Pausing and Reckoning
Excerpt from Rhonda V. Magee’s’s book “The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Community Through Mindfulness” pages 11-13. copyright © by Rhonda Varette Magee. (Used by permission of Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
College–my passport to freedom-was just around the corner. And for the very first time, I was in love. His name was Jake. Yes, at that moment, there was more right than wrong in my world.
Which is why what Jake told me just days before I was to leave Hampton for a summer university course hit me so hard.
“My dad just kicked me out of the house,” Jake told me over the phone.
“He did what? Why?!” I said this, knowing what would come next.
“You know why. … I told you how he is. It’s because of us. He said no son of his is going to be dating some black girl. …”
Oh, did I fail to mention that Jake and I had been raised in a world in which he was considered “white,” and I, “black”?
(Micro reflection: Had you already made assumptions about Jake’s race? Was the question forming in your mind? Either way, congratulate yourself: you’ve just brought awareness to some of the ways that your brain “does race” -i.e., the way that you make race-based assumptions and fill in the blanks as you go when reading stories, names, résumés, and so on).
Jake had used the word black when he might have used some other. I knew that his father’s way was something he was actively resisting. We were on the same side in this, and that meant everything.
But even with Jake’s support, I still remember the pain that gripped me that afternoon, on hearing that my race–this category created by others that did not and could not capture much of who I really was had made me unacceptable to my true love’s family.
My race had made me the Other.
I had known that this might happen when we started dating, of course. But that did not make it any less devastating.
And I remember learning something more- that my being “a black girl” had not only made me unacceptable to Jake’s working-class Virginia family, but had made me so unacceptable that they were willing to throw their own, reportedly beloved son out of their home and onto the streets like garbage.
It hit me hard that this notion that they had about me- or more accurately, about people supposedly like me, as they had never actually met me- had made me so unacceptable that they were willing to hurt their own son, and thereby themselves, and all to teach him, me, and anyone around us a multifaceted lesson.
It was a lesson about what must never come of his having been the first generation in his family to attend a racially integrated school in the South: as a white man, Jake must not come to see black people as equally deserving of dignity, inclusion, and love.
It was a lesson about who they-Jake’s parents took themselves to be: people profoundly and pervasively “white” in the American South in the twentieth century. They may not have had college educations, or achieved greatness in the eyes of the world beyond their hometown. But what they had inherited–the cultural, sometimes economic, and psychic value of whiteness-meant something and was in a way defined by their willingness to reject me, to reject this thing called blackness. Whiteness was more valuable than the safety of their own flesh and blood.
Despite my being an A student, a model leader who would soon be named Teenager of the Year in our town, I was not good enough to be associated with them. This hurt me badly. Yet I was clearly not the only one suffering. To this day, I cannot imagine how Jake must have felt to learn the limits of his father’s love. The pain we both experienced in those moments has faded over the many years. But for me, its clarifying lessons remain. What happened to me and Jake taught me a lot about racism…
…What I learned that summer inspired in me a desire truly to understand race and racism in our everyday lives and to see them for what they are: deep and pervasive cultural conditioning for grouping others into categories and placing them at enough distance to render their suffering less visible, for obscuring our intertwined destinies, and for turning us against one another rather than toward one another when we suffer in common.
In short, what I learned that summer inspired my life’s work: dissolving the lies that racism whispers about who we really are, and doing whatever I can to reduce the terrible harm it causes us all.
Click the link to purchase Rhonda V. Magee’s book “The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Community Through Mindfulness” on the Penguin Random House website:
This year, Shalem is honored to award Rhonda V. Magee with the Contemplative Voices Award. Join us Nov. 17th, 3-5pm ET on Zoom for this special event. Register for the event using the link below.
“Whiteness was more valuable than the safety of their own flesh and blood.” A chilling reminder of the culture we live in. My new neighbor asked if she could trust Our housekeeper to not steal things. I live in a privileged white residential community, a sea of internalized racism, homophobia, ableism, heteronormative assumptions, etc.etc. Not in the Deep South, in Asheville, NC