Name Your Shame

Growing up in Atlanta, I consistently lived in neighborhoods with few white people and attended schools with few people of color. My parents’ teaching positions were simultaneously a privilege and a hurdle, for the schools they worked for were of incredibly high caliber and prestige, but their salaries were not such for our family to truly assimilate with the dominant community culture. I grew up watching the ways in which my city would change on that drive to school, crystallizing a feeling of difference in me, an understanding that the exclusivity and inaccessibility of this elite upper class life would render me never truly a part of my school community, but that my experiences as a “passing” member of Atlanta society would limit affinity with my neighborhood. 

When I found my first job, I felt a profound sense of difference within my work environment, resting in the intersection of race, age, and class. Despite the similarities my coworkers and I shared, I felt as though my participation in the deeply white and upper class circles I knew was irreparably damaging to our ability to relate to one another. 

Through my reading of Thandeka’s “Learning to be White” this semester, I have realized that this experience was one of my first major moments of white shame. As a young woman who labels herself progressive, I was at last reckoning with the negotiation of that label with my active search for association with and mobility from the white elitist groups at my disposal. 

White people, regardless of how progressive our politics may be, have a history of complicity in oppressive laws and practices, admiring upper class affluence at the expense of greater systematic equity. Though we preach the good word about how *others* should treat marginalized individuals, we tend to neglect to examine the effects of our own actions and passivity. 

The predominant environment for my day to day life had been for many years one in which I was the less privileged... my white shame that summer was the slow and steady realization of what it felt like to be in an environment in which I was the most privileged. 

Moreover, while my coworkers embraced exactly the socioeconomic status they had, I yearned for something more, looking towards new status and losing sight of my current one. It takes incredible privilege to value where you could be to the point you forget where you are. 

White shame is valuable if it is the first step in a more enlightened understanding of your own privilege.