My "unique" white person’s position

I have a fairly unique white person’s position: I have spent decades of my life both relating to and engaging with Black (and brown) people, as well as studying white people and our racism.

I began my quest, not originally with the primary motivation of educating myself about Black history and experience, but having a driving need to understand the venom white people hurled my way, my daughter’s way, my husband (of the time) way.

And again, even more importantly after I left my husband, I had to know how to protect and arm my daughter against their venom.

These are valid and important credentials and yet, because of the superiority/inferiority feelings of whites, I have to be cautious about revealing my entire experience. Some white people want to believe my experience does not grant me with a level of expertise that more than likely greatly drawfs their experience and/or expertise, and yet it does. Not because I’m a better white person than they are, but merely because I’ve not only dedicated so much of my entire life to dismantling racism inside myself, my country, our institutions and culture but also because my world, my family, my chosen family and friends do not constitute a majority of white people since I was a teenager.

I also rarely reveal this part of my herstory to Black and brown people I just meet or that I am developing a relationship with because I certainly know that just because the human beings I love most in life are Black, just because I’ve spent decades studying, analyzing, strategizing, acting, doesn’t mean that I am not racist. I want to shout like all other white people who wish they weren’t racist, “not me, not me” and then, when I get comfortable in my whiteness and let my racism guard down, I find I’ve done something, said something, thought something that I know is racist.