The Dinner Guest

A lifetime ago, George and I were invited to dinner at a popular café on Broadway in San Antonio's affluent Alamo Heights. Among the guests was a Latina professor of Latin American Studies, taking her place at the table to enjoy some fine food and great music with friends old and new. The conversation drifted to the topic of racism.

In one of many moments when I should have listened rather than spoken, I interrupted to make a thoughtful comparison. Being a young professional woman and idealistic liberator of all things, I said that as a victim of sexism I could definitely identify with racism.

Exasperated, the professor retorted, “You can never understand racism because you have never experienced it.” She went on to say, “Look at you. You are white with blonde hair and blues eyes. Yes, you may have experienced sexism, particularly because of the way you look. But sexism is not racism.”

Suddenly, dirty windows were clean. I couldn’t really empathize with oppression observed but not lived. I may have had many struggles due to being female in a male dominated society, for example. A "latch key kid," I may have struggled with class-ism. However as perpetual benefactors White people cannot claim to be victims of a system we continue to perpetrate inadvertently or deliberately. 

Forever "awakening," I defer to the disenfranchised and marginalized to lead as I follow, opting to listen rather than speak. Humbled by a Latina American’s powerful words as well as those of James Baldwin and others, I can only effectively “shine the light, and get out of the way.”

"(James Baldwin) made it very clear to me that all of us white liberals--guilty, well-meaning people--were merely a big flashlight cast upon the evil of racism, and the flashlight found some corners where it continued, and still continues, to live. 'Throw the light,' he told me, 'and then get out of the way. This is our battle to win,'" Marlon Brando.