AWAKE IN THE SCRATCHY DARK
Twelve years ago, I adopted a young baby in Vietnam and made myself a firm but vague promise not to “raise him white.” But what did that mean? To figure it out, I started to educate myself about race, trying to see how I, a white mother, might not mess up raising a brown boy. I assumed he would face racism (I didn’t yet grasp that he would also face my own racism1). Then, when he was around 3, I started trying to write poems about whiteness. For a long time I did not see the two efforts—the poems and the parenting project—as connected.
One task was turning over a problem in my mind, trying different ways to make language catch fire, as I always do as a poet. The other was reading history to understand the world my kid would face. The link between the two seems obvious now. It was impossible—is impossible—to write in a complex way about race without a deeper understanding of the American whiteness machine. I cannot overstate how badly the poetry writing went for so many years. It is still not easy. Whiteness, it turns out, is not a subject you can sit down and “master.”
The space of an essay is not enough to cover the basics of whiteness in America, let alone racism’s subtle, insidious forms that overlap with and inflame other biases. I am no master of the subject anyway. So this is not a master class. Instead, it is a tour of my mistakes. I offer it, along with a couple of possible ways forward, because poetry needs more, and better, poems about whiteness. I am impatient to read poems of every kind—intricate poems, stark poems, messy poems, musical poems, poems of scorching flatness—that confront, frame, and mess with whiteness.
If you are restless to bring the subject of whiteness to your work, or your work to the shifty, bruising, elusive presence of whiteness, this essay is for you. Accept, or resist, whatever you find here. Resistance is just as useful for getting to the page.
1. ON NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
To write about whiteness, you will first want to examine it. But that’s impossible. You can’t look at whiteness because it exists only in opposition to everything outside itself.
Whiteness is a force, like wind. You can perceive the effects of it, but not it. For instance, you can see racially gerrymandered voting districts, or the number of business loan rejections (twice as many) for black entrepreneurs as for white or for any other ethnicity.2 You can look at your skin tone and gauge how likely it is you will find that color in the makeup department or be followed by security in the makeup department. But you can’t look at whiteness. This quote from historian Manning Marable explains:
It’s not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false … It is the empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.3
The first mistake I made in my poems was to assume whiteness holds complication. Everything holds complication, I thought. My understanding of art is based on the belief that nothing is 100% worthy or unworthy, useful or useless, good or bad. Poetry comes of negative capability. That means being able to hold in your hands irreconcilable truths. I don’t know a different way to wrestle with a problem than to track its complication. I am white, I reasoned, and I am a person. I embody conflicting truths, therefore whiteness must also embody conflicting truths. But it doesn’t.
Given that the best poems are containers for complication, and those are the kind of poems I want to write, what could I do with whiteness, which lacks complication? If whiteness is only oppressive and false, what are its uses in a poem?
I hit this wall just as I had stepped up to claim my whiteness, accept my identity as a white American, white parent, white poet. I was ready! But I couldn’t find what to claim. At the same time, I had to accept responsibility for my whiteness. I was granted the power of whiteness without asking, and I have used it, as it has used me, to harm.
It took During those years, I didn’t write at all.
