The Backstory on Race in America

“Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” is an honest, apprising look at race, and why it has remained such an intractable issue in America. Author Debby Irving writes that race is “the elephant in the room.” Her cultural memoir is, as she describes it, “my story of racial ignorance.”

“I was talking with a friend of mine, a woman who came to America from Trinidad, a black woman,” Irving told me, speaking about the beginning of her journey toward greater understanding. “She was telling me about a group in her church she was involved in, and that it was amazing to her that white people didn’t think they have a race.

“That actually included me. It was a moment when I chose to be silent – yet it could have been a perfect moment to speak up – to wake up,” she said.

“Whites I meet now will commonly say, ‘I’m so afraid of offending people.’ But when I dig deeper, it’s much more about revealing their ignorance on race.”

“Talking about it is messy,” said Irving. “When you live in a culture that is risk averse, we don’t learn how to talk about conflict. For a very long time, I didn’t have the confidence that a blowup in such a conversation could be resolved.”

“Waking Up White” is a long conversation about race and how messy it can be. Irving tells the story of her own messy journey, growing up middle class, of good New England stock, thinking that race was a story about other people – people of color. How she had no understanding of the invisible, systemic racism that had favored her race, her family – herself – at the expense of people of color. Her book is neither preachy nor condescending. It is informative – and enlightening. And though it fundamentally stays grounded in her own experience, it invites readers to assess their own backgrounds and beliefs, too.

She speaks of the elephant, and how difficult it was for her to learn how to speak to others, black and white. She told me, however, that “it is very important for white people to do their education on their own. People of color are exhausted from having tried to educate us for four hundred years.”

Read her book. It’s an important one, and it offers a ray of illumination for how we might move to new place ground on race in America. 

Note: Read the afterword from my novel, Dream Singer, on my website: http://www.frankosmithstories.com/dream/afterword/afterword.html,

where I write about race as relevant to my novel.