Circumstance of Birth: Life on the Color Line

Abstract

The article describes how my privileged social-location in a White, middle-class suburb shaped my interest in unpacking White privilege and White blindness. I define and elaborate on the implications of one’s “social location.” In unpacking the influences from, and implications of, my social location, I describe the development of a clinical attitude that aims at inclusive dialogue, with special emphasis on humility, dignity, and emotional courage.

Notes

¹ Although Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) was writing about the arts and literature, I think about all of the Black construction workers we witnessed building the houses in our new neighborhoods, and of the fact that although I grew up next door to the White House, I only learned in my adulthood that it was built using slave labor.

² A wonderful exploration of suburbanization and the social construction of Whiteness can be found in anthropologist Karen Brodkin (1998), How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America. A parallel story that is under-represented in socio-historical studies but is intimately related to the social construction of Whiteness, is the story of the massive internal migration of Blacks from the south in the years 1917–1975. One moving, well-told version can be found in The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), by journalist Isabelle Wilkerson.

³ Many years later, in 1983, when my (male) life partner suggested we consider getting married, I said I did not want to do so as long as my gay friends and colleagues could not do the same.

⁴ In what is probably a good example of what Kimberly Leary (2012) calls, an “adaptive challenge,” in which different stakeholders may hold irreconcilably different meanings regarding a shared situation, I have struggled over the decision to use the racialized color terms, “Black” and “White.” The term, “African-American” is uncomfortable for me, at least in my position as a White person concerned with “White privilege.” When discussions about race occur, I often see “African-American” and “White” juxtaposed as though they are parallel terms. But the correct juxtaposition should be, “European-American.” European immigrants generally drop the hyphen within a few generations because it is easier for them to be incorporated into American consciousness as “Americans.” (see footnote 6). Blacks live doubly. They are quintessentially American, having been here—involuntarily, of course—from the start. And yet they are never fully “American;” they remain outsiders (again, footnote 6). Some Blacks also want to reclaim their stolen heritage by using the term, “African-American.” I prefer the terms, “White” and “Black,” because, aside from ethnic heritage, class etc., racialized skin color DOES matter in this country. Ask any Black person who tries to catch a cab northward from mid-town Manhattan.

⁵ Perhaps one of the most insidious implications of this non-seeing—the transparency—is offered by social historian Grace Elizabeth Hale, in an intriguing book, Making Whiteness (1998):

Central to the meaning of Whiteness is a broad, collective American silence. The denial of White as a racial identity, the denial that Whiteness has a history, allows the quiet, the blankness to stand as the norm. This erasure enables many to fuse their absence of racial being with the nation, making Whiteness their unspoken but deepest sense of what it means to be an American (xi). [p. 32]

⁶ In a recently published book, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Metzl, 2010), the author provides a telling example of a racist narrow-lens, decontextualizing formulation: “In the 1850s, American psychiatrists believed that African American slaves who ran away from their White masters did so because of a mental illness called drapetomania” (p. ix).

⁷ Later, during the Freedom Rides, he was almost killed. That did not dissuade him from participating in marches, such as the one on the Edmund Pettis bridge. Nor did he stray from his ethic of nonviolence.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynne Jacobs

Lynne Jacobs, Ph.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, and co-founder of the Pacific Gestalt Institute.