When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  By contrast, UCLA was a sprawling metropolis of two hundred buildings and over four hundred acres. It had its own zip code. The main buildings on the quad were cathedral-like structures of red brick and tan limestone. Their ornate columns, mosaicked ceilings, and arches seemed transported from Southern Italy, bringing with them the warmth and light of the Mediterranean. I knew enough of architectural bombast by the time I arrived on campus to be wary of the idealism and superiority the place evoked, but its majesty still overwhelmed, the more modern buildings hiding around the behemoths intrigued, and I could not help drawing my hand through the hypnotic downward flow of the Inverted Fountain.

  I was happily surprised when I met the other incoming fellows. Three of us had corresponded by email shortly after arriving in Los Angeles and had decided to meet up for drinks in Westwood. When we met at Westwood Brewing Company, UCLA’s watering hole, we all laughed: East Coast transplants as we were, on the bright and sunny LA day, in a sea of pastel tank tops, Daisy Dukes, cargo shorts, and UGGs, we were all wearing black.

  All of us were either biracial, bilingual, bicontinental, binational, bicultural, or a combination of all five. Not only were we racially and/or ethnically different from most scholars in our fields, our scholarship was interdisciplinary, going beyond or outside of what was considered the normal purviews of our respective fields. There had been no requirement for minority status on the application; in this case, it happened that the best scholors for the program were non-white.

  We dubbed ourselves the Island of Misfit Toys. I ate my basket of fries and exclaimed, “Wow, even the bar food is really good in LA!” I realized what a relief it was not to feel like an outsider, or rather to have my outsider-ness validated by being chosen to be part of this select group.

  When we finally met the cohort of fellows from the previous year, it reinforced what a special gathering it was; I was the only American-born fellow. Sicilian, Catalan, Afro-Canadian-Indian, Punjabi, and Egyptian German, were some of the identities I learned went with the faces of my new peers. We came from all different fields, and queer, feminist, and minority perspectives dominated our work. For the first time in my studies, none of my fellows were white Americans.

  Our program directors were both women: one Taiwanese, who studied Chinese modernisms, the other ethnic French from Mauritius, who studied francophone African literature. They had coedited a collection titled Minor Transnationalism, which discussed how language, art, and culture around the world was enriched and driven not by mainstream or majority populations, but by immigrants and minorities who brought with them new and varied influences.

  Being able to wield the knowledge of Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak in my own work felt like scholarly activism. During my graduate studies, I did not read the work of postcolonial thinkers. I didn’t know that kind of work existed. Now I discovered that a small number of scholars in my field were branching out to bring the discipline of Russian literature, which strictly dialogued with itself, into a more global conversation.

  I spent years writing about Gennady Aygi, a poet from the small Asiatic country of Chuvashia, which was part of the Soviet Union. He was from what Russians considered a backwater, but he wrote poetry that recalled the modernists of the 1920s. He considered himself a citizen of the world. I resonated with the mix of opposites he seemed to embody. No one could pin down his identity. If he were a minority, why did he write as if he were the equal of the great Russian poets? Where were the paeans to village life? Where was the folksiness?

  Critics suspected his language was experimental and “difficult” because he didn’t speak Russian well. His poetry was not a work of genius but an accident caused by his ignorance. I knew what it felt like to be indefinable, to be expected to fit into one box or another, and how confused others were when I did not. I knew what it was like to have my intellect doubted despite evidence to the contrary. In grad school, when I told others I studied Russian literature, they asked if I spoke Russian. Even though the subject was obscure and, to some, exotic, no one asked that question of my white colleagues. It was as if they didn’t expect someone who looked like me to be interested or competent in such a field. Even on a job interview, one of the professors, in seeming exasperation, asked, “Why do you even study Soviet literature? You weren’t even born then.”

  His comment revealed his prejudices against someone he perceived to be too young for the subject she studied, and who, as African American, he perceived to have no connection with the culture. I wanted to ask him why people studied Shakespeare or medieval literature. There was usually no assumption that a subject needed to correspond directly with a person’s demographics, but in the case of people of color, that wasn’t true. Perhaps he wanted to ask me why I studied Soviet literature and not African American literature. He seemed to wonder what possible relevance Soviet literature could have to someone like me, and what insight someone like me could possibly bring to the conversation.

  Now, as I encountered the perspectives of postcolonial thinkers who laid out in great detail why the artistic work of minorities all over the world was valuable and unique, I realized that assumptions about minorities’ intellectual inferiority had been around for centuries. I thought back to the pan-African graduation ceremony when I wondered what I shared with everyone else in the auditorium, and I realized it was this: our achievements would be considered inferior even when they met or exceeded the standards of achievement set out by our society. People spoke of raising and lowering the bar, but I realized there was no bar, the raising or lowering of standards was arbitrary, and often depended on how they are looked at.

  To proceed to the doctoral phase of my program, students had to pass a master’s exam. Our professors determined the questions on the exam, and they changed from year to year. I remembered binders thick as telephone books, study guides written by students from years past. There was no earthly way each of us could amass the necessary material on our own, so we researched the guides in minute detail, adding dozens of pages of our own to fill in the gaps.

  There were no letter grades on the exam, no numerical point total, no standard means of evaluation. The goal was to achieve as close to perfection as possible, and the committee of professors decided what that meant. Looking back, the process was much more subjective than I’d realized. There were horror stories, passed down like urban legends, of grad students who failed the exam and were ousted from the program with only the dreaded credential of master’s in Russian literature. That degree was a well-known code in our field for those who were not deemed fit to continue in their doctoral program. No graduate program would take them after that, and one was even less employable with that degree than with the Ph.D. we’d risked life and limb to attain.

  The further I got from that environment, the more I realized how contingent my success—and the success of all students in my program—had been.

  When I arrived in Princeton, I was fresh off an apprenticeship in traditional Japanese pottery at the home studio of a potter who lived in the woods of Virginia. The potter was an American who’d traveled to Japan and learned her craft in the 1960s. Her style of wearing bandannas as neckerchiefs and headbands and her aversion to wearing bras had rubbed off on me. Since I had been living in Philadelphia the year before, I had also developed the habit of detaching the front tire of my bike before locking it on the street.

  I arrived on Princeton’s campus braless with my curly hair tied up in a bandanna, carrying a bike tire, my car trunk full of anagama pottery like it was the most natural thing in the world. My professors must have been horrified. Perhaps, like Dean Heermance back in 1930, they thought, Whom did we admit to our esteemed program? I received backhanded comments from them, like being called a “free spirit.” My command of Russian and the fact of my being admitted as only one of two students that year seemed to take a back seat in their evaluation of me to my unconventional appearance.

  For my dissertation defense, my hair was stra
ight, and I wore an Ann Taylor outfit with low-heeled shoes. It wasn’t only scholarship, knowledge, or passion that was important; I learned that I had to conform to a certain image of what an intellectual looked like. Many of my professors looked bizarre and unkempt themselves; Professor Savich had long, bushy eyebrows and sometimes wore baggy sweaters with holes in them. Another professor wore green galoshes nearly every day and pants that looked like jodhpurs. Her face was free of makeup except for bold red or pink lipstick. Yet another professor wore her hair in a messy topknot and wore layers of baggy skirts. Their eccentricity was acceptable, but mine was not. For young scholars to be taken seriously in our field, and perhaps for me more so, conformity was half the battle.

  Once, I expressed frustration to my advisor because I was not getting job interviews after attending a conference. She ventured, “Maybe you should try dressing a little more … conventionally.”

  I was wearing a head wrap, hoodie, and camo cargo pants as I sat in her office that day, but at the conference, I had worn a prim sweater with my initials monogrammed on the breast and tasteful wide-leg trousers. She did not know that because she had not attended my panel, but her comments seemed to apply to my general appearance as well as how she assumed I dressed at conferences. My advisor dressed in a more traditionally professorial manner than some of the other faculty in our department, but it didn’t seem fair that there was a double standard. The other grad students in my program were pressured to conform in their style, too, but from what they told me, none of them received the freighted comments I did.

  In Los Angeles, even in academia, there was far less of an expectation of conformity to white culture, thinking, and style. My directors and peers looked professional, but not at the expense of their individuality. Instead of ending our seminars with a plate of cheese and crackers, or nothing, we ended with dinner at an Italian, Iranian, or Taiwanese restaurant. There was wine and laughter. Our postdoctoral conferences were convivial and catered, with more on the table than a lone pitcher of water.

  Having such festivities made us feel like we were valued by our program and university. The Mellon postdoctoral program was no smaller, our fields of research no less specialized than my graduate program, and yet we were made to feel like we were doing important work, like we belonged. When I met new people, I didn’t have to pretend I was someone I wasn’t. It was becoming clear to me that there was more than one way to be a scholar, and the more I realized how free I felt in LA, the clearer it became how restricted I’d felt back home.

  Thirty

  Not long after I moved to LA, I began seeing a therapist. My state of mind consisted of overanalyzing my mother’s actions to the point of obsession, which resulted in constant frustration, and of being angry with myself, which, despite my positive experiences at UCLA, led to a steady erosion of self-confidence.

  None of my colleagues knew what was going on with me; I kept this side of my personal life private. I was enjoying my new academic milieu and the friends I was making too much to complicate things with my messy personal story and worsening psychological state. To them, I was a self-confident activist scholar, easygoing, and sociable.

  At home, a different side of me emerged. I was obsessive, irritable, anxious, depressed. Absorbed in an unwinnable argument and the desire to discover a truth that may or may not have been there to find. Michael was the only one who knew what I was going through. He believed I had a right to know the truth that existed behind my mother’s vague and evasive account.

  My mother made it clear that she had said everything she had to say on the subject of “the donor” and had given me as much information as she knew.

  “Why are you lying to me?” I’d yell over the phone as the argument got heated. “Why can’t you just tell me the truth?”

  “Real life isn’t like a book,” she’d snap back, mocking my field of study. “I’ve told you the truth. There’s no hidden love story, no matter how much you want there to be.”

  Through my anger, I knew there was truth to what she was saying, but I just couldn’t accept it. Something wasn’t right. She was still holding something back. How could I tell? She was overly defensive, it seemed, every time I brought up the subject, which was basically every time we spoke. Was she just exasperated at my insistence on revisiting something she considered ancient history? Was it trauma that never went away? Or was it something else?

  I thought back to that night at the Residence Inn when I had been too sad and stunned to pick up on everything that was being yelled back and forth between my parents. I wished to God I had heard the name my father ventured because it elicited an enraged response. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. But then, was I just grafting a literary trope onto real life? I was no psychologist, though I considered myself fairly expert on the work of Dostoevsky. Didn’t actions in real life, as in novels, have subtext? Didn’t people, like characters in a well-constructed novel, betray themselves by what they refused to say?

  “No, it couldn’t have happened like that,” my therapist, an African American woman named Dr. Wade, said after I told her my mother’s story of rape. “A black man raping a white woman on a small, white campus in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s? No,” she said. “Black men have been killed for less.”

  Tara, Courtney, Sveta, Angie, David, and Michael were skeptical of my mother’s story, too, because there were so few details, and the details she did give smacked of cliché.

  “I’ll never understand your mother,” Tara said across a large mahogany table on one of her trips to Princeton before I graduated. We had a ritual of holding our conversations in one of the empty, ornate seminar rooms on the first floor of my building. We called these sessions the Meeting of the Minds.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I replied, my voice echoing off the carved walls and ceiling. “Why won’t she tell me the truth? Do you think she has some kind of mental illness or personality disorder? You’ve known my mom for years. What do you think?”

  “Your mother is a mystery. There’s probably some type of mental illness in the picture, but I don’t know which.”

  When I was in high school, my mother had some health issues she thought were symptoms of heart disease. She went to the hospital and was tested for everything that could reveal a heart condition, but all tests came back negative. The doctor told her the symptoms—chest pains, heart palpitations, and shortness of breath—were most likely due to anxiety. According to my father, who accompanied her on the trip, she yelled at the doctors and told them that they were wrong: she had a heart condition and she knew it. Why weren’t they taking her seriously? The doctors suggested keeping her on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold, but she didn’t want to hear about it.

  “I don’t want someone’s opinion on my mental health,” she said.

  On my father’s insistence, she met with a therapist, but walked out of the session before the fifty minutes were up.

  “He was an idiot,” she said.

  When I told Michael about this incident and about her refusal to give more details about what happened to her that night in college, he said, “Something did happen to her, but she’s also hiding something.”

  I wanted to believe my mother even though my closest friends fueled my doubt, but I also wanted her to tell me the whole truth.

  Dr. Wade was the same age as my mother. Her extended family consisted of white, black, Asian, and mixed-race individuals. Personally and professionally, she knew about the dynamics of interracial families and how children of different races were socialized differently. She also knew that whiteness was the most fragile and insecure identity.

  “Whiteness makes people hide,” she said during one of our sessions, “because in confronting their privilege, they have a lot to lose.”

  She explained the concept of white privilege, how whiteness historically protected itself and the advantages it enjoyed from the encroachment of other races. She explained the perceived dangers of miscegenation that were deeply roote
d in our society, that at one time in our history, people like me were illegal, evidence of an illicit union.

  She refused to diagnose my mother.

  “Stay in your square,” she told me.

  In her view, my most immediate need was sorting out the identity transformations I was experiencing that caused my psychological anguish. Because I was raised white and socialized like a white child, I internalized white identity. Now, as I discovered my biracial and black identities, I was like a child learning who she is in the world for the first time but with an adult’s mind-set and expectations. Because I was also waking up to the ways I was complicit in whiteness and how whiteness operates as an oppressive identity, I was experiencing intellectual and emotional dissolution. This identity formation and disintegration all happening at once, my therapist assured me, was something she had never seen before and could cause severe enough strain to precipitate a mental breakdown. I felt like I was on the verge.

  She gave me reading on identity formation for white, mixed-race, and black individuals so I could see how each was socialized differently and progressed through their journeys of self-awareness. She emphasized that the stages of identity development occur at different times for different people; they don’t all take place during childhood or the years that are typically considered the time people come of age. Adults experienced these changes, too, and no model could fully encompass how an individual experiences their sense of self.

  Nevertheless, I needed guidelines and explanations, something no one up to that point had been able to give me. If I could process the changes I was undergoing intellectually, I hoped it would make the emotional turmoil easier to work through.

  The theory of white racial identity development (no source was given for this theory) progressed through five stages: unidentified identity, acceptance, disintegration, redefinition, and integration. In the unidentified or naïve stage, the white person has no awareness of race or racism. They are unaware of themselves as racial beings and may have little contact with people of other ethnicities, leading to negative stereotypes. During acceptance, a person cognitively examines and acknowledges their state of being white. At this stage, white people either avoid contact with minorities or develop a patronizing attitude toward them. They do not yet acknowledge the existence of racism. In disintegration, a white person blames the dominant group as a source of racial inequality rather than blaming the minorities themselves. The white individual becomes aware of their own racial biases and becomes angry, hurt, and pained, with these feelings directed at themselves and their own racial group. In the fourth stage, redefinition, the white individual begins to confront their biases, rejects paternalism, and accepts minorities as intellectual equals. Integration or autonomy arrives when the white person realizes how they have benefited in society from being white and how whiteness has negatively impacted people of color. The white person develops an actively nonracist identity and works to help eradicate oppression and racism.