One of the most frustrating things, while I was doing anti-racism training, was how little time we spent talking about the boundaries and limitations that the oppressive system places on whites as well. The system that has been designed to benefit us also requires that we act and reinforce that system to receive those benefits. It's true, the lotto is rigged, so the level of participation is less a requirement to win. But there is still participation.
On Wednesday, I posted the following on my facebook page.
I have always known that the protection of white women was a driving force in this country. I have never feared the police, because I know, viscerally, that they are there - over endowed with weaponry - to keep me safe. I have never feared the government - because it exists to make my well educated stay at home motherhood possible. I have never feared business; I control nearly all retail spending in America, directly or indirectly.
I was taught to fear black men because they would violate me. I was taught to accept unacceptable touches by white men because they were protecting me.
This is the white woman's world. This is how we vote.
This is a painful truth for many women to hear, I know it took me perhaps 20 years to fully suss out and understand.
I can't speak as intimately for white men. But I've been married to one for 20 years and we have talked about this a lot as I have done this work trying to understand why the world we speak of and the world we live in are so disparate.
White men are taught that they must provide for everyone. The great white benefactor is a mythos we don't much speak of anymore, but none the less, the system that is this country demands and reinforces this standard for white men.
Because men are told they have the responsibility to make sure that the government operates with the justice that is built into the system, businesses are able to provide jobs and that jobs are able to support women and children, that people are safe (police and open carry laws come from this). Men are taught that to do this fairly, they must be impartial, and the best way to be impartial is to be unemotional. To be unemotional, men must in fact built strong walls around vulnerability (no crying, logical conclusions from starting principles, not to let emotional reasons dictate decision making, etc). The result of these walls is that men are deeply out of touch with their own emotions, they have been separated from empathy and compassion and being able to see and experience others as autonomous people.
White men are taught that young is more attractive than old. White men are taught to fear the power of women especially adult women. Adult women have an autonomy and an ability to withhold much needed and rarely available support and love and safety. The fear of not receiving that safe place to feel pain, loneliness, longing, to cry and to be held as a child is held by a mother, cause men to seek the company of younger women, who feel less empowered to withhold that safe space, reinforcing the resulting real experiences that young women are more beautiful and attractive than older women and that women young and old are attractive as sexual objects but not as companions or friends, and that men require excessive amounts of emotional labor on the parts of women.
In order to dismantle or even just mitigate this system, which maintains it's own homeostasis, which bends the will and emotions and actions of all players to itself, we have to start talking about what it requires of us as white Americans. We cannot ask black Americans or any other group of Americans who are also being bent to this system to do this work for us or to teach us. We must educate ourselves of what has been required of us. Then we can choose freely, which mythos we want to play to win, the system that locks us within ourselves in fear, or the mythos that says everyone gets a chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and can start their own business, that anyone can own a piece of the American Dream, that every little boy and girl can dream of one day being President.
