Several years ago, I deeply offended a new friend by saying that I didn’t see humanity when I walked into a room of all white people. What I’d meant was that I’m never comfortable in all-white spaces, especially as a white woman from the South. In Memphis, any all-white space is constructed. It is constructed intentionally that way by a person or group of people or it is built systematically, institutionally that way, but it is artificial. And it feels really creepy to me. I am much more comfortable being the only white person in a room than in a room of all white people.
But what my friend had very reasonably heard in my comment was an erasure, a dismissal of his own humanity, simply by merit of being a white person. Here in the American West, all white rooms may indeed be constructed in the same way they are in the other places I’ve lived. The wholesale genocide of the region’s Indigenous populations -documented slaughters and a long history of treaty violations- did ‘clear the frontier’ for waves of white people who’ve really been showing up here consistently for over 150 years in significant numbers. When I do a land acknowledgment here, I say that I hold deed and title on land stolen from the Arapahoe by people who look like me.
Denver and some of its surrounding communities have histories just as long of Americans from African ancestry coming here, although not in the same numbers as white folks. And of course a large part of the state *was* Mexico until 1848. Chicanx, Latinx, and Mexican culture are the core of the Denver region, in my experience.
I could argue that all-white rooms here without at least a Brown face or two are of the same racist construction that I grew up within as normative in the American South. This is absolutely true if any decision making is being done, but I think could happen pretty organically in casual contexts. It’s a different kind of frame for the othering required by Whiteness than I know well, but I am learning its characteristics.
Or is there truly no difference between the personal gatherings and the powerful gatherings? Is this one of those ‘distinctions without a difference’ oft cited to dismiss nuance? And what do I do with the very real fears and feelings of disenfranchisement and confusion from white folks struggling to be good human beings in a racist world? How do we dismantle a system that is our ground, our breath? I’m honored and humbled when I am able to step outside of it, to check and shed my privilege, and to undermine these systems of separation and oppression. But I don’t always know where to step, or how to go.
These are hard questions that feel insurmountable because we are all attempting to regain our humanity while swimming in oppressive systems intended to strip us of it. Most insidiously, these systems claim to assist us with our lives while in truth, they are the obstacles we must dismantle. These systems separate, sort, and ‘other’ people into constituencies, client bases, media markets, patient pools, consumer pods -all of which depend upon an enemy, a group so unlike you it must be isolated, or an ‘overthere’ place, a not-it status to function.
When I was a child in the 70s and 80s, public school was the norm for me and my family’s friends. The US public school system was intended to be an aid, an institution of authority and responsibility. We learned methods of thinking, systems of problem solving, and of course many facts. But most importantly, we learned to get along with people completely different from us, and to learn from them as well. It wasn’t perfect, and many kids still fell through the gaps. But fewer.
No one in my family, and few of my friends, have their children in public school any longer. It’s heart-breaking, as the flight of white folks from that system has been a large part of its destruction and deterioration. All of us have to play for the game to go well, and too many have ‘opted out’ for it to function. The well-documented school-to-prison pipeline that thousands of black and brown children are subjected to each day flourishes in these education systems that are supposed to help us become better humans, not end our claim to humanity altogether.
Healthcare in America is high among the slimiest, and creepiest losses of basic human agency. Over the last 40 years, healthcare has become more expensive and less available to those without massive privilege. There has always been a toxic link between health and worthiness. The ill must have done something to make them that way -smoked or taken the wrong drugs or ignored the signs. We love to demonize the unvaccinated, for example, and feel little sympathy when they die or become ill. We blame them for our current Covid situation, because we require scapegoats and obviously, some deficiency in them put them on that path. It’s a deeply twisted and toxic logic, of course, and fails immediately when calamity strikes US. Then we too come to know the ways in which the ill automatically have some of their humanity stripped away by simply being sick.
We know this isn’t new -Jesus preached against it regularly. In part, we’ve set up a healthcare system that only allows the wealthy to thrive because at some level, we believe wealth and health denote worth. It’s vile and perverse, and ubiquitous. The very notion of for-profit healthcare is a moral obscenity, but we’ve been living with it in this country for several decades now -long enough for questioning it to feel radical instead of ethical.
Last fall, I wrote a blog post about my own experiences with various social safety nets, and began some thoughts about moving towards policies and procedures that nurture the common good. I remarked that
Sometimes the cruelty of our systems stuns me to silence. I find myself mute in the face of the choices we have made as a society, as a culture, as a country. I am not sure where my rage should go, which insurmountable mountain I should attack, which dams to blow and what to wash away.
We must name the ways in which we have chosen cruelty over compassion as a country, as a people. Our criminal justice system is the clear realm where this is painfully lived out everyday, but there are many others. The three I explore here, obviously, but the ways in which we’ve chosen to be cold and inhumane, hard-hearted and retributive are present throughout our common lives.
If you start looking for them, you’ll see them. Take a drive later and compare the parks and open spaces in a low income versus a high income neighborhood. Note the state of the roads -the potholes get bigger as the household income drops. I can walk to 7 grocery stores within 15 minutes from my home, and drive within 5. But a house 3 miles away in any direction will be in a food desert, with virtually no walkable food access. Before Covid, 1 in 3 GoFundMe campaigns was to raise money to offset medical expenses. I am sure the percentage is now much higher than a mid-30%.
The only way to change is to face the reality of where we are. If these systems be working for you, you are probably white and have safe men in your life, or are male yourself, and either way have some financial means. This is nothing you earned or fought for or deserve in any way, and the depth to which these systems are not working for others is shocking. Is that too harsh? I’m sorry but it is absolutely true. I wish there were privilege chits we could turn in like carbon offsets -I move aside in these ways, and those 3 women get mammograms.
We all deserve health and healing, knowledge and support, dignity and equitable access to the true abundance of this amazing world. All. Of. Us.