This is the story of how I discovered an ugly truth about myself, and lost a friend in the process.
Who was the friend? She was my one Black friend. Not my “token” Black friend; just the one friend I had who happened to be Black.
What was the truth? I am racist. I already had an inkling of this. I already had a fear. I didn’t understand how deeply it ran until pictures were published showing Justin Trudeau wearing blackface.
It’s hard to explain all of this, because I am feeling deeply ashamed of myself. But I’m going to try anyway, because I owe it to myself and to my friend to own this, and to learn from it.
For a couple of years now, I have been reading about privilege, and especially about white privilege, and hearing the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour saying, “White person, it is not your time to speak.” I have felt so much grief over this, because so often throughout my life I have felt a requirement to be silent, despite having so much I needed to say. My emotions have been so often deemed inappropriate by my family and friends, coworkers and managers; I have had my Self pounded into the dirt by people I trusted. All of this has led to a lifetime of mental illness, and to the feeling that I do not deserve the space I take. I do not deserve to exist. And now, because people of colour are finally finding their voices, and taking the space they deserve, and speaking their truths, I have felt even less deserving of my life than I did before.
Self-expression was becoming a zero-sum game. The more that other people raised their voices, the less room there was for me. I was a white person, and it was not my time to speak. Yet I still so desperately need to be heard and understood.
My one Black friend was one of the many people expressing her rage at the way she and people who look like her have been treated, and continue to be treated. It got to the point where whenever I read her social media posts, I felt like I was being punched in the eye for the sole crime of being white. (Yes, I understand the irony here. I absolutely understand the irony.) I couldn’t take the daily onslaught of that anger, so I unfollowed her.
A few weeks later, I read Angie Thomas’ incredible book The Hate U Give, and discovered that I was appalled and disgusted by the one white character who treated her Black friend in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason. That girl was a racist! Which meant… so was I.
I went back to my social media accounts and re-followed my friend immediately, ready to learn from her without feeling threatened.
Until we saw the pictures of Justin Trudeau “wearing makeup”.
And my friend wrote that she believed that blackface was a rite of passage for white people.
I sat with that for about a day and a half, and then I gave in to my own anger. I wrote, “Not all white people.” I wrote, “Surely making a blanket statement about all white people is as harmful as a white person making a blanket statement about all black people.” Words to that effect; I don’t have the guts to go back to the post to see exactly what I wrote.
My friend’s other friends, her true allies, jumped all over me. There were recommendations that I read White Fragility so that I could understand why what I said was not okay. But there were other comments that were much more angry and much less helpful, and I was not graceful in my response. I lashed out. I struck back. Again, I don’t have the guts to revisit exactly what I wrote, but it was awful. To the point that one person said that I was “gaslighting”. I had mentioned that I got it: that I was a horrible person who didn’t deserve the space she took up. But that they didn’t know anything about me, and what I had already done in my efforts to recover from my own racism. I reacted out of the deep hurt I was feeling, first by my friend’s post, and then by the responses to my own comment.
You know who I reminded me of? Brett Kavanagh, responding to the accusations by Christine Blasey-Ford. The bellow. The how-dare-you. The privilege.
I had turned the thread around to make myself out as the victim. I had weaponized my own hurt to stop my friend from expressing hers.
I have apologized to my friend. I have apologized to her allies. It will never be enough to undo the harm I have done just because I was unable to sit with my own discomfort.
To my white friends, if you’re reading this, please don’t respond with, “Oh, Linda, you’re not a racist!” We all know that I am, and that I have a lot of work to do.
To my Black friend, if you’re reading this, I am so sorry.
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