No Forgetting

As a white woman, the privileges of whiteness have influenced every aspect of my life.

Especially as a petite white woman, people generally assume that I am well-intentioned even in the absence of any indication. I could sit stone-faced with arms crossed, and people would still assume I was “nice.” People don’t cross the street to get away from me. If anything, they barely notice me. That’s part of my white privilege.

I have the privilege of paying attention to race sometimes and forgetting about it sometimes. The one exception, when I lived in China, changed my perspective forever. Even then, I was still a rare foreigner who was generally revered rather than vilified.

Race is just one of the many themes addressed beautifully in Everything I Never Told You, the 2014 novel by Celeste Ng. It’s the story of a biracial family in 1970s Ohio whose teenage daughter dies mysteriously. Painful and compelling, it portrays a tug of war between sadness and hope, the definition of tragic. At its core, it’s a story about family, why we speak up and why we stay silent, and how those choices can change everything.

A particular passage on race and forgetting stayed with me:

“Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn’t look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn’t think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.”

White people have the privilege of forgetting about race  at times. Affluent people have the privilege of forgetting about poverty at times. Heterosexual folks have the privilege of forgetting about LGBTQ discrimination at times.

Privilege and rights are different things, and should not be confused. Rights are inalienable and afforded to all. Regardless of our privileges, we must protect everyone’s rights.

Our neighbors can’t step out of these issues, and neither should we. It’s time to speak up and speak out. Forgetting is comfortable, but it’s not the time for comfortable. We must each acknowledge our privilege, and make the choice not to forget, not to dive into a more comfortable space, but rather to fight like hell for the rights of all. Forgetting is not an option.