The White Side: Entitlement Run Amuck

Some whites, well actually quite a few of them, believe they know more about the racism I've encountered than I do! To my face they dispute the accuracy of MY experiences. I've run into this a lot since I wrote a memoir about coming of age in Indianapolis back in the day when being racist was standard operating procedure. In the book I describe the daily humiliating incidences of racism I had to live with, and tell how they shaped my outlook. I grew up during the 1940s and 1950s BEFORE the Civil Rights Movement displayed racism in action on the nightly news. The horror of attack dogs chasing children and city water hoses nailing demonstrators to the side of buildings made some whites think that maybe racism was not such a good thing after all.

I spoke to a book club whose members were all white and had read my book. One woman said she was "about my age" and had also grown up in Indianapolis. She belligerently insisted that she had never witnessed any of the racism I wrote about. I responded, "That doesn't surprise me since you're not black." But, she persisted, "There was a black family in our neighborhood and everybody was nice to them." That was her "side" of my story; "proof" that what I had experienced was not true!

I wrote about what happened in the newly desegregated high school I attended. Other blacks who attended the same school while I was there told me about similar, though not identical incidents. (Though a few were actually identical.) Some schoolmates encountered less racial hostility than I, some more or about the same. But, not one of them said, "I don't believe you because nothing like that ever happened to me." There were also white former classmates who didn't deny my experience, but commiserated with me because they had no idea at the time what the black students were going through.

One white male classmate, however (who went on to become a well-connected, prosperous lawyer), was offended by what I wrote. He never saw any of the things I wrote about and couldn't understand how I, who was reared with basically the same values he was, could have come up with such skewed ideas about our high school and home town. I repeat: he's a white male; I'm a black female, both of us born in the 1930s.

Someone I once worked for emailed me that reading my book "creates an immediate urge to tell...your own story, or your side, or whatever." Of course he should tell his own story, but I wrote back that, "There are no sides in my story. It is an account of how I experienced the events of my life at that time." He also wrote that he would send me something to read that, "You probably will not like it...is somewhat autobiographical so I may get back at you." I don't understand his need to "get back" at me, but I asked him to send it. "It will either confirm or contradict my expectations and I welcome either outcome."

It occurred to me that the people who want to tell their "side" are submerged in their whiteness and the belief that their view of the world is not just the right one, but the ONLY one. It's impossible for them to grasp that an experience that doesn't match theirs can be valid.

Either that or they're hopelessly racist.