In context of the current resistance to Critical Race Theory, an excerpt from Ruth Frankenberg’s autobiographical essay on coming to cognizance of racial privilege.
I have been performing whiteness, and having whiteness performed upon me, since—or actually before—the moment I was born. But the question is, what does that mean?
Memory, and one's sense of self, are continually (re)formed. Chains of events in a life are such that each moment seems both to lead to or even make the next, and to be remade by the moments that follow it. My childhood was then, if not literally relived, certainly reconceived in context of my adult life. In this way, we can say my memories, my self, are (re)formed. Thus in order to say how it was that my first steps towards self-consciousness about the racialization of my own childhood happened, not in Britain but in Santa Cruz, California, I need to say how I came to realize myself as answerable to a set of questions about racism, imperialism and my own history and identity. And in order to explain how that happened, I need to explain how I got to Santa Cruz at all.
I came to Santa Cruz and, more exactly, to graduate study in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, fresh from completion of a BA at Cambridge, fresh from three years of intense political activism, and in love with socialist feminism (or as it was named in Britain at that moment, Marxist feminism). I had come to the US against the better judgment of my peers, all of whom viewed this place as the "belly of the beast," and therefore best avoided. For myself, I was pulled by the rumor that in the United States there was something called "women's studies," and pushed by a lack of inspiration about what to do next in Britain, for the trajectories I saw before me seemed either unmanageable or uninviting.
I landed in New York, was dazzled by street names and locations thus far encountered only on TV—Broadway, Central Park—and, rather than flying westward, took a hippie version of the Greyhound bus across the country, so as to know where I was. Cultural difference began to hit as, standing shoulder-deep in the hot water of a mineral spring near Cheyenne, Wyoming (you know, that place from the cowboy movies), an elderly gentleman standing next to his wife and dressed only in a stetson hat, drawled, 'Welcome to our country." Back on the Grey Rabbit my new friend Laura commented wryly, "He wouldn't have said that if you were Mexican." I had no idea what to make of this, and didn't ask.
Thus, Ms. English Marxist Feminist arrived in Santa Cruz. In my mind, I'd figured I wouldn't have a problem settling in—we all spoke English, there'd be a left community and a feminist community, and once I found both I'd be all set. But somehow the codes seemed entirely scrambled. Early on a woman told me she was impressed that anyone heterosexual could be a feminist—not the inverse, mind you. She said it was noble of me to take on the feminist struggle as a straight woman (which I was at that time). I found her comment both mystifying and insulting. I had come from a strong network of women who were heterosexual, leftist and feminist: none of them seemed to find that a contradiction, but rather were committed to reframing heterosexuality and their relations with men.
I was taken, in my first week, to hear Meg Christian who was dressed in a Fair Isle sweater and sensible shoes, and who performed to a room full of women of whom one or more would burst out weeping every five minutes, overcome by I knew not what. A far cry from the Patti Smith, Marianne Faithful, Bob Dylan, and Bob Marley who had structured my own and my friends' listening pleasure. "Wholesome" was not my middle name. Honesty forces me to admit that I too burst into tears at the Meg Christian show, overcome, finally, by homesickness and the enormity of being in a strange land. Looking back it strikes me now that all of this destabilization had its benefits, beginning to shake open a cultural solipsism and presumed universalism that I had, entirely unconsciously, been carrying with me unexamined, along with the rest of my luggage.
But I still had my political lines intact. At first. In this regard, a key moment for me—although I confess that others to whom I have tried to tell this story have been left puzzled and unmoved by it—had to do with my very strong commitment to campaigning for the provision of workplace daycare for working mothers. I'm not sure, looking back, why working fathers were not also in my mind, but at that point I viewed the provision of "daycare" for children as a key aspect of women's liberation. Some of my earliest experience of political organizing had taken place in context of a struggle with Cambridge University to provide childcare for the children of faculty, staff, and students. At this point I can't remember why and how the question of public- and corporate-funded childcare came up in a seminar room early in my time at UCSC. But I do remember being blown away when two older women, June and Estée, both mothers, both working-class, the former white and the latter a Puertorriqueña from the east coast, told me firmly and pointedly that, not only were they not convinced of the benefits of workplace childcare for women, they had serious concerns in general about placing childcare in the hands of the state or of corporations.
Ms. English Marxist Feminist was stunned, not so much from a feeling that my position was questionable, but from a sense of unreality, of perceiving an impossibility in hearing these two women challenging the position I held. How could it be wrong? How could they believe themselves to be right? Where I came from, the pressure against childcare that I had encountered came from the right wing. It entailed the kind of back-to-the-home patriarchy that had served, since the end of World War II, to justify ideologically women's unequal access to paid work. My point of view, in other words, was embedded in a particular (and I would now say, a partial) reading of history, and my sense of its "rightness" came out of that narrative. With the hubris of youth, I told Estée I'd like to discuss this some more, and with a generosity of spirit plus, perhaps, some curiosity, she invited me over to her apartment the next morning….
From Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi eds., Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, Routledge, 1996, 3-17. Read the essay here.
