Understanding Whiteness Part 19: Waking up, becoming the other, and changing - for good
I usually put this part at the end but you know what? I can’t even lie: this is some of my BEST work. If you haven’t realised yet, it’s a whole book delivered in chapter long instalments. Please, tell people. In time, it’ll be common knowledge, but for now, it’s just you. So thank you, sincerely, and I hope you feel compelled to spread these ideas. I genuinely believe I’m on to something important here and this post goes even further into ideas that hold incredible value and weight. So, thank you for being here, thank you for connecting, and get ready. Are you sitting comfortably? Let’s go.
Without change, stories go nowhere. Seeking justice and retribution and payback might be feel therapeutic, but the protagonists need to change if true resolution is going to be achieved. When Sam Cooke sang ‘a change is gonna come’ he wasn’t joking, but the change in question couldn’t just be a general change for the better. It had to include specific changes in attitude among white Americans who had participated in the racism that made the Civil Rights movement necessary in the first place. Not to mention legislative and structural changes to counter the structural racism that black Americans were (and are) suffering from.
We’re not in Civil Rights era USA and we’re not in post-Apartheid South Africa, but we are in a world where whiteness will continue to suffer in its own supremacy until, or unless, it learns how to go forward.
Which poses the biggest question of this series so far: Can dominant whiteness change? And moreover, will white supremacy let it?
Becoming the other
In the best, most satisfying, most comedic stories, everyone becomes a little bit of who they’re not. It happens time and time again. Characters go through their various trials, struggle to overcome their flaws, consistently trip themselves up, hit a huge point of crisis… and then finally embrace elements of the thing that opposes them most. The control freak learns to let go. The submissive becomes assertive. The irresponsible becomes a little bit more sensible. The dreamer becomes a realist. The realist embraces the dream. It’s part of a process of learning that is necessary for flawed characters to heal, in a psychological sense, in order to go forward happier than they have been before. Remember, that’s what makes a comedy a comedy, according to the rules: when confusion and mayhem is solved and untangled, and everyone can laugh at how mistaken they had been.
When deployed effectively, it’s a formula that salves that soul. It’s the moment in Toy Story where Woody announces to Buzz “We’re flying!” to which Buzz, echoing Woody’s own cynical words from the first act, replies: “This isn’t flying – this is falling, with style.” It’s the moment when Mr Darcy lets his guard down enough to express pure emotion in his declaration of love for Elizabeth Bennett. In a sense, divisions are made whole and characters take on the characteristics of their own foil.
Our very real lives run often along these lines. Getting things wrong, stumbling over ourselves, reflecting and subsequently modifying our behaviours are all prerequisite to personal growth. Often, the risks we have to take in order to go forward and prosper involve doing things that oppose, to some degree, our habitual leanings. If we list five of the biggest personality traits that all people can project, we can see the beginnings of a very simple roadmap for personal change:
Openness: curious vs cautious.
Conscientiousness: organized vs careless.
Extroversion: introvert vs extrovert
Agreeableness: friendly vs challenging
Neuroticism: nervous vs confident
In the stories of our lives, it’s easy to see the push and pull of these traits, with success often gleaming when the passive element is forced to ramp up the intensity and win just a bit more of the struggle. What I mean by that is that we often have to be a bit more of the thing we’re not in order to succeed. I’ll use myself as an example. I have a stutter. It’s something I tell my audiences whenever I visit schools and various organisations, and no-one believes me. They don’t believe me because I’m a teacher and educator, I deliver keynote speeches, very eloquently too might I add, and I present a double award-winning radio show on the BBC. How could I possibly have a stutter? Well, I do, and as a teenager, it was threatening to become debilitating. I remember seeking solutions in text books and academic papers, going to the big library in Croydon to see ehat I could find to ‘cure’ my affliction. Nothing. And so I had to seek other approaches. I thought about it. I realised that I didn’t stutter when I was performing, on stage, or speaking in chorus, or when I was relaxed. So I actively sought out opportunities to perform. I read aloud, in public. I faced my fears. I had to. And I also realised that I gained fluency when I spoke from the heart, with passion, leading with my core values. So that’s what I do. When I speak, I speak with intensity. It matters, and so my stutter doesn’t have the opportunity to eclipse the content of my words. I had to become the extrovert that my stutter didn’t want (doesn’t want) me to be. And they all lived happily ever after.
Whatever whiteness is, it’s arrived at a point in its narrative where it needs to accept (and become) elements of what it has not been. At its most monstrous, whiteness has been callous, exploitative, malicious, avaricious and lacking in self-awareness. Flip the script and the needs become clear. To go forward whole and happy, whiteness needs to be empathetic, generous, benevolent, selfless, and capable of deep reflection.
New starts?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Are You Sitting Comfortably? to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.