To my baby sister

I think I finally get why liberal white people are sometimes the bane of POC activists. I was reading the last few chapters of March by Geraldine Brooks where she has constructed a fictional interposition of what happened to the chaplain father of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” The Reverend March, when he went off to serve in the Union Army.

He had, many years before, made the acquaintance of a young woman slave who he greatly admired for her intelligence and grace; had been driven towards her when, as a Yankee peddler he had stopped for a few days at the plantation in Virginia. Many years later they met at the same plantation which was serving as a field hospital at the site of a battle, and she as a nurse. Again, they nearly gave into lust, but circumstances wrested them apart. When he next met her it was a convalescing soldier after a stint in the South as a teacher and preacher to ‘contraband.'
His family had been involved for many years in The Underground Railroad, and had been supporters of most the major abolitionist activities over the years, but he had immense sense of responsibility (or, perhaps, ego) and a sense of failure over his many shortcomings, or failures to act, and his guilt all but dripped from him. She, despite her many painful turns in life, knew that “of things in this world, some are within our power and many are not.” (Epictetus)

She tries to point out to him that their time together is past and that he must stop beating himself up for the many human weaknesses he has displayed – cowardice, lust, lying – and go forward with his good works, perhaps with his image of himself tarnished, but with his good will to do useful and generous things intact. He proposes to go out among the newly organizing colored troops to work and teach.

But she cuts him off, a little angrily, “ We have had enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny….Go home, Mr. March,…If you sincerely want to help us, go back to Concord and work with your own people. Write sermons that will prepare your neighbors to accept a world where black and white will one day stand as equals.” Sometimes you read a whole book for a paragraph or two like that.

This is what my baby sister was saying one day to me when she explained that she could not proselytize among white people about race, that I, and others like me, must do the talking. That she had her own fields to plow.

I also saw, to me, glaringly, and shudder to think I may have voiced similar things, that a white liberal who must remind you of his or her liberalism with long recountings of their sufferings for Your cause (as if the cause against hatred and ignorance is not for every one of us born to this planet, this species) is not unlike the stereotyped Jewish mother. “Oy, the terrible pangs I endured just to bring you into this world, the nine months of suffering to support you, the years of educating you and doing without things for you and worrying about you and working my fingers to the bone to keep you clothed clean and fed, and this is the thanks I get?!”

(As Alexander is purported to have said of his own mother, “She charges a high price for nine months rent.”)

While appreciative of the efforts and fumbling attempts at understanding, People of color, the GLBT community, the impoverished, and all other such communities outside the mostly white, mostly straight, mostly male power structure, wish whites who had a choice on how to live their lives would take ownership of their own choices, including the choice to suffer whatever it was, and allow them to do the same (and stop telling them about it.) And allow them the ‘adulthood’ to determine their own agendas for the future.

Ahh, baby sister, I think I finally get it.