, but being honest about which ones I do not want to give up, even for the sake of justice, even for my friend. I don't want to be uncomfortable, guilty, ashamed, hurt, bad. I like the privilege of being "no-race," of being "above it all" -- of being dominant. This is the truth, no matter how much I might want to pretend otherwise.

It's all pretend, that's what I come back to. My "moral neutrality" isn't a fact that I can abdicate, it is an illusion under which I labor, and one that keeps me from being authentic, from being intimate, from being real. That's the sucker punch to the gut that all this thinking brings me to.

It isn't that by talking about race I give up the reality of being good. It's that I finally accept what has always been true: White is not good. And I am white. And the sooner I let that reality just be and refuse to pretend differently, the sooner I can start being a real friend, and maybe more than that, a real person.