I swim in water.

Thinking we have the *best* perspective is dangerous. Not knowing we have a perspective *at all* is even scarier.

In 2009-2010, my husband and I fostered a Haitian child. I was 26 years old, my husband 32. The little girl was three. She could not speak English, and I could not speak Creole. I met her for the first time the day she landed in the US.

Fostering that child was the first risk I had ever taken in my life. It was the first time I’d ever willingly stretched beyond the limited capabilities I already possessed, the first time I signed up to do something I didn’t already know I could do.

The child lived with us for only 107 days. There is no logical reason it should have upended my life the way it did. It seems almost exploitative, now, to refer back to that period as the time everything changed for me, but that is also the only way I can make sense of everything that followed.

I won’t tell that story here, mostly because it is a story I tell only when I can offer it the reverence it deserves. But I need to tell you one tiny piece of it.

Our foster child, with whom I had fallen madly (perhaps even dangerously) in love, was in the bathtub. She was covered in bubbles, scrubbing herself with a yellow, giraffe-shaped loofah. She was quietly humming a Haitian folk song as I sat propped on the bathtub ledge, smiling at her.

And I was suddenly flooded with memories, one after the other like a video reel, of my experiences over the years with black- and brown-skinned people. Images flashed, old conversations replayed, and even former feelings washed over me in turn, as real as they had been in those moments. As if I were again 12, 15, 22.

That night I did not sleep.

For many nights afterward, I often did not sleep. A Pandora’s box of self-knowledge had opened in that bathroom, during that sweetly hummed song—and it was full of shame and sadness and regret and confusion. I was often horrified by what I saw, often baffled by what I had not before seen. Others might not have had such a dramatic memory bank, but perhaps others had not made the mistakes I had made.

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Now, I think of that evening as the night I saw, for the first time, my whiteness. What it meant, what it had afforded me, the way it drenched every private and public understanding I had of the world in which I lived. It was as though I had only looked out onto the world from behind my own eyes, and suddenly I was standing outside myself, seeing myself the way someone else might. And around me: a now-visible web of powerful systems, belief networks, and experiences.

I don’t have the space to say much more than that here. It is a long, long story. But reckoning with my whiteness (and, let’s be clear, my racism) toppled some internal dominoes. If I could be wrong about that, what else might I be wrong about? I had not merely missed my own wrongness; I had held opinions I didn’t even know I held. I grew up in rural south Georgia, where racism is sort of baked into the cake. People inherit it, and most of them don’t know it (me, for most of my life, included). It is the invisible, slippery, unarticulated nature of the sin that makes it so pernicious. How does a person rectify a crime they don’t know they committed? (Are committing?) How does a person come to care about a foreign grievance they haven’t heard?

When we are raised with impenetrable cognitive frameworks already in place (which, Richard Rohr argues in Falling Upward, is essential to healthy human development and for which I am grateful), we struggle to understand the system we are a part of. Or that it even is a system. Maybe the system is whiteness. But it can also be Americanness. Or religion. Or capitalism.

David Foster Wallace famously wrote,

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

It’s not just that we don’t understand the substance we are swimming in is “water”; it’s that we never considered another environment might exist. We can’t see or hear creatures on the land or imagine how they might breathe without gills. Isn’t everyone swimming in water?

Isn’t water… reality?

Certainty in childhood, when it is felt as stability, is a gift. As children we are vulnerable, and we need absolutes. The alternative is a sort of traumatic uncertainty. Although a bulletproof, inherited framework provides a stable place from which to interact with the world in our youth, many psychologists and sociologists argue that in order to keep growing toward wisdom, we must in our adulthood begin to ask questions of that formerly impenetrable (to us) system. And how do we ask questions about systems we don’t know we are a part of?¹

We need to inherit a framework for understanding that we can, at the very least, borrow for a time. But if, as adults, we never ask questions of the substance holding us afloat (is this “water”?), we will drift aimlessly along (at best) or continue to enforce and embody division or oppression (at worst). Is (for example) whiteness reality, or is it a form of water we’ve swum in so long in this country, we don’t know it’s there?

When I started pulling threads, Ibram X. Kendi had not written a book, George Floyd had not been murdered, and the term “whiteness” was not a part of the average American’s lexicon. Certainly the word did not signify wokeness or liberalism. Rather, acknowledging the damage I had done was solitary, painful work. And because ideological deconstruction had not been narrativized as the trait of a justice-oriented political liberal,² I had no sense that a wider group of people would approve of my reckoning.

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Little did I know, scholars had been studying whiteness for years.

I had encountered the idea fifteen years earlier in grad school in a paper by Toni Morrison. (It is remarkable, isn’t it, how a class about whiteness can leave us unbothered, but a moment sitting on a bathtub can undo us completely?)³ Morrison wrote an essay called “Playing the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.” In it (and this is a crude summary), Morrison posits that white people often see themselves as “unraced” and others as “raced.”⁴ When whiteness is the default assumption of and representation in literature and other media, white people stop seeing it. Certainly this was the case in the 1990s, when as a kid I can’t remember seeing more than a handful of Black people in advertisements, movies, or tv programs.

Whiteness was the water in which white people swam.

Here’s Morrison (whose water metaphor here is lucky but purely coincidental):

It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.

It seems to me that, when all the answers are provided for us (neatly explained within whatever orthodoxy to which we ascribe), our own thinking apparatuses atrophy.⁵ Only living inside an unfamiliar story (intentionally or unintentionally), helps us see the bowl that constrained and permitted our former lives.

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I became obsessed with all this after the 2020 election, when we all (I think) recognized the lines we’d drawn around ourselves, as if the ink had darkened on the page of our shared cultural lives. How had I, for more than 30 years, not merely tacitly approved of the lines but myself wielded a giant black marker, drawing and redrawing lines for my own benefit?

We need beliefs. Even psychological and neurological research supports this idea: our health is measurably better when we have beliefs.

According to my reading (of course these are not my ideas), people don’t usually recognize the extent external factors (particularly the in-group phenomenon) determine their belief systems. For example, Americans don’t decide whether they are Republican or Democrat in isolation; by the time they can vote, they have been raised inside a structure that encourages thinking in a particular way. Adult humans aren’t a blank slate for thinking through these issues on their own.⁶

But there is an important difference between (a) believing things because we are convinced we’ve cornered the market on Truth and (b) believing things with an open-mindedness that makes space for feedback and adjustments and, as I always say, new stories.

Most people don’t intentionally indoctrinate their children along political lines, but that’s often what’s happening. (However, the parties themselves do indoctrinate by constantly asserting that a person with X position MUST also take Y and Z position.)

It’s not just that we don’t acknowledge the substance we’re swimming in is water. It’s that we don’t acknowledge we’re swimming in anything.

It’s not just that we don’t acknowledge the cognitive frameworks that influence the way we understand the world and interact with it.

It’s that we don’t think we have a framework. Because it is so ingrained as to have become our default, it is invisible to us.

We don’t think we have a perspective; we think we have the perspective.

And how can we accept feedback to “update our beliefs about reality” if our models are invisible to us? Our decisions flow outward from our models like powerful rivers.

My point about whiteness is not that I was a card-carrying member of the KKK or that I had ever even made an overtly disparaging remark against humans of another race. The point is that, the night I sat in that bathroom, I felt the presence of a barrier, however thin, between me and a person I loved. It was like a haze that made the girl blurry, an object I had to bend to reach around to get to her.

And I knew with absolute clarity that it was a barrier I had erected, and for which I was now accountable. I didn’t immediately have some ideological conviction that I wanted to see “other people in general” more clearly. But inside the story I was living, I urgently wanted to move anything that obstructed my view of this toddler I adored.

As a non-American, non-white child, she swam in entirely different water, subject to an entirely different ecosystem of experience, privilege,⁷ and burden. If I wanted to get to her, truly reach her, I would have to begin to understand my own decisions in terms of the systems and ideologies from which they flowed.

And it would have to start with a simple, excruciating assent.

This is water. I swim in water.

1. We place ourselves inside an unfamiliar story.

2. Or, alternately, religious heretic.

3. This, I think, is the difference between [information I was given] and [a story I lived], but that’s a post for another day.

4. Remarkably, she wrote this in 1992.

5. In fact, forgoing this kind of critical thinking is often a signal to our in-group that we belong because we assent without question. As in the case of RINOS (an insult that stands for “Republican in Name Only” and is used by ultra-conservative Republicans to signal that a person doesn’t fully uphold the positions of the in-group), total assent is often a requirement for full membership within a community.

6. An easy way to prove this is the way particular policies inevitably huddle together in sometimes counterintuitive ways, whereas a person raised on a deserted island would almost never draw that exact set of confluent policy conclusions on his or her own (abortion and second amendment freedom, for example, are not in fixed, logical opposition).

7. This is another word that has been rendered virtually useless by the baggage of polarization. It still matters.