Lace on Race

Racism: The American Dream

I’m sitting in my gazebo looking out over my yard.  There are big trees and flower beds.  There is food for birds here – both in feeders I fill and in the fertile ground where we grow all manner of things.  The birds perch on my fence for a moment as they swish and swoop between yards.  To them the fence is not a barrier.  It is merely a place to light for a spell as they move throughout their much larger domain. 

But what is my fence, to me?  Protection?  A stamp marking this yard as my own?  It defines my land as something to defend; and with defense, justification of violence quickly follows. Maybe the fence is even a status symbol ~ of something I have accomplished.  Something I can measure, and measure others against.

In the LoR community we often talk about power.  We talk about the ways that we wield toxic power.  We talk about whether or not we can (and how to) leverage our power on behalf of others.  I’ve participated in or observed multiple conversations on the topic and I think it can get tricky.  We don’t always agree on what power is or what it could look like to wield it well.  For me, it all keeps coming back to ‘power over’.  Power in and of itself is not a limited resource.  If you have power (agency, means, influence), that does not automatically diminish my power.  But ‘power over’ is limited.  For me to have ‘power over’ you, you cannot also have ‘power over’ me.  Maybe the American dream isn’t really about a house, two kids and a white picket fence at all.  Maybe that was just a pretty picture painted to disguise the fact that it’s actually about becoming better than someone else – as many someones as I can. 

In white supremacy the goal has always been to create a group or groups that even the most disadvantaged white person can feel we still have power over.  And it has worked for so many, for so long.  We have been wooed by an idea that something better is owed to us.  And if not something better than what I already have, it should at least be better than what they have.  And we lie to ourselves here.  “I don’t think I’m better than black people.  I’m thankful I have a job and can afford this house.  I earned it.”  But at bare minimum, I am exerting ‘power over’ by my complacency in the face of a system that gives me unearned advantages.  The wage gap helps me afford what my counterpart may not be able to.  The color of my skin helps me during the mortgage approval process (when I actually didn’t have savings for a downpayment).  And the advantages go on and on.

It’s nice to think I can blame someone else ~ British colonizers, founding fathers, wealthy execs, Donald Trump.  None of them seem to care about fixing the system.  In fact, these are the ones who built and uphold the system.  That’s not entirely untrue but it places a comfortable distance between me and the problem (or between me and the solution). 

We live in a place and a time where we’ve accepted this power imbalance as the norm. We each might think we’re navigating our way through to the best of our ability but in fact I find I often resort to navigating my way through to MY greatest advantage. It’s time to tear down the barriers which separate us and measure us. It’s time we lay down our arms, that we say we use only to protect, and rather share resources.  And it’s time to lay down our ‘power over’.  That’s why I’m committed to staying under the leadership of black men and women, who are experts in the understanding of toxic power structures. It’s time for me to humble myself.  Time to listen, learn, and walk in community with others ~ with action, intention and faithful engagement.

Will you walk with me?

Danielle Holcombe

7 responses to “Racism: The American Dream”

  1. Christina Sonas Avatar
    Christina Sonas

    Humility is definitely a primary component of my walk to lessen White harm. It has two sides: humility about my Whiteness, and humility in service to BIPOC. White supremacy has kept me in “power over” for so long, it feels too pervasive to simply enter into a “power equity” relationship. Dangerous, too, because “power equity” isn’t a strategy for reconditioning my Whiteness, and I know that is critical to the entire project of making myself less harmful to black and brown folk. “Power equity” would bring me into relationships with BIPOC without having changed my Whiteness at all, and that would cause grievous harm. Humility isn’t “under the power”; I still have my agency, my volition, my capacity. I am using those when I choose to be a follower and a listener and an assistant to the mission.

  2. Rhonda Eldridge Avatar
    Rhonda Eldridge

    It’s all so ingrained. After the 2008 crash, the bank called and offered my husband and I a great deal to refinance. It saved us a huge amount of money and allowed us to pay off our house years early. It let the bank look like they were re-financing loans on houses in a mid cost range. We did not need this re-financing. People who were at risk of losing their houses needed those loans and re-financing. We took the deal and didn’t blink. I didn’t realize until the last couple of days how doing this was another automatic act of power and privilege. We have opened an account at a black owned bank. At least if something like that happens again, the profits will go somewhere I am more comfortable. Not much. Something.

  3. Dakota McKenzie Avatar
    Dakota McKenzie

    Thank-you for this. It gets me thinking about how I’m trying to opt out of this but the extent to which I can is greatly facilitated by my white privilege. It gets me thinking about where I live and the fact that I am planning to move, one of the reasons being this unspoken competition thing I especially experience in my affluent, mostly white community with little yards and impressive fences. I want to move to a small town in the mountains with plenty of nature as well as a working class community ethic influenced by a Quaker heritage. I am well aware that I will be more easily able to fit in there because I’m white, even though I’m a single woman, which will be points against me commanding respect until I prove I can command it. I want to earn respect by being empowered and empowering to be around, not by asserting power over others. There are opportunities all day every day to exercise this muscle in conversations about race. In a place without much diversity I think this will be about engaging conversation with other white people about their assumptions while continuing to examine my own. The lack of diversity is something I anticipate will be a deep loss. But that’s another thread.

  4. Jes B Avatar
    Jes B

    So interesting. As yet another woman in what was traditionally a male-dominated career, I can relate to a desire to be “better than”, and this feeling that I earned something, when actually I see ways that I took advantage of my privilege. Will be processing this for days to come. Thank you for sharing.

  5. Varda L Avatar
    Varda L

    Greta Thunberg once invited a bunch of journalists to a meeting about climate and then turned her back while a group of indigenous climate leaders spoke.

    And the reporters dutifully printed exactly that. I don’t know what the climate leaders said because it wasn’t reported.

    Formal power is a problem. We are only given power for limited scope, that serves the organizations that grant it – with supremacy baked in to the system. The alternative is social power. Our ability to collaborate across normal barriers and do new things and new ways is the power to make change.

  6. Laura Berwick Avatar
    Laura Berwick

    What you’ve said here, Danielle, is beginning to help me make sense of an idea I raised on one of the threads on Amy Cooper on the FB page. A commenter mentioned that she doesn’t hear panic in AC’s voice, in spite of her using fear as an excuse, and I replied about how I think, when I get strongly activated by fear, I have a gut-impulse to assert dominance, and become in my words there, “a stone-cold bitch”. I related it to realms in my life where I’ve spent a lot of time and energy competing against men, which I think also applies to AC, as a VP of something or other in an NYC financial firm of some sort. I stated there that I can’t… quite… make the connection to white supremacy that I suspect is there.

    But I think what you’ve written here has helped me start forming that link. It’s not that I didn’t realize this about America, though I haven’t always known it. But pondering it right now, as clearly as you’ve laid it out, brings things into a sharper relief.

    My drive to be “better than” SOMEBODY is… actually really low these days. But for a large portion of my life, it got daily exercise. It was part and parcel of dealing with men, and, quite frankly, the vast majority of those men were white. The need for dominance over someone is a blood sibling to the need to have a better life than someone. The need to have “power over” absolute informs both.

  7. Christin Spoolstra Avatar
    Christin Spoolstra

    Your reframing the American Dream as a pursuit of ‘power over’ is helping me process through some things. I connected it to the trope of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ and how the striving for ‘upward mobility’ was more about social positioning than anything. I’ve been trying to slowly engage with someone from home on a facebook meme (he’s anti ‘socialism’ and I’m wanting to critique American capitalism) – I know he won’t change his mind, but I hope others are watching the conversation. He keeps coming back to these themes of the American Dream and hard work and getting what you deserve. But there are so many power structures in play, particularly the power over (like, what’s the harm in communal benefit other than our not being able to claim superior benefit?)… but I’m struggling to get at those root causes with him while being able to stay in the car with him. All that in a round about way to say: yes, I’m walking with you. I want to learn more from all of you about these tools so that I can keep on having conversations like with this guy without either my getting out of the car or pushing him straight out of it by going too deep too fast

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