Ah Hah Moments
Early one Winter morning, needing money for a trip out of town, I drove to the nearest bank outlet. I used my card to get into the ATM area, grabbed my cash and rushed out, then realized that I’d failed to retrieve my card.
It was 5 a.m. but I was confident that I could hang around that deserted corner and ask the next person who showed up to let me in “to check if I left my card there.” I loitered outside the ATM until a stranger gave me bank access: no problem.
I’d been reading about the concept of “white privilege,” but not until that moment did the reality of everyday skin advantage sink in. Were I Black, especially if I were also male, my request would most likely have been refused, albeit with a polite excuse, one of those aptly-named “little white lies.”
Since then, I’ve begun to value these flashes of recognition: If unconscious prejudices can be revealed in a second, perhaps they can be undone just as quickly, in what I call “ah hah” moments.
For instance: I went to UPS to deliver a large package for a friend, but was told that sending a package of that size and weight required a credit card. I’d left my card at home but was allowed, despite posted regulations, to pay by check, without even a cursory look at the signature on my driver’s license to be sure the handwriting matched the card’s. I realized with a start: if my friend, who is African American, had delivered the package himself and had forgotten his credit card, the rules might not have been so blithely waived. My “trustworthy” skin color had trumped the rules.
I’ve also recognized how often my white privilege allows me to break social norms. At a lecture by a prominent historian who was speaking on historical and current discrimination against Asian Americans, I took a front row seat, as I usually do. The room was overheated and my feet were starting to swell painfully inside my boots. So I took them off.
Sitting directly in front of the speaker, in my stocking feet, I realized in a flash: I could never afford to choose comfort over propriety if I were a person of color, whose behavior might be viewed as emblematic of her group rather than the bad manners of one individual, in this case, myself.
Increasingly, I began to see how daily, my white skin gives me unearned credibility that I don’t give others. At my first conference on white privilege, a woman spoke up from the audience to say that she was glad to be there, and grateful to be alive, because a truck had run her off the New Jersey Turnpike and driven off. The policemen who showed up did not believe her account and refused to write up a report.
Black members of the audience immediately responded with offers to back her up, saying they could track down the truck driver, report the police inaction, and insist that the Attorney General pursue the case.
Meanwhile, I sat there thinking: Well, how do we know her story’s true? What if no truck driver were involved? What if she had run her own car off the road? I did not bother to ask myself what would motivate her to make up such a story: I questioned her. And then I knew why: I was skeptical because she was Black. Chagrined at catching myself thinking stereotypically, I nevertheless stayed in my seat and kept mum.
Over the next few years, I did start to speak up. And yet I continue to get flashes of insight into racist thinking and behavior of my own and of other white people, including family and friends.
Consider my shock when I discovered African American novels that described a white character’s skin as “the color of dead fish,” hair as “lank,” hands as “clammy” or rear ends as boringly flat.
Ah hah moments can also come from movies. Back in 1967, when I saw TV’s first interracial kiss — “Star Trek”‘s Captain Kirk (white) kissed Uhura (black), I was shocked. Yet now, viewing a re-run of “Ghost,” I’m shocked in reverse. The two main characters do not attempt a cross-racial kiss, although the plot required it. Even in 1990, when that movie came out, the film industry did not dare “go that far,” which now dismays me.
I don’t expect an end to ah ha moments. My most recent recognition that racial associations are deep and unlikely to disappear completely, occurred while I was being prepped for an EKG by a doctor who was African American. As he applied electrode pads to my chest and my body, the words “This isn’t right — this shouldn’t be happening,” rose up in my head.
Two of the doctors I visit regularly are Black. One of my good friends is a doctor who is Black. Where, then, did those “this is wrong” images come from? And what do I do about them?
Step back. Look my unconscious biases in the eye. Turn them around and try to understand them. And then let them go.
Tags: white privilege