White people in this country are often misguided. Why else would my 'allies' cause me so much grief, pain, and moral agony? They can't even begin to grasp the most simple truths or have the most basic conversations about race. Rather than face the truth about their own racism, they contort themselves to continue their own delusions. Nearly all White people do this. Don't believe me? Find yourself in this list of ally act-ups from just the previous few weeks:
- A group of white professional women closed rank on a woman of color, effectively locking her out of the profession, (since mentorship is a part of the entry into the profession). They ignored and marginalized her, making it impossible for her to join their ranks, once they decided she was 'unworthy' yet if they sat in one of my seminars while I talked about diversifying this profession, they would NEVER recognize their own overtly racist act of purposely locking a woman of color out of the profession. They would cheer my message smugly agreeing that yes, of course the profession needed more women of color without ever giving a thought to the woman they had ostracized. (This by the way, is one of the problems with mentorship- it breeds 'good ol' girl' networks.) It's also why I started a mentorship program because this happens to women of color ALL THE TIME and everyone always thinks they have a good NON RACIST reason for not mentoring this woman of color (but its still racism).
- A preceptor once asked me if the reason a client gave for not having me at her birth was racism in disguise. I answered, 'yes.' It took the preceptor two weeks of mulling it over, to recognize the client's discrimination. It took my own internal 'bullshit-o-meter' about 2 seconds to figure it out, but to be fair, I've had the lived experience of being Black in America to fine tune it. Most white preceptors would have never figured it out. Fortunately this preceptor and I discussed this topic openly and regularly but too many white preceptors NEVER have this conversation with their apprentices of color even when they witness clients abusing them. Most of the time they think they should get a medal, just for HAVING an intern/mentee/apprentice/student of color.
- A national organization rolls out a new logo. They've gathered a 'representative' group of members to approve the new logo and when it is unveiled, it looks every bit as dominant culture as every other logo that preceded it. There is NOTHING multicultural or representative about it. I do not see me represented in it-anywhere, as usual.
- I have witnessed several chest thumping events by older white women wishing to be recognized as 'pioneers' 'groundbreakers' or some such thing because of the work they did across the span of their careers. I am willing to allow for that. But here is what I won't allow. Don't say you did it for me, to open doors for me. You did it to open doors for other white women. Let's be honest, you did not spend your career creating opportunities for women of color. History just does not support that assertion. BIPOCS live as oppressed classes in this society and the agents of that oppression are white people. White women traditionally have responded in great numbers one of two ways, co-agents in that oppression or stunning silence. Those are the two main responses I see to this day, with rare exception. Oh there's lots of lip service, plenty of sound bites. But actual working to secure equity when it actually costs you something to do so- very little of that. The work white women have done to secure equality has been equality for themselves. I have noted their annoyance when young women of color take the spotlight. I've even seen them be publicly critical and turn the spotlight back on themselves. They want to be known as mothers of the movement. But this is a movement they can never claim motherhood to.
- Please don't ask me to teach you how to "wrap your head", "do your hair that way" or other sacred traditions that I'd prefer not to share outside my intimate circles.
- Had a client ask for a homebirth to 'escape' the system. With good reason. Her baby will probably be taken away and fed into the system that seems to exist to supply white families with Black and Brown babies. These women and their babies don't stand a chance. The system is not in place to help them but to further exploit them. They are mere commodities for the state to dispense with as they see fit. Woe unto them.
- While traveling around I have encountered several White individuals who received a grant for starting breastfeeding support groups in the African-American community. These individuals have little to no ties to the community they want to start a group in and often don't know any qualified African-Americans! How do I know this? These people walk right up to me and tell me! I'm not blaming them for trying to seize an opportunity. I'm blaming the funders for setting up their grant in a way that allows outsiders to come in impose themselves on communities of color instead of building on the strengths and human resources already at work in those communities.
- I get calls weekly from folks all over the country. White folks. They want to do this or do that for my community. They always get the same spiel from me. Who are your partners in the community? Of course there usually are none because as I'm told on a regular basis, 'there are no Black people doing this or that." My next question is always the same. HOW ARE YOU QUALIFIED TO KNOW THAT??? If you are a white person on the outside of the community looking in, how the hell do you know WHAT is going on inside? You can't tell me there is no one for you to support or partner with because you are not even qualified to go find an answer. You are just ASSUMING because no one presented themselves to you, that there is no one doing the work. This is just more White arrogance and privilege at work. You have NO IDEA was is going on in someone else's community. Plain and simple. You are an outsider. That's WHY you need to partner with an insider.
- Just came from another professional meeting where I met the newest staff member of the team of a local hospital; another White female, even though the population served is 80% women of color, and even though I spoke up and said that I hoped the position would be filled by a woman of color prior to it being filled. But of course my saying that was offensive- because everyone they hire is qualified (and White).
So there you have it. Nothing changes. The status quo lives. Black people die. White people take offense. We must somehow manage the moral fortitude to speak the truth and do what is right, even in the face of systemic racism embedded in the healthcare system. We must speak truth to power even when we have very little power ourselves, we must take down Goliaths where ever we find them, whether it be by bringing legal action against unjust monopolies, creating our own organizations, or writing unpopular blogs we must do the thing we think we cannot. And then get up the next day.... and do it again.
In solidarity
Dear Readers,
I have invited a guest post from someone I consider an ally. I think it would be good for White people reading this blog to hear a White person's perspective. This is written by someone I trust and respect and whom I believe understands the appropriate role of an ally. Dear Reader, I give you the thoughtful musings of Diana Casser-Uhl.
In solidarity
Dear Readers,
I have invited a guest post from someone I consider an ally. I think it would be good for White people reading this blog to hear a White person's perspective. This is written by someone I trust and respect and whom I believe understands the appropriate role of an ally. Dear Reader, I give you the thoughtful musings of Diana Casser-Uhl.
I met Sherry Payne for the first
time in 2013, at the USLCA conference. I had submitted my thesis a week prior
and had final exams still ahead of me before I was to graduate with my Master
of Public Health in behavioral science and health promotion. I had given and
was still to give presentations at several conferences that spring, and I was
looking for a job. I had reasons to be exhausted, and didn’t attend many
presentations at USLCA in favor of rest and preparation for my finals. Having
studied about social determinants of health as a primary and recurring theme in
my coursework, Sherry’s session, entitled “Chocolate Milk Café” caught my
interest. I had just spent the last 2 years learning about health disparities
and I wanted to hear about how I should help women of color improve
breastfeeding rates in their communities.
What I got, though, couldn’t have
been further from my expectations. I heard words like “my community doesn’t
want you to come give us breastfeeding support.” Um, what? Is my IBCLC credential
not enough for women who look like you? I had studied up on “cultural
competence” so I was ready to be tolerant! I was totally okay with black people and I certainly wasn’t a racist. I
knew all too well what racists were and I wasn’t that!
“If you’re working with a woman of
color, and you want her to come to my breastfeeding support group, sure, give
her a ride if she needs one. Then wait for her in the car. Don’t come in.”
Again, I was shocked. Why shouldn’t I go in there? I had no problem with black
people!
It didn’t even occur to me that
maybe, black women had a problem with me, with my authoritative claims that I
could help them be successful. “Black women don’t want your white hands and
eyes on their breasts,” someone in the room said, and others – clearly others
who knew something I didn’t – robustly agreed. But wait? Isn’t that racism? I shifted uncomfortably in
my chair and let the more courageous, more erudite (older) white women in the
audience carry the conversation. I knew in my gut that anything I might say
would be … wrong.
“The black women I see at the
clinic where I work don’t really want
to breastfeed, anyway. “
Energies were high in that room, and every point being made
seemed valid. We can’t make someone want to comply with our care plans, right?
I knew enough to understand that there were determinants beyond the clinical
setting that influenced the decision to breastfeed – family members, community
organizations, workplaces, society in general makes it difficult to breastfeed.
I also knew that, of those who managed to breastfeed anyway, most were white
and Asian women.
Sherry
calmly but firmly fired question after question to the group. Her message was
to advise us that we can’t possibly know what it’s like for these women,
because our experiences were so foundationally different. How can a woman of
color in a community that does not support breastfeeding possibly breastfeed
for an entire year? When her mother, grandmother, and all of her aunties – all
of whom live nearby and are very involved in the upbringing of the family
babies – didn’t breastfeed and have no interest in re-learning how to take care
of babies, when they already know very well thank you how to handle a
bottle-fed baby?
I wasn’t
feeling it. I was the first woman in my family to successfully breastfeed in 3
generations. And by “successful,” I mean my babies got nothing but my milk for
6+ months, from my breasts even though I went back to work in an unsupportive
(but thought they were supportive – the worst kind!) 10-12 weeks postpartum. I
breastfed through two pregnancies, I tandem nursed. My babies refused bottles
so I stayed up all night nursing them when they reverse cycled. I suffered
discrimination in my workplace. My mother and grandmother didn’t understand why
I breastfed, hasn’t I turned out just fine? Breastfeeding seemed so much
harder, and I was bringing that on myself. I had no sisters, cousins,
co-workers, or friends who valued breastfeeding and mothering at the breast the
way I did. I had terrible healthcare. My partner questioned my choices, felt
alienated from our families and our friends, and supported my breastfeeding
under what felt to him like sheer duress, all that only because I wanted to
leave our workplace and he was adamant about my staying in it. I wasn’t a
stay-at-home wife of a wealthy man in Lactopia. And yet, I was a breastfeeding superstar against every
barrier I knew of. I wasn’t buying that a mother could only be successful in an
environment that fostered success, because I had been successful in what I
thought was the very same environment Sherry was describing.
Sherry
shared about Uzazi Village, a community center in the urban core that provided
perinatal health services and support to families in the neighborhood. She acknowledged
that those of us in the room were obviously there because we wanted to be part
of a solution, but kept driving home the point: we, ourselves – the white women
in the room – were NOT the solution. I hadn’t learned yet about the white
savior narrative, wherein learned white people descended upon a needy community
of people of color to save and fix them – but this was what Sherry was teaching
us about. Our job isn’t to go to Uzazi Village and provide breastfeeding
support, it’s to take an active role in the development and mentorship of women
of color so they can provide breastfeeding support in their communities. Our
job isn’t to tell the story of the marginalized, it’s to get out of the way and let them tell their own story – and, when
invited, to amplify their messages, to let women of color stand up on my
shoulders.
My
shoulders.
It was at
that moment, over an hour into Sherry’s presentation, that the light bulb
turned on. I thought some more about how similar my own breastfeeding
experiences and efforts at early mothering had been to the circumstances Sherry
described in the community she served. Why did I overcome? What was different
about me? It wasn’t because I’m a better person, or a stronger person. It
wasn’t because I was more motivated or because I wanted to work harder. It
wasn’t because I loved my babies more than black women loved theirs.
It was –
and continues to be – because I was raised to question authority and to
exercise my own. My own authority. At
every turn – home, school, in jobs I held, in day-to-day interactions I had
with people I knew and didn’t know – I was encouraged to believe in myself.
That I could accomplish anything I set out to accomplish. The world was my
oyster, carpe diem. I received this message loud and clear, unequivocally,
every day.
Mothers
don’t pull their purses and their children closer when I approach from the
opposite direction on the sidewalk. Drivers don’t lock their doors when they
enter my neighborhood and see me on the corner, waiting to cross the street.
I’ll tell you what else doesn’t happen to me. Just yesterday, I picked up my
keys to the apartment where I will live while I’m in school and my family is at
our home 250 miles away. There were several emails and posted signs in the
leasing office stating that I’d have to show photo ID to receive my keys. My ID
was never requested. The black couple receiving their keys were asked for
theirs by not one, but two employees at the complex.
I live in a
different world because I am white. Someone recently commented on Facebook,
about a political figure who has no concept of privilege, “he was born on third
base and thinks he hit a triple.” I didn’t earn the relative ease with which I
pass through my life, I was born into it.
I didn’t
learn too much about how I could provide breastfeeding support to black women
that day at USLCA, but I left Sherry’s session with an unrelenting discomfort.
I donated to Uzazi Village that week, to support a cause I believed in with
means I had. I was confused that the knowledge and skills I had acquired as an
IBCLC and a public health professional weren’t worth what I thought they might
be. I struggled for awhile with whether there was any place for me at all in
the fight against racial and ethnic health disparities. It would be a few more
months before I’d realize that the disparities are caused by systems, not
individuals, and eliminating those disparities would take a systemic effort.
I’d love to tell you that from that
moment on, I’ve been a perfect ally, a white woman who waves my Magic Wand of
Privilege and makes things better for women of color every day while I scale
tall buildings in a single bound and mother my three children and get a
doctorate and … no. More often than not, I still feel helpless and lost about
what I can do, what I should do. More often than not, I still feel ashamed and
confused about the biases and prejudices I’ve permitted – and sometimes
continue to permit in my own thinking and behavior. I get frustrated that
certain ZIP Codes, even one less than 10 miles from my own, harbor awful, awful
health disparities, but I raise my own family in the ZIP Code where we have a
better shot, and I wonder if I an implicit or complicit supporter of the
structures that created those disparities – the structures that make it
possible for me and my white family to make a life in a town where black and
brown families have to work twice as hard to get half as far. I listen to and
do what I can to amplify the voices of my black and brown friends, peers, and
colleagues. I listen carefully. I listen to every word and, when my knee-jerk
reaction is to say “but that isn’t about race …” I stay quiet and I keep listening because it’s not my job
to tell black people in America what their experience has been or how they
should do things differently so they can be just like me. Their world is
different from mine, and my job is to bear witness, to believe what they say,
and, maybe by my words or maybe by my example, to challenge the systems that
make our worlds so different.
