White Supremacy and Me

by Rev. LeDayne McLeese Polaski

As a child, I witnessed a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I was young enough to have been baffled by my mother’s fierce anger when the hand-made KKK signs started appearing in our neighborhood.

I don’t remember how she explained the group to me, but I vividly recall seeing the event itself as it was held early one evening in an empty corner lot alongside the state road which was the regular route into our neighborhood.

Riding home in the family station wagon as the sun was setting, I saw hooded figures in bright white robes standing listening as someone with a ragged voice shouted over a loudspeaker.

I had a glimpse of flames rising high as we sped past. The fire was likely contained in a barrel, but in my mind it was a conflagration. My vision could have lasted only the few seconds it took to drive by – but the scene has been seared in my memory ever since.

I recently asked my parents if they could confirm this happening. I hadn’t imagined it, had I?

They indeed remembered the rally, and my dad was prompted (as he often is) to tell a story of how he recalled the event. A black friend of one of my older brothers had shown up at our house. He’d been on our side of town, and the only route he knew home went along the same state road we’d just traveled.

He wanted to be home, but he was too afraid to go the way he knew. My dad, who as a city police officer seemed to know every back road ever paved (or not), took the young man into his truck and took him home by a different route.

For years, whenever I have heard the phrase “white supremacy,” I have returned in my mind to that scene of flames, hoods, robes, and angry voices.

Yet, in the past few years, I have begun to see white supremacy located not in an abandoned lot a few blocks from my childhood home but in a place far closer and more frightening – in my own heart and mind.

For most of my life, fighting racism was something I imagined I could do by focusing outside of myself. Only recently have I begun to grapple with the fact that my struggle is at least as much an internal one.

As my eyes have been opened, I have begun to see how deeply white supremacy is a part of me. I do not consciously think of myself or people who look like me as superior, but the vast majority of my friends are white – as have been most of my co-workers and my closest ministerial colleagues, most of the people at my church and in my neighborhood, and every member of my family.

Even my Facebook page was a mostly white enclave until a friend posted the challenge “Do all of your Facebook friends look like you?” and I took steps to widen my circle of social media connections.

This reality is not a coincidence. This is the result of my conscious and unconscious decisions within a society in which separation is often the path of least resistance. And this reality is not without consequences – it affects the stories I hear and do not hear, the things I know and do not know, and what I think of as normal, natural, and best.

I have unknowingly but regularly lived out of a supremacist framework in the groups I have joined (or not) and in how I have conducted myself within them, in how I have planned agendas and run meetings and taken minutes, in the silences I have chosen to ignore or didn’t notice, in the priorities I’ve set for my work and personal life, in the relationships that have received most of my energy, in the way I have written job descriptions and conducted interviewed – I could go on.

So, now what? I am beginning to see. I expect that journey toward deeper understanding and greater awareness will continue the rest of my life. Guilt and shame serve no one and cripple rather than motivate efforts for change. I try to use my growing awareness to recognize the depth of the work we must do and my inability to do it on my own strength.

We cannot get to where we want to go by retracing the route by which we came.

The first step toward the home we long for is rightly naming the path that’s delivered us to where we are.