On a Good Day

After watching the DNC that week in 2020, I talked with an old friend. She is a therapist with advanced degrees in Black Studies and psychology. I asked her if she’d like to elaborate on her firsthand experience. It was intimate. It was insightful. It was personal. It was harrowing.

Here’s what she said:

I grew up and lived with my mother in La Jolla, one of the wealthiest and predominately white Southern Californian regions in San Diego. The first time I understood that I was seen as different, was when my grandmother and I passed by my pre-school playground and one little girl shouted out, ‘She looks like Fat Albert.’

As I advanced through grades, white kids became more brazen about my biracial appearance. Oreo. Mutt. Half-breed. Occasionally, I was spit on. Junior high was the first time I was around other Black kids, most of them bussed into my district from southeast San Diego. It was my first exposure to expanded diversity.

I started emulating my speech after the way the bussed-in kids from southeast spoke, and when I first used ‘ebonics’ at the dinner table, my mom shut it down quick. In 1970’s and 1980’s San Diego, you were included if you were white, thin, blonde, blue or green eyed, athletic, drove a nice car. White Southern Californian guys didn’t notice girls like me.

After high school, I was accepted to the University of California, Santa Barbara. My work-study, financial aid-dependent self marveled at all the trust fund babies. The widespread white privilege was astonishing. In my sophomore year, I chose to switch from a major in psychology to a major in Black Studies. UCSB was a school that was very ‘white’ in terms of its culture, with the beach nearby and a student body primarily into activities like surfing, volleyball, Frisbee football, skateboarding, biking, non-Black sororities and fraternities, partying, loud live garage band type music. Children coming into Santa Barbara from predominantly Black areas generally came from vastly different cultural norms.

I don’t recall the percentage of Black students at UCSB, but I think I probably knew every Black student and faculty member on campus. It was strange how tightly the Black students stuck together and how the group felt so monolithic. Before I switched to Black Studies, my psych studies had felt somewhat hollow because so many concepts in that field had been based on the classical white male archetype. Most of the founding fathers of psychology like Freud and Jung were almost exclusively white men of western culture.

In my Black Studies curricula, I found an American academia in which I could be truly seen and understood. There was a narrative in which my story existed. Within the Black Studies department we had psychologists, sociologists, musicologists, political scientists, and whether I took a class on Black Women’s Literature or the Civil Rights Movement, it was the Black Experience that was accentuated by my instructors first and foremost.

Marginalization, to me, is the same thing as feeling invisible, or unseen, or insignificant. White privilege (or rather, the denial that it exists) is an inconvenient truth. Defense mechanisms are used by humans to separate or protect ourselves from threatening or uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, and denial is one of the most common defense mechanisms.

As a psychotherapist, the way I would approach denial if I was working with a client exhibiting it, would be to investigate and probe what they’re defending against, and I’d ask them what they have to lose, or what others had to gain, in acknowledging certain realities like white privilege. 

Personally, I believe that white people who refuse to acknowledge their privilege do so because they have too much to lose. They are unconsciously invested in seeing themselves the way the dominant trends in society portray them – good hearts, humanitarian, freedom-loving, patriotic, open-minded, God-fearing, law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working, self-reliant.

To have any of that taken away from is an affront to their self image and identity. So much of our status is defined by how we dress, where we live, what schools we attend, what we do (or what our husband does) for work, how much money we make, where we vacation, and so on. 

It’s easy for white folks who presume they’re progressive to say they’re color blind – erasing color means they don’t have to deal with it, but when they deny they see color, they’re also denying their status in society relies on the continued oppression of people by race.

Recently I was discussing the current movements with an African-American associate, and she insisted that ‘all lives matter,’ but I think what she meant was, ‘Black lives matter too, and no one life is more valuable than another.’ I didn’t bother to get into definitions about BLM because frankly, I feel as a campaign label that acronym has caused more confusion than enlightenment, even among older Black people.

What I think is happening, is that we’re living in a time in which fear has found so much strength and power because we’ve been asleep at the wheel. We’ve been so caught up in curating social media profiles and watching reality TV that we forgot to keep an eye on our democracy. Obama asked us to pay attention. He asked us to get involved. We were too lackadaisical. We thought we’d made it. We had a black POTUS! We thought we’d achieved MLK’s dream of a post-racial America.

But we forgot to nurture our basic humanity, our connection to each other, what we’re truly here on earth for, to love one another and help each other and find meaningfulness in our lives, not to value money and property over all else. I told my friend to take heart, to bring focus back to the good that’s happening, even if it’s just feeling lucky to have a job and a house and a healthy child, and to look for the good in others, try to follow more positive news stories, try to give herself a dose of light and hope every day.

We don’t have to look very far to find the bad stuff, but it takes effort sometimes to find the good stuff. We can see this as a universal wake up call to remind us to get our priorities straight, stop taking things for granted, and work harder to be kind to each other.

That’s what I think anyway. On a good day.

*Testament given on September 15, 2020