a rare book-review

I don't usually do book reviews. I don't like to read them or write them. I might enjoy hearing a friend's opinion of a book, but I'd rather read a book myself and form my own opinion rather than going in with preconceived notions. So it won't hurt my feelings if you don't read the following. But I think...or, rather, I hope that this book can be an important book.

A friend gave me the book Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multiethnic World.  It's by Paula Harris and Doug Schaupp, and published by Intervarsity Press.  (Of course.  ...from what I've heard IV is the only campus ministry that has already been really striving to deal with race stuff in a constructive and effective way [no offense to RUF].

Of course I was immediately interested in the title. While I don't "struggle" with being white, necessarily, it's not really my favorite thing about me. My life pre-integration  (personal integration, not Brown-v.-Board) really has very little to recommend itself, my greatest hurts have been at the hands of white people, the white church provided very little soul balm while I was going through the hardest time of my life. I still love British literature, my white friends, and country music. ...I mean, I'm a white girl. I'm not even like a white-hip-hop girl. I'm just white. But as long as I can keep British literature and my white friends...and maybe country music, I don't mind leaving most of the rest of white culture.

But the people I love the most are "of color." What's most important to them is now most important to me. What happens to them happens to me. Even though I have greater freedom and privilege when I'm by myself, when I am with my family, I bear their burdens with them, and of course, chief of the burdens are racism and oppression.  I am there with my family.

But I also HATE HATE HATE telling black women that my baby is mixed, or that my husband is black.  I know that there are not enough black men to go around and honestly, I got probably the best one.  But I also hate it when I know that people who meet me assume my husband is white. So I'm trying to use color as a descriptor more myself, "oh, is he a white man?" This is in part to fight my own tendency to assume someone is white unless there's hints otherwise. However, even though in my house, (especially when my brother-in-law is over), there are color words like "red, yellow, dark, (and my own personal favorite:) lightskinneded, I don't use those words. I just stick with white and black --even though if I were going to be REALLY good about this, I should also ask if people were Asian or Latino/a.

Sorry I haven't gotten to the book review part. The whole concept of "being white but not with white people" is something I've been half-thinking about for a while now, and this is giving me a good chance to think it out more fully, and hopefully will help me be a better reviewer of the book. Gives me some actual credibility.  Sorry my path to getting there is so torturous.

Another aspect of this that I've been having to think about is when I leave my family and go back just around white people again. ...Frequently, this means I have to be an educator. I dislike this intensely, mostly because my stomach still gets nervous when I have to speak up, but also because people should by now really know better. ...right? This summer I had a conversation/argument/discussion with a sweet, sweet girl who said that the punishment for slavery on America was that all white people were immediately thought of as racist. I didn't even have words to respond.

[Sidenote: it is tremendously fun to write "family" and mean me, my husband, and my baby (and sometimes my brother-in-law).]

So, you see, my life can be really tricky. People I dearly love can say the most terrible things about people whose interests I consider my own, and not even know what they've done, and people who I would rather befriend may consider me worse than a thief, and sometimes when my husband is talking to his brother I can't understand either of them (this partly because they are from New Orleans, but not wholly).  And let's not even get into the complicatedness of beautiful and "good grade" of hair. It's weird to be white in a family of color. I wouldn't want to be in any other family, except maybe Billy and Marian Joseph's...and then only if Roy and Iris could come too, but it can be mentally and emotionally taxing (duh) in ways that people in uni-racial families don't have to worry about.

So. I was really looking forward to seeing what this book had to say about being white in a multiracial world.

Well, this wasn't the book to help me with that. I'll just have to talk to Roy more often for my current white problems. But this is a good book for getting to be where I am, if that doesn't sound too full of hubris. The back of the book says "[the authors] present a Christian model of what it means to be white." In secular terms, though, what the book is really about is learning to be socially conscious, or, as one of my black friends say, being "down." It's an easy and gentle read. I usually read fiction books, so I feel like I should say "spoiler alert!!" before I go on to talk about the content of the book more, but ...I'll try not to be that dorky.  The authors are both white: one is married to a Korean American, one was married to an African and so has mixed kids--now she's married to a Hungarian. But both of them have had significant experience in relationships with other races.

[Confession: I skimmed parts of it that were not new to me.]

They have five "stages" of being white. Really, though, they mean "godly white" or something. Let's calling "down white."  The first is ENCOUNTER, then FRIENDSHIP, then DISPLACEMENT, then WHITE IDENTITY, then the JUST COMMUNITY.  Since I work at a publishers, I can't in good conscience give the meat of the book away, but there were two parts of it that really struck me. One was the displacement stage. By that, they mean consciously becoming part of a group where you-the-white-person are a minority. I've done that, and it is pretty important...it's so weird to be the only white person in the room. (I should put that sentence in past tense, because now it's normal...it's weird to only be with white people now. ) I also got the same feeling from a professor of mine in grad school who studied evangelicals. It definitely made me rethink how often I talked to Roy about studies of black people. It is VERY weird (at least for me as a privileged white person) to think of yourself as something so strange it needs to be studied... welcome to life as an other!   So yes, I think "displacement" or immersion is really important. Even though if all the white people tried to do that, we might run out of places to be the minority.

I think it's in the last section (let me look) ....Just kidding -- it's in the fourth stage, one of the authors lists different types of racism. I'm going to repeat her list--one of them was really good for me to read.  Aware/Overt racism [you're a racist and you know it], More Subtle Racism [the system is racist and you don't know it, Aware/Covert racism [you know it and you try to hid it], Unaware/Covert racism [you are racist but you don't know it], and finally, mine: Unaware/Selfrighteous racism: being a "good white person" who shames people of color and white people both for not being aware enough or culturally observant enough.  This one is so easy for me to get into.

The authors also address white guilt, systemic discrimination, and even get into the definition of racism-- a discussion I had with Roy and some [black] friends just on Sunday. Racism = prejudice + power. They also talk about personal racism and instituational racism.

See, this is why I don't like book reviews...I get lost and don't know what to say.  But, basically, I found it to be helpful. If you are a white person who wants to have more friends of color, you should read it. If you are a person of color who has well-meaning but annoying/offensive white friends, you should give them a copy ...maybe anonymously, so as not to be too pointed? If you're a white person who's ever wondered if you bother your black friends, or if you don't have any, or if you're scared of talking to people from different races about things that matter, you should probably read this book. It will take you-white-person from  the moment of seeing someone who looks different than you to the moment when your life has been changed and you are ready/eager to lose your white privilege or use it to fight for justice for people of color.  (gross. now I'm sounding like an amazon.com review). It doesn't promote white guilt, either. And it's gentle; it has lots of accounts of the authors' own experiences of being racist, so it's not judgy. But it's really truthful. It could easily be a companion volume to Divided by Faith. (it's DEFINITELY much better than United by Faith).

Two other things. It'll annoy reformed people that the husband and wife teams are sometimes co-pastors; it annoyed me exceedingly that they have applying questions in the text, not at the end of the chapters.

I'm going to quit now. Thanks!  Also please note that I wrote this without Roy's input.