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2 C H at t e r I n g w I t H a n g e l S “I wonder,” says my colleague, “if I could ask you a question.” We are sitting in a restaurant booth in the Midwest. I’ve been invited here to offer a workshop on antiracism. Our conversation had wound slowly to this moment, my colleague telling me a little of her childhood, her experience of being a light-skinned Latina woman in a family that prized light skin ever so highly; about a father who hated Mexicans, who maybe hated himself. About her children and their schools. About her work at the university. “I wonder if I could ask you a question? I think the workshop participants may want to know. Actually, I imagine everybody who meets you wants to know.” I can see she is nervous, but I think I know the question already. I smile. I invite her to ask. “Who are you? I mean,” she hesitates, trying perhaps to make the question smoother, “why do you do this work? Why do you care?” She apologizes immediately. Maybe she asked too bluntly, she worries. But I think it’s a fair question for a person of color to ask of a white woman coming to town to lead an antiracism workshop and perhaps also a fair question for readers to ask of a white woman writing a book about antiracism. Who are you? This is a question that deserves a thoughtful answer and as true an answer as one can offer in the moment it is asked. I am qualifying the term true, and here’s why: the preservation and conservation of white identity depends upon a very particular answer to the question who are you? It depends upon the answer not you. But white identity may also be preserved by answering in denial mode: “Why, I’m just like you.” Or in obsequious mode: “I’m 28 I HOPE I JOIN THE BAND not you, but I’m on your side.” Or in refusal mode writ cute: “I’m nobody, who are you?” Or more pointedly: “Isn’t it obvious ? Why would you even need to ask that question?” In some way, I think, anyone who is asked the question who are you? must answer provisionally. We are all, as Judith Butler would say, opaque to some degree, even, and perhaps especially, to ourselves. For Butler, it is our recognition of our opacity to ourselves that might enjoin us to interest in and openness to the incompleteness, the tentativeness, the ongoingness of one another’s answers to a question like “who are you?” (2005, 136). And yet, with particular regard to raced-white identity, there are matters beyond the opacity of which Butler speaks that impede one’s ability to both attend to the question and answer truly and provisionally. For we whites are taught carefully and from birth the art of selective forgetfulness. We are taught also, alongside the mastery of spoon and fork, of high fives and the first articulations of words, that who we are as raced subjects is not a matter requiring too much thought on the one hand, but demanding the cultivation of very particular forms of consciousness on the other. Whiteness is all-at-once a story that need never be told and a story that is endlessly replicating, endlessly asserted through successive denials. Who are you? My colleague has asked me for a story and it’s a righteous request. Of course, I can’t tell all of it, can’t get it all in, get it all right, but I can give a story as true as I can make it by telling who I think I am today. The stony gray edifice of the church, St. Peter Clavier, sits high on a bluff just off the interstate, in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the early spring, with the trees still devoid of leaves and the sand in the church playground a soup of mud and leaves and twigs, the place looks forlorn. My husband parks the car and we join the stream of congregants walking to the doors, our children, Dan and Lucy, clinging to our hands and looking about wide eyed and curious. I walk carefully, awkwardly. I’m very pregnant. We’ve come at the invitation of Sister Mary Lou, my favorite of Mike’s many aunts. Sister Mary Lou has told me that I will like [18.217...

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