On Being the White Racial Minority, White Privilege, and The Fight for Racial Equality
By: Angela Meredith
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Racial Justice, Racism, White Privilege, Social Change

Photo by Sunyu on Unsplash

My Story

When I was fourteen, my military family moved from Bremerton, Washington to Hagåtña, Guam. I went from a whitewashed A-rated middle school with more resources and extracurricular activities than you can shake an expired Bernie Sander’s sign at to a high school in the South Pacific that looked like it was plucked out of the Oakland hood and had the bloody gang fights to prove it.

In addition to the dramatic change in geography and academic resources, I was suddenly a racial minority. No amount of agonizing over my perfectly coordinated mainland wardrobe bought from the mall in a manicured suburban neighborhood could fix the fact that I was one of a few white girls in a sea of islander brown.

On my first day at Oceanview High School, where you could see the gorgeous crystal blue Pacific Ocean from the front door, where chickens trotted free in the streets, and some of the homes in the surrounding neighborhood looked like uninhabitable shacks, I found my way to a portable at the edge of campus. The portable was near a fenced off area that held — and by held I mean held captive behind an enormous chain linked fence — the “troubled” kids.

I still don’t know why those kids were in the cage, but it was a cage, and when I walked by, they jumped at the chain link, shaking and climbing it as they taunted me. Looking back, my best guess is that they had a juvenile record or behavioral issue and had to be kept separate from the rest of the kids. They seemed to know that the scene was scary for a freshman white girl and did their best to make it even more so by catcalling me as they rattled the metal that separated us.

In the portable, I took my seat for Guam history, which is a topic worthy of study. It’s just that I was a teenager who was, first of all, terrified of high school and also terrified of this place that was the polar opposite of where I’d come from. Behind me sat a local boy who, I realize in retrospect, immediately identified me as fresh meat.

One thing you need to know about Guam is that the culture is incredibility laid back. It’s a boundary blurring, shoe less, shirtless, welcome (everyone!) to my home and my fiesta, kind of laid back. I didn’t know this on my first day, so while I was trying keep a low profile as I dealt with my fear and uncertainty, my reticent silence made me seem unfriendly, decidedly not laid back, and stuck up, which is one of the all-time worse things you can be as a new kid in high school no matter where you live. That doesn’t justify that, as soon as I took my seat, the boy behind me leaned forward, got my attention and then, with his thick islander accent, casually asked, “Want to smell my balls?”

A question to which I mustered the most profane response a nice middle-class girl like myself could think of: “Fuck you,” I said.

Then, I turned around, trying my best to keep my fear and horror concealed behind those two words, which I had learned years earlier from my oldest brother and his friends and had only previously used to sound edgy or to garner both the attention and shock of other kids my age back in the states, most of whom didn’t drop f-bombs or any cuss words for that matter.

That moment in Guam history began a three-year tortureship (a relationship that’s torturous) in which this boy would tease and torment me at his will. Soon after the “smell my balls” incident, he placed a freshly dead cockroach the size of a small rodent on my desk, earning him the nickname Roach forever after.

It turns out Roach wasn’t the only kid in school who liked to pick on white girls. It also turns out that Roach wasn’t the only person on the island who liked to target, harass, and assault white people. It was a common occurrence, as I would soon learn.

My second to oldest brother, like many of the white boys and men on the island, was jumped and badly beaten by a group of local guys one evening. For all doctor’s visits or medical care, we went to the Naval hospital where I recall seeing young white enlisted men limping through the halls as they recovered from having been beaten by a group of locals.

We were howlies. White people. The colonizer. And some locals, though certainly not all, really didn’t like us.

And I don’t blame them. I didn’t blame them then, and I don’t blame them now. I can see how I represented the privileged colonizer and, knowing the history of the island — how the indigenous people of Guam, known as Chamorros, were raped, murdered, dominated, and assimilated like so many other native cultures, I can understand why there would be a powerful resistance towards, even a hatred for, anyone who came down that line.

I don’t encourage hatred or violence but, in this case, I do see where it comes from. I can empathize with the generational trauma and pain. I also realize that Guam remains a disenfranchised territory of the United States that doesn’t have adequate representation in the Federal Government and that the Guamanian people, while legally American citizens, do not have equal protections under the laws of this county.

The people of Guam have many good reasons to be radically pissed off at white people, especially those of us who saunter over from the mainland with little knowledge, sensitivity, or understanding for their heritage, history, culture, and struggles.

It’s also true that I was just a kid from a military family being carted from Navy base to Navy base and stuck in whatever school was closest to wherever we happened to land. There was no apparent thought given by my parents to what that would be like for myself or my brothers, and no real care or attention given when it resulted in one of us being relentlessly harassed and the other being beaten until he bled.

While living on Guam, I experienced regular racist treatment and I saw other white people experience the same. I don’t know what it was like for Black people. I expect they experienced racist attacks on the island, too. I do know that for us howlies, experiencing racism was a common and accepted part of living on the island. While it bothered me, and I found it frustrating to be treated differently because I was white, I was all along aware that my privilege was greater than any discrimination they could dish out.

While on the island, I recognized that my status as a minority was temporary. Our tour of duty would end, and I would go back to the states where I would — once again — be part of the racial majority. At best, my race experience was like visiting an escape room. Actually, it was easier than that because I was never locked in and I didn’t have to do a damn thing to get out. There was a simple and easy way out all along — which I didn’t have to lift a finger to orchestrate. All I had to do was make the best of it on a beautiful tropical island until our tour was over.

Before Washington State and Guam, I lived in Florida, which is my home state and where, during my early childhood, racism was evident all around me. My white, conservative, and southern extended family freely used racial epithets and espoused their discrimination and feelings of reverse racism. As a young child, I remember feeling that their racist views and words weren’t “nice.” That was the vocabulary I had at the time. It just seemed “mean” and “unfair” to treat people that way, and I didn’t like it. That feeling grew as I did and by the time I was a teen, I was decidedly anti-racist, though I still had racial biases, some of which I’ve reckoned with and others that I’m I still reckoning with.

I didn’t need Guam to teach me that racism is wrong, but I did need the island to teach me that even when I’m the white minority, I’m still privileged and that there is no experience for me that will be comparable to the experience of being a Black person in the United States.

At best, my experience as the racial minority only served to highlight how privileged I am.

For example, even though racism against white people was rampant on the island, I became the popular captain of the cheerleading team. I was invited to parties and formals and had a wide circle of friends that included other Navy kids and lots of locals. I wasn’t universally excluded or condemned for my race, though there was a limit to how much I was included and accepted. Throughout most of my last year on the island, which was my junior year of high school, I received menacing crank calls at home from a boy I didn’t know, but who knew me. As a racial minority, I stood out from the crowd and that difference drew attention that could quickly become threatening.

This is also true for Black people in the United States. The big difference here is that I was never at risk of being shot dead in the street because I was white.

Racism Isn’t Relative

There are lots of things that we can talk about as relative. For example, trauma is relative. If you have a terrible car accident that leaves you feeling traumatized and fearful of driving and I have a terrible childhood that leaves me traumatized and fearful of relationships, we couldn’t say with any fairness which is the worse trauma. Perhaps your accident was a brief experience with a lasting impact and my childhood was, of course, longer, but we could both be walking around with about the same amount of trauma.

Racism is also traumatic, and the trauma associated with it can be relative. My experience as a howlie on Guam was traumatic. The regular harassment and threats wore on me and left a wound that I had to attend to later in life. I no longer feel traumatized by those experiences but, perhaps, someone who suffered more, like my brother who was beaten, may still live with that trauma, which could be comparable to the trauma of someone of another race who also suffered a violent attack because of their skin color. Their feelings of trauma could be equal even if the context is different.

What isn’t relative is the racism itself. This is because the context and histories are not the same. As white people, the racism my brothers and I experienced didn’t happen in the context of 400 years of our race being subjected to wide ranging and pervasive inequalities. It happened because we were representative of the colonizers.

Also, we were still part of a social group that had power. We were children of a Naval Officer and that afforded us some additional privilege and protection. Even if we were treated terribly by the locals, we had recourse and we had a way off the island and a place to go when we left.

Our ancestors were not stolen from their homelands and enslaved by the people of Guam. Our culture and our freedoms had not been systematically undermined, pillaged, and destroyed by the people of Guam. We were in no way at a disadvantage to the people of Guam. We may have been a racial minority, but we still had power, privilege, and agency.

This is also true for white people in the United States who claim, “reverse racism.” Maybe some Black people don’t like you because you’re white. Okay. Big deal. You’re not at a universal disadvantage to that person because they don’t like you. In fact, no amount of their disliking you can give them an advantage because systemic racism makes it so that you’re privileged no matter what you do.

Unless we’re able to magically reverse the entire racial history of the United States, there will never be reverse racism in this country.

There is no amount of racial discrimination that a white person will experience today that will be comparable to the racial discrimination that a Black person experiences. We will never understand what it’s like to experience anti-black racism because we will never be Black. The best we can do is own our whiteness and all that it means and get honest with ourselves and others about our privilege, and our limitations in understanding what life would be like without that privilege.

I shared my story of racism as a white person above and I explained how throughout it all I was still the race with more privilege and power, and I knew it. I also stated how I am still reckoning with my own racial biases but, the thing is, I don’t know exactly what they are. I just know that I’ve been enculturated to have them and that I’ve come up against biases in the past that I had to confront and I feel that the most responsible thing I can do at this point is to assume that I have more biases, be on the lookout for them, and be prepared to confront them when they arise.

A previous bias of mine was fear of Black men who were strangers to me, not because I didn’t know them, but only because they were Black. This came from growing up in a culture that portrays Black men as the dangerous criminal and from being around a racist family that villainized Black people.

This bias came fully to my attention when I was a college English instructor with many Black men as students, one of which accused me of being racist.

I’d been having problems with this student making inappropriate comments about my appearance, using hate language about homosexuality, and bringing inappropriate material of a sexual nature to class. He vacillated between trying to get my attention with flattery and trying to get it by being obscene. Neither strategy was getting him what he wanted, which I concluded was to challenge and usurp my classroom authority. The way I saw it, he couldn’t accept a woman as an authority figure and did whatever he could to upset that dynamic. I came down hard on him more than once with verbal corrections during class before taking a path of least resistance and basically ignoring his behavior.

Near the end of the semester, he came to my office and told me he thought I was treating him differently because I was racist. The truth is, I was treating him differently. I was treating him differently because he was acting differently than any other student and that behavior required different treatment. Even though I knew that to be true and I felt he was, yet again, trying to gain control and win my attention, I took his words to heart. Could racial bias be playing a part here, I wondered?

I loved teaching. I loved my students, and I loved watching them succeed, so if I was unconsciously holding them back or being harder on them because of their race, I wanted to correct course. I took some time to reflect and look objectively at my interactions with my students, my expectations, and my grading practices, and I didn’t find any evidence of racial bias. I did, however, notice that I tended to feel fearful of Black men around campus and in my neighborhood unless I knew who they were. I thank that incredibly difficult student for forcing me to take a hard look at myself and helping me to reaffirm my commitment as a teacher and to see and eliminate this bias.

One of the things I’ve learned recently is that Black men try to appear non-threatening because they know that they’re seen as a threat. After learning that, I reflected on several interactions I’ve recently had with Black men and how these men had been exceptionally friendly. So friendly that I walked away from crossing paths with them feeling uplifted by their kindness. It then occurred to me that they’d treated me that way to deflect my fear. Thing is, I wasn’t afraid of them. I’d eliminated that bias. Learning that Black men feel they must go out of their way to make people feel comfortable around them broke my heart, and then it pissed me off.

Dear White People

We have a lot of work to do.

The recent racial uprising in the United States in response to the murder of George Floyd and other Black people has created a public discourse that’s brought to light numerous facts about the Black experience and Black history that I knew nothing about.

That Black men sometimes go out of their way to appear non-threatening is one, but there are many others. Like how Black people refer to summer as hunting season because it’s when the actual hunting seasons are over and white people are more likely to come after them. The Tulsa massacre, the Philadelphia bombing, and how Black people are afraid to run or walk for exercise in areas where they feel they’ll seem out of place, are the facts that have struck me the hardest.

As I mentioned above, learning these facts broke my heart and then they pissed me off.

Part of my anger is directed at myself. I’m angry with myself for not knowing more and doing better. How can I be an ally if I don’t know how unsafe Black people feel, and in what circumstances they feel the most vulnerable and at risk? How can I be an ally if I don’t fully understand Black history and the Black experience? How did I miss so much?

Then, I’m angry at white male patriarchy and every person, system, structure, and organization that supports and perpetuates the most deadly and dangerous construct in the history of humankind. I’m angry that I’ve been taught and fed a whitewashed version of our history even as I saw myself as a progressive, feminist person who has long held the cause of EQUALITY FOR ALL PEOPLE in her heart and brought that passion to every vote and political action that I’ve taken since I was old enough to take such action. And what has any of that amounted to? What difference have I made for anyone, or for this world that I’ll leave to my children?

My children. This is when I get really fucking angry. Because, I’m a mother. I’m a mother to sons: white sons who are safe and alive while there are Black sons who are not. And those Black sons and Black daughters, those babies that have been harmed and murdered, they call forth a grief storm from my heart for all of the children who have been lost and the mothers who have lost them.

What’s left is the low and building growl of maternal rage.

This is the most powerful rage known to humankind. It has guarded and enabled our evolution from the start. Without ferociously instinctive and protective mothers, our race would not have survived. This rage is like the claw of the bear, the fang of the tiger, and the piercing bite of the wolf, and it does not quit. You cannot quiet the heart of a mother and you cannot temper her rage when you’ve crossed her child.

It’s been said that all mothers were summoned when George Floyd called for his mama, and I believe this is true. Now that we’ve been summoned, there’s no turning back. The brunt of what lies ahead falls on white mothers like me. It’s our turn.

Racism is our issue and it’s our job to address it in every insidious nook and cranny. Each of us has a responsibility to become an immovable force against systemic racism in our communities. This work begins within. We must be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about our experiences with racism, our biases, and our fears.

I’m sharing my experiences and biases as an example and conversation starter for other white people. We’ve all had experiences with race and racism, and we need to keep talking about them so that we can help each other see our own blind spots and then fill those spots in with support and education. It’s uncomfortable, for sure.

In writing this, I’m concerned I’ve mis-stepped or gotten something embarrassingly wrong about race and racism, but I’m sharing because I want to learn and I want to help others learn, and I need to channel my maternal rage into something productive.

That’s what mothers do. We grieve, then we get angry, and then we turn that grief and anger into action that has the potential to carry the entire human race forward.

You don’t have to be a mother to be with me in this. You simply need to be willing to stand against anti-black racism. Here’s how:

Get real about your history and experience with racism. Have you experienced anti-white racist treatment? If so, now is a good time to understand how it functioned. I laid out my experience as an example. Once we see very clearly that our white experiences are not comparable to Black experiences, we can fully inhabit our role as an ally. What are your racial biases as you understand them today, and what’s your plan for dealing with the ones you’re not yet aware of? We all have racial biases. There’s no debate about that. Our task is to understand what they are and then how to eliminate them. Take action. This can be donating, speaking up, volunteering, or other community involvement, but it’s also needed in your immediate relationships, family, and community. It’s needed in your workplace and in your social circles. White people need to keep speaking up against anti-black racism in all of these spaces even when it jeopardizes our connections. Vote for candidates that will take a stand for racial equality. We must fill every politically appointed seat with citizens who demonstrate unwavering support for equality for all people.

So, there you have it: My story with white racism, my take on why racism isn’t relative, and my call to white people to step up and do the work that only we can do. As I close out this piece, I notice that my maternal rage has been replaced by something that’s more enduring and even more powerful, and that is a deep and abiding love for humanity.

It’s been said that only love can conquer hate, and I believe that’s true. Racism, however, isn’t just about hate. That’s too simplistic. Racism is about power and control, as are all forms of abuse and oppression. Love conquers hate. Mindful, intelligent, and consistent action conquers power and control. We need all of these things, we need them now, and we need them on a grand scale. The only question left to answer is, how are you going to help?

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