Write. Just write.

I couldn't write yesterday. I was paralyzed by my lack of plan. There's no outline that I'm following except for a bunch of random notes I've been writing in my journal, and even that has no rhyme or reason to it. In contrast, the writing that I do in all the other aspects of my life seems to start with an outline. It's part of the writing process that I teach my kids at school. Start with brainstorming and thinking about how you're going to structure your ideas. The chapters that I am writing for my masters research project all started with outlines. That's not really what's happening here. My intention is to write about what's on my mind, what I learned that day, and what I still want to learn.

So in the midst of being stuck yesterday, wondering what to write about first, I found myself circling back to the title of this blog: Swirling in Whiteness. Before I became so acutely aware of the construct of race (yes, people made this up so someone could be better than someone else, so someone could oppress someone else), I didn't think much about what it means to be white. I just went about my days being white and benefiting from all the things that white people benefit from. Oblivion is bliss? 

During the foundations course I took for my MEd, we talked about this very thing. I was tricked into answering a very loaded question: Who here thinks race is biological? I wasn't thinking about the fact that race is a social construct, which I knew. I was thinking about the fact that (white) people have historically  looked at people who look different than they do and placed them in a category. And the traits that have made it possible to categorize people (read: skin colour) are passed down from their ancestors. That's biology, right? Anyway, this is an example of how underdeveloped my social justice radar was back in those days. I'm still working on it. I probably always will be. That's why I'm here. 

I am currently reading a fantastic book of essays by Eula Biss called Notes From No Man's Land. In the book she's talking about race from the lens of a white person, so it makes me feel quite at home. We seem to understand each other well. I find her talking about experiences she has had that are in parallel with experiences I've had. For example she talks about walking through her life as a white person feeling like she had no race. From here lens everyone else around her who wasn't white had a box to check off on the census form but someone who was white had no category. I remember feeling like this when I was young. There were racialized people around me that were considered "other" in whatever way. I was always kind and respectful, but their categories were always apparent to me. Mine wasn't. 

I know now that if we are going to talk about race and colour, which we should because it exists, we need to include white as a category. And we need to unpack what it means to be white so we can fully understand the depth and breadth of what it means to be part of the historically dominant race. White supremacy, in all its overt and covert forms, scares the daylights out of me. It makes me very uncomfortable to think that I might be lumped into a category with the KKK, but I am part of that because I am white. I would never participate in the overt racism that the extremists do, but the part that makes my head swim is learning about all the covert examples of racism I have participated in without even realizing that's what it was. This is why I'm here. I'm determined to understand it. I'm determined to call it out. I'm sitting with the uncomfortable feelings because that's how I'm going to learn, regardless of how much it makes my head spin. And like I said in my last post, I want to be able to help others with this. But first I have to work through it myself.