1 RACIAL STRESS

CHAPTER 1

RACIAL STRESS

The day my eldest daughter and I read Harlem’s Little Blackbird by Renée Watson (2012) together, she voiced that people with my skin color had oppressed people who looked like her. In that moment, I grappled with some big feelings. I sensed that whatever I said in response was important, possibly more important than any other difficult topic we would ever talk about. I felt like I had to get it right. I knew that saying the wrong thing could be extremely detrimental to her and to our relationship. I also felt the need to defend myself, even though she wasn’t talking about me—she was talking about a system of injustice and oppression carried out by White people against Black people. For a moment, I was paralyzed. My heart sped up. I felt a buzzing in my temples and the sensation that I had lost all my words. I looked down at the picture of singer Florence Mills, who had been invited to perform in New York City when she was a child. She stood with her family as an angry White man held out his hand to block her family from going into the theater. Behind him, a group of White people held a “Whites Only” sign.

What made this conversation more difficult than others? Why did I suddenly feel like I was trying to paddle upstream in a rowboat with no oars? I was struck by the desire to say, “I wasn’t there! It wasn’t me!” I worried that saying the wrong thing would reveal something bad about me. Since then, I’ve learned through reading the work of Robin DiAngelo (2012) and Ali Michael and Eleonora Bartoli (2014) that this desire to be seen as someone who is not racist was interfering with my ability to engage fully in the conversation.