The Veil of Privilege
I lift the brittle oak leaf from where I had pressed it, pull it from the wax paper that had held it since the autumn of my father’s death. Its destination was an ancestral altar still under construction. Near the leaf would sit the palm-sized diary of a paternal great-great-grandfather. My grandmother’s translation of its Swedish script reads in part, In 1892 I got “America fever”. . . . my wife and I decided that I would go first and the family (with six children) would come later . . . . I sailed for America June 5, 1892, destination Mankato, Minnesota, Blue Earth County. . . . I realized that I had come to the Land of the Free but that this “new freedom” was much different than the “freedom” I had before. Now it was a question of “selling my skin” for what I could get. . . . I sold myself for $1.50 a day to work at the cemetery . . . . He then describes the future that arrived for himself and his family. The spiral of life in the new world erased much of the story of what had been left behind.
I’m in the middle of a course called When We Were White: Ancestral Recovery for Collective Liberation, offered by White Awake. The course description explains that “White Awake addresses the particularities of white racial socialization with tools and resources that prioritize spiritual practice, emotional intelligence, compassion, and curiosity alongside historical analysis and intellectual rigor.” I approached the course with a “white and woke” arrogance that assured me I would hear what I already knew. With my memoir publication close at hand, I needed a refresher. My childhood in the segregated South of the 1960s had taught me plenty about systemic racism, but only in retrospect. Once a solid education found me, my politics had veered toward equity, and I understood that our society was in dire need of a shake-up, from power structures to educational curricula to health care to what neighborhoods look like, how they function, whom they serve. I’d directed all kinds of attention to social justice as a teacher, designing units inclusive of the underrepresented. I’d held protest signs at rallies for human rights, women’s rights, environmental rights, and marched because Black Lives Matter. The surnames of authors in my personal library hailed from all over the globe, from all shades of the rainbow. Yes, I was just needing a brush-up on the most current lingo, the memes of the moment, to assure my readership that wokeness was what I was all about.
That was before the first three weeks of the White Awake course. The readings, videos, and guest speakers sidestepped summaries of the familiar and beckoned me into the deep forest of my own family line, of what the lives of my ancestors had looked like, how they had been pawns in the plans of the powerful. Divide and control. Make whiteness an attribute that splits the servant class in two. A blizzard of history froze me in my tracks. Wait? This course isn’t about how woke I am? What then?
I had long believed that if anything, peace begins with me. I began to imagine a circle of elders from my family line. What could we learn from each other? What stories could be quilted from the Scandinavian geography of past generations, the agricultural failures and foodless futures, the journeys across the Atlantic, the quick assimilation of Swedish newcomers ripe for absorption, the children born on foreign soil, the severing from the homeland, its latitudes, darkness, and light. And the entry into a system where already the stage was set for my family tree to be veiled in white privilege.
As I place the flattened oak leaf on my ancestral altar, my heart squeezes at the thought of myself as a source of ancestral healing. What has been lost? What has been damaged? What can be acknowledged? Forgiven? Repaired? Am I ready to confront all the ways in which my family had been elevated when they became white? I quieted to ponder the power of an idea and the necessity of awaking to its harm.
