By Via Perkins
Hometown Weekly Correspondent
The final event closing the community reading of Debby Irving’s book “Waking Up White” took place on February 4 at 7 p.m. More than 20 groups in Wellesley and beyond committed to reading and holding group discussions around Irving’s revealing, hard-hitting memoir. Three months spent considering the impacts of race, power, and privilege led up to a presentation and dialogue in the auditorium of Wellesley High School.
Irving has spent the last two years working as a racial justice educator, and uses her personal experience “waking up” to the awareness of race in her forties as a way to shed light on white privilege and racial dynamics. World of Wellesley, whose mission is to “make Wellesley a welcoming community where diversity is celebrated,” organized the community reading as a means to conversation and education about these difficult topics.
The author was introduced by World of Wellesley President Michelle Chalmers, alongside Reverend Liz Garrigan Byerly of the Wellesley Village Church. Byerly thanked the audience of over 100 for “being willing to sit with uncomfortable stories.”
Irving guided attendees through this unease using fascinating experiences from her life, which she peppered with facts, photos and thought-provoking questions.
Childhood, Irving asserts, is a formative time for our understanding of race throughout our lives. The author grew up in Winchester, a wealthy white town, where she had no interactions with people of color. She thought of herself as a good person, but had no frame of reference to understand how her privileged life directly related to marginalized lives.
This lack of knowledge was crystallized in a memory she recounted from her childhood, which was also featured in her memoir. After vacationing in Maine, her family would make trips to the edge of a plantation to drop off used or broken items to the impoverished Native Americans living there. She felt her family’s tradition was a generous donation to people who couldn’t quite get back up on their feet.
At the time, she had no knowledge of Manifest Destiny, Indian boarding schools, or the horrors that Native American people experienced at the hands of white settlers - not to mention the fact that the Maine property her parents owned displaced Native Americans from their own land.
“I became so attached to the idea that I lived in the best country in the world, and that if you just worked hard enough, you could do anything,” Irving explained.
At age 48, she attended a graduate course on race that changed everything she thought she knew. One of the most shocking revelations for Irving was about the GI Bill. After fighting Hitler’s racist ideologies abroad, around 1,000,000 black WWII veterans were excluded from receiving mortgages and higher education due to their race.
This knowledge was especially difficult for the author personally, as it was this very bill her family benefited from, due in large part to their whiteness.
Audience members provided one-word responses for how they were feeling during a break in the presentation, and “sick,” “numb,” “cynicism,” and “frustration” were among the descriptions. Irving knows firsthand that it is a difficult and painful process to have previously-held beliefs challenged, but reminded the audience of how necessary it is.
“Slavery ended on paper, Jim Crow ended on paper,” she conveyed, “But have we addressed this in our belief systems?”
Irving offered guidelines to provide the audience with practical ways to respond and have respectful cross-racial interactions. Instead of becoming defensive or disengaging from a conversation, she suggested trying to understand one’s own biases, and exploring what is at stake for whom.
Talking about race, especially on the part of white people who want to dismantle systematic racism, is key to finding solutions. “It is white silence,” Irving reminded the audience, “that holds this whole thing together.”
For more information about Debby Irving and Waking Up White, visit www.debbyirving.com. To learn about World of Wellesley and upcoming events about race, visit www.worldofwellesley.org.
