Lying While White

written by AMANDA GROSS

I have said it before and I will say it again, stoicism in my maternal line runs as deep as our varicose veins.

Now at the age of 35, I have been practicing the art of lying for decades. Perhaps this genre of art is not the one you’re thinking of where lying is a deliberate conscious effort to cover up one’s tracks. Although I would be lying to say I haven’t had moments like that.

This is not the type of lying that I would use after smacking my little brother across the face. He wailed like a fire siren. Amanda, did you hit your brother? My parents asked. Nope. I adamantly lied, shaking my head so hard it was bout to fall off. This is not the lying with which I covered up my anorexic tracks, its own menu of sorts: I’m not hungry… I already ate at soccer practice…  I gave that [insert food group] up for Lent…

Like a superficial understanding of racism, we’ve been taught to picture lying as intentional and overt, rather than woven into the very fibers of our social being. The concept of whiteness is based on a lie and so it is unsurprising that my white womanhood has been cultivated on a bed of lies that bestow qualities of purity, goodness, beauty, niceness, and victimhood to the white lady, just to name a few.

Hear No Evil, by Amanda K Gross

There is a lie steeped in stoicism grown from this falsely raised bed, a lie that has been part of my white lady practice since cultivating niceness became a personal goal. It was probably kindergarten, even preschool when I first learned the tools of the trade, that being hyper-nice, compliant and obedient to adults in authority gained me the advantage of Good Little White Girl. Sometimes modified with the adjectives Smart or Nice or Quiet, the benefit of the doubt was in the classroom before I arrived. All I had to do was play the part (or at least most of the time).

Each year I got better with practice. Being nice, quiet, and polite kept the adults happy and provided a safe emotional distance from my peers. Sometimes my classmates would ask for help with their assignments. Sometimes my teachers would assign me to do so. Either way, I was happy to oblige, my good little white girl purpose in life fulfilled.

One important tool in the box of lying while white has meant training myself not to express how I really feel. Frustration, irritation, annoyance, impatience, anger, and rage did not, could not belong to a good little white girl who was growing into a nice white lady. And so, those emotions, too could not belong to me.

As an adolescent, I recited the fruits of the spirit from a framed embroidery at my grandparent’s house. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. And Self-Control. Visually tattooed on my mind, patience and self-control were clearly the hard ones. I vowed to stuff down any feelings that would detract from this list. If you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all.* The dilemma is that I often have so much not nice to say.

White Silence, by Amanda K Gross

And so when recently, while in the middle of chopping vegetables, a feeling of irritation at a colleague welled up within me, it did not occur to me to bring this feeling to them. Instead, I sat with it for a moment, as my yoga practice has taught me. I acknowledged the emotion, as my therapist has taught me. Well hello there irritation, I said to the feeling. And then I lied to myself, as white supremacy has taught me. I diagnosed myself with impatience, surely stemming from my internalization of racial superiority. Impatience, by the way, was not listed on the framed embroidery of the fruits of the spirit. I quickly labeled this feeling bad and, renewing my vow to be patient, stuffed it down and continued cooking dinner.

Except the thing about lying, is that the truth is still there packed under the layers of cover up. The truth is still there and it wants to get out. It too wants to be free.

It took many days for me to realize my self-deception, and even then I only confronted it because of someone else’s emotional labor. It was several days more until I acknowledged my feelings to the colleague, and revealed that I had been lying to them. I created the harm that I feared. I shook the foundation of trust that I had convinced myself that my silence was trying to maintain.

I too have consumed the lie of whiteness with its false pretense that emotional distance (plus privilege) maintains a wall of security that will keep everything okay. The more honest I am with myself and others about my feelings, the harder nice white ladyness is to achieve. And so I am working on divesting from the wall. While obvious in theory, divestment proves elusive in the moment because I – more often than not – confuse the nice white lady for the real me.

*According to Thumper from Bambi