Facebook Publication Date: 6/17/2019 12:06
I am posting this with Lace’s approval, including a link to an article. The links at the end may not work, so you may need to paste the URL into your search engine.
More on “When A Query Is A Weapon.”
Claire Ramsey
On June 15, Lace put up a post titled “When A Query Is A Weapon.” In this post she related an experience with a white woman, who ” insisted upon her ‘right’ to ask people of color in general what their racial mix was, and doubled down on her choice to do so. . .” My first thought was similar to others’ – who in the world is so deluded about her white supremacy that she believes she has a right to demand the details of a Black woman’s heritage? Lace explains the underpinning of this kind of query from a white person. And it was completely new knowledge to me. And the details of Lace’s reply to this woman, and the depth of her thinking stayed with me. Why? Because, though Lace told us, her readers, the background assumptions about a smart Black woman – that she could not possibly be descended from enslaved people – in the moment she summoned the intellectual and emotional energy to make her response “a very uncomfortable, teachable moment: ‘Nope, I’m just a garden variety colored girl from Arkansas’.” If you have been reading Lace on Race for more than a few days, you already know that Lace has a lyrical command of English. You already know that she talks straight, too. So you might think, “Wow. Good call, Lace! Another model bit of wisdom in the Lace on Race tradition.”
But on my second read I saw more, and it reminded me of an article that Lace sent me about a month ago. There is the content of a response. And there is the racial context and the framing that drives the response. Having to frame a response to a deluded white woman, not to mention creating a pertinent and pointed teachable moment is a classic example of the effortful management of emotions that Black people are forced into (probably) daily when they negotiate white spaces. Lace crafts her response with knowledge and awareness of where she stands in the eyes of the white aggressor. And she turns the energy of the aggression back onto the aggressor. These acts, of course, require effort and labor beyond the everyday interactions of life in school or on the job.
Black people in previously all-white spaces – the internet and Facebook, schools and universities, work places – have to seek equilibrium between their well-being, their need to defend themselves, and their general presentation of self in life with the risks of doing so and the potential consequences. Here on Lace on Race we recently discussed the topic of privilege and boundary-setting, and how risky it is for Black women, because setting boundaries in the absence of privilege requires taking a huge and unfair risk. The workplace is another generally white space where the Black people are forced to present themselves carefully because their standing – as a professional or as a professional-in-training, is on the line, and often their livelihoods. Research on Black professionals’ experiences in white spaces* (Evans and Moore, 2015) – law students in white law schools, lawyers in white firms, pilots flying for US airlines (ahem, white airlines) – lays out the emotional burden they shoulder and the paradoxical surreality of those white spaces.
All of the professionals interviewed describe micro – aggressions that reinforce the whiteness of the spaces (or, more recognizably, that attempt to keep the Black professionals “in their place”) – despite the professional ethos proclaimed in statements like “we’re all equal here.” So the Black professionals are forced to do the emotional labor of negotiating the racism in their workplaces – picking their battles, preparing responses that are not excessively “angry,” deciding how far to go to demand the respect that they deserve – while at the same time they are boxed in by expressed institutional frameworks that tell them (bray at them, proclaim at them) that the racism they experience simply does not exist any more, even though the white spaces are completely racialized, Black employees are expected to believe and to behave as if the schools, companies, and firms are either “color-blind and neutral” about race or genuine proponents of racial justice. This unreasonable expectation holds even though micro-aggressions suggest that Black employees and students continue to be viewed as highly emotional, overly focused on race, over-sensitive, “playing the race card,” or otherwise deviating from social and professional norms. The awful paradox is that, if they do not resist or speak in their own defense, they know damn well that they are helping to bolster the white institutional pecking order. . . if they do speak in their own defense, express frustration or anger, they risk losing status and their jobs.
This is the reality of white supremacy and the impossible burden we white people force Black people to shoulder. The woman who thought she had a right to demand Lace’s DNA analysis is just one more racist white person boxing in a Black woman. Lace’s authentic and pointed response is a lesson to us all about the level of emotional work and engagement we require of Black women that we would never think of demanding from a white woman.
*Evans, Louwanda and Moore, Wendy Leo. (2015). Impossible Burdens: White Institutions, Emotional Labor, and Micro-Resistance. Social Problems, 2015, 62, 439–454.
https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spv009
https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/62/3/439/1637635
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