even this page is white

by Vivek Shraya

  how to talk to a white person

  ...i think one has to even abandon the phrase ‘ally’ and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.

  —ta-nehisi coates

  saraswati

  words

  can i trust you to say what

  words

  have struggled to say

  words

  can you bridge over where

  words

  have sunk slammed rock from rift

  words

  ever my raft yet

  words

  punctured this craft how odd to look to

  words

  the refuge and the dagger

  words

  have i never asked you what you want

  words

  have i never let you do the talking

  words

  are what got us here—a lie

  words

  what would you say if i didn’t interfere what

  words

  would you use to say pain and have

  words

  cease and provoke listening.

  eraser

  I will not make this about race.

  I will not make this about race.

  I will not make this about race.

  I will not make this about race.

  I will not make this about race.

  I will not make believe.

  I will not make believe.

  I will not make believe.

  I will not make believe.

  I will not make believe.

  I will not bring my race to work.

  I will not bring my race to work.

  I will not bring my race to work.

  I will not bring my race to work.

  I will not bring my race to work.

  I will not bring my race to school.

  I will not bring my race to school.

  I will not bring my race to school.

  I will not bring my race to school.

  I will not bring my race to school.

  I will not share my race online.

  I will not share my race online.

  I will not share my race online.

  I will not share my race online.

  I will not share my race online.

  Race is a choice not a construct.

  Race is a choice not a construct.

  Race is a choice not a construct.

  Race is a choice not a construct.

  Race is a choice not a construct.

  count the brown people

  1n y0ur 1tunes tw1tter

  feed fr1end c1rcle

  sex l1fe café classr00m

  textb00k ne1ghb0urh00d

  0n the walls 0f y0ur art

  gallery tv screen l1sts cred1ts

  at y0ur galas dance

  d1nner h0use

  h0l1day part1es staff

  meet1ng

  1 am capt1ve c0unt1ng search1ng

  a cl0ck with a sec0nd hand stuck

  brown life is an unbroken bearing of the weight and hollow of the active

  absence of brown life.

  #notallwhitepeople

  i don’t know your story

  this is true

  you are a good person

  sterling intentions

  golden heart

  extra mile

  your parents laboured

  you grew up poor

  picked on and kicked out

  haunted by loss

  many truths can be true

  at once you can be all

  the above

  and you can be racist.

  because race is constructed as residing in people of colour, whites don’t bear the social burden of race…we move easily through our society without a sense of ourselves as racialized. race is for people of colour to think about—it is what happens to “them”—they can bring it up if it is an issue for them (although if they do, we can dismiss it as a personal problem, the race card, or the reason for their problems). this allows whites much more psychological energy to devote to other issues and prevents us from developing the stamina to sustain attention on an issue as charged and uncomfortable as race. —dr robin diangelo

  a dog named lavender

  are you staring at me because

  are you not looking at me because

  you don’t like me because

  you don’t desire me because

  you desire me only because

  i don’t like myself because

  i wish i was like you

  am i safe here

  where are the others like me

  there are no others like me

  i was not considered because

  i was only considered because

  why would you say that

  i thought you cared about me

  did you say that because

  do i respond

  how do i respond in a way that you will hear me

  how do i respond without making you angry

  or uncomfortable

  can i be ok with not responding

  why doesn’t someone else respond

  i shouldn’t have said anything

  are you ignoring me because i responded

  there has to be another explanation

  maybe i am making this up

  maybe i am too sensitive

  maybe i am too defensive

  maybe i am undesirable

  not everything is because

  i can’t assume the worst

  of course i am safe here

  of course there are others like me here

  you probably haven’t seen someone like me

  i just need to work harder

  you don’t know how to think about this

  you don’t mean what you said

  of course you care about me

  of course you will hear me

  maybe it’s good for you to be uncomfortable

  maybe i’m better off in the long run

  what would i think of if i wasn’t thinking about this

  a dog named lavender

  a home in idaho

  a book about landscapes

  what would I make if I wasn’t thinking about this

  who could i be if i wasn’t thinking about this?

  the truth about the race card

  is that even before i knew what it meant

  i knew not to play it refused

  to spin brown into excuse let it hold me back

  believed you when you said we are the same

  blamed my parents and camouflaged to prove

  you right no wonder you couldn’t see me

  people who said racism were whiny or lazy

  and i was neither

  but there’s no worth for my work no toll for my toil

  when you hold the cards keys gavels

  unravelled, brown is not a barrier you are

  and when you say don’t play the race card

  you mean don’t call me white.

  you are so articulate

  i had to

  inherit a lighter shade

  from my mom’s side

  be born in Canada

  be designated male

  dad had to

  work three jobs

  sold vacuums door to door

  fly on your magic carpet

  back from where you came

  to work three jobs he had to

  give his time off to sleep

  instead of knowing me

  mom had to

  be dad

  stay awake alert

  be a bedtime story and work

  make my teeth less crooked

  make sure i could go to university

  so i would have money

  not have to be shift working

  unfamiliar like dad

  i had to

  reject mom and dad’s dreams

  of becoming an engineer

  a profession

  major i
n english

  for you to hear me.

  conversation with white friends:

  sara quin amber dawn rae spoon dannielle owens-reid

  because i still believe in the value of dialogue

  and because white people listen to white people

  when did you realize being white gave you privilege?

  what was that experience like?

  sq: my awareness of racism and my whiteness started in junior high school. our behaviour as kids—the way we talked, dressed, fought, expressed ourselves—was scrutinized on an entirely different scale depending on the race of the student. i was experiencing white privilege first-hand and knew then that it was unfair.

  ad: when i was in fourth grade my friend thi and i were spending another lunch break in our teacher’s office. both thi and i had served lunch break detention before, had been sent to the principal’s office, and were regularly called “bad,” “stupid,” and “lazy” by teachers. we were both poor. both of us were surviving violence at home. during this particular detention, thi tried to flee the office. the teacher grabbed her by the arm and physically dragged her back to her chair. i remember thinking that the teacher would never touch me like that. it took me many years to figure out that it was my whiteness that protected me.

  dor: once i started getting involved in queer spaces and met queer people of colour who had such drastically different experiences from mine, i was like “whoa, whoa, whoa” and started to examine my understanding. i remember my friend andre telling me about the challenges of being gay in a black family. as time went on, i would think about his story all the time, and then i met you and you had all of this knowledge that you explained in such a cool and easy-to-understand way. i had never really heard the word “privilege” but once you were explaining it so clearly, i was able to look back on my life experiences and see that you were right and it was legit. and i was so happy to have a word to define it. i’ve always felt a little lost in talking about racism until i met you because i didn’t have the ability to say, “it’s going to be harder for someone with immigrant parents. it doesn’t mean they can’t have the good life, it just means they’ll have more obstacles, because people look at their parents, hear an accent, and assume a bunch of shit.”

  in instances where your white privilege has been highlighted, how do you manage any defensiveness?

  ad: i listen. i let the person know i’ve heard them. i might ask the person if they need anything from me in the moment. i might offer an apology. i thank the person for taking the time to educate me. i let the person know that i will think more about what they said. i debrief with other white people. sometimes, depending on the situation, i debrief and discuss with people of colour with their consent. i don’t expect any of this to feel comfortable.

  rs: the toronto star did a cover article on “they” as a singular pronoun and decided to put a photo of me on the front page. when the article came out, i found out that the paper had mainly interviewed white people who use the pronoun. elisha lim requesting “they” as a pronoun from xtra and the boycott that happened until that paper started using it for people was a huge part of my own coming out as agender. elisha brought up the exclusion of poc folks from the article with me. i had a moment of feeling defensive, and also i felt like i had really let them down. it felt like being wrong, and i wanted to do anything i could not to be wrong or to get out of the situation. i tried to remember what it’s like to be on the other side of that kind of space-taking, and i tried to keep it to a minimum. i wrote a statement on tumblr about the exclusion and shared it in the same spaces i had shared the article.

  how do you reconcile being white with the history of colonization by white people in north america?

  ad: i doubt the small acts i currently do can be called reconciliation. in my working life, i read aboriginal writing, both scholarly and literary. i include aboriginal authors in my curriculum. when i have voting power as to how guest speaker funds are spent where i teach, i put forward the names of aboriginal authors. when i receive author payments from work where i’ve written about sex work, i designate a modest percentage of that payment to the missing and murdered memorial march committee in vancouver.

  rs: the final report of the truth and reconciliation commission defines reconciliation as an ongoing process of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships. reading that really impacted me because of my own history with being the victim of abuse. it raised my awareness of the fact that i am approaching relationships with indigenous people in canada from the side of the abusers and the people who benefit from that cultural genocide. it means that i don’t get to decide how reconciliation happens and i am responsible for being informed and supporting self-determination for indigenous people as well as calls to action.

  dor: i think about this a lot. i don’t think privilege makes any one human a bad person. i think ignoring your privilege, defending your privilege, or refusing to understand where that privilege comes from is the problem. i have privilege because the world is fucked up. i hate the history of north america and i hate the way it’s taught. i love when columbus day comes around and the internet is flooded with “fuck that guy.” i think one of the best things we can do is recognize the true history and say “no thank you, you guys did that and we are not okay with it.” sharing the true history, the real stories, the actual events, that is so important.

  one of the things that i’ve really struggled with, especially in the past year, is that in my social media feeds brown and black people are often posting links or commentary about racism or racial violence in the news but there is a kind of white silence. i have wondered why white people aren’t engaging. why aren’t white people angry about racism?

  ad: i think many white people are angry about racism, but white people are both consciously and unconsciously attached to power. white people are taught that our experiences are authoritative and right. when we learn to be allies, we must wake up the fact that we are actually so fucking ignorant. we’re undereducated when it comes to just about anything outside of the white gaze, and we’re grossly under-practiced in talking about racism.

  dor: i think it stems from people feeling like if they say something, they are admitting to being racist. or they are afraid someone will ask them about it, and they don’t know how to defend their point of view. people are afraid because if i were to say “black lives matter” and someone were to say “fuck you, all lives matter” and in my mind i’m like “oh yeah, i guess that’s true, all lives matter.” so now i’m in a place where i have no idea what to say to this person, because they are right, all lives do matter, but there is a clear imbalance and i don’t know how to say that, so i end up too scared to do or say anything at all.

  admittedly, i do feel resentful when white people do or say nothing at all, because of this fear you are talking about. so much of my own learning this year has been recognizing anti-black racism specifically, how different this is from my own experience as a person of colour, and my own privilege in this respect. it has been challenging and even uncomfortable at times to know how to show solidarity. but i constantly have to remind myself that being an ally is ultimately learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. that it’s more important that i use my voice and privilege, and probably mess up along the way, than to do or say nothing. this has also been the year when i have been saying to white friends, it’s not enough to not be racist, i need you to step up. what are examples of your allyship towards people of colour?

  sq: i’ve always felt that one of the most crucial things a white person must do as an ally is to listen to the voices of people of colour—essential voices that are so often marginalized and silenced in mainstream society, it sometimes takes some extra effort to hear them. in my early twenties, i moved to montreal, and it was there that the world of social justice and politics really opened up to me. so many of the writers and thinkers i admired then and now are people of colour. i was compelled to learn from diverse voices a
nd not just accept the perspectives of mass media. bell hooks and angela davis led me to writers like james baldwin and alice walker. a dozen years later it feels even easier to find and be inspired by (new-to-me) writers like hilton als or ta-nehisi coates. and that’s just writers. there is so much happening right now in music and art and on the front lines of the movement for racial justice that is being expertly and fiercely documented by people of colour. the idea of “listening” also involves being aware of what we’re consuming at all times. if my tastes become too homogenous—in music, art, or literature—i actively go out and look for other stuff, to make sure that i’m hearing those diverse voices. learning from outside of a dominant white culture has truly enriched my life. and hopefully it has made me a better ally too.

  dor: i think sharing stories, articles, essays, videos from the point of view of people of colour is such a strong and easy way to contribute to a positive dialogue. i always try to share a good solid tweet, video, or write-up from a person of colour because i think it’s important that those creators have the opportunity to create even more. i could retweet a white guy who says “racism ruins lives” or i could retweet a muslim guy who is saying “racism is ruining my life.” that story is more powerful, real, true, and the perspective is what matters. i think (as with all movements) you need people from all sides standing up with/for you, but it’s important that the movement originates within that community.