HOW I BECAME WHITE

From the desk of White Correspondent, Callie Shanafelt

























Inter-racial friendship is one of the biggest struggles of my anti-racist journey. Ironically I think it’s also a crucial element to dismantling racism.

I’ve always been passionate about racial justice. Yet, as a young white girl in the suburbs of Seattle, the most radical racial justice theory that I was exposed to was “color-blindness.” I wanted to be friends with the few people of color around me, but culturally I was stripped of the tools to understand the differences.

I had one friend whose mother was white and father was black. Her parents weren’t together and she lived with her mother. We were friends throughout elementary school and jr. and during that time we were very similar culturally. I loved the difference in our skin tone, and because of the colorblind culture we were swimming in we never spoke of our racial differences. By the time we were in high school, she went to live with her father. In my eyes she had changed. Her friends were now predominately black, she started corn-rowing her hair and listening to music that I didn’t. Our friendship fell apart.

I later realized that I felt betrayed. I wanted her to fit into white culture so that we would be the picture of multiracial harmony. Of course this notion was racist. Color blindness had stripped us of the closeness to talk about these things as they happened.

After high school it didn’t take long for a person of color to knock me out of my color-blind stupor. She insisted, “If you don’t see color, you don’t see me.” So I passionately threw myself into “understanding” people of color. In many ways this was a crucial moment of my development. Unfortunately, I took it to the extreme and put all people of color up on a pedestal, which also lead to difficult relationships.

I had a mentor who I put on a particularly high pedestal. I was dying to join her in the way she thought. I quickly threw out any previously held convictions and espoused her beliefs. Many of those views I’ve kept to this day, but I learned the hard way that instead of appropriating her thoughts – I had to develop my own through experience. When my views developed differently than her's, it was pretty hard to watch the pedestal topple.

The other key lesson I’ve learned is that it is more important for me to understand myself culturally than it is to understand others.

Now I build friendships where I recognize and appreciate cultural differences, but the journey is never over. I feel like my biggest struggle is getting too comfortable but that is the beauty of growth; there will always be more to learn.

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