just call me The Man...

yesterday evening, had a conversation with a much-shaken-up HG mentor wherein she related the following story: "i was having lunch with ______ and _______ and ... they basically told me that Higher Ground was useless because a lot of us are white and most of the girls are Puerto Rican and African American. i felt really...i don't know, ganged up on. they seemed to be saying that i shouldn't work with the girls because i am white. i asked _______ why she didn't get involved, and she said she'd been approached, but that she didn't want to because it [HG] is a 'white organization.'"

i was pretty appalled, because i am (comparatively) close to all three women involved in this conversation and had always thought they were pretty supportive of what we're doing in norris square. now i find that my skin color makes it completely impossible for me ever to relate to or empower the young women with whom i've been working for the past few years.

it's true that the majority of women who work on and with HG are white. it's also true that the issues surrounding white people working for community service and social justice organizations in minority communities are significant. but i refuse to believe that i have nothing to offer. at base, that is what makes the assertions made by _______ and ______ so offensive. not that they are groundless--because racial power dynamics are both important and dangerous--but that, in their total lack of nuance, they ignore the resources that any swarthmore woman brings to a neighborhood as troubled as norris square.

in making race the primary issue, people who complain about white women working with Latina and African American girls are missing out on opportunities to connect with girls as girls. they negate the importance of gender, age, class and location in favor of a unitary vision of a "minority" culture. i tend to see the world through a class lens--growing up in north dakota, for example, i had much more in common with my middle-class Native American neighbors, with their educated parents and cultural literacies, than with the rich white kids in south grand forks or the poor white kids a few blocks over. because of that bias, i tend to see the poverty, and the impoverished sense of possibility, in norris square as The Major Issue(s).

i would be an idiot not to come back to racism as the root cause of much of that poverty. and there should be programming that develops positive racial and ethnic identification alongside positive gender identification. but in the end, it comes down to what we can do, on the ground, right now. yeah, i care about the plight of white middle class girls. being privileged does not erase the problems of being an adolescent. but we started HG because we saw a need, a hole in the social services of the norris square neighborhood, that threatens girls there on a much more fundamental level than girls in, say, wallingford are threatened.

every swarthmore woman has had opportunities and luck that girls in norris square only dream of. but too few of the (comparatively privileged) swarthmore women who are concerned about racial politics on a sweeping level have made on-the-ground attempts to deal with people instead of races. if you go to a school that is so poor that you can't have a math text, and therefore can't add or multiply, how far is your racial identity going to take you towards success, however you define that, and empowerment? not very.