Thirty years later, after the Charleston massacre, my parents’ rural Virginia town buzzed about how to respond to the racial issues agitating Americans’ consciousness. A local church invited the community to come together and address it. My parents decided to attend.
They sat in a large room with about a hundred other white folks. A woman stood up to bring the meeting to order. She announced that she and a few other women had decided to respond by sending care packages to the predominantly black school across town. She suggested that they break up into groups and choose items to collect. The room exhaled in relief: Yes! Outward action! Performance instead of transformation! Our insides are safe!
My father was confused and frustrated. He raised his hand. The woman called on him.
My dad stood and said, “I’m not here to make packages. I’m here to talk. I was raised in a racist southern town. I was taught a lot of things about black people that I’ve been carrying in my mind and my heart for decades. I’m starting to understand that not only are these lies, but they’re deadly lies. I don’t want to pass this poison down to my grandkids’ generation. I want this stuff out of me, but I don’t know how to get it out. I think I’m saying that I’ve got racism in me, and I want to unlearn it.”
My father is a man who spent his entire career in schools championing kids who didn’t look like me. He is a man who taught us every single day that racism is evil. But now my father understood that a person can be good and still be sick. He understood that there is such a thing in America as a highly functioning racist. He’d become humble enough to learn that we can be good, kind, justice-loving people in our hearts and minds—but if we live in America, we’re poisoned by the racist air we breathe. He had dared to imagine that he played a role in our sick American family. He was ready to let burn his cherished identity of “good white person.” He was ready to stay in the room and turn himself inside out.
I am a feminist, but I was raised in a sexist culture. I was raised in a world that tried to convince me through media, religious organizations, history books, and the beauty industry that female bodies are worth less than male bodies and that certain types of female bodies (thin, tall, young) are worth more than other types of female bodies.
The images of women’s bodies for sale, the onslaught of emaciated women’s bodies held up as the pinnacle of female achievement, and the pervasive message that women exist to please men is the air I breathed. I lived in a mine, and the toxin was misogyny. I got sick from it. Not because I’m a bad, sexist person, but because I was breathing misogynistic air.
I became bulimic, and it’s taken me a lifetime to recover. Self-hatred is harder to unlearn than it is to learn. It is difficult for a woman to be healthy in a culture that is still so very sick. It is the ultimate victory for a woman to find a way to love herself and other women while existing in a world insisting that she has no right to. So I’m working hard at health and wholeness every day. I’m an advocate for women’s equality because, at my roots, I know the truth. I know what my body is for. It’s not for men’s use. It’s not for selling things. It’s for loving and learning and resting and for fighting for justice. I know that every body on this earth has equal, unsurpassable worth.
And yet.
I still have the poison in me. I still have all the biases that were instilled in me for decades. I still struggle to love my body every single day. Fifty percent of all my daily thoughts are about my body. I still step on the scale to check my self-worth. Subconsciously, I would likely still judge a thinner, younger woman to be worth more than a heavy older woman. I know that often my knee-jerk reaction is not my wild, it’s my taming. So I can correct that misguided first judgment, but it takes me a deliberate effort. We become the air we breathe.
When I was thirty-five, I noticed that the wrinkles on my forehead were deepening and I found myself driving to a doctor’s office and paying hundreds of dollars to have Botox poison painfully injected into my forehead to make my face worth as much as the younger, smoother faces on TV. I quite literally knew better. But my subconscious did not know better. My subconscious had not yet caught up with my mind and my heart, because it was (is still) poisoned. It took a conscious decision to stop poisoning myself. To stop paying to have misogyny injected beneath my skin. I am a fierce, forever feminist. But I still have sexism and misogyny running through my veins. You can be one thing, and your subconscious can be another thing.
I talk to women all the time about how the misogyny pumped into the air by our culture affects us deeply. How it corrupts our ideas about ourselves and pits women against each other. How that programmed poison makes us sick and mean. How we all have to work hard to detox from it so that we don’t keep hurting ourselves and other women. Women cry and nod and say, “Yes, yes, me, too. I’ve got misogyny in me, and I want it out.” No one is terrified to admit she has internalized misogyny, because there is no morality attached to the admission. No one decides that being affected by misogyny makes her a bad person. When a woman says she wants to work to detox herself of misogyny, she is not labeled a misogynist. It is understood that there is a difference between a misogynist and a person affected by misogyny who is actively working to detox. They both have misogyny in them, programmed by the system, but the former is using it to wield power to hurt people and the latter is working to untangle herself from its power so she can stop hurting people.
But then when I bring up racism, the same women say, “But I’m not racist. I am not prejudiced. I was raised better than that.”
We are not going to get the racism out of us until we start thinking about racism like we think about misogyny. Until we consider racism as not just a personal moral failing but as the air we’ve been breathing. How many images of black bodies being thrown to the ground have I ingested? How many photographs of jails filled with black bodies have I seen? How many racist jokes have I swallowed? We have been deluged by stories and images meant to convince us that black men are dangerous, black women are dispensable, and black bodies are worth less than white bodies. These messages are in the air and we’ve just been breathing. We must decide that admitting to being poisoned by racism is not a moral failing—but denying we have poison in us certainly is.
Revelation must come before revolution. Becoming sober—from booze, patriarchy, white supremacy—is a little bit like swallowing the blue pill and slowly watching the invisible, deliberate matrix we’ve been living inside of become visible. For me, the process of detoxing from booze included becoming aware of the matrix of consumer culture that brainwashed me into believing that my pain was to be numbed through consumption. Detoxing from my eating disorder meant seeing the web of patriarchy that trained me to believe that I was not allowed to be hungry or take up space on the earth. And detoxing from racism is requiring me to open my eyes to the elaborate web of white supremacy that exists to convince me that I am better than people of color.
In America, there are not two kinds of people, racists and nonracists. There are three kinds of people: those poisoned by racism and actively choosing to spread it; those poisoned by racism and actively trying to detox; and those poisoned by racism who deny its very existence inside them.
I’ve decided that the people who called me a racist were right.
And wrong.
I am the second type of person. I am a white woman who has come to the conclusion that the reason people call me a racist when I show up to speak about racism is that I am showing up as I am and I have racism in me. By what I say and don’t say, by the way I say it, people can see my inner racism on the outside. What they are seeing and pointing out is the truth.