I Have Been Listening
Editorial note: My Dear Black Friend is an imagined composite response to the themes and questions raised across the My Dear White Friend letters. It does not represent one individual or suggest that there is a single White response to conversations about race. Its purpose is to turn the letters into dialogue: to explore what might happen when the person being addressed begins to answer.
My dear Black friend,
I have been listening. Perhaps not always as well as I thought I was.
You have asked me some uncomfortable questions in the My Dear White Friend letters. At times I have wanted to answer you before I had even finished reading. At other times I have wanted to explain myself, correct something, tell you that perhaps you had misunderstood me, or reassure you that I am not the kind of White person you are describing.
And perhaps that is one of the first things I need to notice: how quickly your experience can become a question about my character.
You tell me that something hurt you, and somewhere inside me a different conversation begins. Was it really racism? Could there have been another explanation? Surely they didn’t mean it like that? I wouldn’t have done that. I am not like that.
And suddenly, without intending to, I have moved away from what you were trying to tell me and towards protecting what I need to believe about myself.
You asked me to stay in the room. I thought I understood what that meant. I am beginning to realise that staying in the room is relatively easy when nothing in the room threatens me. It is harder when you remember an experience differently from me. Harder when you tell me that something I regarded as ordinary looked very different from where you were standing. Harder when you tell me that someone I like, respect or trust behaved in a way that you experienced as racist. Harder still when you ask whether I might have done something similar myself.
Because then I have to choose. Do I become curious about what you are telling me, or do I begin gathering evidence for my defence?
And I need to admit something else. Sometimes I genuinely do not know what to say. There are moments when I am frightened of getting it wrong. I wonder whether I will use the wrong words, ask the wrong question, say too much, say too little, make assumptions or expose something in myself that I would rather not see.
Sometimes silence feels safer.
But perhaps I have confused what is safer for me with what is fairer to you.
You have asked me not merely to listen to you, but to think about what listening requires afterwards. That is more difficult. Because I can read your letters and feel moved. I can agree with you. I can press “like”. I can tell you privately that what happened was terrible. I can describe myself as an ally.
None of that necessarily tells you what I will do when there is something at stake.
I have been thinking particularly about the question you asked me: How are you with other Black people when I am not there?
I wanted to answer immediately. The same. Of course I am the same. I treat everybody equally.
But then I realised that you were not asking me what I believe about myself. You were asking me to examine what I actually do.
That is a much harder question.
Do I return the call? Do I answer the email? Do I extend the same warmth to someone I do not already know? Do I assume competence, or wait for it to be demonstrated?
When a Black woman I know and respect speaks confidently, I may call her confident. What happens when a Black woman I have never met speaks in exactly the same way? Do I still hear confidence? Or do I hear arrogance? Challenge? Difficulty? Threat?
I don’t particularly like having to ask myself those questions.
Perhaps that is precisely why I should.
Because knowing you cannot become evidence that I have somehow completed the work. You warned me about that too. You told me that friendship with one Black person does not necessarily tell me very much about how I respond to Black people.
I can see now why that matters. Familiarity may have taught me how to understand you. It does not automatically mean that I have examined all the assumptions through which I encounter someone else. The American Psychological Association describes implicit bias as attitudes and learned associations that can influence perception and behaviour without conscious awareness. (APA)
And perhaps there is something else I need to say.
I have sometimes expected you to help me do that examination. I have asked questions because I trusted you. I have asked because I genuinely wanted to understand. But I can see that I have not always stopped to consider what answering those questions might require of you.
To me it may have been curiosity. To you it may have required remembering. Explaining. Translating. Revisiting. Making something painful sufficiently coherent and sufficiently palatable for me to understand it. And then, perhaps, reassuring me afterwards that I had not caused offence by asking.
Research examining interracial interactions has also described the additional emotional labour, codeswitching and burnout that can fall on Black participants in majority-White contexts. Read the research on emotional labour in interracial interactions (PubMed)
When you told me that you could not always carry that for me, I confess there was a part of me that wanted to respond: But how am I supposed to learn if I cannot ask you?
I hear something different in that question now.
I hear the assumption that my learning must somehow be made convenient for me. That somebody should be available to shorten the distance between my ignorance and my understanding.
Perhaps that distance is sometimes mine to travel.
Perhaps I need to read the book. Find the article. Listen to the podcast. Pay for the training. Sit with the uncertainty. Do some of the work before I arrive at your door.
That does not mean I never want us to talk about race. I hope we will. But I am beginning to understand the difference between conversation and extraction. Between asking because relationship has opened a conversation and asking because relationship has given me access to an educator I do not have to pay.
You have also asked me what I do with discomfort. That question has stayed with me. Because I like to think of myself as someone who listens. But I notice how differently I listen when what I am hearing threatens something important to me.
My reputation. My friendships. My professional judgement. My belief that I am fair. My belief that the people around me are fair. My belief that, had racism been happening in front of me, I would certainly have seen it.
Perhaps one of the hardest things your letters ask me to accept is that I may have been present and still not have seen.
Not because I am uniquely bad. Not because you are uniquely perceptive. But because we may have learned to notice different things.
And perhaps there were things you had to learn to notice in order to navigate the world that I was never required to see at all.
That is difficult for me. Because there is comfort in believing that if something serious had happened, I would have recognised it. Your letters interrupt that comfort. They ask me whether absence of awareness is the same thing as absence of harm.
I know now that they are not.
But there is another thing I want to tell you, my friend.
Sometimes I worry that I will never get this right.
Perhaps that sounds self-indulgent after everything you have described. But if we are going to have an honest conversation, I need to bring my uncertainty into the room too.
I worry about speaking when I should listen. I worry about remaining silent when I should speak. I worry about centring myself. I worry about disappearing from the conversation because I am frightened of centring myself. I worry that the language will change and I will not keep up. I worry that I will make a mistake and that the mistake will tell you something about me that I do not want it to tell you.
But perhaps this is another place where I have been asking the wrong question.
Perhaps the goal cannot be: How do I make sure I never get this wrong?
Perhaps it has to become: What do I do when I realise that I have?
Do I defend? Disappear? Explain? Become angry? Ask you to reassure me? Or can I remain present long enough to learn something?
You have asked me to stay in the room. Perhaps I need to tell you that sometimes staying will be uncomfortable for me too. But I am beginning to understand that discomfort is not necessarily a sign that the conversation has gone wrong.
Sometimes it may be evidence that the conversation has finally reached somewhere that matters.
And perhaps, my dear Black friend, there is one more thing I need you to know.
I do not want my response to your letters to be a performance of goodness. I do not want to tell you that I have listened and understood and therefore reached some destination called allyship.
I don’t think your letters allow me that easy ending.
Because tomorrow there will be another meeting. Another conversation. Another person I do not know. Another moment when speaking will carry a cost. Another opportunity to retreat into certainty, silence or comfort.
Perhaps what you are asking me is not whether I can produce the right response to a letter.
Perhaps you are asking something much more difficult:
Who am I becoming because I read it?
That question I cannot answer for you today.
I think the answer will be found elsewhere.
In whose call I return. Whose expertise I recognise. Whose experience I allow to complicate my own. What I say when somebody makes the joke. Whether I speak when you are not in the room. Whether my values remain intact when there is something to lose. Whether I continue learning when nobody is watching.
Perhaps this is also where the Six Stages Framework lens becomes useful: not as a way of declaring that we have arrived somewhere, but as a way of remaining curious about our responses, movement and behaviour.
So, my dear Black friend, I have been listening.
I will not pretend that I have understood everything. I will not promise that I will never become defensive. I will not tell you that reading your letters has somehow placed me beyond bias.
But perhaps I can promise something smaller and more meaningful.
I can notice. I can question. I can do more of my own work. I can resist making my discomfort your responsibility. I can look more carefully at what I do, not simply what I believe about myself.
And when I discover something in myself that I would rather not see, perhaps I can resist the temptation to close the door.
Perhaps I can stay.
With care, uncertainty and a willingness to keep learning,
Your White friend
Continue reflecting: Explore the My Dear White Friend series | Through the SSF Lens | Belonging, Fitting In and the Psychological Cost of Assimilation
