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On the limits of White Listening
This is a long story and the beginning is probably going to sound trivial, but it has a relevant point, so bear with me.
To set the stage:
Back when I started college, my school gave its incoming freshmen a bunch of onboarding activities and presentations. One of them was "trying to give all our new white students, many from super-white areas, a quick shot of appreciation for the experiences of all the non-white students who have to share a campus with them."
So we all piled into an auditorium, and a series of older students got up on stage, sat on a stool in a narrow spotlight, and gave little monologues about some of the everyday struggles they went through as young POC. There was a mic in the center aisle of the audience, so when each person was done talking, we were invited to line up and ask questions about anything we hadn't understood.
Well, there was a point I didn't understand. One young woman mentioned how uncomfortable it made her when a friend told her "you're so lucky you have good hair."
(If it matters: the young lady onstage was medium-brown, with a glorious mass of ringlet curls going down to her shoulders. I took her for non-black POC at the time, but my grasp of all the nuances of racial categories was pretty thin, so who knows. My impression was that the friend in the story was also non-white.)
Now, in my experience -- as a white kid who grew up in a suburb that, while not any kind of Confederate-flag-hanging overtly-racist, was definitely wall-to-wall Nice Middle-Class WASPs -- this was a completely neutral compliment. Like saying "what a nice shirt" or "those are cool glasses" or "I love your new haircut."
Trying my 18-year-old best to be a Proactive White Person who is Actively Listening and taking concrete steps to Unlearn Racism, I went up to the mic, and I asked:
What was bad about that one comment? I don't want to make someone upset because I tried to say a nice thing and did it wrong. I want to know how to be supportive. Help me understand.
And of course, what's wrong is that, for Black and Brown people in the US, "good hair" is an incredibly loaded and racialized term. Hair is "good" when it's closer to white beauty standards, when it's more manageable with products designed for white people. Any time you see a black person with long straight shiny hair, that's not natural, it's either a wig/extensions or done with relaxers -- which, in spite of the cozy name, are incredibly harsh chemical treatments. Like, make-your-scalp-bleed harsh. There's a massive built-from-the-ground-up video community of POC sharing their curly-hair-care routines, trying to learn from experience and pass that on to others -- because the products to do it right weren't even on the shelves until recently, and/or they'd been straightening it for most of their lives, and/or their families and communities focused on teaching them to keep their hair "good" instead of covering how to keep it healthy, and/or any number of other factors and nuances that I am still not at all competent to summarize...
The point is that, back in the day, I didn't know any of that.
Didn't have anyone in my life who would've talked about it with me. Didn't pick it up by osmosis from the media. Sure, I'd been exposed to stories with characters of color who had Feelings About Hair, but not enough to get across that it was a pervasive cultural thing. I just processed it as "okay, caring about hair is a character trait for this one individual."
(In a different, unrelated Person Talks About Race presentation, a black woman rattled off a description of "things I have picked up about white people washing their hair just from hearing about it on TV." It was long, there were lots of offbeat little details, and they were all spot-on. Media osmosis works just fine the other way around.)
So I, an earnest and well-meaning college freshman, ask my question without knowing any of this important context.
And the speaker...who is not a Professional Explainer Of Things To White People, she's just another earnest and well-meaning college student, maybe all of 1-2 years older than me...well, she gives me an answer that assumes we already share this important context.
It will make perfect sense in retrospect, years later! But for now, it explains nothing. This is supposed to be an educational presentation, and it does not educate me one bit.
Because I am missing essential pieces that are, to her, so obvious and omnipresent that she can't imagine anybody missing them.
In the past week, at least online, there's been a fresh tsunami of people trying to have conversations about racism. Trying to explain, trying to listen, trying to teach, trying to learn.
So if you're new to this, I really want you to grasp that this disconnect is happening all the time.
This gulf is always between us. There are people on both sides who are trying in good faith to bridge it, who are earnestly and desperately reaching toward each other, and sometimes we make connections and sometimes there's progress, but not always. A lot of the time -- maybe most of the time -- we miss.
To my fellow well-intentioned white people: we're getting a lot of calls to Listen. This is valuable and good -- but it has limits. You have to try to account for the problem that "listening", by itself, won't catch the things people aren't saying.
(Maybe they seem too obvious. Maybe they're too painful for a person to talk about. Maybe a person doesn't even know how to put it into words, because they've only ever talked to folks who already got it...or who didn't care to.)
Listening is a long-term process. You aren't going to solve anything by doing it for a day, no matter how dedicated you are, or how memetic that day is. You've gotta listen to many, many different people. Listen to them over time. Listen for the patterns in what they say...and (this part is much harder) the patterns in the silences. Read books by Professional Explainers, who have long experience in figuring out how to put things in a way that will click with you. Read posts and tweets and memes and rants by average people who aren't making any effort to frame them for your benefit, just putting the feelings out there.
If there's something you're having trouble puzzling out on your own, then yes, ask questions. Not just to any random co-worker or online mutual or person whose viral tweet crossed your timeline! Ask people who have indicated they're ready and willing to help confused white folks.
And if you can't make sense of their answer: don't get pushy or argumentative. This specific person might not be in a position to explain it better. Doesn't mean they're wrong. But it does mean hassling them over it isn't going to help either of you.
Instead, sit with your confusion. Do more listening. Give yourself time to pick up more of the pieces that will make it come together.
...alternately, if you really suspect a person is just full of it, give yourself time to hear from a pattern of POC confirming something different. Any race can have pranksters, grifters, conspiracy theorists, etc.; but as white people, our ability to make those calls in racism-related situations is...a mess. (Also: different people can have legitimately different opinions.)
And I get it: this goes against some of our deepest instincts. Especially at the height of a protest.
People are dying! The need is immediate and urgent! You want to help This Minute. What's the good of listening if it's going to take years to be effective? Can't you...I don't know, speedrun this part? Isn't there One Great Thing you can listen to in an afternoon that'll clear it all up, so you can skip ahead to the part where you're being useful and helpful? People need that Right Now!
To be clear, there's a range of things you can do Right Now. Go to protests (with safety measures, there's still a pandemic on), make donations (here's the National Bail Fund Network), contact your representatives (this site offers specific policies your city needs), signal-boost news and resources (with prudence, scams and disinformation run rampant in times like this).
But there's no shortcut with the Listening. You need to take in lots of different perspectives, your brain needs time to absorb and readjust to new information, you need to have firsthand experiences that you process through the lens of your new understanding, lather, rinse, repeat. I'm 10+ years out from that college presentation, and I'm still working on it.
You definitely can't be all fired-up for one night (or one week, or a few weeks) and then lose steam and move on to whatever feels most-urgent the next month.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to be in this for the long haul.
Finally, to any POC who are still reading past all the to-white-people stuff:
I'm so sorry. This is awful beyond measure.
I don't have a whole lot to offer here, but if you happen to be wrestling with a case of "I want to explain Race Thing X to a sheltered-but-earnest aspiring ally, how deep do I have to go in explaining the obvious?", feel free to run it by me and I'll try to give some productive feedback.
To set the stage:
Back when I started college, my school gave its incoming freshmen a bunch of onboarding activities and presentations. One of them was "trying to give all our new white students, many from super-white areas, a quick shot of appreciation for the experiences of all the non-white students who have to share a campus with them."
So we all piled into an auditorium, and a series of older students got up on stage, sat on a stool in a narrow spotlight, and gave little monologues about some of the everyday struggles they went through as young POC. There was a mic in the center aisle of the audience, so when each person was done talking, we were invited to line up and ask questions about anything we hadn't understood.
Well, there was a point I didn't understand. One young woman mentioned how uncomfortable it made her when a friend told her "you're so lucky you have good hair."
(If it matters: the young lady onstage was medium-brown, with a glorious mass of ringlet curls going down to her shoulders. I took her for non-black POC at the time, but my grasp of all the nuances of racial categories was pretty thin, so who knows. My impression was that the friend in the story was also non-white.)
Now, in my experience -- as a white kid who grew up in a suburb that, while not any kind of Confederate-flag-hanging overtly-racist, was definitely wall-to-wall Nice Middle-Class WASPs -- this was a completely neutral compliment. Like saying "what a nice shirt" or "those are cool glasses" or "I love your new haircut."
Trying my 18-year-old best to be a Proactive White Person who is Actively Listening and taking concrete steps to Unlearn Racism, I went up to the mic, and I asked:
What was bad about that one comment? I don't want to make someone upset because I tried to say a nice thing and did it wrong. I want to know how to be supportive. Help me understand.
And of course, what's wrong is that, for Black and Brown people in the US, "good hair" is an incredibly loaded and racialized term. Hair is "good" when it's closer to white beauty standards, when it's more manageable with products designed for white people. Any time you see a black person with long straight shiny hair, that's not natural, it's either a wig/extensions or done with relaxers -- which, in spite of the cozy name, are incredibly harsh chemical treatments. Like, make-your-scalp-bleed harsh. There's a massive built-from-the-ground-up video community of POC sharing their curly-hair-care routines, trying to learn from experience and pass that on to others -- because the products to do it right weren't even on the shelves until recently, and/or they'd been straightening it for most of their lives, and/or their families and communities focused on teaching them to keep their hair "good" instead of covering how to keep it healthy, and/or any number of other factors and nuances that I am still not at all competent to summarize...
The point is that, back in the day, I didn't know any of that.
Didn't have anyone in my life who would've talked about it with me. Didn't pick it up by osmosis from the media. Sure, I'd been exposed to stories with characters of color who had Feelings About Hair, but not enough to get across that it was a pervasive cultural thing. I just processed it as "okay, caring about hair is a character trait for this one individual."
(In a different, unrelated Person Talks About Race presentation, a black woman rattled off a description of "things I have picked up about white people washing their hair just from hearing about it on TV." It was long, there were lots of offbeat little details, and they were all spot-on. Media osmosis works just fine the other way around.)
So I, an earnest and well-meaning college freshman, ask my question without knowing any of this important context.
And the speaker...who is not a Professional Explainer Of Things To White People, she's just another earnest and well-meaning college student, maybe all of 1-2 years older than me...well, she gives me an answer that assumes we already share this important context.
It will make perfect sense in retrospect, years later! But for now, it explains nothing. This is supposed to be an educational presentation, and it does not educate me one bit.
Because I am missing essential pieces that are, to her, so obvious and omnipresent that she can't imagine anybody missing them.
In the past week, at least online, there's been a fresh tsunami of people trying to have conversations about racism. Trying to explain, trying to listen, trying to teach, trying to learn.
So if you're new to this, I really want you to grasp that this disconnect is happening all the time.
This gulf is always between us. There are people on both sides who are trying in good faith to bridge it, who are earnestly and desperately reaching toward each other, and sometimes we make connections and sometimes there's progress, but not always. A lot of the time -- maybe most of the time -- we miss.
To my fellow well-intentioned white people: we're getting a lot of calls to Listen. This is valuable and good -- but it has limits. You have to try to account for the problem that "listening", by itself, won't catch the things people aren't saying.
(Maybe they seem too obvious. Maybe they're too painful for a person to talk about. Maybe a person doesn't even know how to put it into words, because they've only ever talked to folks who already got it...or who didn't care to.)
Listening is a long-term process. You aren't going to solve anything by doing it for a day, no matter how dedicated you are, or how memetic that day is. You've gotta listen to many, many different people. Listen to them over time. Listen for the patterns in what they say...and (this part is much harder) the patterns in the silences. Read books by Professional Explainers, who have long experience in figuring out how to put things in a way that will click with you. Read posts and tweets and memes and rants by average people who aren't making any effort to frame them for your benefit, just putting the feelings out there.
If there's something you're having trouble puzzling out on your own, then yes, ask questions. Not just to any random co-worker or online mutual or person whose viral tweet crossed your timeline! Ask people who have indicated they're ready and willing to help confused white folks.
And if you can't make sense of their answer: don't get pushy or argumentative. This specific person might not be in a position to explain it better. Doesn't mean they're wrong. But it does mean hassling them over it isn't going to help either of you.
Instead, sit with your confusion. Do more listening. Give yourself time to pick up more of the pieces that will make it come together.
...alternately, if you really suspect a person is just full of it, give yourself time to hear from a pattern of POC confirming something different. Any race can have pranksters, grifters, conspiracy theorists, etc.; but as white people, our ability to make those calls in racism-related situations is...a mess. (Also: different people can have legitimately different opinions.)
And I get it: this goes against some of our deepest instincts. Especially at the height of a protest.
People are dying! The need is immediate and urgent! You want to help This Minute. What's the good of listening if it's going to take years to be effective? Can't you...I don't know, speedrun this part? Isn't there One Great Thing you can listen to in an afternoon that'll clear it all up, so you can skip ahead to the part where you're being useful and helpful? People need that Right Now!
To be clear, there's a range of things you can do Right Now. Go to protests (with safety measures, there's still a pandemic on), make donations (here's the National Bail Fund Network), contact your representatives (this site offers specific policies your city needs), signal-boost news and resources (with prudence, scams and disinformation run rampant in times like this).
But there's no shortcut with the Listening. You need to take in lots of different perspectives, your brain needs time to absorb and readjust to new information, you need to have firsthand experiences that you process through the lens of your new understanding, lather, rinse, repeat. I'm 10+ years out from that college presentation, and I'm still working on it.
You definitely can't be all fired-up for one night (or one week, or a few weeks) and then lose steam and move on to whatever feels most-urgent the next month.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to be in this for the long haul.
Finally, to any POC who are still reading past all the to-white-people stuff:
I'm so sorry. This is awful beyond measure.
I don't have a whole lot to offer here, but if you happen to be wrestling with a case of "I want to explain Race Thing X to a sheltered-but-earnest aspiring ally, how deep do I have to go in explaining the obvious?", feel free to run it by me and I'll try to give some productive feedback.
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This article on Slate has more details, but the short version is this: American public health experts consider racism a major public health problem. It's the underlying cause of significant diseases in Black Americans (particularly those diseases caused by stress, like heart disease and diabetes), and also means they are less likely to be able to get health care to treat them.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/protests-coronavirus-pandemic-public-health-racism.html
"The letter [supporting the protests in the current pandemic] and the experts who signed it make a case for viewing the protests not primarily as something that could add to cases of coronavirus (though they might) but as a tool to promote public health in and of themselves. Protests address “the paramount public health problem of pervasive racism,” the letter notes. “We express solidarity and gratitude toward demonstrators who have already taken on enormous personal risk to advocate for their own health, the health of their communities, and the public health of the United States.”
"By Tuesday afternoon, more than 1,000 epidemiologists, doctors, social workers, medical students, and other health experts had signed the letter. "
The pandemic has been killing Americans since January 2020. Racism has been killing Black Americans since 1776.
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"(what kind of a hellhole country doesn't provide free medical service to all citizens?!) " -America. Being outraged about it and calling the country shitty doesn't fix the problem. What kind of hellhole country lets police murder a man in the street? What kind of hellhole lets it happen hundred of times a year? If we want free healthcare, we have to protest for it. If we want police to stop murdering people, we have to protest for it. It's our country, it's our job to fix it.
Since the protesters are adult human beings who love their family members, I'm pretty sure they are weighing the risks to their family members even more highly than you or I would consider it - and they are going anyway. You seem to be reading that choice as based in "utter ignorance" - I'm reading it as a choice based in the knowledge that these are causes worth protesting for. Please - consider that everyone making these choices is doing their best and has as good a capacity for understanding the dangers involved? Protesters are not doing this out of ignorance, they are doing it out of desperation.
If American police can turn up on any day, and shoot into your home, and face no accountability for killing your family members, then the pandemic is not the biggest risk that you face as a Black American. Given that Black Americans also have grannies, grandpas, and people who are diabetic or immunocompromised or smoke in their families, who are all at risk for Covid19 AND ALSO who are at risk of being murdered by police - maybe trust those Black people to be making the best choice for their families as the only true experts on what it's like to live in that situation?
"Africa", given that it's bigger than Europe and made up of 54 different countries, will probably have about 54 different reactions to the risk of covid19's spread, and I'm going to trust those countries to handle their own political and public health issues. Since, of course, these protests are about Black AMERICANS, and not about Black people who live in other countries. Since this whole conversation is about American political problems and public health issues, let's maybe not bring in 54 different countries and try to figure out how they are going to feel about police violence in a country they don't live in.
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You hear about POC doing something that doesn't make sense to you, that doesn't seem logical or based on facts...and you immediately decide the only explanation is their "utter ignorance." It can't be your ignorance! It can't be that they know something you don't know -- or that they have better judgment about the situation that you do -- or that they're making a rational, informed calculation that would make perfect sense if you listened for long enough to understand. Nope, you already know everything. Anyone who comes to a different conclusion obviously needs to be enlightened by you until they change their mind! Never the other way around.
...also: most protestors in the US are average working-class or middle-class people. They're not taking transatlantic flights on the regular, and certainly not right now. Trying to make them seem responsible for the outbreaks on a whole other continent is some serious magical thinking.
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If/when you get tired, you can also point people here:
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org
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