Ever since my kids were little one of my favorite after school questions was “who did you sit with at lunch?” When my son Max went to high school I noticed that despite having Black friends, he never mentioned eating with them. When asked why, he said he didn’t know but that they all sat together. I was baffled. What had changed in high school? Was it because he was attending a private school? Was it a racist place? Had we made a mistake?
I mentioned my concern to a Black friend who had attended the same school as Max. He said it was the same in the 90’s and explained that it was due to shared experiences. Many of the Black kids took public transportation to school and came from non-parochial elementary schools. They felt more comfortable together. He didn’t seem concerned, so I let it go.
Flash forward to the first antiracist conversation group I hosted last summer. The discussion got heated when the topic of lunch room sorting surfaced. There was much surmising as so why some of us witnessed segregated seating in our various school experiences and some of us didn’t. We fumbled our way through dialogue about how much of it had to do with certain locations and ages being more racist than others. None of us felt like we could speak to what was going on, and there was much frustration.
Jump to today. I’ve just read the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum. She explains the role of personal identity development and how in adolescence most of us struggle with questions about who we are and how we fit into the world. For those of us who see our race as the standard, racial identity isn’t on our radar, but for those of us who are beginning to understand our race as perceived as a deviation of the norm, perhaps due to experiencing various micro and macro aggressions, seeking out peers who understand and can reflect understanding of our experience back to us is of vital importance, hence the separate cafeteria seating.
This theory also explains why students of different races may congregate readily in elementary cafeterias and may choose not to as they enter the stages of self- exploration and identity development in high school. In addition, it explains why not all Black students feel the need to self-sort, as adolescents vary in both experience and timing of identity development.
I’d like now to come back to the idea of white people not necessarily having to consider race as part of our personal identity development. Why would we? We see ourselves reflected back to us positively everywhere we look: on TV, in the movies and in leadership positions from the classroom to the capitol. We are the norm and we have been for as long as we can remember.
Though many white people don’t choose to reflect upon being white, I believe the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing BLM movements and resistance to these movements during the critical pause of the pandemic and under the exclusionary rhetoric of Donald Trump have caused many of us to feel the need to explore what it means to be white and our role in current events.
Like the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria, we too need to come together to share our experiences of racial development. We need to share our stories of coming into racial awareness, of the discomfort and the fuck-ups, of the guilt, fear and frustration. We need to gather with other people interested in developing white identity, one not based on assumed normalcy or felt superiority, but rather one based on reality, cognizant of the current system of racism set up for our advantage.
We need to gather with other white people who are further along in the process and acting as change-agents, who can accept where we are and compassionately offer guidance for us in noticing our blind spots and taking steps toward dismantling personal and cultural racism.
We need to strive toward techno-colored vision— toward appreciating the uniqueness of each person we encounter, regardless of race, while at the same time recognizing the role race plays in our all our experiences. We need to strive for equality for all, with focus on our own liberation from patterns of socialization that lead to the oppression of self and others.
We need to create a world in which school isn’t felt to be a racialized space, where Blacks aren’t feeling the need to segregate, a world in which asking “why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” is a question of the past.