Nine: Fellowship

A few years ago, an Al-Anon friend started a group to apply the principles of Al-Anon to White racism. One evening, as he and some other members of the group were heading off for their meeting and I was making a move to join them, he told me that “it’s just us,” meaning just people of color. Very privately and inwardly, always trying to be cool, I poured myself a big old glass of White whine. I’m not invited! Why?!

It wasn’t long before it occurred to me why: because White people are like the alcoholics, and everyone else is like the Al-Anonics. White people have the disease, and everyone else is affected by it. When we’re challenged on our racism, not only do we react like addicts protecting their supply, our denials take a similar form: alcoholics are people who are lying drunk in the gutter, and I’m not lying drunk in the gutter, therefore I don’t have a drinking problem; people who harbor White-racist attitudes are in the Ku Klux Klan, and I’m not in the Ku Klux Klan, so therefore I don’t have any White-racist attitudes. It’s the other people not seeing it that way that’s the problem.

In any alcoholic family, it’s often the Al-Anonic person who seems like the crazy one. The alcoholic is fine, as long as there’s alcohol, and it’s the Al-Anonic who’s screaming that the children don’t have shoes. Whereupon the alcoholic may say a couple of things: one, if it weren’t for your yelling I wouldn’t have to drink; and two, I’m going where I can have some peace, which is usually someplace where there are reliable drinking buddies who understand perfectly how hard it is to live with someone who’s always on your case about your drinking, and where both that person and the children who need shoes are out of sight and earshot.

This is how Black people and other people of color get to be the problem—because so many of them keep pointing out that there is one, when so many White people are so perfectly happy dreaming White-supremacist dreams in White Racist Fantasyland and can’t see any problem whatsoever with that.

Alcoholism is a family disease, and within the wider human family, White racism impacts everyone. It’s probably fair to say that the majority of us are what we call “double winners”: impacted both by internalized White racism and by the behavior of other people who feel free to express their White racism on us.