Here’s the Table of Contents for Was I Thinking? Digging Deeper into Everyday Racism

Word Wealth: Messages From My Vocabulary Book

I looked back at my junior high school vocabulary book, Word Wealth, to see what words I learned back then, and what else I may have absorbed, unintentionally.

What IS This about Bloodlines?

I had looked down on people who pursue their family trees and DNA test results – until I discovered what I was missing.

Reading My Mother: Eugenics, Race and Foster Care

After reading my mother’s 1920s college paper and 1930s orphanage report, I thought they showed her to be a bigot. When I read more closely, I saw something quite different.

My Circuitous Path toward Cultural Respect

I assumed that to be “culturally competent,” I’d need to learn everything about ‘other’ cultures. But I’ve found a simpler route: cultural humility.

Keeping My Integrity AND an Open Mind

As I learn to listen intensely to others’ experiences, how do I stay honest to my own, although possibly flawed, understanding of reality?

Seeing Institutional Racism: Where IS It?

I seek to uncover hidden racism in health care, transportation, and sports, but seeing clearly is not always so easy.

Giving Jargon Its Due

I rebelled against the unfamiliar words used by my fellow racial justice activists, especially academics, until I realized that to change people’s thinking, we may need to create such new words.

Books that Matter to Me

I recommend these 18 books published between 2010 and 2012, written by white authors and by authors of color, in genres ranging from non-fiction and memoir, to novels, poetry, and personal testimony.

It has been a while since I have wanted to let this out. But it took me five extended plane journeys back and forth to USA, before I could put pen to paper.

At this point, I have made my home in several airports on forty eight hour journeys, living sleeping and feeding myself in a manner not unlike Hanks in The Terminal. Long before that, I’d d acquired the practiced ease of a frequent traveler, and if my parents lived in the era of frequent flyer miles, or if Indian Railways decided to honor loyal patrons, I would inherit a fortune of discounts. But this is the story of the woman of color flying abroad.

Warmth and welcome have greeted me on foreign shores, in friends who have loved and cherished me as part of a community that I was not born or naturalized into, in colleagues who have welcomed my difference with respectful interest, and in graduate classes brimming with motivating conversations about racist discrimination. Yet my experience of international travel has remained unsettling territory. It has loomed large almost as a rite of passage that I have to endure every single time I cross the Atlantic. I feel somehow — out of shape.

Of course, I have met countless gregarious airport staff, cheerful crew members, and helpful immigration officials. In fact my very first immigration officer, who looked at me over his scary eyeglasses, gave me a little tip about what not to miss in the Hawkeye-Cyclone football face-offs. I have been rescued from despairing situations by the most proactive security officers, and ushered into closest-to-comfort seats by concerned air hostesses.

Yet, I cannot but revisit today the discolorations under the corners of my glittering eiderdown. Quiet moments of initial shame and later contemplation, nudge me into discomfort. Especially that very first time when I did not know what my ‘first port of entry’ required of me.

Now, as my Mom would regretfully vouch, I am a very quick person. I jump through hoops of possible responses even before I am expected to begin articulating a reply. I run in rapid short steps and am averse to holding up the world for any reason that could conceivably be attributed to me. Nevertheless, I realized that first time I stepped into USA, that the Customs and Border Protection – the CBC – was the eccentric professor of times bygone who expected nothing short of intuitive genius. Well then, perfection thy name was me! I was being my usual efficient self, carefully scrutinizing videos that prepared me to face the formidable customs staff, even while I was queuing to walk up to the Immigration Officer. And I glided through the scary interview effortlessly. I even made my Immigration officer chat about football! I could frog-leap into the blues and do a little self-congratulatory somersault! Life was beautiful. I was fitting in just fine.

But then came the moment of reckoning. I had collected my heavy checked-in bags and was on my way now to reroute them onto my domestic US flight to my final destination. I had been trained on how this ritual had to be performed at the ‘first port of entry’. My heavy bags had been loaded onto a cart.

I was scuttling smoothly with these toward what seemed to me like security channels where they would be rerouted. Two well-dressed officials awaited my arrival . I halted with my cart. With a contorted body gesture I was trying to communicate my need of help to unload the bags for their rerouting. The gentlemen at the security channel looked at my clueless visage and then at each other. With what sounded like a suppressed guffaw, they resumed their disbelieving gaze at me. One of them said, “You’re good.” Figuring that he meant I could leave my checked baggage and move on toward my final flight, I prepared to deposit my heavy bags with what would have been some herculean effort. The man interrupted me with a snigger.

I stopped dead in my tracks. It seemed I had done something — something terrible and irredeemable. I prepared to clarify, first looking back to make sure that I was holding nobody up with my faux-pas. Thankfully, my histrionics did not have an audience. I ventured a stutter, “I thought this was where I check my baggage in again for my final destination….” I swallowed the rest of the words. “We are not the flight people. We are the CBP…” — the haughty grumble rolled into hilarity. What was previously a laugh, now grew into a snort, twisted into a hoot , and erupted as a cackle: “Now THAT’S a first one!” His companion nodded in merry assent.

So I was one in a long line of similarly clueless souls, foreign to the occult codes of airports, passing the limbo into the grand American dream. Bowing my head at what seemed to be a disgraceful beginning to my process of ‘cultural acclimatization,’ I walked away with my cartload of bags. My eyes welled up as I cursed my careless self, “Stupid, STUPID me.”

I write today, exactly two and a half years and fifteen international planes later. Such self-reproach has resounded within me on my several phases of international travel since. Sometimes even for my excessive friendliness such as when I smiled widely to another such security official and asked, “So is this where I go for my security check?” He looked me in the face with a smile not quite resembling my own and chortled, “Yeah baby, this is where you go baby, yeah baby…” Unable to fathom an appropriately outraged response, I hurried on for my flight.

I have revisited this string of words time and again to make sense of it. As I walked past the security channel that day, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a sturdy, serious–looking American gentleman glide past the officer with the grace of a magnificent swan. The officer did little else except to politely nod at him. Once again, my sense of inadequacy drowned my eyes in watery silence.

Of course, a friendly smiling face at a Starbucks counter, and the sumptuous sandwich accompanying it, rescued me from losing myself in oblivion. There is, I guess, something to be said for progressive capitalism that lets you buy your way out of insult with a Frappuccino and injury with a muffin.

Here is a story by Marianna Sommerfeld, a retired social worker who lives in Cambridge, MA. She wrote it when she was 85 years old.

 “They call them pickanninies,” my parents said, in love with a new word and in love with our new country. We had been watching some Black children at play. Newly arrived in New York, we had come from Germany at a time – before World War II – when the two continents had little knowledge of each other. None of us had ever seen a Black person, and it didn’t occur to us that ‘pickannny” could be a word offensive to Black people. We settled in Scarsdale, an all-white suburb, and gave no further thought to Blacks.

I remember only two Black students in college, although Smith, to use the lingo of the time, was considered “good about taking Negroes.” One of the two, who had an outstanding academic record, couldn’t pass a swimming test, which at that time was required; it was said that “they” simply couldn’t learn to swim. Much later I would run into the other Black women, waiting for the ferry to the Vineyard. She recognized me, I didn’t recognize her, and this happened again the next year. She paid me back: ‘Oh, so you’re a social worker now? You’re meeting unmet needs?” “We don’t talk like that any more,” I said. I still cringe when I think about this encounter.

I had always thought of myself as a good white liberal, without racial prejudice. I learned about my own racism in the seventies, when the Boston schools were being desegregated. I was working at a mental health clinic in East Boston; a community group had asked for mental health consultation. With this group I went to meetings with parents, with teachers and principals, and with politicians. Rather smugly I wrote in my diary some of the comments I heard from other good white liberals; “ I am tired of hearing about slavery,” “If they want better schools why don’t they hire better teachers?” I also found myself describing a biracial parents’ meeting thus: ‘Then the Black mothers came in, pushing and shoving each other, and giggling.” A friend pointed out the condescending tone of my descriptions. I might as well have been writing about Little Black Sambo.

It’s easy to be unaware of one’s own condescension. We see this when men condescend to women without knowing what they’re doing. “They should stop complaining now that they have everything they want,” say people unaware of the daily slights, the daily put-downs Black people still encounter – in school, at work, in the marketplace.

As a child, I was taught a little English ditty:

Jimbo Jim was cast away, Upon a desert isle

The ‘habitants they liked his ways, They liked his Irish smile

A desert isle with “habitants”? I’m guessing the islanders were dark-skinned and so didn’t quite count. I don’t know who taught me this song. It seems strange, now, that I was taught it, since I didn’t learn English until I came to this country. But I think of it from time to time. Like many Whites I grew up with habits of mind that are difficult to get rid of. They are part of the baggage we carry.

This is Sarah Miller’s story:

The first time I remember realizing there was a negative value in our society attached to being Black was when I was abut ten years old. My family had recently moved to Baltimore and lived in a neighborhood that was pretty much exclusively White. The neighborhood was divided by Roland Avenue: to the West were wealthy white houses and to the East were less well-off houses. But pretty much everyone was White.

However, Baltimore is a city that, then, was about 75% Black and so the public schools reflected this demographic. My parents had chosen Roland Park because of the public elementary school there. They could choose Roland Park because they are White.

Throughout my elementary and high school years I was always a racial minority. This did not faze me either way and I did not give it much thought. It did not really occur to me why all the Black children arrived at school every day on buses but did not live next door to me. The principal, vice-principal and many of the teachers and administrators were Black and made it clear that they had equally high standards for everyone. I don’t think they drew attention to or from race.

One day, I was standing in a store near my school with my mother. This store, Tuxedos, was run by two kind of cheesy White men (Jewish, I later realized). My mother was talking to the person at the counter who said to her, “I can’t believe you send your children to that school with those children.” My mother responded that she sent her children to that school because it was one of the best in the city, and we left. After that I realized that there was different value and experience attached to my skin and the skin of my friends.

I feel fortunate that I grew up in a home where social justice and equality were stressed. I really don’t think I learned overt or covert messages from my parents about differences in people except that we were all equal. There was no expectation of who we would date. My dating a Black, White, Jewish boy was of no consequence to my parents. What mattered was that they didn’t honk outside our house, that they came in and met my parents, and that their last names were presented to my parents.

I remember my father telling me about a time when he was in the Army in North Caroline and picked up a Black service man who was hitchiking. He said that they stopped to get something to eat and saw that the counter in front of the building said “Whites only” and did not serve Blacks. My father said that he stood next to his companion and said to him, “What would you like? ” and then proceeded to order for them both. I remember being proud of my dad and taking away that it was important for me to stick up for the person who can’t do it for themselves for whatever reason.

I spent my elementary and high school years in close contact with Black kids. I mostly listened to soul and R&B music. However, almost all of my close friends, to whose houses I went, were White and lived in my neighborhood. This changed somewhat in high school. I grew up very comfortable around Black people while being pretty aware of the discrepancies in treatment and accomplishment.

I was not a very good student and so was not in the advanced classes with all my other White friends in 7^th and 8^th grades; I was in the regular program with mostly Black kids. But when I went to high school I was placed in the A program, which was predominantly White, while the B program was predominantly Black. I remember trying to figure out how I got there and wondering if it had to do with being White and from Roland Park. I’m pretty sure it did.

I went to college in Indiana to a small Quaker liberal arts school. Blacks represented the national percentage — about 12% — but that meant that only about 100 of them. I felt so out of place and confused to be in predominantly White environments. I quickly knew almost all the Black students and they are some of my closest friends today but it was a strange bridging experience. Most of my White friends did not share my comfort level and I bridged my communities. I think ultimately it was good for the White students but at times awkward for all.

I began having the feeling then that I have now that I don’t really fit anywhere. I am White and grew up Protestant but that identity group does not really hold for me now. I am very comfortable with Black American culture but clearly I am not Black. My skin grants me automatic membership into a group that I don’t want to claim: White Supremacy. I, like many White folks, find myself in situations with other Whites who say racist remarks because they believe that my skin means I will agree.

The most glaring example of this was when my husband and I lived in Costa Rica for about a year. We met a group of White ex-patriots from the U.S. who were the most foully racist people I had ever encountered. The n-word was a regular part of their vocabulary because it simply meant Back person. They made overt racist jokes that literally made my jaw drop. They quickly realized that they did not have an ally in me and our relationship was strained (it was necessary because they were friends of my husband’s uncle, for whom we were working). We further insulted them with our presence because we were Jewish. There were those comments too.

The other thing that blew my mind about these people was that they were incredibly kind, thoughtful and generous people — as long as the recipient was the “right’ kind of person. This experience complicated my understanding of racist who, until then, I thought could not possibly be kind.

Another situation in which I feel a lack of it is that nine years ago I converted to Judaism. I now strongly identify as Jewish, but I pass in the non-Jewish world and so also hear my share of anti-Semitic comments that are intended for a colluding audience. I have been told that I am not “really” Jewish because I converted and that I do not “look” Jewish. While I know what they mean, why they think this, I am offended and indignant. However, I feel that because I have the luxury of not growing up with the anti-Semitism that my husband took to be normal, I have an obligation to speak out every time I hear it.

It was only in the last five years that I began to realize that these themes that I saw as solely personal were being tackled by Whites and others in a professional and educational capacity. I took a class during my Masters in Social Work program called the Institute for Undoing Racism. It was only five weeks, three hours a week, but it was revolutionary for me. We read about the history and myths about race and racism. We delved into White identity, we delved into ethnicity and how whites threw theirs away to become American. I really began to explore in an explicit and public way my Whiteness, what it affords me and has afforded me, and how I feel about it. I was so incredibly excited by this class and could not get enough of it.

I then did my final research paper for graduate school on the development of White racial identity attitudes: 1) Contact; 2) Disintegration; 3) Reintegration; 4) Pseudo-Independence; and 5) Autonomy. The states cover a naive “color-blind” attitude, an overwhelmed “blame the victim” antagonistic attitude, an attitude in which White racial identity begins to be integrated and understood, and the final stage in which one fully accepts and understands one’s White racial identity. It was fascinating and very challenging to many in our class.

I have to say that while the topic can still make me uncomfortable and re-examine new elements and old elements of White race identity, it feels so good to me to do it, to be doing something with what I have thought about and cared about for so long. I still cannot get enough of it even though at times I am exhausted by the struggle. There was a time that I felt guilty abut being White and having all of my un-earned privilege; now I see it as a gift that God gave me to challenging me to become a better person and so that I can do something good in this world. The privilege of White skin opens all sorts of doors to me, but it also affords me the luxury and privilege to be instrumental in dismantling racism. That is so exciting to me.

Last year I attended the Peaceable Schools Institute at Lesley University for the first time and it too was revolutionary. For there I met other White folks like me! There I met other White folks who talked about White race identity and racism in a clear and articulate way. They were just so inspiring for me. And I realized that there is a place I belong and that there is a sizeable community doing this work. Now I seek out any form such as this to further expand my mind, to grow and meet other allies. I just love this work and know that it is what I have to do in my life.

I do not for one minute mean to imply that I do not or have not had racist thoughts. I do and have. Growing up in America dictates that all people — regardless of their race — we all have racist ideas and thoughts. It is what we are taught and no one is immune. However, I feel that I have actively worked to undo and unlearn these thoughts and ideas and I cherish every opportunity to work on myself more. But I am proud of the fact that I have done a lot of work and embrace the challenge with all of its discomfort.

This story is by  Aimee Sands, a Boston-based documentary filmmaker: her most recent film is ”What Makes Me White”?

When I was growing up in Westchester County, my grandparents used to drive out from New York City in their gold Impala, pick us up, and drive my sister and me back to the city. It was a thrilling ride, as they had electric windows, which we never tired of zooming up and down.

However, when we entered Harlem, my grandfather took charge. The windows slid up and sucked shut. The automatic locks clicked down. The dark people of Harlem were sealed out. We were sealed in.

Sometimes I find myself saying that I didn’t know any black people growing up. But that’s not true. I knew Susie, who cooked for my grandmother. So why do I say I didn’t know any black people? Do I mean I didn’t know any black kids my age?

But that’s not true either. Deborah P., a black girl from Harlem, visited our family for two summers, sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund.

Maybe it’s the word “people.” By “people” I mean the kids I played with in my neighborhood.  “People” were my mother’s friends and my father’s tennis partners. “People” were the bus driver, the custodian, the teachers. “People” were white.

Every black person I knew was a guest in our world, an outsider who left at the end of the day, or at the end of a Fresh Air Fund visit. Weren’t they people to me?

There are other questions I never thought to as. Why was i allowed to call Susie by her first name, but always used “Mrs.” or Mr.” when addressing white grownups? What was Susie’s last name?

What did it do to me to grow up in a segregated white suburb of the North? Not long ago, a black colleague told me he had gone to Radcliffe College, a more prestigious school than the one I had attended. I barely prevented myself from blurting out, “You went to Radcliffe?” That was the day I understood that in spite of my professed beliefs, I had always assumed that I was better than black people.

Nor one every taught me this. On the contrary, my mother and her friends were passionate liberals who worked for fair housing in our town, hardly a popular issue then or now. It wasn’t what was said that taught me to feel superior. It was the way we lived our lives, the unspoken grammar of our segregated reality. It was important to be “nice” to black people. It was important to share “our” lovely town and find schools with “them.” But I was a given that the power to be nice and the power to share — or not — belonged to us.

It was also a given that everything we had was better than anything they had. No one ever suggested that I visit Deborah P’s family in Harlem, that there might be anything for me to learn there.

But there was a great deal for me to learn — and unlearn — after I left the suburbs. As I began meeting people of color, I had to face the fact that I’d never really looked at them before, that sometimes I even mixed them up with each other. I started to talk with black colleagues, who were matter-of-fact about the routine racial slights in their lives. I realized I’d never really listened to people of color before. Deep down, I’d believed that their accounts of racial harassment were exaggerated.

Most of all, though, I’ve had to learn how to talk about race as a shaping force in my own life. Being around white people all the time, I didn’t know that I was having a distinct racial experience, as distinct as that of being black in Roxbury (which , in fact, is a far more diverse community than most suburbs). There was a kind of embarrassed silence about who and what we were as white people that for me still defines the suburbs.

In my new film, “What Makes Me White?” diversity consultant Manuel Fernanedez, who is black, describes a visit to a supermarket in a Boston suburb. A 4-year-old white boy looked at him with great interest, and then announced to his mother, “Mommy, he’s black!” “Ssh!” replied his mother. “Maybe she thought that I’d be in shock to find out I was black” Fernandez says, dryly.

Talking about race I shard for a lot of white people. We feel awkward and tongue-tied. We are afraid of saying the wrong thing. Segregation has made us this way. We did not create the separate and unequal world of the suburbs – the federal government is largely responsible for that. But if we do nothing about it, we and our children will remain as sealed off as I was in my grandfather’s car.

Carol Shilakowsky’s story

I grew up in Waltham (MA) in the early 60s to mid 60s: no blacks in school and none that I noticed in town, although there was one man who married an Italian woman and both were dark-skinned, said to be “mulatto,” meaning mixed race.

I came from that Catholic Sicilian ghetto atmosphere, which one would not consider “White Protestant America.” However, we seemed to be fiercely proud that we were “Italian” (although we WERE, in truth, from the mountains of Sicily) and also, proud of being Sicilian — and NOT black or “near-black” as the Northern Italians would say Sicilians were, due to the proximity of Africa to Sicily and to the Moorish history of the island.

I had an Irish father — and did not have the olive complexion and was not associated with the Sicilian surnames of my cousins and friends from Sunday school – and I made it into the “higher echelon of white America.” being placed in a college honor division in the 6th grade, on track for university life with 50 other students, mostly white Protestant, few Italian, none black, but a good number Catholic.

I did not realize any of this at the time. To me — I was living in “white America” and the “poor Negro people” were living in the South, or maybe in New York City where they played jazz, basketball, and smoked dope or were Beatniks. My associations were mainly with Negro movie personalities and musicians, dancers, and vocalists.

I was interested in the Civil Rights movement in the mid 60s, but I was a 25-year-old mother living in rural New Hampshire with 2 young daughters and an older “redneck” husband who had lived in the South. Dirt poor as a child in the 30s, his family had been treated as “white trash” for living among the “nigras” and his was a mixed opinion. He was the only person I knew who had experienced the attitudes of racist America first-hand and seemed friendly to the few Blacks in New Hampshire who had moved to our city and to the Haitian apple pickers who came seasonally.

I was a little nervous around Blacks until I met and befriended a wonderful woman who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Yes, she DID preach – but I listened – and was transformed into a better Christian than my Catholic upbringing had made me. I did not join her fold, but I learned respect for other people in a way I might never have, and learned not to fear people of color. Her religious intolerance was uncompromising, and yet I understood the comfort it was for a “Fresh Air” child of the 50s, from a Black ghetto in New York City, to come to New Hampshire to stay with a family of her faith for the summer, to do God’s work — however they saw it. They were FREE to do so. A lesson to be learned in the villages of Yankee New England.

As time passed, I lived in the South, myself, with my musician second husband. We lived in New Orleans, we lived in Charleston where the black men in 1990 would STILL say “yes’em” and not look directly at me. I learned, then, about the long years of hurt and oppression in the South the race had endured. I listened to the stories of the Gullah people, slaves who had walked from a mutineered African slave ship in broken chains to became “free” to America. I listened to Preservation Jazz. I was there as the wife of a symphony violinist who played for the “class” of cultured America. This husband, the musician, showed me that tux and tails and all – the orchestra was in the PIT and were slaves to the music, to the conductor, and servants to the actors and dancers in musical productions and to the audience — many of whom were affluent and Black.

Class structure, even in the 90s, was still in place in America, and we still seem to use job description and money-making ability across several ethnicities an indicator of status. What you can afford, rather than the color of your skin, still applies as a criterion for discrimination: “poor white trash” — “niggrahs” — “Sicilian” and others can still be seen at the back of the bus, I think, whoever they are. Maybe this year they are Hispanic? Maybe next year they will be those white Protestant Americans who do not have cell phones and DVD players?

My growing up in “white” in America was due to segregation, intolerance, archaic attitudes and inordinate fears, and in some states, legislation concerning race, which fostered the prevailing attitudes. Once many of the legal factors that hindered acceptance disappeared, racial barriers fell. Although probably not perfect, America became visibly more interracial. The American consciousness shifted in the late 1950s to mid 60s: issues concerning African Americans were openly discussed, rights fought for and won, and an entrance into society, once denied, opened. I have a visceral, as well as intellectual, sense of it, being that of a generation where major changes were made in much of the fabric of America.

I happily introduced myself as white, straight, “temporarily able-bodied,” and as an ally to all three of what we called “target groups.” But our in-group language turned some people off. Several refused to label themselves: they wanted to just sit and observe. Our caucus organizers insisted. Those otherwise sympathetic attendees never came to another meeting. Accusations of “nomenclature puritanism” and “oppression competitivness” followed. Mutual respect went down the drain. Ever since, I’ve been leery of jargon.

Now, as I try to understand persistent racial inequality in the U.S., I find myself reading dense books that are full of in-group language. The authors mix words I know in mystifying combinations like “racial touristing,” “aversive racism,” or “the racialized other.” They also create “neologisms” — academic lingo for new words such as  ”positionality,” interiority,” “overprivilege” or “cyberwhitening.” My computer’s spell checker flags each of these as not words — seems that getting a PhD these days requires thinking up new words as well as new ideas.  

Ordinarily, I’d bypass books that use such terminology. And yet, I’ve been hanging in there: racism is too important to turn away from just because those who study it most closely use language that turns me off.

After a year of reading brain-straining books, however, I looked forward to an upcoming conference aimed at grassroots anti-racist people – my type of folks. But even then, confusing codewords cropped up. Take the conference title: “White Privilege,” a term that was once code for KKK attitudes: anti-racists now use it to name advantages for some that should be rights for all.

Some workshop titles with unfamiliar terms like microaggression, code-switching, and nadanolization, intimidated me. But I attended them anyway and did learn a lot. I even came home with a t-shirt that I chose for its bright blue color, tolerating its jargony saying on the back: “Interrogate your hidden assumptions.”

In fact, I’m finding that yes, jargon can be alienating, but it can also be catching. I’m starting to use it myself. I now co-lead an adult education course that talks of “systemic white privilege” as the underlying cause of racial inequality. To make that abstract idea real, we use an image from anti-racist educator Peggy McIntosh, of an invisible knapsack that gives white people, wherever they go, assumed credibility in intelligence, honesty, beauty, and access to people in power.

As I get comfortable with anti-racist terminology, I’m sometimes caught up short. Like the time I was shoveling snow with my neighbor and friend, who knows about my class. As we toss shovels full of snow from street to yard, the conversation turns to race. “I can’t stand it when folks say Black people can’t be racist,” he says. “Black people can’t be racist because they lack institutional power? That’s bunk.”

I am taken aback. He’s African American, and I take his perspective seriously. I’m one of the folks he’s objecting to.

I frankly admit that in my class, I use the definition of racism that’s currently prevalent in anti-racist circles: racism = race prejudice plus power. I try to defend the concept that without the backing of significant institutionalized power to oppress, prejudice is just prejudice, not racism. But he’s not having it, and I realize that I’m arguing for a cutting-edge theory that makes so much sense to those who use it, but which makes no sense to almost everybody else.

I’ve since tried to avoid anti-racist terminology that I’d gotten used to using — trigger words, target groups, code-switching, matrix of domination — but which elicits from most people a “huh?”

Jargon that’s grounded in the day-to-day is still okay by me. Take “gate-keeping,” a phrase that’s widespread in anti-racist circles. Yes, it’s jargon, but at least I can picture a gate, and a person who latches it or unlatches it. The metaphor works for me. It helps me see how people like myself have power to keep gates to closed to people unlike ourselves or to open those gates of opportunity to everyone – in our workplaces, our schools, or our neighborhoods.

I particularly welcome fresh images that give me new perspectives. W.E.B. Dubois’ visionary “double consciousness…. the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others” shows me what it means to be Black in America. Ralph Ellison’s metaphor of the “invisible man” — “because people refuse to see me” — shifts my outlook, as well. And when Beverly Daniel Tatum describes “cultural racism” as an unhealthy fog that we — people of all colors –can’t see but we breathe in daily, I get her point.

So the next time I come up against a catchphrase, for instance “the problem is not Black underprivilege, but white overprivilege,” I’ll ignore my spell checker’s  irritation, and my own. Instead, I’ll look anew at what’s right, what’s wrong, and what we need to change.

I faced this quandry when a friend of Korean heritage (I’ll call her Chang-sook) told me about a disturbing aspect of her experience in my city’s schools.  As a substitute art teacher, she’d expected her students would challenge her authority. But she did not anticipate what felt like a barrage of ethnic insults, from “ching chang chong” gibberish and eye-stretching into slits,  to remarks such as “go eat pork fried rice” and “konnichiwa ” said with a sneer.

What bothered her more than the behavior itself was the absence of sanctions. In just one school, the principal took unequivocal action: the student who called her “chink” was immediately suspended, and allowed back only after a satisfactory apology.  But at a different school, the student who called her “a slant-eyed bitch” got a mere talking to. As did another who made a veiled threat about having a knife in his pocket.

Out of frustration, Chang-sook compiled a list of 18 questions to which she would not respond to questions such as “Do you eat with chopsticks?” “Were you born here?” “Are you Japanese or Chinese?” She gave out the list in her classes, but her strategy backfired. The taunts escalated.

Fed up, my teacher friend took her complaints to the school system’s human resources office where, to her disappointment, she was met with inaction and “kids will be kids” dismissiveness.

Out of frustration, she wrote a letter to the local newspaper. The editor turned her complaint into a feature article, highlighting her dismay that most of the taunts came from Black male students who, she felt, ought to know better. The newspaper’s next issue printed a two-page spread of students’ “You’re the racist!” letters.

We met for coffee to talk over her upsetting experience, and Chang-sook acknowledged right off that her don’t-ask-me list was a big mistake. That misstep aside, however, she was sure that speaking out as she had done was justified.

To get some perspective on her account, I pictured it from another angle. Let’s say that a Jewish teacher’s students pepper him with “What kind of a name is that?” “Are you Arab, Jewish, or what?” “Were you born here?” “Why do you wear those little caps on the back of your head?” “Do you know Hollywood bigwigs?” “What do you think about Israel?”

And what if they were to call the teacher a kike?

As a former teacher, familiar with behavior control strategies, I found myself wondering: couldn’t Chang-sook have responded to her students’ stereotyped questions with pedagogical counter questions? How about, for instance: “No, I’m not Japanese or Chinese. How many other Asian countries can you name? If you can come up with five other Asian nationalities, I’ll tell you where I’m from.”

I offered this strategic alternative, but Chang-sook would have none of it. She’d seen a wrong and would not stand for it. Our conversation got heated and perked up the ears of nearby latte-drinkers.

Then she told me that several Asian-American parents had privately thanked her for speaking out. They told her that their children were frequently harassed, with no consequences to the harassers. So I had to acknowledge that there was a serious problem, one that needed a whistleblower — someone like outspoken Chan-sook.

By the time we left the coffee shop, I had offered, if it came to a discrimination hearing, to testify on her behalf.

In retrospect, I can see that my “what if ” caveats had clouded my ability to see a wrong that needed righting. My temporizing was like a fog that takes time to dissipate.

On another occasion, I managed to quickly grasp the distress provoked by a speaker’s remark at a National Writers Union program I’d organized. The guest presenter, a children’s book editor who was white, told the assembled audience that she welcomed multicultural submissions, “but only if they’re good.” One African American audience member was so outraged by the comment that she wrote a letter to the publishing company president. Her complaint was to no avail: the CEO responded by assuring her of his editor’s good intentions. This time, I had enough racial awareness to back up the union member. I contacted the guest speaker herself to make clear why an African American writer might be insulted by the editor’s suggestion that she might deliberately submit an inferior manuscript, hoping to get “a pass.”

I could “see through the fog” as well, when a white colleague posted a story on the Web about an African immigrant, emphasizing the blackness of his body in a way that some readers considered racist. I knew of my friend’s committed relationship to her city’s Sudanese community and did not think her racist. But I managed to explain to her why her wording could offend others.

Yet I did not immediately sign on when my union took a stand supporting re-trial for Black Power radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer. I knew that Black men are often set up, especially if they’ve exposed police misconduct, as he had done. But I’m a journalist: I need evidence.

So I read both the prosecution’s case and the defense’s: both were murky. The one clarity I had was that the prosecutors used Abu-Jamal’s political views during the penalty phase of his trial to argue that that he should be put to death. At the time, I saw the core issue as freedom of expression: I added my name to the union’s statement supporting retrial on that basis. Today, I would sign on as a death penalty opponent, my eyes having been opened to pervasive inequities, racial and otherwise, in death penalty sentencing.

But I can still see only so far. A small incident made me realize how narrow my vision still is. I was asked to be on a panel discussing  a Black writer’s short stories. To help audience members who might not have read the stories being discussed, I composed plot summaries to hand out. The author had done the same, so we used hers as handouts.

But later, when I compared our two versions, I was humbled. Mine had viewed each storyline as racial, while the author described her themes more broadly — as human dilemmas.

I’m reminded of what African American scholar W.E.B. Dubois called the Negro’s “double vision” — the sense of seeing yourself as American, but also as someone white people view with pity and disdain, leaving you longing for a single vision of a true self. I, too, yearn for a truer self, as I struggle, not with double vision, but with partial sight.

It’s not easy, peering through white fog.

As for Native Americans, I’d read Tony Hillerman mysteries set on Southwestern reservations and thereby thought myself in the know about Navaho and Hopi cultures.

So when I made a date to speak to the head of Harvard’s Native studies center, I readied myself to shake hands with respectful limpness, as Hillerman’s Native characters did , and to speak in a soft, unmodulated voice to the person I expected to be soft-spoken, and pictured as wearing long braids and turquoise jewelry.

Instead, I was met by a hearty ‘Hi, how are ya?” from a young man with African American features, and a hip and casual style. So much for my attempts to learn a culture via short-cuts.

Years later, having graduated from book to real-life learning, I filled out a racial knowledge inventory from Overcoming Our Racism: The Journey to Liberation, by Derald Wing Sue. By now, I was more genuinely familiar with the cultures and norms of various heritage groups. I knew the meaning of Nisei, La Raza, the “one-drop rule,” and the infamous Tuskegee Experiment: I aced the test. Finally, I thought, I’m culturally competent – the buzzword for knowing all there is to know about cultures other than one’s one.

But in retrospect, by thinking so, I revealed myself to be at a dangerous blind spot in my journey toward multicultural respect. Yes, the cultural competency formula had become de rigueur in the medical field, as doctors and nurses studied various cultures’ ideas about health and illness, pain and pills, but it was now reversing itself. Cultural competency was now considered a trap. If you memorize how  Italians, Latinos,  Middle Easterners, Native Americans, African Americans or Cambodians tend to deal with pain, you may miss how the particular person you are treating deals with pain. Looking for imagined norms, it turned out, was likely to miss individual realities.

So a new idea had emerged, called cultural humility. What a doctor, teacher, social worker, or plain person like myself needs to know is our own assumptions, norms and prejudices. How do I interpret quietness, crying, criticism or eye contact? Sure, it helps to know that some Middle Eastern people may consider cross-gender touching improper. But it is more important for me to know how my words, my voice, my gestures, my expectations may affect my thoughts and behavior toward whoever I’m dealing with.

In other words, to be culturally savvy, I need to study everything there is to know about —myself.