I Ask Your Forgiveness
What’s Your White-Privilege Story?
Many of the articles coming out in the past few weeks have been explaining what white-privilege is and showing how many times we’ve taking our privilege for granted. Sharing a story of white-privilege is a necessary exercise to recognize times previously unrecognized. So…I set myself a task of self-awareness: to analyze my experiences and then share in hopes that I don’t hide from reality. It took me much longer to write this than I thought and not out of procrastination (for once). It turned out, I wasn’t really sure what my white-privilege story was.
I know, logically, that I have benefited from being white. But, I feel like—felt like—I do my best to treat everyone fairly and kindly. “You never know what is happening in someone else’s life,” I always say to my various retail store trainees, “it’s rarely about you, so treat everyone like human beings; it melts most rudeness and can affect people’s lives more than you know.” Customer service jobs tend to expose negative, unwanted stereotypes. Until I moved to New York, I never realized how sheltered I’d been. I tried not to let stereotypes get the better of me, but whatever prejudices I may have had, I wasn’t exposed to diversity as much as I had thought I’d been. Being blasted with diversity all at once can cause a revelation.
I once lived in a mouse-infested apartment above a liquor store on the corner of Myrtle and Vanderbelt Streets, Brooklyn. A friend of my family grew up in Brooklyn and said that block had been called “Murder and Vanderbelt.” The floor was sloping in a way that we—three roommates—joked one day we would wake up in the liquor store. We were pretty close to destitute—loosing my month metro card ($70 in 2003) was a tearful fight with my husband at the time. We could see the end of Fort Greene Park diagonally across the street from our window. The Projects started across the other street from that window. We lived next to the Fort Greene Projects: next to, not in. There have been several times in my life that I probably qualified for subsidized housing. Brooklyn was the first, and I never considered it. I look back on it now and wonder if that was simple pride or because I considered Project housing for them. It was the subconscious label of other that stopped me; it wasn’t financial, it was cultural.
I thought of my family as lower middle class during my childhood slowly growing toward middle-middle class by high school. But, truly, we have never been affluent. Perhaps my sense of economic inferiority from growing up surrounded by very well-off families allowed me to make-believe I had some understanding of discrimination.
I went to a private school because my mother taught there. She struggled to pay for ballet and piano, singing, art, bassoon lessons, debate tournament trips, so we could have what our friends had. Well, also because we wanted them. And every class—ballet or homeroom—had only a few people of color. That was my world. The struggling white family in a sea of…more white people. The black people around me were—literally—on the other side of the tracks (except for the few black children at my school). While we chose between one kind of enrichment or another, I was unaware that many people were choosing between food or rent.
I grew up 5.4 miles from Eatonville, FL, the setting of There Eyes Were Watching God by resident Zora Neale Hurston and one of the very first all black governed communities in America. So few white men would sell to African Americans that the town founders decided to name the town after him, Josiah Eaton. Eaton sold a former slave, Joseph Clarke, 112 acres of land. A white man treated humans like humans: a town had its first all black government in 1887. In the 1990’s I was still warned not to go there alone or drive through at night.
It’s not that I had no idea that there was a great, unfair disparity that was fueled by racism. But the focus on it was only in little spurts when something went public (https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2012/03/20/not-the-first-time-a-black-teen-shot-to-death-in-sanford), or I saw a confederate flag on a car (Yes, Mr. Trump, they do stand for racism). Or when I questioned why there was only one black student in my grade—one black kid in all of grades 2-5—and I could see his discomfort at times (the fact that I knew his family had more money than my family put me more at ease than is acceptable). Those things prompted discussion. What I wasn’t getting from these discussions was that, like Krista Varnoff, my misguided, pre-teen shoplifting of gum, candy, and makeup never ended in a confrontation with so much as a mall cop. We were talking about other people’s hate, other people’s prejudice. We talked about how to treat people and how to show support…without getting hurt. It turns out, I missed something.
I missed the part about how my life was made different because of other people’s hate. My life is not made different because there are people who look different from me. My life will always be different because there are people who hate those who look different from me.
The public Middle school I would have gone to if mom hadn’t found a job at a private school was one of the most violent, overcrowded and dominantly black in Central Florida. I was shielded from that, and received an excellent (academic) education. My father employed homeless black men to help him with yard work (ok, that sounds slightly degrading now that I think about it), gave them rides and sometimes money to make sure they got into a shelter for the night. My mother went to protests—goes to protests—teaches her students tolerance and accurate history at a conservative school. Yet, their was nothing to be done for the public school kids. At least I can vote now: vote for legislation to make schools better, vote for affordable healthcare, affordable housing, and vote for people who care.
I think my real white-privilege story is that I never realized I even had one. It feels like that’s the realization many of us are having. I was so wrapped up in my own struggle that the struggle of racism was another newspaper headline amongst many important causes. My parents are good people and taught me good values. And, still, I learned fear. The systemic nature of racism is a clear root to so many of our country’s problems. (Systemic sexism is another root that is destroying us. Dealing with our racial prejudice can only help us pull down systemic sexism.) I was allowed to be afraid of the wrong things because I didn’t have to be afraid of racial hate. I don’t blame my parents. I am an adult and take responsibility for letting my own blindness keep me from being part of the solution. I pledge to change that now. And I ask for forgiveness.
May nerd-dom abound!
Katrina Pavlovich
Quote-of-the-day
“My skin tone has given me white privilege. For more than five decades of the journey across my tightrope, I’ve had what feminist researcher Peggy McIntosh calls an “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. These are the tools of white privilege…”