More on the Dynamics of Shame

A few more unfinished thoughts:

When I arrived on campus as a college freshman, my resident faculty advisor shared a piece of unforgettable advice.  The most important decision you make every day here at Stanford, said Dennis, is where you sit in the cafeteria. Will you sit with people who look like you?  Who promise comfort and appear to share your background?  Or will you seek students of other races and cultures?

I was from a small town in New Hampshire.  My childhood hadn't given me many chances to befriend, in a meaningful way, kids of other races or backgrounds.  I remember the moment I learned the "N" word while playing four square in our condominium complex.  The neighborhood bully, Joey Cicotti, used it to taunt two Black girls who'd just moved in.  I didn't know what it meant, but I could tell they knew what it meant and it wasn't good.  I ran inside to ask my mother.  I was crushed to learn, and guilt-ridden for not having shut Joey up on the spot.  I was also scared of Joey.  I discovered early both the shame of sharing responsibility for racial violence by virtue of shared race and my powerlessness to stop it.

(An aside:  Joey transitioned later in life; she is now Josephine, and she runs a car dealership in our area.)

This story distilled the essence of the white shame dynamic.  I felt ashamed of the attitudes and behavior of another white person, whose ignorance and hatred cause visible harm.  As a small child, I started the process of forming a white identity based on taking responsibility for white racism, and by standing up to it, guaranteeing that I couldn't be guilty of the same.

Dangers of excess lie in this, among them ideological rigidity that justifies any degree of shaming other white people to protect our own egos.  More on that toward the end.

So I followed Dennis's advice.  Gathering my courage, I headed for a table occupied only by African American students in our dorm complex.  Conversation stopped upon my arrival.  I had the distinct feeling I wasn't welcome, not hostility exactly, something else.

Freeze frame:  How should I interpret this awkward and embarrassing moment?

The sensitive ego could choose to turn awkwardness into resentment, to let loose the contained beast of shame, which ~ scaring the sensitive conscience into paralysis ~ would justify a defensive and self-aggrandizing reaction, something along the lines of Don't they appreciate that I'm trying?  Or worse, see? They're racist too!

For many, their development is arrested at this point.  Maybe it didn't happen on a college campus, but on a work site, or a basketball court.  The wounded and fragile white ego says, I tried, throws up its hands, and surrenders the project.  This path is mistaken and leads to the Dark Side.

We can choose other responses. One is simply to imagine that it's not all about us.  I don't know what each individual student at that table felt, but what I came to understand through repeated efforts to join conversations on campus was that for many Black students, this was their first experience finding a community of other students who shared their experience of being high achieving and Black.  They were discovering commonalities they wanted to build and explore after 18 years of being the token African American student at their schools, of suppressing parts of themselves or hiding the impact of accumulated comments, exclusions, and overt forms of prejudice they'd endured to get where they were.  They did not share my need for an experiential interracial learning project just then.  I had the choice to respect their privacy and not take it personally.  (Which is not the same as giving up the bigger effort.)

During my freshman year, the Western Civilization curriculum became the target of protests.  Students occupied the Dean's office.  I think they overturned a bus?  It made national news.  I was sympathetic, but I didn't join the protests.  I was fully on board with revising the cannon, but I wasn't convinced that the classical philosophers and writers of the Western tradition, whom I'd only just discovered and whom I thought deserved credit for some of the very ideas supporting these campus protests, should be discarded on the basis of being male and white.  I wanted to think about these questions a little more slowly, in more depth.  But I also understood that change must sometimes reach a revolutionary fervor.  I appreciated my classmates who seemed full of sound and fury; I trusted they signified something ~ I was just trying to catch up.

The more revolutionary frontier for me lay in the personal spaces, at meals, speakers, classes, activities with classmates where I could experience my awkwardness in the context of growing relationships and, hopefully, gain deeper insight into differences in our specific life experiences.

My junior year, I was invited to participate in a panel of women of color for a "Psychology of Women" class by my roommate.   Jeanne reunited six or eight of the women we'd known from our freshman dorm.  We represented a wide range of racial and cultural backgrounds and sexual orientations.  I represented "white."  For my part, I described my journey from small town New Hampshire to California college campus; by then I had also lived in Japan for a year, which had stretched my thinking about identity a great deal further.  I shared my idea that being female and raised by a single mom may help me imagine the experiences of women of color, in the power differentials I witnessed and to which I was subjected, a kind of empathetic bridge to reach across our experiences.  My friends on the panel listened and nodded sympathetically.  It was an intersectionality fantasy.

The next year, after Jeanne left for graduate school to study Culture and Emotion at Berkeley, the professor asked me to compose a similar panel.  By then, all my dorm mates had graduated; I was on campus an extra year, owing to my time off in Japan.  I invited women I didn't know well.

It was disastrous.  I knew from the first word that the premise of the panel was offensive to many of the women I invited.  Being white, I didn't offer the safety Jeanne, being Asian American, may have. I tried to share similar thoughts to the previous year, but was met with derision for presuming that my experiences had any relevance to theirs.   Whether anyone said it, I don't know, but what I felt was: You and your white privilege...  It's amazing how shame literally burns.  I suppose the blood floods our capillaries or something.  I'd like an evolutionary biologist to explain.

So let's freeze frame again:  How should I react to this humiliation?

Again, the ego ~ ever sensitive to shame and ready to flare up to protect us ~ might say, I'm out of here.  My first reaction was to resent the professor.  I blamed her for making me lead a hot-button discussion for her class without either the credibility of being a woman of color or the relationship of TA with students.  These were valid critiques, but not deserving of resentment.

After venting a little, I was ready to learn.  I realized that I needed to listen to the discomfort I felt from the women when I first approached them.  I needed to discuss the plan in more nuance with the professor.  I needed to question the comfortable narrative I'd spun for myself that my womanhood gave me a way to connect with women of color's experiences.  I learned beyond any doubt that the path would be many lifetimes long.  I learned to survive shame and come back to the conversation.

When I got to Mississippi to teach, I was shocked to find my social reception reversed:  My white students now held me in greater suspicion than my Black students.  Being from California, I supposed, my whiteness connoted that I was probably another ideological carpet bagger from up North who came to impose their values on the South.  My petitions to incorporate African American writers, the Blues as poetry, and to teach Standard English as a dialect, with respect to the Black English, etc. would have confirmed prejudices my white students may have had about me.

And their mistrust had rational roots, not only in history but in their daily lives. The school was about 20% white, 80% Black.  The white students who attended were mostly poor.  They didn't have an easy time as minority students, nor did many of them have an easy time at home, as I witnessed at close range.  I felt the concentration of judgement upon them, the shame-based emotional tactics of parents living in poverty against their kids, of upper-middle class Southern whites looking down at lower-class, that I could add to if I wasn't careful.

Shame not only cuts the soul, but it can unleash violence.  I didn't want to be an agent of such destruction through a thoughtless or monolithic application of my so-called progressive values.  To care about racial reconciliation is to love all people.  I made it my mission to forge close ties with all of my students.  I accepted invitations to church revivals, including a white church revival in which the congregation circled me to help me achieve the ecstasy of speaking in tongues.  (I didn't, to all of our disappointment.)  I attended Thanksgiving dinner with a family who deep-friend their turkey in an oil drum.  I befriended an elderly neighbor, a Baptist who surprised me with his accepting views on gay love.  The more you get to know people, the more individual they become.  The more individual they become, the more you just can't sum it all up.  Ultimately, love is always and only personal.

Why am I compelled to write about all this?   There's an urgency in trying to find the words.  I still feel like I've only begun to tell my story.  I floated a working title to Jordy this weekend:  The Autobiography of Nobody.  Why would you call yourself a "nobody," he asked?  Because by being a nobody, I've been able to meet and get to know so many amazing Somebodies who've revealed parts of myself to me, who've helped me map my place in the world and, as Geena Davis says, learned how to stop apologizing for the space I take up in it.

Like so many Americans, I am living with exhausting daily grief that the dream of achieving a country that judges people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin, and gives all people their shot is slipping away from us.  We are living in a terrifying time of fear, mutual suspicion, retraction.  We have a White Supremacist in the White House who courts favor with vicious racists and anti-semites.   He whips up hatred toward immigrants, the cheapest of populist tricks to manipulate his so-called base.  How does he do it so effectively?  By activating unbearable shame wounds.  My resistance is to call for the end of shaming as a weapon of mass destruction.

We pushed the concept of infinitely delineated political identities to its logical conclusion, and in carving out turf, lost track of our shared public spaces.  We hit a dead end.  We hid our pain behind anger. We gave up on the Love part, the oxygen we share.  Our story needs to be re-written.  I guess I'm writing in search of the new narrative.   It has to do with specificity.  Seeing each other and ourselves individually, beyond categories and beyond fear.  Listening to each other's stories.  Feeling the details.  Reclaiming "virtual reality" for what it always was ~ art that enables empathy.  Giving each other permission to find ourselves in each other.

To be continued.