How a Racial Wound Motivated Me to Become a Racial Ally
By: Helen W. Mallon
Tags: Implicit Bias, Equality, History, Racism

I grew up in an integrated section of Philadelphia, yet like many other white families in our neighborhood, we had a Black cleaning lady. Her name was Frances. Unlike my tense, busy mother, Frances didn’t deny me her affection. One morning, I cuddled in her lap in the living room while my mother was busy in the kitchen. The white uniform Frances wore was soft, like her, and it had a crinkly texture I loved. Her smell was earthy and tinged with furniture polish.

My arm rested on hers, and I gasped aloud. I’d had a revelation.

“My arm is pink! And yours is brown!”

Immediately, Frances gave me a little slap on the cheek. She stood up, and I slid off her lap. “Don’t be fresh,” she scolded.

I began to cry. She comforted me, and then she walked away on her silent, white maid’s shoes. The cheek-tap hadn’t hurt, and I knew she loved me, but the shock of being scolded for an innocent revelation both stung and confused me.

As she left, I came to a conclusion that shapes me to this day, although in an adult guise. “I guess I can never sit in her lap again,” I concluded sadly.

I never did.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

As James Baldwin points out in the above quote, the history of race in America was a part of me even before my encounter with Frances. And as I grew up, racial integration increased around me. My Quaker school began its Community Scholars Program, admitting new students of color from the surrounding urban neighborhood. In the Quaker meeting my family attended I learned about the civil rights movement, about Quaker heroes who had struggled against slavery. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated when I was in sixth grade. My teacher put his portrait on the wall, but it was the first time I‘d seen an image of Dr. King’s face. I stared at it in sad fascination. How could someone so calm and handsome be dead? I felt the winds of change coming, inevitably, but I also felt insulated from potential violence: By being a kid, by the world of privilege I inhabited.

Only much later did I begin to learn bigger lessons than the one Frances had unknowingly taught me: It’s best not to mention race at all. Now I think I understand why she reacted as she did. My mother must have overheard us talking about skin color, and Frances could have lost her job if she had been truthful about the real meaning of Blackness in America.

In 1897, the Black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois introduced the enduring concept of double-consciousness to the mostly white readership of The Atlantic Monthly. Du Bois describes the white world as one “which yields him [the Black man] no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” Black folks were not — and often, still are not — allowed in predominantly white spaces to define themselves on their own terms.

He writes, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Double-consciousness has demanded a tremendous expenditure of energy from generations of Black Americans who still navigate it, prevailing by “dogged strength.” If the people in power define you as essentially lacking in intelligence, more prone to violence and sexual misconduct, and fit only to be ruled over, an inner battle is required not to buy into that self-hating assessment.

Du Bois begins his essay with a childhood memory, describing the moment he learned he was “a problem.” He called it “the day the shadow swept across me” — when he discovered what it meant to be Black in white America. As a young boy in late-nineteenth century New England, he and his white school mates exchanged beautifully printed visiting cards. It was the era’s equivalent of friending on Facebook, only far more intimate in such a small community. To accept a visiting card meant that you accepted the giver’s friendship on their own terms, and that in turn you’d be welcome by their family. When a newcomer to the group, “a tall girl,” refused his card “peremptorily, with a glance,” Du Bois writes, it “dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

He goes on, “I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the world I longed for, and all its dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, — some way.”

The “veil” Du Bois describes is the source of double-consciousness, and it was hung in place by white people. This veil is translucent enough that those on both sides can make out the presence of those on the other side, see their general outline and activities, but it’s opaque enough that from the white side — the only side I have experienced — we have to extrapolate from our own store of assumptions, biases, and prior experience what life might be like on the other side.

Two groups divided by a veil: this doesn’t mean that white people are the harmonious Yin to black Yang. In his essay, “The Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin put it clearly: “In this long battle, a battle by no means finished…the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.”