When her high school swim team was floundering, she didn’t want to bear the responsibility of their failure. Her daddy asked her to dust off the old Bible and she found a lesson that fit for today. The writer of our beloved Hot Chicken Story would love to believe that she ain’t like all those other white people, but the lesson is a little more complicated than that.
by Rachel Louise Martin
All it took was Daddy asking me what had happened, and I was off. It was those other swimmers, I said. All year they’d been goofing off during swim team, joking around, skipping laps, and talking back. I tried ignoring them, figuring they’d settle into the workouts as the competition season started. They didn’t. Then I’d set a good example, swimming every lap, making every split, doing all the optional workouts. Nothing changed. I pushed myself even harder. Still, they cut up, cut sets, cut practices. And now, this afternoon Ms. Coady, our coach, had called all of the juniors and seniors on the team — even me — into her office and chewed us out for our behavior. How could she loop me in with the others? How dare she act like any of this was my fault?
My dad shook his head in that way that said he had his own take on my situation, one I wouldn’t necessarily like. Then he grabbed his Bible off the bookshelf behind him.
Now, I don’t usually turn my essays into Bible lessons, but hang with me even if the Bible isn’t your thing, because the parallels to today are uncanny and uncomfortable.
Daddy flipped about two-thirds of the way through the onion-skin pages, cleared his throat, and said, “Tell me about Daniel.”
The task was so easy I knew it had to be a trap. I launched into my well-practiced Sunday school response about how Daniel was an apocalyptic prophet during the Babylonian Exile. I had already started reading some historical criticisms of this take, but I knew that wasn’t the correct answer for my father, not on this evening. Daniel was chosen by King Nebuchadnezzar II for special training, so he moved to the king's court where he was supposed to eat the king's own food. But Daniel and three friends refused. They said they would survive on vegetables and water as a way of proving their righteousness. God rewarded them by making them better looking than their peers. And there were some dreams only Daniel could interpret. And who could forget that incident in a lion's den?
“So you’re saying Daniel wasn’t just a good man, he was someone who pursued godliness even when it meant almost certain death?” Daddy asked.
“Yeah?” I answered.
Daddy passed me his Bible. I grabbed it with both hands, careful not to dislodge the notes and bulletins he’d stuffed between its pages. “Read Chapter 9 aloud,” he said. “You can start with Verse 3.”
“‘Then I turned to the Lord God, to seek an answer by prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes,’” I began. “‘I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession.’”
I paused; Dad motioned to me to keep going, so I did, reading: “we have sinned and done wrong, acted wickedly and rebelled” and “righteousness is on your side, O Lord, but open shame, as at this day, falls on us” and “we have sinned against you” and we “transgressed your law and turned aside” and “we did not entreat the favor of the Lord our God” and “I was speaking, and was praying and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God.”
“Well, yeah, that’s right,” I said, rereading the chapter quickly, trying to make sense of it.
“So why did he confess and repent?”
“I have no idea.”
“We are all part of the world around us,” Dad said. “Now I know — and Ms. Coady knows — that you are always hard working and respectful, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been a great teammate. How have your actions and attitudes contributed to the problems this season?”
That long-ago lesson came back to me recently as protesters swept through our streets and the backlashes ramped up. Daniel is who I thought of as some folks came up with creative new ways to say #NotAllWhitePeople; who I reflected upon when friends claimed they “didn’t have a racist bone;” who I remembered when I saw others make public pledges to only read or talk or post about racism for a month; who I thought about when I started to feel good about all the internal anti-racist work I’d already done.
Daniel was a part of his society, and so am I. I am responsible for the institutions around me, for the systemic racism that governs the United States. I helped create this world through my choices, my preferences, my assumptions, my prejudices. I have been part of this racist structure.
When the police murder Black teenagers walking home from convenience markets, shoot Black women asleep in their apartments, choke to death Black men because they seem suspicious, invent reasons to pull over drivers for being in the “wrong” neighborhood, arrest some teenagers for marijuana possession while releasing others based on nothing more than melanin, and otherwise intimidate people of color, the excuse given is that they are protecting white women like me.
Terror is being done in my name; therefore, I must fight it. Disagreeing with racism isn’t enough. I must help unseat the people who are perpetuating the violence and deconstruct the institutions that enforce inequality.
And it’s also not enough to say I try to be personally anti-racist. Part of the reason Daniel confessed was that he had failed to win his people over to godliness. Similarly, I had fumed at my teammates, but I had always done it while my head was underwater. I’d known most of them for over half my life, but I never pulled one of them aside and said, “I’m concerned about how this year is shaping up,” or “Hey, what’s going on with you?”
Today, I have the same tendency to avoid personal confrontations. I scroll past the bit of hateful ugly when it pops up on my social media feed, asking myself how many people would be converted thanks to a Facebook confrontation. Or I pretend I didn’t hear someone voice an opinion that they would say is well-meaning but is actually racist. Or I fail to explain that it’s impossible to be post-racial in contemporary America, that anything short of active anti-racism means being complicit with the inequality built into every aspect of our society, culture, and government.
My silence makes me part of the problem. “Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing,” Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. “All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf.”
But Daniel wasn’t only confessing to and repenting from what happened during his lifetime. He took responsibility for what the generations that had come before him had done. I would love to say “But I wasn’t even alive then” or “My momma’s folks didn’t even immigrate to the U.S. until after the Civil War” or “My dad’s folks were sharecroppers, so how did slavery benefit them?” Daniel’s example forces me to deal with a truth I find hard to accept: we both have built better lives for ourselves because of our ancestors’ sins, and we’ve both profited from others’ pain.
I was on the high school swim team because of the privilege my white skin had bought me and my family. Swimming has historically been a segregated activity across most of America, and that affected the racial makeup of my team. We had only a couple of team members who were people of color, and none of them were Black.
But my skin color had bought me more than just access to a swimming pool. It had allowed me to join the right swimming pool. Race and class are not the same thing, but they are intertwined, and white privilege was part of what allowed my family to leave the working class. My dad was articulate and tall and white and male and charismatic and just the right amount of Southern, so when I was a toddler he was able to trade his jobs as a mechanic and grasscutter for a lucrative position in sales. His company bought our membership into the local country club where I learned to swim competitively and befriended the kids who would become my teammates.
Just like I drove in the pool, knocking out laps even when others slacked off, I have worked to become the overeducated, underemployed writer I am today. My hard work doesn’t negate the ways I have benefitted from being a white woman (I’ve explored these questions in greater depth elsewhere.) I can’t inherit white privilege, however, without inheriting responsibility for changing the ways race structures my culture.
Now this is where my interpretation of Daniel will diverge from that given by many theologians and my father. I think some of Daniel’s righteous deeds were selfish, a way for him to feel superior to his peers.
Daniel wanted to follow God, but he was still human. I bet the teenage prophet preened when his diet of veggies and water made him hotter than the other guys at the palace. Maybe this is why a few chapters later, the other political leaders used Daniel’s faith against him, tricking the king into passing a law that ordered every citizen in the land to pray to the king and only the king. Daniel, of course, refused, so he was thrown into a den of hungry lions. Was the lion’s den plot hatched because Daniel was godly or because he was self-important and arrogant?
Maybe I read Daniel that way because I know I have a similar pretension. In high school, that meant I worked myself to the point of vomiting, just to show I was nothing like the swimmers who skipped sets. I still have those inclinations some 20 years later.
My first reaction when I see something unjust is still to stay silent. Then when I do finally speak up, I talk over others, anxious to be heard. My speeches are a product of my discomfort, but they are also a result of my arrogance.
Sometimes this means I fail to hear what people of color need to share about their experiences. Rather than listening and learning, I justify and obstruct.
My failure to be silent can also keep me from reaching other white people, from helping them work through what anti-racism means, from doing the emotional labor that has fallen on Black Americans for too many years.
Facts and figures and arguments don’t change minds. Personal stories sometimes do. But the most effective method is asking questions: Why did you say or do or think that? What did you mean by it? Why might that hurt someone else? And look, I’m not attacking you or singling you out on this because every white American has been taught the same ways of thinking and acting, if not by our families than by our culture; can I tell you a story about how I came to realize this? What are some other examples you can think of?
I wish I could say that after my Dad walked me through Daniel’s story of repentance, I jumped into the pool the next day and asked my teammates the questions I had been self-righteously fuming over. I didn’t. I was still mad the next day and for a couple of weeks after, still feeling I had been unjustly included in Ms. Coady’s lecture.
When none of us swimmers stepped up to reform the team, Ms. Coady did instead. Since we weren’t mature enough to be responsible for the quality of our own workouts, she instituted a system of rewards and punishments. Within a few practices, everyone started to focus on our drills and sets. Soon we were winning more races and improving our times. We started strategizing for the final meets. The next year, we showed the junior varsity swimmers what it meant to work hard.
I’m glad Ms. Coady turned us around, but I will always wish she hadn’t needed to do so.
Over the past four centuries, millions of different voices have shouted out about the injustice white Americans have built into our democracy, trying to show us how we are accountable for our nation’s failure to achieve its promise of liberty and equality for all. The changes we’ve agreed to make have fallen far short of the total revisioning necessary to reconstruct America, rooting out the prejudice foundational to our system.
Despite a summer of unprecedented protests, we still hear about new instances of police violence against Black citizens. The pandemic has illustrated how closely race is tied to questions of healthcare and safety. The economic devastation that has spread across the nation is disproportionately affecting people of color. And now, despite the early waves of success, activists are fighting inertia, struggling to reclaim public spaces.
I have started the hard process of acknowledging the ways racism has woven itself through my thoughts, my beliefs, my actions. Part of prejudice’s insidiousness, however, is that it is not only about the individual but also about the society around them. I would love to say the problems the marchers and speakers and writers are decrying are not my fault, that slavery ended almost 160 years ago and I have no part in its ongoing aftermath. I wish I could just refuse my racial inheritance and be done with it. But as my father and Ms. Coady showed me back in high school, your own good deeds can be negated if your team is failing.
Like Daniel, I am a part of my culture and its failures. Therefore, like Daniel, I, too, must repent not only of what I have done myself but also of what my society has done.
Repentance means turning away from what feels natural and then resisting the urge to ever look back. It means when I slip up or when my society does, I have to begin (again) the process of confessing and making amends.
Repentance from white privilege isn’t about saying the right words, reading the right literature or showing up at a single protest.
Repentance is a lifetime of action, a lifetime of discomfort, a lifetime of failure, a lifetime of trying again.
Want to become a more engaged anti-racist? Fantastic. Get ready to be uncomfortable. Start with the internal work, but being an effective accomplice means taking action. Here are some ideas and resources for how to do that:
Start with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist
Take the AntiRacist Table’s 30 day challenge. Every morning they will email you a new lesson or activity.
Consult Eric Deggan’s Life Kit for NPR.
Read the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s roundup “Talking About Race.”
Use Teaching Tolerance’s guide for tips on how to talk to other white people.
Acknowledge that you are part of the problem.
Listen to what the people around you are saying about you, your neighborhood, your city, your state, and your nation. Don’t argue or fight with what you hear. Take their criticisms to heart.
Find a local organization run by people of color and support their campaigns. Notice that I said support not commandeer. Your efforts, however, should not simply be monetary. Volunteer to be behind-the-scenes so that the leaders are free to organize, educate, and agitate.
Practice what you will say to friends and family members. Remember that few of us are won over by facts, nor do we respond well to anger. What questions would challenge them to begin thinking about things differently? What story from your own life can you use to illustrate the key points of antiracism, showing what it looks like to screw up and repent? How can you model a better way?
When you see something, say something. Take on the emotional labor of educating other white people, and hold your leaders accountable.
Know you will fail and you will fall. Repent, apologize, and try again. When you apologize, remember that the apology isn’t about easing your guilt. You have caused someone else harm. Don’t make excuses and don’t focus on convincing the other party to forgive you. First, listen to whatever it is that they have to say to you. Admit your mistake, acknowledge the damage you caused, then come up with a way to make amends for what you have done.
Rachel Louise Martin is a writer and historian based in Nashville. She has written for O Magazine, The Atlantic Online, and CityLab. Look for her first book, Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story, is available for preorder. It's based on her Bitter Southerner article "How Hot Chicken Really Happened."
