"Becoming the race of white"

"Becoming the race of white." How strange does that sound? "What the!?" you may wonder. Is this some kind of white supremacy crap that has been hacked onto this otherwise progressively leaning blog?

No! Exactly the opposite!

"Becoming the race of white" is a phrase from "White Noise and Queer Families," an amazing article written by Susan Raffo that moves forward the thinking and groundwork for anti-racist work by embedding it right into the heart of a family -- her family. And she offers clear suggestions for others to follow suit.

The article, which is a guest post on the Bilerco Project blog, is a thoughtful, intensely personal (yet accessible) account of thinking about, thinking through, and then acting with intention about what it means to be white parents (in their case white queer parents) raising a white child in our world of skin-color privilege.

Please go to that post and read the whole thing! (It's long and you miss way too much if you skip reading all of it.) Here is one passage that I found to be particularly engaging:

Whiteness

"...I love my daughter. I love to watch her naked - the way her body shifts and moves, the muscles playing out beneath her skin, the crazy exploding vitality of this skin, hair, nails that is constantly becoming as she grows and grows. It's a beautiful thing to watch.

Did you know that in utero, the same cells that eventually become the brain and the nervous system also become the skin? Some folks call skin our "outside brain." In the ways in which skin receives information about the world around us which is then interpreted through our nervous system, the whole thing is our brain. And we have defined this outside brain by race. And my beautiful daughter's skin is white. And that can never be neutral.

So in loving this child with white skin, my partner and I decided we wanted to pay attention to how our daughter becomes the race of white. What does it mean for her to slowly grow in to the racism and white privilege that is part of the story of that skin that surrounds her?

Paying attention to how our child becomes white is about a lot of things: and we already know that we don't know half of them. Sometimes it means paying attention to all of the ways in which being white gives her a kind of "get out of jail free" card, a kind of free pass into an adult life of better jobs, more income, and less stress and struggle. It means recognizing her access to having something like an "innocent" childhood, to unchallenged attendance at parks, dance classes, and a lineage of belonging. It means watching and learning from what happens when she pops out of me, all instinct for survival and connection to mama, and starts to grow a personality and set of understandings about herself and the world..."

I can't recall in growing up that I ever once got any sort of overt message that taught me to understand that I was part of "the race of white" and what that meant in the larger context of the world. We just were. Anybody else was them, the other.

Then, as a white parent of two children of color, I did lots of conscious parenting while raising them about learning to love and embrace all of who you are, to be strong, self aware, culturally aware, and especially to be prepared for a racist world. Would I have spent the same amount of love and energy in (or seen the value of) teaching them the same stuff if they were white? Honestly, probably not.

I think Susan, her partner, and those who have come together to do this work are doing truly groundbreaking stuff. They are taking work typically reserved for the world of white adults (such as understanding white privilege), and making that work as essential to parenting -- and as everyday -- as buckling your seat belt, learning your letters and numbers, and how to ride a bike.

Now that's a revolution.

Susan Raffo lives in Minneapolis where she writes, is a bodyworker, parents, lives in communal housing, organizes and, when the weather permits, gardens.

Susan Raffo