{"id":36443,"date":"2024-03-07T17:24:54","date_gmt":"2024-03-08T01:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=36443"},"modified":"2024-03-08T07:00:23","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T15:00:23","slug":"the-box-its-a-white-people-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-box-its-a-white-people-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Box: It’s a [White] People Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Befuddled.\u00a0 That\u2019s the word I would use to describe my efforts to understand where Yascha Mounk is coming from in The Identity Trap<\/em>.\u00a0 On the one hand I weighed his personal background: his mother lost most of her family in the Holocost, he became a teenage activist noting Germany\u2019s lack of support of refugees, and called out his country\u2019s passive stance on Crimea.\u00a0 I imagined these highlights of his lived experience were foundational in his journey to pursue his studies and ultimately his career as an academic and scholar.\u00a0 So how did he crossover the bridge in this ideology to a place that discounts fundamental concepts of identity development?[1] Perhaps because it is cradled in American Whiteness. [2]\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>I don\u2019t have enough word count to get into this thing called \u201cWhiteness\u201d so I\u2019ll just add a footnote to the best description I\u2019ve found this week. [3] Or perhaps it’s purely an intellectual exercise and not a practical tool (unless can can be weaponized, which is the opposite of what Mounk suggests.) Surely, this trap is more than just something to think about and I suppose it is in certain circles, but rarely for those who are most impacted by the trap. [4]\u00a0 I mention these options of perspective to establish foundational understanding related to why this book pissed me off: White people just don’t get this whole racial “identity” thing, for whatever reason.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Mounk, my early life experience guided future paths. What’s different? Living as a person of color in a world of Whiteness. Fifty years prior to the current “wokeness” I grew up as the only Black in an all-white town. I escaped Oregon whiteness to Oakland, CA to earn my bachelors in Communications with a minor in Ethnic Studies. Went on to get a master’s at an Ivy League institution researching the social construction of race in America.\u00a0 Spent years working in departments related to \u201cdiversity\u201d or \u201cmulticulturalism.\u201d\u00a0 Decades later we\u2019ve added letters to some and new acronyms for others. Diversity has grown to DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging), gay or lesbian has become LGBTQIA+, and gender is now a pronoun integrated into conversations we have everyday. Now, I’m researching a doctoral related to “us” in relation to “them,”\u00a0 as it relates to healing and wellness, while fearing I’m pigeon-holing myself into a field that is mentally and emotionally exhausting with little reward and minimal impact.\u00a0 And still, I’m here.<\/span><\/p>\n

I write all this so that you (mostly white readers,) might believe that I have some level of expertise parallel to Mounk.\u00a0 I could ask you to just \u201ctrust me\u201d when I say I\u2019ve done more than merely observe or study. Yet, I know how important it is for white folks to have the right degree in the right study to be taken seriously which is why I have used so much of my word count to justify both experience and study.\u00a0 Was this necessary?\u00a0 Maybe not, if I didn’t live in America where I have to prove myself.\u00a0 Or teach my children to do the same.<\/span><\/p>\n

My mother did not teach me.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t have the knowledge.\u00a0 She was a white hippie chic, born in the 50s in that same rural town I grew up in, and although she did her best to help me struggle through my identity development, (books were how she chose to communicate – Zora Neal Hurston, Alice Walker, etc.,)\u00a0 there was no actual conversation about my Black identity. This is why I went on to study the conversation so I could come to an understanding about this whole \u201crace thing.\u201d Which is why I felt so insulted that Mounk would casually dismiss my experience, my history, as if I don\u2019t see the contradictions in today\u2019s \u201cwoke\u201d identity politics (or Identity Synthesis as he coins it – which is such a white people thing – claiming new terminology for something that has existed before they showed up to name it.\u00a0 <\/span>Chimamanda Ngozi articulated this strange process of identity labeling beautifully, <\/span>\u201cI didn\u2019t know I was Black until I moved to America.\u201d [5]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Becoming woke is also a white people thing. <\/span>DEI trainings, corporate workshops, and new laws or organizational policies are largely geared towards the comfort and understanding of white people. People of color, and others who live outside the norm defined by white folks, have lived boxed existences for hundreds of years prior to neo-liberal white folks waking up to our reality. \u00a0I get was Mounk is saying – identity based on race, gender or any other box is a trap that limits and confines. But when forced to live in that box, to break free I must first concede that the box has been constructed so it can be dissembled and I can get out.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

So as I read Mounk, I found myself more and more in my feelings.\u00a0 As I write this blog, I\u2019m in my feelings.\u00a0 The more I read and tried to process objectively, the more I would keep coming back to the same emotion. And it was not befuddled. As I wrote\u00a0 – which usually has a calming effect – the harder I tapped on the keys.\u00a0 I realized I was feeling more than one emotion.\u00a0 Urgency. Insistence. Clarity. Rage.\u00a0 I know I don\u2019t know a lot of things.\u00a0 I know I may be wrong about quite a few things. But I also know, I know what I know<\/em>, not the Psalm 46:10 kind of knowin\u2019, but knowin’ like my people know – in my bones.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Clark talked about this in our last meeting: this is my thing.\u00a0 When a book shows up in required reading that does not represent what I know about my thing, I\u2019m fired up. I\u2019m ready to research, study, and pontificate.\u00a0 Yet despite this readiness, and with all the reading done thus far about lessening the emotional and reaching for the logical, I kept finding myself in an emotional space.\u00a0 I kept repeating the same mantra before I wrote the next sentence. \u00a0 \u201cHold on.\u00a0 Breathe.\u201d\u00a0 I referred back to <\/span>Kahneman.\u00a0 “<\/span>System 2\u2026 engage.” And then Friedman.\u00a0 \u201cAm I feeling anxious?\u201d Or all the way back to Coven. “Have I reached a threshold?”\u00a0 I spent time reflecting – more than I have with any other of our readings – and I\u2019m clear: Mounk speaks only partial truth.\u00a0 Is it my role to fill in the blanks?\u00a0 Sigh. If the answer is yes, that feels exhausting.\u00a0 It\u2019s largely up to the people of color in the room to fill in the blanks for white folks.\u00a0 I\u2019ve decided I\u2019m not going to do that today.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got enough synthesis to work through.\u00a0 And y\u2019all ain\u2019t paying me.\u00a0 But\u2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

This week God has been pretty loud in His wisdom. It manifested in a random reel about 1) worship and 2) last night\u2019s bible study about gifts of the spirit.\u00a0 First, worship is not about the songs we sing before service, it\u2019s about the sacrifice we make between services. Secondly, I know my gift (teaching). So in an act of worship, even when I don’t feel like it, I am going to teach this one thing – and it is not going to come from a <\/span>German-American political scientist <\/span>who got his degree from Harvard.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to quote myself, the Black girl whose grandfather was Swiss-German. The woman who was stereotyped and marginalized as Black, who eventually got her graduate degree from Cornell University as a single mother.\u00a0 Though we have things in common, Mr. Mounk, I respectfully disagree. Race IS<\/strong> the “dividing line of life” for those who live a racialized existence. [6]\u00a0 We don’t want to walk this line.\u00a0 We would love to “just be” human, but we don’t have that privilege. <\/span><\/p>\n

Further, it’s not a liberal or conservative thing. [7] It’s a common, every day thing. Simplification of a complex history re-traumatizes generations of people who have suffered and continue to struggle daily under the cloak of invisibility and silence.\u00a0 We didn’t create the boxes.\u00a0 We don’t benefit from them except to get scraps of resources distributed by systems created to determine who gets what and how much – all based on the boxes we are stuffed into.\u00a0 Your ideology simply adds fuel to be used by other identities – who were conveniently not studied in your book, i.e. right-wing conservatives –\u00a0 to justify dismissal of the reality that manifests in the moments of the lives who exist in these boxed identities.\u00a0 <\/span>If we want to live in a just and equitable world, we must consider identity as an integral part of our being so we can finally come to a place of peace with simply “being” as we have the divine right to be – God designed, outside of the box. Anything less is a [fill in the blank\/box] worldly thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] https:\/\/umana-taylorlab.gse.harvard.edu\/files\/gse-umana-taylorlab\/files\/murchison_eri_fact_sheet.pdf<\/p>\n

[2] https:\/\/medium.com\/3streams\/the-conspicuous-absence-of-white-identity-from-yascha-mounks-trap-aacb860788b0<\/p>\n

[3] https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/news\/2021\/apr\/20\/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea<\/p>\n

[4] https:\/\/www.apa.org\/news\/podcasts\/speaking-of-psychology\/white-privilege<\/p>\n

[5] https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=prlY0YDAQPM<\/p>\n

[6] Yascha Mounk, The Great Experiment<\/em> (New York: Harvard University Press, 2019)<\/p>\n

[7] Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap<\/em> (New York: Harvard University Press, 2018)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Befuddled.\u00a0 That\u2019s the word I would use to describe my efforts to understand where Yascha Mounk is coming from in The Identity Trap.\u00a0 On the one hand I weighed his personal background: his mother lost most of her family in the Holocost, he became a teenage activist noting Germany\u2019s lack of support of refugees, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3093,2005,770,2010,1679],"class_list":["post-36443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlpg03-mounk","tag-america","tag-identity","tag-race","tag-whiteness"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36443"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36495,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36443\/revisions\/36495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}