find it odd to label whiteness "white"

Amy

(wearing 1 cup of white self-raising flour)

In Locomotion, a novel for young readers by Jacqueline Woodson, a young black child named Lonnie Collins Motion tells his story. The novel’s format is unique—a series of sixty poems written by eleven-year-old Locomotion (that’s Lonnie’s nickname), who writes them at the prompting of Ms. Marcus, his white teacher.

Throughout his poems, Locomotion gradually reveals that his parents have died in a fire a few years earlier, that he’s separated from his sister, and that he’s staying with a woman he knows as Miss Edna.

In one of his verse-style poems, Locomotion reveals his ability to see the significance of something that his teacher seems unable to see as at all significant—her own whiteness:

Last night this commercial came on TV. It was this white lady making a nice dinner for her husband. She made him some baked chicken with potatoes and gravy and some kind of greens—not collards, but they still looked real good. Everything looked so delicious, I just wanted to reach into that television and snatch a plate for myself. He gave her a kiss and then a voice came on saying He’ll love you for it and then the commercial went off.

I sat on Miss Edna’s scratchy couch wondering if that man and woman really ate that food or just threw it all away.

Now Ms. Marcus wants to know why I wrote that the lady is white and I say because it’s true. And Ms. Marcus says Lonnie, what does race have to do with it, forgetting that she asked us to use lots of details when we wrote. Forgetting that whole long talk she gave yesterday about the importance of description!

I don’t say anything back to her, just look down at my arm. It’s dark brown and there’s a scab by my wrist that I don’t pick at if I remember not to. I look at my knuckles. They’re real dark too.

Outside it’s starting to rain and the way the rain comes down—tap, tapping against the window—gets me to thinking. Ms. Marcus don’t understand some things even though she’s my favorite teacher in the world.

Things like my brown, brown arm. And the white lady and man with all that good food to throw away. How if you turn on your TV, that’s what you see—people with lots and lots of stuff not having to sit on scratchy couches in Miss Edna’s house.

And the true fact is alotta those people are white. Maybe it’s that if you’re white you can’t see all the whiteness around you.

Locomotion ends his poem with a profound understanding about a fundamental difference between white and non-white self-awareness. While non-whites carry around a conscious sense of their own racial makeup wherever they go, most whites are blithely oblivious to their own.

This white oblivion to a significant part of one’s social identity has an array of consequences. One of the worst is the common white belief that non-white people pretty much see the world the way they do. A result of that belief is that when non-white people say that race still matters, white people often ask in return, “What in the world are you talking about?”

Another consequence of the common white inability to see the whiteness all around themselves is the discomfort they tend to feel when that whiteness, and their own racial status, are pointed out to them.

In her luminous book Learning to Be White, the theologian Thandeka describes the results of a revealing experiment that she likes to conduct with white people. She calls this experiment “the Race Game.”

My luncheon partner, a fifth-generation Smith College graduate with a New England genealogy older than the state and a portfolio perhaps as wealthy, wanting to get to know me, asked what it felt like to be black.

I was not offended by her query. Her face was open; her eyes were friendly and engaged. She simply believed that nothing from her own background or experience could help her understand me. I knew better. I had been assigned a race by America’s pervasive socialization process, and so had she. I thus believed that if she drew upon her own experience of being “raced,” she might then be able to see what we had in common.

But how could I make her conscious of the racialization process to which her own Euro-American community had subjected her? Searching for an answer to this question, I invented the Race Game and invited her to play it for a week.

The Race Game, my luncheon partner very quickly discovered, had only one rule. For the next seven days, she must use the ascriptive term white whenever she mentioned the name of one of her Euro-American cohorts. She must say, for instance, “my white husband, Phil,” or “my white friend Julie,” or “my lovely white child Jackie.” I guaranteed her that if she did this for a week and then met me for lunch, I could answer her question using terms she would understand.

We never had lunch together again. Apparently my suggestion had made her uncomfortable.

African Americans have learned to use a racial language to describe themselves and others. Euro-Americans have also learned a pervasive racial language. But in their racial lexicon, their own racial group becomes the great unsaid.

I wanted my luncheon partner to give voice to her whiteness as the racial unsaid in her life. By consciously referring to this unvoiced color, she would become aware of what it feels like to take and maintain a racial identity in America.

Or so I thought. . . .

Why was the very prospect of playing the Race Game so daunting?

As both of these examples point out, the labeling of whiteness with the word “white” is daunting to most white Americans. Because they’re just not accustomed to doing that, being pushed to do so makes them uncomfortable.

But is that all there is to that discomfort?

Are there more feelings, or thoughts, or suspicions that arise when the great unsaid gets said?