Names We Call Home

Autobiography on Racial Identity

Becky Thompson, Sangeeta Tyagi, Becky Thompson, Sangeeta Tyagi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135771034
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Names We Call Home is a ground-breaking collection of essays which articulate the dynamics of racial identity in contemporary society. The first volume of its kind, Names We Call Home offers autobiographical essays, poetry, and interviews to highlight the historical, social, and cultural influences that inform racial identity and make possible resistance to myriad forms of injustice.

Part I

BLOOD TIES,

Communal Relations

1

“When we Are Capable of Stopping, We Begin to See”

Being White, Seeing Whiteness

Ruth Frankenberg

Prologue

1. i was born, i will die, the end.¹

2. ego loves to talk about itself.

3. but where is the way home?

“i” have been remade several times. Feminism remade “me.” Recognition of the profound level of my coimplication with racism and imperialism remade “me.” Migrations, across the UK and across the Atlantic, remade “me.” Self-identification as lesbian remade “me.” And a small yet infinite awakening to the vastness within which all these “me's” exist, is just now not only remaking “me” once again, but also asking who that “me” actually is.

i was born, i will die, ego loves to talk. And yet, the way home must be found. Increasingly, from a new (to me) vantage point that sharpens and reframes prior convictions, the unreality of “race” is evident. Of course it always was, and many people, among them a good number of race theorists, have asserted and clarified this point. Yet the challenge has remained that of how to, in Audre Lorde's terms, “dismantle the master's house” while, not only do we live in it but it, by some architectural trick, lives in us² How to enter more deeply and self-consciously into one's racial identity in order to challenge it while making sure, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's terms, that any moves toward essentialism remain “strategic.”³ Not, in other words beyond a point of identifying with one's (small “i”) identity. Indeed it may be that a spiritual path of disidentification from what appears to be, is in reality the way home.

Finding the way home, then, entails finding the way out—out of the master's house. This essay will ask, though, how I got in—into the master's house—in the first place. For asking how we got in—into this mess called racism—is, I believe, an important step toward getting out. Toward getting home.

Placing the “i” in quotes, changing its casing? Changing its garb, remembering its provisionality, non-sovereignty. Not “i”dentilying means knowing there is an infinity beyond history. And yet. We live in our version of reality, its conventions, its violence. So I plunge back into the “I,” in order to examine the conditions of its making.

I

I have been performing whiteness, and having whiteness performed upon me, since—or actually before—the moment I was born. But the question is, what does that mean?

While the subjective meanings of my racial identity have changed considerably over time, the objective meanings of my being white have changed little or not at all from the moment of my birth until now. Here, I mean to underscore the material bedrock of race and class structuring, which have served to anchor race privilege in my existence in the two countries in which I have lived. Coming to consciousness about one's racial identity and/or race privilege as white is not, then, by any means the same as transforming it. Racial positioning and self-naming are contextual and thus their transformation must always entail collective processes, ones that take place, so to speak, within history, rather than as individual journeys. Racial identity is also relational, made through the claiming and the imposition of samenesses and othernesses; I realized early in the work for this essay that writing it would by no means entail speaking only about myself. This relationality also means that I cannot discuss racialization without also talking about racism and antiracism.

However, let me suppose that I am concerned here, at least in part, with my sense of self. And let me also suggest that, in living out a sense of self, I enact—or better, I act from within and/or against—an assemblage of elements, drawn in turn from diverse histories, all the way from the familial, to the local, to the national, to the global, and translated into (self)-expectations, (self)-images, forms of (self)-disciplining, desires, and so on. Let me then suggest that my identity is all of this, and that it is also usefully understood as practice or as an ongoing process of practicing, rather as an entity or thing, whether stable or changing. Racial identity can, in short, be understood as the situated practicing of a multifariously marked self.

Let me begin with some basic socio-data: I was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1957. I spent my childhood in the outskirts (as we say over there) of Manchester, England, one of two daughters in a single-parent household. Before my sixteenth birthday I left the nest by moving to a wild boarding school in Devon and then to a staid university in Cambridge. (Actually, however, certain conventionalisms—including unquestioned homophobia and a patronizing approach to class—sat alongside the liberatory pedagogy of the former; by the same token some of my early lessons in radicalism took place in context of the latter.) Finally, through what my dear friend Emma memorably described as “a whim that got out of hand,” I found myself, in 1979, turning twenty-one years of age in Santa Cruz, California. Since 1984, I have lived mainly in Oakland, California, although with a three-year sojourn further up the west coast in Seattle, Washington.

Notice that I have been able to say all of the above without mentioning race, whether as defining feature, as impediment, or as benefit. And that, in fact, is part of the trick of whiteness, in this historical moment and in those parts of the world wherein I have been white. As I have frequently said to students in the past five or so years, race privilege is the (non)experience of not being slapped in the face. As expressed far more eloquently by a woman whom I unfortunately cannot name here, for us whiteness is “a privilege enjoyed but not acknowledged, a reality lived in but unknown.”⁴

So, let me run that through again. I was born in Cardiff in what was, if my memory serves me correctly (and it should, for I continued to return to my grandmother's house there up into my teens), an entirely white part of that city. I now know that because of its status as a port, Cardiff has one of the longest-standing black communities in Britain as well as one of the longest histories of interracial marriage. But the black community was in the docklands area, very far from our home. Of course, being under three, I did not ponder this question at the time. However, I obviously knew about blackness somehow, because I actually remember startling my great-aunt by pointing to the (white) man delivering coal to our house, who, as a result of his line of work was completely covered in soot, and asking whether “that man was black.” Both he and my aunt laughed, and told me no, it was just the coal.

How did blackness enter my consciousness (if only to reappear as misrecognition) in an apparently all-white world? Perhaps from my favorite children's story character of the time. In a series of books, which I would beg to have read to me again and again, the main character was Epaminondas, a “picaninny” who was constantly in trouble and who, as his mother would tell him at the end of each story, “didn't have the sense he was born with.” Epaminondas and his mother lived on a plantation, somewhere in a mythified Africa. She wore bright dresses and bandanas, and smiled all the time, despite the endless trouble Epaminondas gave her. I was, then, at less than three years old, already a child of the British Empire, already taught through no malice aforethought on my mother's part, the beginnings of racist love. Racist love. Racist love.

It is interesting that one can, in fact (re)tell a white life through a racial lens. One can begin showing how, in fact, the white subject's formation is marked in myriad ways by her positioning in the racial order, spatially and discursively. Note too that my racialization was displaced onto a putative Other. Seeing blackness was not seeing whiteness, although logically, it must, at some level, have also been just that.

At three, I moved with my parents to the north of England. We lived on a brand new housing development (housing “estate” in British parlance)—so new in fact that our street was mud rather than pavement for quite some time. To my clear memory, no one of color (or to use British English, no one Black, no one of African, Caribbean, or South Asian descent) lived on the housing estate. When I went to preschool, all the children were white except for one girl of Caribbean descent. I can still picture the two thick braids worn around her head, framing her dark brown face. Although I have no other memories of her as a person (and indeed this is true of all the other kids at my preschool, too), I do remember some kind of solidarity between my mother and her father, since, like my mother by that time, he was a single parent.

When I saw blackness, this must have meant that I had already computed whiteness, or that I did so in that same instant. But whiteness seemed not to be named, as far as memory tells me. Odd really, since there was so much of it about. . . Also, notice that racialness did not totally define my mother's sense of this child's father—other contingencies were also in play.

Although the suburbs were all white in Manchester, this was not true of the city as a whole. I remember clearly driving into the city center with my mother, and passing neighborhoods that were poorer, and differently colored, from our own. The cracked paving-stones, the second-hand furniture stores, the men on the streets with loose flowing shirts and trousers (now I'd say kurta-pajamas), the women with saris and ill-matched cardigans, made an impact on my consciousness: fear of the unknown, fear of the dishevelled, of the seeming disorder which I can now more easily name as poverty.

About whom am I speaking? “Them,” or me? How did I become white? Here, we may note that my whiteness and their Asianness were in part marked by class. I was positioned, historically, to drive through this neighborhood and find it Other, through the culmination of an imperial history that began long before my birth, through a process that in fact invented race and “classed” it. That history positioned this small child, me, as a spectator behind the glass of a car window. And these are, indeed, components of my whiteness. But another component of my whiteness is, in fact, my seeming neutrality, my seeming unmarkedness. For why do we not, apparently, need to know what I was wearing, whether my clothes were in my view matched or ill-matched, whether my family's trousers were tight, or whether they flowed. One can name only a part of one's racialization by making a spectacle of an Other.

At elementary (or primary) school, the children were again white except for the three children of one Indian family. The middle child in that family, Shalini, was in my class. I remember at least some of our classmates making hostile comments, mostly behind Shalini's back, and also leaving notes on her desk, with comments about her dark skin. Shalini and I had a friend in common (another classmate, also white), and the two of us were invited to tea. I was perhaps nine years old. Her family's house, just two doors from the Catholic church, smelled of spices unfamiliar to my nostrils (clichéd, but true). Her mother, when we went to tea, gave us snacks that at the time smelt and tasted completely different from anything I'd ever encountered—strange and therefore a little frightening, but not unpleasant. Now, of course, I'd recognize them, and be pleased to eat what I now know to be vegetable pakoras at anyone's house. Moreover, Britain is a different place now from how it was in the 1960s, and some version of Indian food has entered the white mainstream: white mothers are probably routinely picking up frozen pakoras at the supermarket and bringing them home to give to their white kids after school.

My connection with Shalini was such that she told me things—like her father's job; where her father was from; what her own middle name was, and what her sister's name meant (I still remember); what her father's full name was (long, complicated to my ears, and I forgot it immediately); how to pronounce her last name correctly, as opposed to how it was pronounced in England. I don't recall ever going back to Shalini's house, although I would play with her often in our other friend's backyard. Unlike most of our elementary school peers, Shalini and I ended up at the same high school (the selective one, for the supposedly “brainiest” kids), and we used to walk home together, braving the jeers of the kids coming out of the other school—what was at that time called a “secondary modern” or non-college preparatory school, on the way past.

In writing of Shalini, I was telling the truth (that is, I did not lie). But one may note that the burden of my narrative was one of redemption of my white self. I did not leave those racist notes. I did like the pakoras. I got to like them even better as an adult. I grew to love (the food of) the Other. In short, the narrative implies, I am a good person, racially. I am, it claims, not racist. Shalini and I were united by class (or more precisely, by an educational stratification system that is generally class-marked). Therefore we were not divided. We were united. History made me, and had I been a few years younger, my story would have been different. I am telling what James Clifford, speaking of ethnographic practice, calls a “fable of rapport.”⁵ And as is true in general of fables of rapport, my narrative protests my own “innocence.” my innocence as in “not guilty,” and my innocence as in “youthful, naive.”

Thus, this seemingly benign story, or rather, this story in which I appeared to myself as benign—and here is the solipsism of racism—turned out to be rather less straightforward than it first appeared. It turned out, in fact, to have some quite sickening aspects. We are frequently complicit with racism even when we are absolutely confident that we are not. Why am I drawing attention to all of this? I could, after all, have simply re-edited my own story. But the way “out of the master's house,” the way home, requires, I think, as great an honesty and clarity as the ego can muster in any given moment. I feel compelled, at this moment, to offer as much detail about my route “home” as ego will permit, as much of what is required of us as ego can, at any point, recognize and name. And I am drawing attention to this particular move, that of a narrative deployment of Others in such a way as to secure one's own “redemption,” because it is a common one, a “wrong turn,” taken frequently by antiracists and self-analysts of whiteness.

As I said, I went to a new school. I was eleven. At this new school, out of about a thousand students, there were in addition to Shalini and her brother three others who were not white. It speaks to what Elizabeth Alexander has described as the “neon footsteps” effect of being a person of color in a primarily white environment that I can picture the three, and even remember two of their names.⁶ But it is important to note that, while memorable as signs, by their sheer presence, this did not mean that there was a recognition of them, on my part, in terms of their personhood. For I did not know their personalities, their ethnicities, how they ended up in this school. It is true that there was perhaps no reason why I should remember or ever have known details about students who were not my age and therefore never my friends nor in classes with me. But in fact it was the unevenness of my recognition which makes it worth comment. For I cannot call to mind even the faces of any—truly—of the other perhaps three hundred white students who between them would have made up the cohorts of each of these black young people. As I said, then, these students were signs from my white standpoint, simultaneously over- and under-visible. Nor, I think, did their presence disturb the whiteness of this space, so much as it underscored it. For this was not an environment whose center of gravity was amenable to being moved away from its particular brand of northern English, middle-class, white conventionalism to accommodate even other varieties of whiteness, let alone any manner of non-whiteness.

Again, is the examination of my own racialization, my own whiteness, only to he achieved by this minute cataloguing of “Others I have encountered?” Indeed is it to he achieved at all by that means? What is whiteness? It is in part, I would suggest, a mere mirroring of a mirroring, a “not” of a “not.” Whiteness comes to self-name, invents itself, by means of its declaration that it is not that which it projects as Other. And there is thus a level at which whiteness has its own inbuilt complacency, a self-naming that functions simply through a triumphant “I am not that.” But beyond a point, I fail to name my whiteness if all I do is shout “not that,” point to those who occupied the space of “almost,” (that is to say, almost nonexistent from a white purview) in my “almost all-white” school.

To mark out whiteness beyond the “not,” as an effect of its context-specific and historically formed disciplinary and cultural practices, is challenging since I write in one country, but about another. Whiteness, then, has both local and global resonances. Some of the terms and relationships through which this whiteness was articulated may be less than meaningful beyond their own context: that of a particular lower-to-middle middle class, northern English, Tory-voting, largely suburban, Cheshire-accented social conservatism. Although not a church-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction, Storytelling as Social Conscience: The Power of Autobiography
• Word Problems
• Part I. Blood Ties, Communal Relations
• Part II. Piecing Together History
• Part III. Love Letters and Conversations
• Part IV. “Acts of Creation: Sweat, Blood, Bone”
• Contributors
• Photo Credits