On implicit bias and white privilege

I never spent much time planning my dream wedding. Honestly, as a teenager on the chubby side, I kinda figured I’d never get married. The only thing I can tell you is that I knew I wanted a plantation wedding. You know, because the scenery is so pretty.

I started touring the Deep South when I was a kid, twelve or thirteen at the most. My mother is a lifelong addict of the architecture and culture, having been touring antebellum homes since she, herself, was around twelve. As she tells it, her folks (my grandparents) were driving to Disney World in Florida and decided to stop in a town called Natchez, Mississippi, which, at one time, had been home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country, including New York.

Three guesses what those millionaires did that made them so rich.

Natchez was where the wealthy planters of the day built their townhomes. These are not strictly plantation homes, but the difference is so minute in what they represent that it’s not really worth getting into. All you need to know is that slavery was what made it possible.

My mother would describe herself as a history buff before anything else. She grew up in a conservative household where, if there was a story to tell and someone not-white was involved in any manner, you damn sure heard the ethnicity as part of the scene-building. And she is a liberal hippie by comparison, though my childhood was somewhat dominated by this obsession. One of my earliest memories is watching the old miniseries North and South (starring the late Patrick Swayze), an adaptation of the John Jakes series of the same name that was all the rage in the 1980s.

As I said, I first started going with my mother on her yearly trips to Natchez, Mississippi when I was a kid. I’d grown up in a household where the Civil War was more or less rubbernecked. Understand, I always knew that slavery was wrong, believed that all people were inherently equal, and that the North rightfully won the war. I was also told that the war was fought over States’ rights, something still contested within my family. That the specific rights were that the States wanted to own people was incidental to the larger cause.

If you’re white, it’s easy to be taken in by the aesthetic beauty of these homes. And I was. For more than twenty years, Natchez became my home away from home. I looked forward to traveling there the way other kids might look forward to Christmas. I was never interested, really, in the stories of the families who owned the homes, who built the homes, who married who, which was really the most you got on these tours. They were names and assigned to random paintings throughout the home, recited in a manner that was, let’s face it, boring. It was all tell, no show, and the stuff they did share about the families was typically not very interesting. I couldn’t give a damn about the history behind their very fine furniture and Old Paris vases, or that they’d buried their china to help keep them safe when the Yankees invaded and established Natchez as one of the Union’s strongholds (buried possessions, oh the horror!). Still, for all the stories shared on tours, it didn’t occur to me until much later than certain stories were never shared. Slaves became servants, and were only mentioned in association with the role they’d play as part of the owner’s property. Like, I can tell you that the “shoo fly” (properly called a Punkah) was typically operated by a small slave child while the white family ate on the fine china. I can tell you that in some of the grander homes, there was a bell system in place for the white family. The slaves knew which slave was to appear in which room based on the pitch of the bell. I can tell you that slaves were not to use the grand master staircase, rather cramped, tucked-away stairs so as not to offend the white owners or their white guests. I can’t tell you what life was like for the people who were owned by other people because those stories weren’t good for business, and were therefore not told. On occasion, you’d get a white person asking the painful, “Was the owner a kind master?” But only on occasion. Tourists didn’t want to be reminded of what had built these homes any more than the tour-guides wanted to do the reminding. Slavery was an unpleasant, unfortunate truth that was more convenient and comfortable to dance around rather than address directly.

The Punkah

Guys, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this, and the process was an uncomfortable one. The reason I opted against a plantation wedding wasn’t because I woke up one day and realized how terrible they are, but rather due to logistics and price. I got engaged in 2011 and married in 2012. Yeah, that’s 7-8 years ago. This means that 7-8 years ago, I didn’t see the inherent racism in visiting Natchez for the purpose of touring these old homes. My penname, Rosalie Stanton, is one I chose the name based on two of the antebellum homes that I’ve toured ad nauseum over the years, Fort Rosalie and Stanton Hall. This bothers me a lot, but more on that in a minute.

One night, while my husband and I were going on a walk around our neighborhood, he tried to talk with me about the inherent racism in visiting this town for the purpose of touring and staying in places that are essentially huge monuments to slavery. I did not take it well. I defended its historicity, defended my reasons for going, threw a goddamn fit over the suggestion—the implication—that I was engaging in racist behavior because being a racist was the worst thing ever, and I refused to accept my part in it. It was insulting, painful, to hear the man I love espousing these views about me. Even if he was right.

Fort Rosalie

I think about that night often now, how rigid I was in my stance, how defensive I became over my love for visiting this place that was, in many ways, my home away from home. Our mutual love for Natchez was one of the cornerstones of my relationship with my mother, which was and is precious to me. I didn’t share my father’s love of baseball, which at the time seemed to be a prerequisite for having any sort of relationship with him. I didn’t want to confront the possibility that this thing that I loved innocuously (in my mind) could be in any way harmful to anyone. Because I am a Hufflepuff through and through, and the thought of causing anyone harm is painful. I resented it in exactly the same way we’re seeing some white authors resent the implication that they themselves are promoting racism in any way right now.

I honestly can’t say when the change happened, but I believe it was due to becoming more engaged on social media. I live in the whitest corner of Missouri (there’s a reason for this—in the early twentieth century, three black individuals were lynched on our town square, and drove the black population out of town), so my experience in interacting with non-white people was more or less limited to traveling down South, where we stayed with white families but were often served by people of color. But I started making connections with others, through fandom and my budding career as an author. I also started resisting my mother’s annual invitation to travel with her to Natchez—not for any reason I could identify, I just wasn’t feeling the love the way I once did. I likened this to growing older and broadening my interests, but somewhere along the line, I became uncomfortable with the whole thing. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t go; I would, but I stopped enjoying it. It was more a way to spend time with my mother.

Then, some time ago, a woman I knew through fandom shared an article regarding the experience of a black woman touring one of the homes I’d spent my life visiting. I read the article and my worldview shifted. I started reading more, reading on the criticisms of plantation weddings (and thanking the universe I hadn’t had one, lamenting that I ever wanted one in the first place), digging into implicit bias, the harm in “I don’t see color” and the microaggressions of which I have been guilty my whole life (and am still guilty of, I know) against people of color. I stopped thinking that “I am the least racist person you know” because I realized that due to my upbringing, my privilege, and my skin color, my entire world is defined by my relationship with race—or rather, that I don’t have to have one in order to live my life. I got to visit places like Natchez, choose my penname based on the homes built by enslaved people, and enjoy it distantly through a white lens of whiteness, reflect on it as being “in the past” and marvel at how far we’ve come while ignoring how alive that past is for millions of people. It’s something I know I will struggle with forever, and that I get to choose that struggle rather than ignore it (which so many white people do) when people of color are denied the same right.

In that way, I suppose I am grateful for my penname, because it forces me to remember who I was not too long ago, and who I will try to not be every day going forward. Talking about race as a white person is intimidating and uncomfortable, but it’s painful and exhausting to those for whom the discussion is not an option. I will never stop being intimidated. I hope to whatever’s out there that I will not react defensively when people point out behavior or work that is problematic, because at the end of the day, my intent is secondary to the consequences and harm. And bottom-line, I don’t get to decide what’s racist. All I can do is listen and try to be better.

Stanton Hall

When I wrote A Higher Education (A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice), it was with representation in mind. My books have largely been white and straight, though not by design, it’s still a form of erasure. It’s still saying “this is what my world looks like”, whether or not that was the intent. I realized this first when writing the Sinners & Saints Series—that I had envisioned the Guardians of the Seals as being white men. By this point, I was already an outspoken feminist, so I was appalled that I had subconsciously linked guardian (protector) with being male. And the more I thought on it, the more I realized that the characters themselves were whitewashed. So I introduced some diversity. Some, but not a ton. There was room for improvement.

As I was outlining A Higher Education, I decided that Jane would be black and Mary would be a lesbian to make my work a little less white and straight. And then I camped my ass on Writing with Color for over a year, taking note of the tropes to avoid, reading the responses, and trying to be conscientious of Jane and Mary’s characterizations. In particular to Jane, I wanted her race to be a part of who she was and reflect some of the challenges she faces, but not the sum total. I also very much wanted Elizabeth to not be a white savior, to not get everything right in the way she responded to the racial challenges Jane faced. I did all this knowing full well that Jane’s story was not mine to tell, wanting to be respectful of it but also acknowledge my limitations. It was important to me to not just turn around and make Jane blond-haired and blue-eyed because that was safer.

There are real flaws still within that book that, were I to write it again, I’d change. To date, I haven’t received criticism for Jane’s characterization—though more than one of the negative reviews have been from older white women lamenting the SJW themes, which, honestly, bonus—but I know that doesn’t mean I handled it perfectly. If someone were to explain to me how something in her portrayal and journey was problematic, I’d hope to hell I’d listen. My intent in this means jack shit if it causes or perpetuates harm, just as my intent in visiting Natchez meant jack shit. This is especially true if I clam up and double down when confronted with evidence of my own biases, whether or not they’re subconscious. And that’s a lesson white people, particularly liberal white people who “don’t see race”, need to learn.

We are the products of our environment, and for white people, that means we’ve benefited from white supremacy even if we can’t stand white supremacy. My whiteness allowed me to go my entire childhood and too much of my adulthood blind to the racism inherent in visiting my once-favorite escape (a place I honestly can’t stand anymore). After all, I wasn’t racist, therefore what I was doing or promoting couldn’t be racist. Except that’s not the way the world works. It took a long time to deprogram—it also took a willingness to hear some uncomfortable things about myself. And it’s not behind me; it’s not over. I’m not free of racist thoughts or feelings—what I am is more aware of them when they happen, and therefore in a better position to challenge those things which would have otherwise gone unchecked.

The only antebellum home I have any interest in anymore is the Whitney Plantation.