"White Tears" and the Interrogation of Whiteness

Two years ago, as I was nearing the end of production for The Present Tense, I found myself faced with the harrowing realization that the bulk of this years-long music project lay behind me, and in front of me, a void. That incessantly and uncompromisingly ambitious part of my brain pummeled my more reasonable parts with questions: what would I do next? Why hadn’t I spent more time looking ahead, readying myself for this moment? Drawing near to the end of something that had required so much of me suddenly filled me with much greater terror than I’d felt setting out from the beginning.

But if I’m honest, I spent hardly a night entertaining those “what now?” questions before the answer leapt up at me, as if it had been waiting for its opportunity. Human Becoming began then. The approach and ideas, and perhaps even the trajectory of the project has evolved since, but at its core, it’s been the same in essence since then. I think it’s important that I explain what motivated and still motivates me in this and many other endeavors, and yet for the sake of brevity, I’ll reserve telling the entire series of influences and experiences that has propelled me forward for another time. For now, it bears mentioning that in the fall of 2016, the unjustified killings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Terence Crutcher at the hands of police weighed heavy on my heart and mind. Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the 2016 football season in protest of police violence, and I, while working day in and out in an NFL training room, found myself immersed in endless testimony about the violence this country propagates against those it still deems inferior. These events were the more glaring examples and perhaps the final tipping points, but the truth was that prior to the 2016 football season, I’d already begun shifting the focus of my time, energy, and work toward the trajectory of dismantling systems of injustice that continue to marginalize and dehumanize the other—defined either by a person’s race, sexuality, gender, disability, or religion. It was time, I decided, to use my music toward that end as well.

The method for going about such an endeavor, especially as a member of the majority group, is wrought with pitfalls, and I’ve needed help. Thankfully, there exists a breadth of research, literature, and personal testimony out there that I could access (a sliver of which may be found in the Resources section of this website). Alongside the more academic work required in this journey, I was also blessed by the companionship and dear friendship of patient and gracious people like SueAnn Shiah and Roz Welch and so many others who supported and corrected me, and continue to do so. It was SueAnn who suggested that as I embark on a project to co-craft songs centering the stories of people wrestling with the idea of belonging in the margins, it was not only important, but imperative, for me to do the work of interrogating my own social classifications as well—my race, my gender, my sexuality, my religion, and able-bodiedness. SueAnn traveled with me to my rural hometown in Colorado as I sought, through this self-interrogatory work, to return to square one. She documented the trip.

At the outset, I intended that this new music record be comprised exclusively of songs written about the experiences of others, as I’d done with The Present Tense. I learned rather quickly that this was folly. Thinking everyone else had work to do connecting race to their sense of belonging revealed to me my insidious belief that I myself didn’t require such work—that I was outside of, or somehow superseded categories of race or gender, which is a trap that many majority people fall into. The status quo is excellent at disguising itself, and as a result, those able to live by it often remain blind to it. Extensive polling by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva recorded in his book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America revealed that when most of his white interviewees were asked what should be done about the “race problem” in the United States, they typically communicated a covert (and sometimes overt) belief that if such a problem exists, the onus of solving it must fall onto the shoulders of those who “have race”—in other words, those who aren’t white. When asked, the majority of white respondents answered in such a way as to suggest they didn’t really have race at all, or if they did, that it didn’t affect their lives in any meaningful way. They often included well-intentioned phrases like “I don’t see race,” or “we’re all part of one human race,” in their responses, touting a colorblind and “post-racial” ideology. Is this true? Are we post race and free of all its lingering effects? I’ve been grateful to begin learning that we aren’t—not by a long shot—and that before I can do any work to dismantle systems of oppression, I must be willing to interrogate the place I hold in that system. I wrote White Tears as part of that interrogation. If you’re reading this and white, I’d like to invite and welcome you into the following interrogation of whiteness as well.

Imagine a war. A soldier, under orders, attacks an unarmed civilian with the intent to kill.

Despite a malicious assault, the soldier isn’t successful—the civilian suffers severe and irreparable brain damage, but survives. In this process, the soldier is also hurt, suffering a mangled hand that eventually must be amputated. To be sure, in this act of violence, both parties were maimed, and will not proceed about their lives in the same manner they were able to before. Both must process their wounds and what those wounds mean for their lives going forward.

Now imagine these two people are brother and sister. The brother is the soldier and the sister is the civilian. If these siblings were to ever reconcile into any kind of familial relationship again, some serious work must be done. For the sake of this (admittedly loose) metaphor, let’s focus on the brother. In order to build any semblance of a relationship with his sister again, he will have to process the violence he caused, and also the consequences of his violence, which resulted in new lived realities for both he and his sister. It’s appropriate—essential, even—for him to process what it means that his violence cost him his hand, but it would be inappropriate for him to attempt to process that with his sister. In the same way, anyone raised wrapped in the benefits of whiteness must consider what whiteness costs them while entering into any “reconciliation” work. And yet, to process this with our siblings of color can be inappropriate at best, and at worst, damaging and re-traumatizing.

As a method for processing what whiteness costs white people—because rest assured, it costs us something—White Tears was written and recorded primarily by white people and for white people, not for the purpose of exclusion, but because it’s necessary that if we’re to get anywhere together, us white folks need to take responsibility of teaching each other, learning from each other, and processing with each other. To return to our metaphor: the best place the brother might go with his guilt and his wounds is someone—perhaps a fellow soldier—who knows what it’s like to enact violence upon another and suffer collateral damage. Any personal profit from this single (75% of royalties and all further mechanical earnings) will be donated. Half will go to Showing Up For Racial Justice, an organization educating and equipping white people for anti-racist work, and the other half, to the Black Lives Matter Network and Black Lives Matter Nashville.

I must be quick to add that the brother/sister metaphor quickly falls apart in its failure to capture the magnitude of what whiteness is, which we’ll begin to get into. Though wrought with violence, whiteness isn’t only alive in the presence of violent acts. It’s not alive only when someone mutters a racial slur or a boss discriminates against a potential hire or even only when a police officer shoots an unarmed black man and suffers no consequences—though it’s no less than all that. Whiteness is a constructed system of racial hierarchy that affects all of us, always. In the metaphor, whiteness wasn’t simply the violence, it was the war itself. It’s the aether we move through. Whiteness is the water, and white people are the fish.

But whiteness, though ubiquitous now, hasn’t been with us forever. The practice of grouping people into ethnic categories has been dabbled in throughout history, but we can say with certainty that race as we know it today didn’t truly develop until around the Age of Enlightenment, during which time scientists’ obsession with classifying just about everything led them to believe that physical variations in humans like skin color and skull size and shape meant that different species of humans existed—some superior and some inferior to others. As Nell Irvin Painter describes in her book The History of White People, these early “race scientists” laid the groundwork for whiteness to sprout during the colonization of American lands by European people. With thousands of square miles of stolen acres to produce labor-heavy crops, European settlers began looking for low-cost workers, and eventually, slaves. Meanwhile, states eager to expand their territories struggled to morally justify the forced removal, cultural and physical genocide of Native people occupying the frontiers they had their eyes on. Whiteness in America offered an apparent solution both of these conundrums. Birthed and legislated in the 1680’s, whiteness became a way to designate which humans truly mattered. It marked who held societal power, who was granted rights in this new society, and who was exempt from being forced into unpaid labor or violently removed from their lands. And as whiteness formed, blackness formed in tandem, as an antithesis to whiteness—conversely marking those to whom no rights were afforded. 

Though many of our country’s founding fathers (see Thomas Jefferson) attempted to use the science of the time to back up their claims of superiority, we know through more accurate scientific processes today that whiteness has no biological basis. We made it up. Genetically, if you’re white, it’s entirely likely that you share more genetic material with someone born and raised native to Ethiopia than you do with your next-door neighbor who shares your complexion. Racial categories are socially constructed frameworks created to benefit those humans who could assimilate under the banner and into the fold of whiteness. In one sense, whiteness isn’t at all a real thing, and yet, because we created it, it’s very real and has very real consequences in the function of society.

“white was the name i gave myself
it was the magic that i used to gain power and wealth
security and comfort too
and white was the name that i used”

Today in the U.S., whiteness no longer exempts white people from being forced into systems of unpaid labor, but it does often exempt us from being as likely to be caricatured a criminal and sent to prison for it, where we might work for next to nothing in jobs that benefit government programs. On average, one out of every three black men in the U.S. can expect to find themselves in the criminal justice system at some point in their lives. For white men, it’s one in seventeen. Whiteness often exempts us from unjustified stops and searches, from facing as many obstacles while voting, from being discriminated against while seeking employment or applying for a house loan or apartment lease. It means we can use and sell drugs at higher rates than people of color while remaining less likely to be suspected for it, and if suspected, less likely to be arrested, and if arrested, less likely to be charged, and if charged, less likely to receive harsh sentences (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander). It means I can fail to update the registration on my car for 9 months, get pulled over 3 times with expired tags, and receive only verbal warnings and a conversation about how the Titans are going to do this year. It exempts me from worrying about whether or not to let my future sons out of the house to buy candy or play with a toy gun (like the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice) or from second-guessing whether or not to carry a legal and registered firearm (like the daughter of Philando Castille) or from having anxiety about leaving early from a party that got too loud (like the brother of Jordan Edwards) or from the constant low-level anxiety that never leaves, even while just sitting on your own couch in your own living room (like the family of Botham Jean) without getting shot and killed by police. Whiteness exempts me from being more likely to be killed without cause at the hands of people sworn to protect society, for which I’d receive no justice.

The machine that upholds this racist system was established by people who decided to call themselves white, so it would follow that the people who continue to wear that moniker should be involved in its dismantling. It’s a mechanism that has changed over time, but to be sure, it remains well-oiled, is self-sustaining, and does not fall prey to entropy. Time will not destroy it. White people must.

This can only be accomplished when white people begin to take responsibility for the destruction this machine has wrought in all our communities. For this reason, I chose to write the first verse in the first person perspective. I wasn’t alive when whiteness was legislated, nor was I around to formulate false scientific defenses of whiteness. I, like a lot of white people love to say, “didn’t own any slaves and my family didn’t either,” but regardless, this system of whiteness is the inheritance my white ancestors handed me, and if I am not active in tearing it down, it’s the inheritance I will hand my children as well. If I am not actively fighting against the status quo, I am complicit in it, and I will remain complicit only as long as I believe and act as if racial injustice is someone else’s responsibility.

“white was the altar where i sacrificed
offered all of my inheritance, it was the price
laid down my culture, said goodbye
and i burned it on the altar where i sacrificed”

My sincere hope is that by this point, we can agree that the system of white supremacy (a phrase I will use interchangeably with whiteness) has damaged and continues to incite damage upon people of color. Now, let’s explore how whiteness harms white people, too. I’ll use my own family history as a jumping off point.

My parents and grandparents, and recently my sister, who’s become the family’s newest historian, are all able to recount dozens of adventurous and sometimes heroic tales carried out by our ancestors—a feature no doubt facilitated by my family’s white privilege. At the time my first blood relative carried a former version of my surname to the country, European indentured servanthood remained common, and Irish immigrants most often filled these subservient roles. My ancestors, the Mundles, were Irish immigrants. The avenue they took to gain their freedom in this new society was to voluntarily spend several years working with little to no pay in order to buy the rights afforded to other land-owning people with similar pale skin tone because, despite their similarities, Irish people had yet to considered white by law. This changed as time passed, however. By the end of the 1800’s, the previous anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment among Americans was waning (though not gone), and Irish people had all but assimilated into whiteness both culturally and legally. But not without a cost. Like all tyrants and cruel gods, whiteness demanded a sacrifice in exchange for its benefits.

For any member of a lower caste, the hope of assimilation into dominate culture meant undergoing an erasure of any former culture. Though African slaves couldn’t assimilate, this was enacted upon them anyway, without consent. Families would be given new names—often those of their slave masters. Masters forbade any cultural practices other than the Master’s own, which meant Christianizing them (but only after enacting legislation stating that a slave’s conversion or baptism into Christianity wouldn’t necessitate their freedom). Native peoples were forced to undergo similar erasures as government officials, in an attempt to “civilize savages,” ripped Native American children from families and enrolled them in Christian boarding schools. If the children spoke in their tribal languages or dressed in a way reminiscent of their cultural heritage, they were punished and often abused.

Whiteness demanded similar sacrifices from members of a lower caste who could assimilate as well, including subgroups like Italian- and Irish-Americans who shared the majority’s pale complexion but had retained their ethnic heritage. My ancestors, in order to ascend to the power that whiteness promised, began hiding and then altogether erasing those features of their lives that exposed them as Irish. This included their names, which they changed voluntarily. Surnames like McHugh became Hughes. O’Sullivan became Sullivan. In my case, Mundle became Mundell. Becoming white meant un-becoming what whiteness deemed unbecoming. The customs and beliefs practiced by my Irish forebears were stuffed away and eventually forgotten.

So what did whiteness cost me, personally? First, an ethnic inheritance or group identity to take pride in. It’s a gaping hole, a missing hand. It irreversibly changed the trajectory of our family through a loss of something vital, and something we will never again recover. The rich inheritance my family cultivated in their homeland was sacrificed for the poison of whiteness, and that poison is my inheritance now.

But let’s also consider those who were from the beginning considered “Anglo-Saxon” (a term originally thought to mean anyone descended from Vikings, because apparently the Vikings were the apex of human self-actualization). Most people from Great Britain, as well as from Scandinavian and Nordic countries, generally felt safe assuming they had some Viking blood in them, whether they did or not (see Thomas Jefferson), which justified their beliefs that they belonged to a superior breed of human. A significant section of my family falls into this category as well. If many of these Anglo-Saxons from Great Britain carried over the culture that would eventually become the status quo, we might assume that they weren’t required to give up much at all. And that would be partly true. But whiteness is ultimately kind to no one but itself. Such types of magic always return thrice-fold. Any time we dehumanize another human soul, we must dehumanize a part of our own too.

Modern psychology shows us that if I were to commit myself to harming you in some evil way, I would have to overcome a great deal of neural wiring in order to do so. If I could, it would demand dissociation from the moral sensitivity and empathetic center in my brain—centers most of us have. It’s a common feature of human life and existence. It lies deep within the human condition. Before I could commit some harmful or evil act against you—whether it be murder, or abuse, or manipulation—I would have to disconnect from that part of myself which is human, thus causing damage to my own connection with my own humanity. We witness this reality in the trauma soldiers bring back from war. We see it in the aloof expressions of serial killers. We hear it in an abuser’s denial when he says he’s done nothing wrong. Dehumanizing others makes us less human.

This truth is profoundly imagined in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, where we read that each time a witch or wizard kills another, a piece of the murderer’s soul is fractured. It’s from such fractures that Voldemort creates his dreadful horcruxes in his desperation to avoid death. I might argue that there’s no better fictional representation of whiteness than Voldemort, who sees only limited resources when looking at his world, and in his obsession to win this zero-sum game, uses violence to subjugate perceived threats and by doing so, upholds a system that both preserves and poisons him.

“i don’t want to die
but every murder is a suicide
call me a fool the moment i’m remiss
of what the wages of whiteness is”

But the wages of sin is still death. Set on our current trajectory, allowing whiteness to maintain its function in our society, we will eventually come to destruction—all of us. That means finding and destroying the horcruxes of whiteness not only frees people of color, but white people as well. The reason we must interrogate our own stations in this system of white supremacy is because we need to understand that all of our freedom is bound up together. When we fight for freedom for people of color, we are fighting for our own freedom also.

“who are my people?
who is my tribe?
can crooked instruments
draw steady lines?
if i give up my power
i give up the thing that binds
me to my people”

Have you ever witnessed the natural in-group recognition between one person of color and another? I was at a grocery store recently, and noticed a conversation happening between a white mid-twenties woman and the store’s black manager, also in his mid-twenties. In language and tone mimicking the woman’s, he explained to her where she might find the kombucha, and set himself back to restocking shelves after she thanked him and headed to aisle three. Seconds later, a young black couple appeared. The manager’s greeting looked different this time. He dapped the guy, falling into a cadence that seemed to flow from him more freely and comfortably. Most of us have seen this before. He code switched, subtly communicating to these strangers an unspoken unity, reinforcing in-group dynamics. Whether conscious or not, these subtle symbols of resistance and hope likely grew out of years of shared discrimination and subjugation. Though I didn’t know these three, I can only assume they were about as different from each other as any three strangers might be, and yet, an unspoken group identity bound them together, and that group identity was forged from hardship.

I grew up without needing to code switch. For most of my life, I’ve spent very little time thinking about who I might have solidarity with in public spaces. When I walk into a coffee shop, I feel no desire or instinct to scan the place for someone else of Irish ancestry. As white people, it’s usually not immediately necessary for us to consider group identity. In fact, it’s possible that many of us, being influenced by a culture that exalts the individual self, blanche at the idea that we could be responsible and bound up with a group of other people we didn’t choose or who don’t know us. Could I posit that perhaps it’s partly because we sense that we wouldn’t like what we’d find if we did begin to think about it? If hardship, resistance, and dignity are the threads that make up something like black group identity, what might be the fabric of white group identity? Really, one thing comes to mind: power, and the abuse of said power. And white people usually don’t like talking about that.

But what happens when white people begin to use that power against itself by becoming anti-racist? What happens when white people fight whiteness? First, when we break white solidarity with other white folks who are depending on us to uphold the status quo, we will be seen as and called traitors, rebel-rousers, cry babies, snowflakes, or whatever else, in the majority’s attempt to drive us back into compliance. Many may interpret our stance as one of self-hatred—but it’s not. If we recognize whiteness as a system of oppression and see our complicity in that system, we love ourselves and others more by doing the work of tearing it down, and we build better communities for everyone.

But breaking ties with whiteness begs a separate question that rests at the very heart of the album I set out write: if whiteness dissolved my former inheritance, and I now refuse the inheritance of whiteness, what’s left? Who are my people? To whom do I belong? And what to do with whiteness? Can it be redeemed in some way? I am a person of faith, and believe that redemption can happen in all places, but whiteness? I’m not sure. I exchanged my cultural and group identity for the promise of power that whiteness afforded, and that transaction isn’t refundable. I don’t think there’s any way around saying this: there’s a great deal of grief and mourning to be done. That’s appropriate and essential work for us to do together, fellow people-who-called-ourselves-white. It’s right that we shed tears for the self-inflicted wounds we’ve dealt ourselves, and poisons we’ve nursed, alongside the tears we shed for our own complicity and violence towards the marginalized. But even while we do this—even while we bring ourselves to see the horrors of whiteness—we must act all the while. We must allow our tears to propel us into action, and not delay in acting, because while we cry, people are dying. Instead of wallowing in guilt, let us use the grief as fuel to fight the status quo. To protest. To campaign. To change laws. To make art. To reconsider where we live, where we work, and what we give our time and money to. As C.S. Lewis—a general favorite of white people—said, "Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.” Let us decide now to act, and keep acting.

*for sources, check the Resources page, esp. “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter and “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander