The discomfort of knowing
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For many—doubtlessly most—White people, there is, as Yancy describes, a latent invisibility to their identity that they unknowingly learn from young. They do not question because, ultimately, they do not know otherwise. But as Baldwin writes: the grandmother who has wiped the pain of her Black sons is everywhere. She is not hard to find. She can be asked what she knows, what she has felt, about those tears she has wiped and those tears she cannot wipe. But she, and what is told to her, and the tears those who are around her shed are hidden. They are hidden by the narrative of comfort, by the 'countrymen' who cannot and will not confront the pain that they have, and do, and will cause.
It is uncomfortable to recognize that one's very existence—the beautiful and happy and comfortable things one knows and loves—are founded upon the expense of others. We are not innocent: our houses are painted and our streets are lined with the pain of others. Others who often live not far away. Others we see and speak to every day. And that, in the age of almost omnipresent visibility, we continue to paint our houses and line our streets with that same pain, is perfectly inexcusable.
White people must look past our own noses—it is not very hard to see. We must see colour, our own colour, to know, with discomfort, the world we have inherited and now perpetuate.