Make My Lawn Green Again

My lawn sprinkler broke; it used to oscillate. Now it seems there has been some mechanical malfunction. Maybe it is electrical. It is a dysfunction of some power. The sprinkler is fixed in one direction, spraying water wildly, unwieldly—at erratic tempos, as sprinklers do—on one section of the grass. Only one section of the grass ever gets watered. After a couple weeks, this one section grass is lush and green; the rest of the lawn brown and brittle. And the one section may be lush and green for now, but if I keep letting it take all the water, it will get swampy. Fungus will start to grow, and once fungus is allowed its genesis, it germinates quickly. The decay, however, occurs more gradually -- its dying is barely noticeable compared to the rapid dehydration of the rest of the lawn. Once I see it happening, it may already be too late.

I can think of a few ways to respond to the problem:

One: Do nothing. Ignore the dying grass. Let it die. That would demand little of me. The lawn, though, would look terrible, and I care deeply about my lawn. I take great pride in it. I like to think it is the finest lawn on the block. I do not want any of it looking terrible, because then the whole thing does. Plus, I'd only have one section to enjoy the way lawns are meant to be enjoyed (and for how much longer?). In the end, I wouldn't be able to grow as much stuff on my lawn -- flowers, bushes, and all that -- and no one would want to come over to play with me.

Two: I almost wish had never entered my consciousness because of the work it requires. It calls for my going out there every morning with a hose and hand-watering the rest of the grass. Put my thumb over the mouth and spray the sections of lawn the broken sprinkler doesn't reach. (Or should I water the entirety of the lawn with an equal amount of water -- both the arid and the over-watered? Water with the assumption that all the blades matter. Does that seem right?) Option two would offer a solution, and likely one with efficacy. It would be necessary if I wanted a healthy lawn. For the time being, this response might serve best, so the dying grass can make it through the summer, and maybe even get a chance to flourish.

Three: Fix the sprinkler. Excavate the lawn and see what is going on underneath. Maybe it was broken when I installed it? Maybe it works how it was always meant to work? Perhaps I forgot to read the specs upon installation. Either way, I must find out what is causing the power to fixate. Repair the malfunction, or rip it all out and get a new sprinkler. This response would be radical—literally, a change from the roots. Neither section of the grass would die, neither from drowning nor dehydration. The lawn would be so pretty then—lush and green across its breadth—and with a new a new sprinkler, a lot trouble is avoided going forward.

There is one thing I nearly forgot: The lawn never actually belonged to me. The lawn itself has never been mine. How foolish of me not to have mentioned. Only the sprinkler is mine. I thought I'd save myself some time, so I put in a sprinkler. Then it broke on me. Or maybe it was broken when I installed it? Or maybe it works the way it was always supposed to work? Perhaps I just failed to read the specs upon installation. Regardless, now I have a dog shit lawn, and it is my responsibility to address the problem. It is my responsibility to fix that broken sprinkler. I must in order to make my lawn green again.

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In the responses to the violence this week, we have been reminded of something: Many of us (white people) still deny the existence of racial injustice. We do not believe that black people are systematically disadvantaged, oppressed, nor that biases and discrimination lead to their deaths at disproportionate rates. I see folks spewing similar sounds of denial all over (Facebook, primarily), in direct response to the tragedies in Baton Rouge, Minnesota, even Dallas. It's hard to think of a more visceral form of testimony to reality than what's been documented this week, yet it has not been enough.

And I get it. Honestly, I believe many of them. I believe they believe what they say they believe. Some don't want to understand, but many others simply don't have a reason to.

It is possible for us to live a life in which the reality of black people in America never enters ours. Or what is more typical, and maybe the more salient situation, is it never affects our reality in a way that is discernible. So maybe white people are not always morally incapacitated, as I often prefer to think, and maybe not everyone needs to be shamed (Though maybe some are and do. I can say that now because if you've read up to this point, I am 100% certain you are not part of that some.) Maybe some white people just have not arrived at the required frame of reference. Maybe we have resisted the push toward an uncomfortable reality, or maybe others have not pushed hard enough. I think this may be the case because I've spent most of my life with that some, in that world.

I am not looking to make pardons. To deny existence of another reality outright -- as simple matter of fact -- is a problem. It is a problem that cannot be accepted. It is a problem with fatal consequences. People are fighting for their lives, and still they are dying. Those who survive are fighting the guilt of outliving the dead, as well as the fear of joining them (this is not to mention the many still who are thriving, continuing to hope with love, in a demonstration of resiliency we could do better to celebrate. Myself included, as is clear from my limiting the celebration to a parenthetical.).

White people created the system; now we must work to fix it. And we are being given the solution. Per usual, the hard work is being done for us. All we have to do is listen. Folks are saying they are experiencing something, and then they are saying exactly what they need for that experience to change. There really is no argument to be had about it. (I know this, and still I find myself trying to argue, and what's stranger is I find myself confused when arguing only leads to greater dissonance.)

To listen, though, can be scary. Accepting the reality is work. It demands deconstruction -- a letting go of what I know -- and that is tiring. It means not only pointing a finger at a cop, but noticing how the decision of a cop is nothing but the culmination of a more pervasive systemic dysfunction, and noticing how I contribute to the system. It demands pointing a finger at myself, and that is trying.

There are a lot of things telling us not to bother putting in that work. A lot of things telling us we have something to lose if we put in that work. Because truthfully, we have it good. I will specify to say I have it good. A straight, white, male -- I know the only resistance I will meet is the kind I impose on myself. That's the fucked up reality I occupy, and I cannot help but reap the luxuries of it daily. So why would I want someone to so much as cast the force of a breath on the standing structure?

But any benefits we reap from racism come with a greater cost. And the more we learn about racism, the heavier the cost feels. The cost will come to outweigh the benefits. The cost will be felt, noticed in ways that we can respond to -- instead of slowly, insidiously siphoning energy from the spirit. I think the more we learn, the more precisely we will see how we can be released from our own form of bondage, a vision of the liberation, and then we will no longer have reason to fear the letting go.

Because if there is indeed a broken system (there is), and white people are part of that same system (we are), then it makes sense we too are dysfunctioning -- part and parcel, violent oppressor and impotent victim -- of that broken system. Again, we advantage in a system that's broken and cannot be excused for the suffering we cause, but we are still part of it, and require a certain kind of healing lest the whole thing remain broken.

Learning the reality of racism -- its history and my entanglement in its present -- is also complex. I know that through my own struggle. Its complexity is the reason this rambling is growing uncontrollable.

It's also why I've included an afterword to this post. Below is the story of my own experience confronting racism -- my whiteness and deep-seated anti-blackness -- and my working to liberate from its bondage. The inclusion of this story is more symbolic than anything, but I figured symbols work best when they're really there, so I included it. Namely, what it symbolizes, is this: We lose nothing by facing the reality of racism and our collusion with it. We lose nothing by sharing the reality and our collusion. There is only something to gain.

I've never been more certain of anything as I am of that.

I thought it would be helpful to provide a concrete example of what it looks like to begin that process ("begin," for it very much continues, and will continue to continue). I wasn't able to work through this without witnessing others do it first, and seeing that I have a stake in this mess. Truthfully, that's when I started to mobilize.

The reflection is very long. Naturally, as is a specialty of mine, it is self-indulgent. How awfully presumptuous it would be for me to expect anyone to read a lick of it. So you can either stop reading right now, or you can check it out. I think you'd enjoy the parts that let you say, Wow, this kid's a big time racist! I like reading through those parts, too. I like those parts because I can say it without judgment that paralyzes, and then decide how I want to respond.

Of course your experiences will look different from mine. I am not intending to speak for us, as white people, or write your story. What a damn shame that would be. Your story is and will be remarkable, triumphant. I have little doubt in this, so long as you take your time telling it. Mine is just a template of sorts, and an example to prove it is possible to put oneself through this sort of reflection and lose absolutely nothing when you do. No one took away my successes or opportunities because I said I was privileged to have them and acknowledged that some people don't (Note: please read the word privileged without a tone of provocation. It is not a pejorative; it is a descriptor of circumstances, and its impact is forfeited when it becomes something else.).

But I've noticed some white people have short memories. Let me clarify that. I mean it to say some of us forget that we too had to learn and unlearn a lot of stuff before we could begin to understand things in a different way. I take classes on racism, do readings, dedicate much of my energy trying to get it right, and still I usually get it wrong. How hypocritical it would be if I weren't patient. I think we fail everyone when we condemn other white people who "don't get it", instead of meeting others at the place where we began and urging them through the same journey we ourselves are still in the middle of. White supremacy works to keep us divided, yes? We, the warriors of racial justice, shout this resentfully from the rafters. So let's not let not let our righteousness be the reason for yet another rift created by the divisive pull of white supremacy.

I've one final observation to make. It's that I've never heard a white person say, There was a time I thought racism in this country existed, but I've since changed my mind. No one has ever said this because understanding racial injustice is a process of discreet transformation, and it has direction. Those words would constitute a reversion, and thus would violate the nature of that transformation, which can only proceed forward. Once you see racial injustice, it cannot be unseen. The phrase "consciousness raising" comes to mind, which similarly, is unidirectional. The way forward is toward greater understanding -- a widening of a lens, an expansion of empathy-- and those who do not yet understand are simply not being pushed hard enough forward. That is what it seems to come down to. In the end, I know I'm not better than anyone, but I am actively trying to be better than myself. We must strive for the same, and push each other to achieve it. If you continue to resist, that's fine, but it hurts me because I know how much you are losing.

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I am white. One reason that is noteworthy is because my father is not white at all. When my dad emerged from the womb, he landed somewhere in the vicinity of zero degrees latitude. That geography is critical. It makes him “Hispanic”, or “Latino”, or sometimes even “Latin American”. He is dark, with faint epicanthic folds characteristic of Quechuans, the indigenous of Ecuador from whom he descends. People say I resemble my father. We share hair that is black and skin with the right stuff to endure an equatorial sun. And while sometimes the mighty melanin has threatened to betray me, I assure you my “American” is not preceded by a “Latin”.

It was only recently I learned details of my family’s emigration from Quito to the United States, probably because it was only recently I asked for them. I figured it was some quiet escape from some noisy oppression—chapter one in that “American Dream” story I was spoon-fed by the shaky hand of a social studies education. It turns out the narrative was a bit more engrossing. My grandfather hosted a radio show in Quito, using a microphone and tobacco-coated lungs to speak out against Ecuador’s dictator. He then caught wind that the government was planning to silence his radical messages. He was not certain how that would be carried out, so he did not take any chances. My grandpa got himself and his family on a plane headed north, where speech was supposed to be free, even when it was not understood.

They touched tarmac in July of 1965. This is the year Malcom was murdered. It is the year Martin kept marching. It is the year Marcelo walked to P.S. 2 for his first day of grade one. While the Civil Rights Movement was at the peak of its momentum, my five-year-old father had more pressing concerns. He was not just a foreigner—for there were many—but a foreigner of color, and thus an insoluble particle in the sea of European-Americans that constituted Astoria, New York.

Language, Chinese, and fights. These three words foment the most affect when he reflects on his immersion. My dad, however, was like dehydrogenated oil. He had a low melting point. It did not take long to succumb to the heavy pressures of American monoculutralism, which liquefied him into a form he could succeed (Sue, 2004). There is no disappointment here; he wanted friends, was motivated in a special way that only first-generation immigrants are, and I ended up with much more opportunity in the wake of this energy (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012). Once the Chinese-looking kid who for some reason spoke Spanish; in a matter of years, he was one of the guys who kept the toughest company, who could take it to anyone on the field, and who had a pretty, white girlfriend. Her name was Elaine. She would later marry that Chinese-looking kid who for some reason spoke Spanish, and she would later become my mother.

I was never able to fill in many details for the immigration of my mom’s family. The narrative has not been transmitted with the same reliability or degree of purpose. It has never been that important, and I think it is important to consider why that might be. My ancestors sailed west from Europe throughout the early 20th century. Most came from southern Italy, some others from Ireland, as well as from the country once known as Czechoslovakia. Anything I do know comes by way of the Italian ancestral line. They hit American soil in the 1920s and were filtered like coffee through the tight mesh of Ellis Island, which did its best to leave any ethnic contaminants there at the shores. The imagery in the prior sentence was deployed to hide the fact I have few actual, anecdotal, or otherwise descriptive details of their journey.

The ancestors who lived those experiences are gone, and their stories have not survived my generation. It was like once their identity—as white Americans—was solidified, legitimized, and empowered, they no longer needed to covet ethnicity as its own source of empowerment. Maybe ethnicity is disposable when other identity traits like race and class are available to surmount it. Maybe there is no more need to tell a story of oppression when the storyteller is no longer oppressed. That idea seems liberating in a way, but also disturbing. It is sad to see history die, no matter how depraved the history. I would think something is always lost in that process.

In 1989, my parents moved to a place called Wyckoff with my three older siblings. It is a pretty, suburban town in northern New Jersey. To really understand Wyckoff, it helps to have a sense of hegemony; namely, how whites as the dominant group dictate the state of affairs in society and tacitly coerce the subordinate group to unconsciously accept it (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012). And if one conceptualizes white hegemony in the form of a hurricane, Wyckoff can best be understood as its eye. Here, in the calm, white people picked up dog feces, filled town halls, ran schools, and delivered the mail. There were no racial winds, no ethnic rains. There was no conflict, no tension.

In such conditions, it is challenging to identify means by which values of whiteness were transmitted to me. My parents did not gather us around the table, lean closely, and whisper that white people and those of color did not belong together. None of my neighbors communicated that message to me, nor did my teachers. This sounds like the rather healthy approach, but sometimes I wonder if it would have been better if I were taught precisely how to be a bigot. What if they told me to hate people of color? Exploit people society endowed me with the power to exploit? What if they had instructed racism to me so explicitly? What if I was given a handbook?

It is discomfiting to entertain, but I cannot help to contemplate how this might have changed things. The likely answer is I would not be who I am right now, and instead I would be a xenophobic automaton, blindly hating a lot of people. I would probably have even more fear than I do now. Still, I cannot help but consider the alternative. If racial messaging was conveyed directly, at least then I could have had something concrete to hold. I could have had ideas to examine, and rotate, and evaluate from different angles, and make certain evaluations about. The way it happened in reality was so insidious and diffuse. Messages were injected like a social anesthetic directly into my unconscious. I never got a chance to accept or reject them.

Racialized messages were communicated only through the physical, social patterns of my environment. In northern New Jersey, there are towns with white people, there are towns with people of color, but they are divided by borders and given different names. As a kid, I took note of the way these peoples were organized in space. Naturally, congruent compartmentalization took place internally, in cognitive spaces (Cortina, 2008). A racial map was laid out in some unoccupied part of my brain. White Supremacy and Eurocentrism were its cartographers. The map could be more aptly described as a homunculus, because races and ethnicities were assigned disproportionate neural space, based on their salience to my life. The movements and welfare of less important groups were lower priority, given less area in my brain, and therefore sensed less acutely.

The validity of this homunculus was confirmed by the institutions I contacted. Only in hindsight can I single out education as an example. Values of white supremacy emanated from the pages of our textbooks and spread over all the students, thinly enough to be invisible, like chalk-dust from the blackboards. Students were taught to raise (invisible) hands in fluorescent classrooms. And if capitalism is the “invisible hand,” then white supremacy is that hand’s equally invisible fingers (Cochran & Malone, 1999). It is horrifying to realize how those fingers were responsible for every keystroke filling the pages of those textbooks. White supremacy was right there in the genocide we celebrate; in colonists showing up in occupied land and claiming it as their own (Smith, 2013). White supremacy was always there. They just never called it that.

We were also taught that as contemporary white folks, we now stood infallible in the arena of racism. History lessons were given on the Middle Passage, slavery, and even Jim Crow. They spent less time teaching Jim Crow, however, because temporally, I think it was too close for comfort. The pedagogy preferred to focus on things which could convince us racism was a historical artifact—dug up, polished, and examined—like the Cherokee hunting weapons we had learned about in the chapter before. What they neglected to tell us is how we all still held that artifact in our hands, and how it still had the edge to draw blood. When racism is presented as an artifact, it is received, coveted, and passed along again. The artifact becomes an heirloom.

I am Catholic, as well as white. For a time, I thought one just came with the other. In 2014, about 60 percent of Catholics in the U.S. were white (Gray et al., 2014), but in my hometown the percentage lands much closer to 100. I later learned the two groups—whites and Catholics—could exist independently. Despite that confusion, I recognized membership in Catholicism much earlier than I did my membership in whiteness. My family talked about Jesus and people congregated in buildings because of Him. It was far more conspicuous. Despite personal struggles with religiosity, I am always grateful for my relationship with religion because it always felt more self-directed. Again, I think this has something to do with the fact I was instructed religion. Critical reflection was encouraged and I got to judge it for myself.

If only it were possible to go back and experience my world again, only in this second iteration, to do so knowing what I know now. Without that option it becomes a frustrating pursuit to reflect on how I was impacted by race and ethnicity as a child. I cannot recall with any reliability. If family and friends shared opinions on race with me, they were not knowingly stored. I can surmise why racial attitudes and stereotypes were deemed unworthy of retention. It is because there would have been nothing to apply them to. I would have had no use for them.

My grandpa is a racist. My uncle is as well. They are “old-fashioned” racists—those of the overt variety. I know that now, and I may have known it as a kid. It must have always been obvious.

When my cousin brought her Indian boyfriend to Easter with the family, they would say something disparaging every time he left the room. I must have understood it had something to do with how he looked and sounded. Back then, though, their racist comments were nothing more than racist comments. They were just words. They did not sit well, but they also did not sit for long.

I wish my analysis here did not have to be so abstract, but abstraction is the only realm I can connect to, no matter how robust my retrospection. The stereotypes I heard were referenced in contexts which seldom presented in my world. I can also recall my friends in middle school making comments about black people on TV, but it was a similar situation. They would say racist things about athletes on their favorite football team. They would make fun of the way black people talked, dressed, and caricaturize them as freak, athletic specimens put on earth for our entertainment. I joined in at times, and it all affected me mildly. It remained abstraction—distant from my reality. We were just talking about characters on the television. I cannot recall situations from my childhood where I was forced to figure out how those racial remarks translated into some sort of subjective reality.

In first grade I made the soccer team. This ensemble of pasty, pocket-sized Pelés would double as a vehicle for much needed cultural immersion, with away games the impetus for contact with children outside township limits. The first game of my career was played in Paterson, New Jersey. I can recall the boys on the opposing team vividly. I can almost make out their faces. I can see the way the whites of their eyes contrasted fiercely with their skin. I noticed this group of kids looked so much different than we did, and wondered if the ramshackle conditions of the playing field had anything to do with that brown skin. The games that followed would bolster the following hypotheses: white-skinned players meant white lines would cover the pitch, and brown-skinned players brown dirt. It was just more evidence to add to my racial schema.

I got to be pretty proficient with a soccer ball at my feet. With new skills, I continued traveling to new places where I would play against the teams with dirt fields. I would play well. Coaches would come up to me and my dad and try to get me to join their team. None of the coaches of the mostly white teams did this, but it happened a number of times with coaches of teams with Latino players. They would confront me and my dad as we sauntered to the car and start speaking to us in Spanish. I would be unable to follow the conversation. The coach would realize this, and switch to “broken” English. Then he would interrogate me about where I was from, and where I lived, and if I would want to play under his unrenowned tutelage. I do not think they cared so much for my ability as they did my dad’s ethnicity. It was like those coaches could not fathom it: Why was I on a team with all these wealthy white kids? It was messing with their world. These interactions led to the first investigation of my ethnicity. I was white—always have been. What was the deal with these coaches? The investigation would revive later on.

My team, I should mention, was not homogenously white; it was just overwhelmingly so. There was one young stud of color on the team. He and his family had recently moved from South Korea. They were distinctly “not American.” They were not practiced in making the “th” sound. They were visibly distressed when our team would go to T.G.I. Friday’s during away tournaments. They were entirely reticent on the sidelines during games. None of this should be confused with those other people of color—and the occasional white person, too—who fight a national ethos which results in mass oppression. These folks are characterized as “un-American” or “anti-American,” as opposed to “not American” like my Korean friend on the soccer team.

When I learned about the exaltation of Asians, as part of the “Model Minority” myth, I began to see how I had been manipulated by the story. In the mid20th century, Asian immigrants were used as a foil for other ethnic groups, showing how to be uplifted by white elites. All one needs to do—according to the myth—is behave appropriately. It spuriously equated these immigrants to the people of color who had been victimized by centuries of genocide, oppression, and slavery (Jung, 2014). By using the “success” of Asian immigrants for justification, the Model Minority myth indemnified the enduring oppression of blacks and natives. They are getting no more than they have earned.

The history is relevant because it captures my personal experience with this ethnic group. My first sustained relationships with non-white people came with classmates of Asian ethnicity. Most were Korean. The “model minority” myth explains why they were able to end up in a town like Wyckoff, and the impact of the narrative dripped down to my cognitions.

I loved the Korean kids in my class when I was kid. That does not sound sincere as I wished it would, and in the end, perhaps it was never sincere at all. It was a juvenile captivation with something different. This different was different, though. It was not accompanied by threat the way other differences of ethnicity seemed to be. It was difference perceived as benign. I could observe the way my friends used wooden sticks to eat their lunches. As a shy kid myself, I could connect with their reserved and obsequious ways. I liked how the Korean students never caused problems. I liked how courteously they assimilated. After just a few weeks in second grade, Heung-Min became Stephen. Then I liked Stephen even more because calling him Stephen instead of Heung-Min made me much more comfortable. It seems my innocent infatuation was a itself a pernicious microaggression. It felt harmless, but served to silently reinforce the expectation of Asian-Americans to quietly assimilate into my culture (Sue, et.al, 2007). It turns out I was casted as an ancillary character in the telling of the myth. No one had bothered to inform me.

Growing up, racism occasionally flashed across my radar—beeping lightly on the periphery—but I did not pay it any mind. Applying Hardiman’s White Identity model, it is not a stretch to identify this stage as No Social Consciousness about Race (Hardiman, 2001). Racism was taught by attrition for years after I broke past stage one. Acceptance of race was internalized via aforementioned patterns of the environment, with absences and silences the perfect fodder for building that racialized conscious (Hardiman, 2001). I was barraged by messages so consuming they could not be noticed, like water to a fish.

In college, I was finally exposed to a more transparent account of white history, even more transparent than the pallid professors who unveiled it. I got to pick through the shrapnel of that hegemonic barrage and at last identify its parts. All my newfound knowledge about white culture was disquieting. For a while, I decided not to pursue it further. I laid the knowledge to rest in the airy lecture halls of Boston College, where it could remain an intellectual concept. This captures Hardiman’s third stage: Resistance. The struggle in this stage would grow in intensity, and this struggle continues to persist (Hardiman, 2001).

The Jesuit Peter Hans Kolvenbach has said that “When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change” (Tracey et al., 2014). This resonates with my development, a fact which both bothers me and makes me grateful. It bothers me that I have to experience something personally in order to understand it, but I am grateful for being open enough to understand something after I have experienced it.

I moved to West Baltimore after graduating college. It is here I made my first close Black friend. She was one of my community members with my AmeriCorps volunteer program. She showed up to move into the house on Mount Street with a gentle presence and a smile that did not reveal any teeth. My initial thought upon seeing her was something like, Woah, a black girl. Maybe I will finally have a black friend. Now I can appreciate the absurdity of such a reaction, and I was once acutely ashamed about having it, but I can do nothing to change the truth that I did.

At the start of the year, I had a lot yet to learn about my relationship with race. I expected my housemate to teach me. I wanted her to acculturate me, but she is not a painting or some “ethnic” delicacy. At no time before had I considered myself racist. In college, I got emotional when reading about systemic oppression. I was the one who could look through the walls society builds and see what was behind them. I would be the one to cringe when I heard someone use the N-word. My stomach hurts now just from rehearsing the word in my mind. These truths made me think racism was not a force that moved me in directions of destruction. I did not know I had a problem, but it turns out I did, as tends to be the case for the most caustic problems.

They call Baltimore “Charm City”. I never found it to be that, exactly. Such an endearing handle conjures images that do too much to romanticize a scary truth: Baltimore is a city built on a fractured framework. During the year there, I read the book Urban Injustice. The subtitle is “How Ghettos Happen.” I would argue a more appropriate subtitle would be “How Ghettos are Built.” Dr. David Hilfiker explained the precise methodology behind the construction of a ghetto (Hilfiker, 2002). Some of the decisions seemed unthinkable when I first heard them. I would soon come to the conclusion, though, the decisions were not unfounded. It seemed to me they were made from guilt, and were in desperate need for repentance.

The thinking in this critical moment of my development was simple. As I came to see it, white people felt culpable for decisions and actions carried out during the era of institutional slavery. They behaved according to that culpability, with guilt and fear. Decisions affected by guilt and fear came at the cost of those who have been purposefully placed on the margins. They are harmed by the prejudice, and are forced to reciprocate as protection. Protection is detected as wanton aggression, validating the vitriol and prejudice which initiated the cycle. It is all rather vicious. I thought the cycle soundly explained the tragic injustice, and simply the human tragedy, of some police officers who murder young Black men and women. Because this sort of thing occurs all the time in daily interaction, just without the weapon and license to kill. I've felt myself trapped in this cycle, and I'm glad I never had a weapon or a license to kill.

As I walked the streets of West Baltimore and feebly tried to engage the patients I served, I found myself operating by the same guilt. Working with many Black folks, I approached with caution in lieu of aggression. Caution is more my style. It appears less malicious than aggression, but I found it to be an equally damaging defense. I hesitated in relationships, questioning why people of color would trust me. The question was conceived from the history of white supremacy and black oppression. There must be something that will keep us apart now as there was back then. As long as I remained anchored in the past, I would drown in its bloody waters. Since then, I have fought to find some sort of internal resolution that takes the form of this statement: I do not necessarily have to be part of that history, but that history is necessarily a part of me. It is a challenging statement to accept, and an even more disorienting one to live by.

Today, of course, there is ambivalence. Here I stand, a transformed man, while centuries of oppression still stand behind me. Even more stands by my side. Remedying that could never be as simple as a dose of awareness and personal repentance. Today, I have doubts. I am stuck in this liminal space with nothing solid to grab, still trying to figure out how to hold myself accountable for the history of my white culture, and how to move forward unencumbered by it.

I am no longer drunk with white supremacy, but certainly hungover from it. It is hard to navigate each day with a racial hangover. Among its most debilitating symptoms are implicit biases, reminding me of my 22-year-long “night before” of privileged indulgence. Michelle Alexander refers to “cognitive schemas,” or “thought structures” that influence unconscious interpretations of the environment (Alexander, 2010). Mine were built very well, and they will not break down. They continue to direct how I interact with other races and cultures. A background identity is formed by race, and it is the prime mover in many of my interactions.

Where I live in Dorchester, living with this hangover becomes problematic. My neighborhood is home to ethnic and racial diversity. The remnants of Irish ethnicity—once dominating North Dorchester—have not been lost. There is a strong Vietnamese presence, as well as many African American families. Contact with these groups forces me to contact the tension between the consciousness I have developed, and my ethnically dehydrated unconscious. The conflict can be illustrated with a comparison of position and posture. I have made strides with the former. I put myself in places that foster relationship. I put myself in places I once avoided. This is exemplified in the community I live in and the people I work with. The problem remains with posture—the internal posture I take while inhabiting those positions. It is harder to control. I have to be very aware of it, lest it betray me.

This paper has been written from the unflinching vantage of a white identity. As mentioned at the onset, this is notable because my father is not a white man. So how did I end up white? I hope what has preceded works to answer that question, but I will be more explicit. Throughout most of my childhood, I actively denied my father’s ethnicity. This was a choice, but one which came highly recommended by my community. That community was constantly saying Be White. Being a white speck on the white canvas was the best way to leverage power. It seems counter-intuitive when framed like that, and what a dull painting it creates.

Despite my finest efforts, there were always some lingering residues of my Ecuadorian ethnicity within. They came mostly from the rice I ingested, the ball I chose to play with, and the frivolous Spanish phrases I used and still do not know the meaning of. On the rare occasion my dad spoke Spanish at home, my siblings and I would be quick to respond with white, hot, American tongues. His English was perfect, so there was no need for those foreign sounds in our airspace. It seems we consistently rejected that culture from entering our lives.

It was a while before I discovered the charm of having access to an ethnicity that placed me outside of whiteness. With new self-awareness fermenting in the form of “White Guilt,” I sought an escape, and found an option. Thanks to my dad’s birthplace, I could disassociate from whiteness and access a backwards sort of power (yay Jesus!) that became attractive when I was spending time with the oppressed. I could call myself Latino, and with one word, could free my feet from the muck of guilt. This tactic was useful in places like Baltimore, where a non-white identity aligned me just a little more closely to those I was surrounded by. It was a convenient trick, and it really worked. Soon, though, I felt like a fraud. It became clear whom my new identity was serving, and I did not feel good about that. I compounded the net guilt by trying to run from the white kind.

What also becomes apparent from the oscillation of my identity is the fact I always had a choice. I could be white; no one would question it. I could be Latino; that was perfectly acceptable, too. It

is quite a luxury. One might call it a privilege. Part of this is contingent on physical appearance. I am dark, but not too dark. My eyes are small, but not too small. My hair is black, but Italians can have hair like that, too. The way I look lets me straddle two sides of ethnicity. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if that chromosomal battle between fraternal and maternal gametes had ended a little differently. I might not have had permission to be white at all, and it would be dependent on nothing but the random mechanism of meiosis.

Physical appearance does not work alone. Since each way I identify aligns with an identity of agency, I end up with more agency in how I identify (Miller & Garran, 2008). It is a positive feedback loop of agent identity. If I were poor—or homeless, for a more visceral descriptor—would people be so ready to accept me as white? I am not sure class is unrelated. What if I were a female, or transgendered? I think this too would strip my power to decide who I am. What if I were not educated? I wouldn’t stand a chance. It would be more convenient for others just to categorize me as non-white, and I am fairly confident that is what they would do. It is trickier for me to explicate on the intersectionality of my identities, because they are all identities of agency, and therefore function as part of a symbiosis towards power. There is not so much intersectional push or pull, and without tension, power can easily go unnoticed. But I am not without intersectionality. It works by giving me the power to choose who I am. I am Latino. I am white. I can be whatever it is I want to be.

To quote one Kendrick Lamar: “Loving you is complicated.” I close this assignment with those words bellowing loudly. Maybe I am overthinking things, which I have a proclivity to do, but the fact I had to write all this for a slightly better understanding of racial justice makes me think it is not a simple undertaking. Racial justice is complicated because it requires my first loving me, then loving you, which are complicated processes. I hope this does not take a turn toward the overly esoteric, but this language of “love” is important to my understanding of racial justice. I have learned that “solidarity” is crucial in racial justice, and personally I cannot tangle myself in solidarity without connecting in love (Peterson-Smith & Bean, 2015).

Loving demands my accepting other people’s definitions of themselves. In the previous section, I noted how people have always been willing to accept the way I define who I am. My identity has never been questioned, and my interactions have worked from it as a starting point. This has been an important paradigm of the privileged experience, and one I must adopt with others, for the sake of solidarity. “Loving you is complicated,” but it is easier if I let “you” do the work. I do not have to figure out who you are. It is not my prerogative; it is not my duty. Racial justice is not about my trying to put you together, but simply listening and being open to accept who you say you are. The work can begin there, and it can save a lot of energy if it does.

Still, racial justice can be tiring. I had to work hard to scratch the surface, and still I have a lot left to do. I had to unlearn a lot, and I have to learn even more. From my experience, achieving racial justice depends on the deconstruction of schemas, which exist in the first place because they are convenient. They provide structure, which provides control. Racial justice demands I forfeit the control over my world by demanding I take these schemas apart and accept more fluidity in identities. That is a lot to ask of people. Generally speaking, I do not think people like giving up control for disorder. It is unsettling.

Another reason racial justice is complicated is because it acts on many levels. The focus of this writing was on the personal. Sifting through my story, however, I see evidence of oppression not only at the personal and interpersonal levels, but the institutional and the cultural. I could not avoid these forces even had I tried, because they all feed into and from one another. There is no panacea which targets all of these four levels of oppression, and can act on all four levels to produce change. Racial justice is a long, demanding process. I think this quote illustrates the challenge of racial justice well: “Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” This metaphor shows that people need to unite around racial justice—it cannot be a disparate endeavor, because everyone’s liberation is stacked and tangled.

No singular element of racial justice, however, is all too complicated to conceive in an intellectual sort of way. It is rather easy to wrap my head around as a concept. In my social work practice, therefore, the challenge is not explaining racial justice to people, but giving people a reason to care. When I talk of oppression and equity and the ideas are not being received, I tend to think, Why don’t they get it? How do they not see it? How do they not understand what is going on? Such inquiries may not always represent the reality.

People need a reason to want it. I think that is what stops racial justice from proceeding, much more so than a failure to comprehend its goals. People need to be shown they have a stake in the game. It brings me back to the quote from Peter Hans Kolvenbach, “When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change.” The quote continues, “Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection” (Tracey et al., 2014). People who have not contacted experience will struggle towards transformation. The challenge for practicing social work then becomes less about “dialogue”, and more about action.

Folks need to be guided into action, because experience is needed to free oneself from their own mind. I have heard the term “emancipatory consciousness”, which is language I am drawn to as a way to capture this liberation from self. I best understand emancipatory consciousness as a process, one by which people are freed to change the way they understand difference. This is a requisite in transforming the monocultural world—which rejects differences and strives for assimilation—to a pluralistic world that finds joy in difference.

After reflecting on my development, I also notice that transformation must often be forced, and it often needs to be radical. It took a white kid with a lot of privilege moving into the Baltimore ghetto before he could begin to find his place in oppression. This is not to say social work is about forcing people to live in ghettos—it is not—but I can dig into my experience to uncover a theme. Social justice is not achieved through gradation. Gradual, incremental change efforts will too quickly be restored to status quo by the gravitation-like force of hegemony. Social work practice must be radical. Change of racial justice comes through challenge, not compromise. What is at stake needs to be imposed into people’s life—thus the need for activism. If racial justice is not imposed, history shows it will not be sought.

#BlackLivesMatter