Hiding Behind Our Masks Of White Privilege
How many of us can directly go to a moment when our face and actions said and did one thing and our emotions, feelings and thoughts were something very different than what you were presenting when faced with a racial choice. There is an infinite list of reasons we go through life putting one mask but the real trick is recognizing you are wearing one. The main reason is fear: fear of judgement, fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, fear of being rejected, fear of not being liked or loved….as you can see, the list goes on and on. In this struggle of being of color and being valued and seen, is something is white or “even passing” will never understand until they realize it is perpetuated by the moronic belief that because you are born white, you are ahead of the game from day one. (which is true) Regardless of what your social status is, financial situation, fame, or living a life of trailer trash. There is an ingrained belief and imprint that the whiter you are, the better you are. Even people of color do this to their own psyche.
I am white, a rock and roll child of the 60’s, a fair redhead who fell in love with a bi-racial boy at 15, took all the hate from my peers, married him and had a beautiful redheaded daughter. My daughter can “pass as white” but doesn’t. She does not consider a color line where her life is concerned. She proudly immerses herself with her darker skinned distant relatives to accepting that she has relatives on both sides of her family heritage that will never think she is good enough. She doesn’t care.
I raised her knowing right from the beginning that she would be called neither black nor white. Too fair to be considered a black woman and to ethnic looking with her wild red kinky hair to be considered white. She choose a path of considering herself a part of the privileged few who could not be labeled by her lineage but who she was as a person, trailblazing a new approach to racism. She is still that way. She married a Spanish man who has slightly darker skin that she does. At a swimming pool one day with her little girl, she was asked why her daughter has darker skin when both her and her husband were fair. She proudly make it clear that her daughter was the melting pot of the future and began to list every single bit of heritage she carried: English, Irish, Black, Portuguese, Scottish, Spanish, Polish, German, French and more than likely a few more we don’t know about.
The feeling of living behind a mask of illusory racial acceptance often springs up from a disturbance in one’s early years with unexpressed anger and taught behavior. The most threatening of emotions, the fear between child and parent that they will be different than them. No parent can fulfill all of a child’s needs. A famous child psychoanalyst, the late D. W. Winnicott, said that “a parent’s job is to neither retaliate nor abandon the child in the face of the child’s judgment and anger if they feel differently than you do. There will always be frustration or disappointment in relationships. Parents who can teach their children if they themselves are uncomfortable with certain races, not even having a reason for it, will allow a child to make their own choice of what racism really is.
But coming out from behind that mask is a very tricky business. A person who tries to reclaim their justification with empty reasons of archaic labels, will end up being an angry person acting like an angry child. An adult expressing infantile aggression of not being able to explain why they do not like dark skinned people but still do, is not a pretty sight. Coming out from behind the mask of a history with the supposed mark of Cain from the Bible, representing darkness conveniently used for justifying the hate and mistreatment of dark skinned raced makes no scientific sense. We ARE different in much more than just the color of our skin and once we throw out the old, rich white man’s conspiracy to make sure people of color would always be held down through any means possible. I believe they have done a fairly good job of it. But if we honestly drop the white privilege masks, there is a good chance we can all be at the starting line at the same place and time.
What the conspiracy wasn’t counting on was the tenacity of the human spirit. It started with music, then sports, then the movies to humanize a person of color. They used their own weapon of keeping people of color in energetic chains against them, money and power! Let us hope that with all the anger that is being stirred up of police brutality, (which has been going on for over a 100 years) against black profiling, that maybe the mask of being privileged white will drop and we can actually see how we have used it to not see those without one.
When we present ourselves to the world without the mask and white denial, keeping it real, we offer the same opportunity for others. Most of us are familiar with the idea of keeping it real and have an intuitive sense about what that means. They don’t need a safe mask to hide behind from their fear of how they might be perceived, a racist! They won’t present a false self in order to appear more perfect, more powerful, or more open minded but still having the attitude of “he is really nice and all but I don’t think I would like him as a neighbor and certainly not dating or marrying my daughter.” People who keep it real present themselves as they truly are, the good parts and the parts most of us would rather hide. White privilege or of color, we all have some racism within us but the part we should be working on is acknowledging it. A person of color KNOWS what white privilege is, those with white skin do not, as they take it for granted they have rights that people of color know they don’t.
Whenever we feel we are is above another and we need to be bigger, better, or controlling; we send a fearful message to ourselves that we are not enough. Meanwhile, if we are lucky enough to know someone who is not trying to be anything more than who they are; they walk into a room and bring a feeling of ease, humor, and warmth with them, knowing they have flaws. They inspire us to let go of our own defenses and relax for a moment in the truth of who we really are, humanity. Not white, not black, not brown, not yellow, not everything in between. In their presence, maybe we will feel safe enough to take off our white privilege masks and experience the freedom of being real and actually “feel” the pain of not being white in a privilege white world.
‘Courage Sans Peur’ (Courage w/o Fear)
To Contact Susan Z Rich:
Website: www.szrwhitewings.com
Email: szrich@aol.com
407–862–6902
Author of Soul Windows..Secrets From The Divine on Amazon
