The Two Big Ws

When we explain that we are going to Africa, much like the Ws of writing you learned in grade school (who what when etc) two big Ws arise, as politely as possible, in conversation: "Why" and "White". Several combinations can occur, the most obvious being, "Why are two white girls going to Africa?". Sometimes there's the approving exclamation: "Why, how wonderful that two white girls want to go to Africa!" Sometimes we get the encouraging "You won't even begin to understand yourself until you've been a white girl in Africa!" Both of these basic sentiments, to me, sum up the real problem when we explain our trip: the notion that we are going to save Africa, or Africa is going to save us. Neither of these statements is true, and each one is damaging in its own right. We are going to Africa for the opportunity not only to travel somewhere we've never been, meet people we've never met, and have experiences we've barely dreamed of in a country and on a continent completely unlike our own, with an utterly different history and development and languages, but also to really immerse ourselves in life there. We wanted to make a point of going for three months to give ourselves the opportunity to do more than sight-see, and we wanted to work with this gender-based violence prevention program in order to learn as much as we can about the women who live in Rwanda and their experiences (women, their experiences and their needs are getting their own equally long-winded blog post, trust - we are drafting as we speak). We certainly hope to touch lives and have ours touched, but in all fairness, we are people who hope for that depth and richness in EVERY experience, from our jobs to a night out. In this case, we hope to be giving ourselves opportunity, circumstance and time for an experience even more out of the ordinary, and even more complex and layered.

I have been thinking about this particularly since returning to a small, extremely liberal, almost paralyzingly well-educated state. Remember how so many kids you went to college settled down in that small university town because they loved it so much? Well here, all those kids went to Harvard.

I had a conversation a few nights ago with a friend who is, in fact, a Harvard graduate, and another friend of ours who went to a small arts college. Both work at a high school in a wealthy neighborhood, but both started teaching in the Metco program. Essentially the grandchild of school busing programs, Metco brings economically disadvantaged students to this school system with all its money and resources. In the interest of giving the kids a sense of community, they have their own room to use as a study and designated as well as free time to spend there. Their awareness of their race and the place it gives them in their school makes them unique students, and has, in my opinion, rendered these two women unique teachers. In addition, one of them is half white and half Japanese. During the conversation they brought up a program they despised, designed by the school to help teachers with their racial and cultural sensitivity. The class involved "unpacking their knapsack of privilege." This was how I discovered neither of these extremely well-educated liberal women had ever read Peggy McIntosh's arguably definitive undergraduate manifesto on race and privilege in America, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack."

As we discussed it, I re-read it for the first time in almost 7 years, and found that, older and more aware of the intersections in my identity, I found flaws in the rules McIntosh lays out for identifying white privilege; namely, that the rules completely ignore gender. For example: "4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed." This is not true, because I am a woman. I am extremely careful about when I shop and where I shop, concerned not simply about being harassed, but about being physically harmed. Or this, "15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group." While this is true of my race, it is NOT true of my sexual orientation; I have often been asked to speak as though my experiences were universally representative of the LGBTQ community. There were also numerous examples where something ceased to be true if everyone in the room knew I was Jewish. While I still feel the basic concepts presented in McIntosh's work are valuable and absolutely should not be disregarded, she writes from multiple points of unacknowledged privilege - she is an upper-middle-class, employed, well-educated woman - while focusing solely on the privilege of her racial status. I found upon re-reading that McIntosh's work seemed steeped in the kind of white liberal guilt that leads people to believe I am going to Rwanda to save Africa - or going to Rwanda so that Africa can save me.

How do we talk about race in an age that we want to be post-racial, in which post-racial dialogue is being hailed by the President himself as the way forward to unity in our nation? How does an experience we would have gladly had in Mexico, or Eastern Europe (and in fact, I hope we will someday have the opportunity to live, work and volunteer in these places and many more besides) change for us and the people we encounter when we take our race and a wretched history of colonization into account upon the evaluation? Should it or does it change our motives or our behavior?

We both went to public universities with much higher than average minority representation and followed that up by living in a city with a large African-American population and a rich and at times fraught racial history, and then took it upon ourselves to move into a neighborhood in which the white people are way outnumbered. One of us worked for a small company owned by a powerful African-American woman and staffed by an extremely diverse group of mostly women (to be touched on later!). As such, I think we can safely say that we have more experience with the very unusual phenomenon (in America) of UNDERrepresentations of whiteness. We have been clearly informed that this in no way prepares us for Africa, where our skin color will very much matter, particularly since we will be spending a lot of time outside Kigali, and may at times be among the only white people some Rwandans have ever seen.

Of course, our whiteness doesn't exist in a vacuum, and I'm looking forward to thinking about, writing about, and experiencing how our gender intersects with our race to shape our experience as we travel; Women, after all, are Why we are going.