Surviving as the only Black kid in town
Author describes how ‘good intentions’ can become a tool of erasure
Rebecca Carroll’s story is extraordinary and singular. Her new book “Surviving the White Gaze” is about her life growing up as the only Black person in her New Hampshire community, living on the idyllic sounding Pumpkin Hill Road. Her parents adopted her when a young friend of the family, Tess, became pregnant. She didn’t see another Black person until her ballet teacher at age six. We spoke about Black history month and seeing history through something other than a white perspective.
I saw on your Twitter this morning that you said, “It’s only the first day of Black History Month. And I’m already exhausted.”
I feel slightly badly that I said that, but I did. It’s really important to do. Black History Month is always exhausting. Black history is American history. So much of this country is steeped in Blackness and Black culture. And so it’s just a choice to not have that be central to the learning of America.
History is seen through one perspective, through the “white gaze.”
What is problematic about that is when you think about surviving the white gaze; when you talk about the way in which America, all of us, have internalized the way that this country has been presented, we then have to internalize that, before we can even think about internalizing something else.
A lot of times, white folks will ask me, and particularly now in this moment of racial reckoning, ‘What should I read?’ What you need to do is immerse yourself in a way that is totally devoid of judgment, of superiority, of presumption and privilege.
It’s all out there already: art, culture, literature, music — it’s all there.
You’re almost a living embodiment of having internalized one way of thinking, then accepted a new way of seeing and internalized that. You take us through a personal story of how to do that. Is that what you were hoping to do?
Oh, for sure. The other thing that I hope the book demonstrates is that we are experts in our own experience. And that is really valid and really important. Sure, we can be scholars, we can be lecturers, we can be activists, we can be organizers, we can be all those sort of conventional things, that put us in the front, to stand up and speak and tell people how to fight. I believe in that and I do that from time to time. But I want everybody who reads this to understand that combating racism, dealing with the white gaze and white supremacy, is really about something inside of you. It’s resetting your instincts. And that’s really hard. It’s time-consuming and it doesn’t feel good.
Growing up as the only Black person in an all-white community, even with “wellmeaning ” parents, there was an entire form of erasure. Can you talk about that a bit?
We get caught up a lot in wellmeaning and well-intentioned because that really doesn’t mean anything. What it ends up doing is being a tool of erasure. So many white people … if there’s something that starts to feel kind of funny, or not quite right, just push it aside or ignore it, because that is what the essence of white privilege is.
The experience that I had, you know, with my fifth grade teacher (who said she was “pretty for a Black girl”) I don’t think that I told my parents because it didn’t occur to me that it meant anything to them. I didn’t identify it as racism because I didn’t know what racism was.
There was another incident you wrote about for The Atlantic.
I almost drowned when I was little because an older girl threw me in the water. Just as the manuscript was in its final stages, I called my sister to ask her about something else. “Do you remember when so-and-so called me the N word?” And she said, “No, but I remember when so-and-so called you the N word after she threw you in.” And I was like, “I’m sorry, what now?” But how many of those incidents must have happened that I didn’t even know about? Because so unaccustomed was she, my parents, all of those white people to actually identifying, fighting against or owning racism.
You’ve written plenty of other non-fiction books. But this is personal, this is a memoir. Why write it now?
I had to wait until I knew in my core that I was ready. And there were a number of times that I could have done it. As I mentioned in the book, right after Tess’s book came out, and then there were a couple of other times where I was like, maybe now’s the time to do it.
But when I became a mother, I felt such fierce conviction. As a Black mother, as a Black woman, as a writer. Just everything came into it. I know that people say this a lot about becoming a mother or parent. For me, it was almost mind-blowing. To have created a person of my flesh, in my body, of my body. I still think about it and actually get chills. My husband (and me), we created this unit that gave me so much strength and emotional fortitude and gratitude. I just had to live until I came to a place where I felt that kind of gratitude and that kind of clarity.
And so it just took a long time. What was the reaction from your family?
Pretty much as written, which is my birth mother is disgruntled and not reaching out to me, but reaching out to my publisher, my publicist. My mom is grappling but as deeply, deeply loving as ever. It’s tough because she’s married to my dad, who is an outsized guy. He doesn’t love it.
My hope is that, ultimately, they will all be able to read it as my story, not their story. They can take issue with how they are depicted, they can take issue with the way I wrote certain things. But it’s still my story. And I waited and I have given myself the gift of being free enough to write it.
Toward the end of the book, you mentioned your husband, who is white, and say, “This has become resolutely clear to me that I only could have married a white man who is also a scholar of race and American history.” Why is that?
Because I don’t want to have to explain anything, I don’t want to have to say, “Well, it’s really important that our son go to school with Black teachers and peers, and it’s really important that we have Black art on the walls.” It’s so conversant and so normal and obvious to him … it’s like the air that we breathe. That’s our family. That’s who we are.
When you talk about your husband and his way of seeing, it really doesn’t sound all that difficult?
It’s pretty simple, pretty straightforward. But this brings us all the way full circle back to the beginning of the conversation, which is that when you have spent your entire life unaccustomed to having to think a certain way or about certain things, especially things that maybe are not going to make you feel great, then why would you? That is the essence of white privilege and white supremacy, for that matter.
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.