Becoming White

Two Reflections by: Laura Newby

1. How My Family Became White

I've been thinking a lot these past few months about how my family became white and what that legacy means in this moment of U.S. and world history.
 
My Swedish ancestors came to the U.S. in the late 1800s. Like many new immigrant groups, they walked somewhat blindly into a new paradigm of social hierarchy: America's capitalist class system built on a black-white racial dichotomy. Being "white" at that time, however, wasn't just based on skin color, though that was a prerequisite. There was white and there was "real" white, namely British-Americans, who considered modern Anglo-Saxons a race unto themselves. The Swedish people arriving in the Midwest during the late nineteenth century weren't considered real Americans or even truly white: just some new, funny talking European immigrants, stereotyped as dirty, dumb, drunk, and violent. The divisions used now to create social hierarchy are strictly based in skin color while the divisions back then were much more dependent on ethnicity. 
 
However, like others before them, Scandinavian immigrants learned to use their similarities to "real" Americans to climb the economic and social ladder and to eventually kick that ladder out from under non-white people. Distancing ourselves from Black people and emphasizing the similarities we already shared with "true" Americans, we were quickly able to blend in. Scandinavian immigrants even took on colonial logic to boost our ethnic credentials in North America, citing Viking Leif Erikson's visit to the continent around 1000 AD and proudly noting that it had happened 500 years prior to Columbus' arrival. We gained standing in society until we blended in with British-Americans and received full American/full white status as we do now.
 
Yet, by accentuating their similarities to "real" Americans and internalizing British-American social acceptance, Scandinavian immigrants helped entrench whiteness as normative and superior. This we did especially at the expense of African Americans who would never be able to blend into whiteness in the same ways. Rather than disavow America's system of privilege and band together with other minority groups, Scandinavian immigrants competed for whiteness, an area in which they knew they had a leg up. 
 
My ancestors were not always "white," but we slid relatively easily into American whiteness because of our proximity to the system that created it. Given its benefits, it was and is easy to turn a blind eye to its brutal consequences for Black, Indigenous and other people of color. So on top of not questioning this system of hierarchy, of getting ahead at the expense of other minorities, and of even internalizing supremacy, we pretend the system that gave us this privilege doesn't even exist. We've been stuck in this posture ever since.
 
These desperate immigrants were looking for new opportunities when they left Sweden. Because of failed crops or lack of land access many faced starvation. So, as anyone would do, they looked for a better life. But to gain that better life, some pretty messed up stuff happened. In order for my great-great grandparents not to starve, Lakota, Dakota, and Ojibwe children were forced to starve. In order to prosper economically and socially, they played into the system of American racism and anti-Blackness so that they would be accepted into white supremacy. And to this day, many of us use the empty and arbitrary logic of whiteness to bolster our self-esteem to the harm of everyone else. 
 
There are a lot of things I like about my cultural background, but I don't want to tell my history without full context. Otherwise, the stench that exists when a bunch of Minnesota Scandinavians get together to celebrate their heritage will continue to be there, white supremacy lurking just below the surface. We will continue to be haunted by our complicity in genocide when we gather on quaint family farms for the holidays, and our hypocrisy will stink to high heaven when we sit on nonprofit boards and discuss how to help the "oppressed." Are we going to forget how we got here? Will we not tell the whole story? Shall we continue to live with skeletons in the closet?
 
Whether we acknowledge it or not, everyone who enters the United States becomes part of the narrative of white supremacy. I rehearse the history above to remind myself, and perhaps a few others, what that story looked like for me and my people. I'd rather have agency over my history than be invisibly molded by it since it shapes me either way. Whiteness is not something I want to compete for. Whiteness (not white skin, not descending from Europe, but "whiteness") as a culture is violence and disconnection of every kind. It is not something worth having and the trade my people made for it was a bad one. I don't want my or anyone else's survival to depend on the ability to resemble or ingratiate with whiteness even though whiteness continues because white people allow it to. We have yet to break the back of the collective choices we've made since arriving on this continent. We have yet to set ourselves on a new trajectory. However, by looking our complicity squarely in the face, we have a chance to undo the bargain made by our ancestors and re-root our identity in kinship rather than competition. Our assimilation into American whiteness has been costly to everyone, ourselves included. Now is the time to renounce whiteness, clean up our mess, and find our humanity again. It's there if we want it. 

(August 2020)

2.  “The death of white supremacy is also the liberation of white-skinned people if we want it to be”
 
My racial awareness started developing fourteen years ago when I began attending Church of All Nations. I was struggling a lot at the time with depression and anxiety; because of evangelical influences I thought this was because I wasn’t close enough to God. I sought out my new pastor, Jin S Kim, for counsel on how to get closer to God so the emptiness I felt would go away. He listened to me patiently and then basically said, “You’re not unhappy for strictly spiritual reasons; you’re unhappy because you’re white. White culture has a deadening effect on people’s spirits. This community and I can help you.”

From there I spent the next many years learning from my new church community about Plato, the mind/body split, and the dissociation that leads to disconnection from earth and spirit and community. I’m still in a process of undoing whiteness’s effects in my body, but I learned early on “how my liberation is bound in the liberation of others,” as Lilla Watson said. I hate white supremacy because of the evil it has done to Black and Brown people around the world and also because of what it has done to me.

“Whiteness” and white supremacy are not synonymous with having white skin (though there is a high corollary) though having white privilege is. “Whiteness” is the culture of imperialism, of colonialism, of racism, of low self-esteem, of trauma, of war, of dissociation, of violence, of forgetting our histories and ancestors, of abstract and wishful thinking, of filling in our shame with an arbitrary sense of superiority and misdirecting our rage at people who had nothing to do with it.
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The death of white supremacy is also the liberation of white-skinned people if we want it to be. I do and I’m grateful to our Black siblings who are now, as always, fighting for its dismantling. I hope we’ll join them, follow them, as they dismantle a system built and perpetuated by our unresolved trauma and sin. We took out our rage through horrible, horrible sins. The first step in our healing is to take responsibility. Our liberation is bound together but we’ve got to first understand we aren’t free either as long as whiteness lives in us. I want a life of joy, which is my personal investment in the death of white supremacy - because they can’t exist together.
#blacklivesmatter

(Originally posted to Facebook on June 8, 2020)

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Laura Newby

As Ministry Catalyst for Church of All Nations (CAN) in Minnesota, Laura Newby attunes to the congregation’s vision and energy to support the community’s evolving needs and natural development. She is a co-founder of Underground Seminary, currently co-leads CAN’s permaculture work, and is training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy to support trauma healing. Laura lives in the CAN neighborhood and has been a member of Church of All Nations since 2006. She is a 5th generation European-American, mostly of Swedish heritage, born and raised in rural Wisconsin. (https://www.cando.org/new-staff/)