A friend of mine, Jed Emerson, is writing a series of posts titled Antidote to Autocracy. I have been writing a post on Whiteness and Autocracy as a response or an adjacency to his work. However, two posts happened. I started by writing one that I now call Whiteness and Autocracy. But as I wrote that piece, it felt necessary to preface it with another post which is a personal history of how I came to understand my white body in the context of all bodies.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

My understandings of race and my racist ideas are jumbled. I grew up in Sacramento, CA in the 1970’s. We had a big house. I spent my summers being a brat at the country club pool and during the school year my identity was mostly around being an athlete: swimming, water polo and skiing. I can remember three kids who were Black. The only Black kids in our big suburban High School. I remember their names. They were our Black friends. One of these young men was going to be the first black Olympian in swimming. I can still remember all that black skin. He decided instead to play football.

I lived in nearly exclusively white communities from birth through college and until I joined the Peace Corps in 1990. I joined the Peace Corps because I never had any real goals. I think the way I thought about my future was more like guesses; guesses about what I thought I would be. I had very little anxiety about it. I joined the Peace Corps simply because I needed to do something that was hard. Something that was not white.

It is of course impossible and absurd for a cishet white man to do something that is not white but I think it is a windmill worth tilting at. When I was a kid my dad and I would drive from Sacramento to San Felipe in Baja Mexico and spend a week in a camper on the beach. He would drink and I would wander the beach. On one trip in the early 80’s I was reading The Stranger, which I am sure shaped my memories of the experience. I met another kid my age and we couldn’t really talk to each other but we wandered together a lot that week. I remember that whole experience like it was its own book; as if it were a story that didn’t happen but is recorded forever in the ether of the pre-Internet before times. What maybe it feels like to belong to an oral history culture? I remember meeting a very dark man who was drunk in a bar in Puertocitos. He grasped my hand in his, turned them over. “Blanco”, he said. Turned them over, “Negro”. I am unclear if that actually happened as I remember it but it is a moment of sense-making that my adolescent brain burned into my consciousness as if it did.

I think of my dad as serendipitously alcoholic. Which is also absurd but this is my story.

I have had significant trauma in my life and I have had nearly enough resources, internal and external, to deal with it. I don’t like to spend time with people who have not been traumatized or who have not had to internalize the trauma that happens to or around them. I don’t like people who are emotionally healthy. I think I think that they are lying. Yes, also absurd. I have always almost liked the phrase, ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’. Now I almost like this phrase better; ‘what doesn’t kill us twists us into new and deeper shapes’. I’m not sure yet what ‘deeper’ means but I know it brings us together, beneath the veneer.

I think it is true that I don’t like white people. I also think it’s not true because I have white friends. Am I allowed to not like white people? Am I not self-loathing? I am white. I have always wanted to be a race-traitor, I like the idea but when I look at the tactics it seems really impractical. Mostly because I’m white.

The Peace Corps was the first time in my life that I was the other. I was stationed, I think that’s the right word; I was stationed on Woleai in the State of Yap in the nation of Micronesia. Woleai is an island, ¾’s of a square mile, one island in a chain of four arranged in an atoll around the mouth of a sunken volcano in the middle of the Pacific ocean. I was, of course, culturally other but in my mind I was prepared for that. I thought I was crossing a bridge made of language, clothes, food, music, dance and spirituality. What I didn’t understand about culture is that those things are not appurtenances or components of culture, they are something more like evidence of culture. I wore the clothes. I learned to fish. But it wasn’t until I understood that the land beneath my feet was an aberration; it wasn’t until I understood that my experiences and my resulting cultural understandings were not useful to understand my new context; it wasn’t until then that I understood what culture was. Land to stand is what my mind told my body I required to exist and land was an aberration. The ocean was intended. Real reality was an aquatic supremacy. I came to understand that there could be boundaries between my reality and a world that is or is supposed to be.