tl;dr: I did not understand then, but I understand now how my life is built upon her suffering. She is systematically marginalized to do low-wage, unstable work that affords me the ability to purchase services, products, and a lifestyle because of race/gendered/class/citizenship privilege. The managing of palliative solutions to her problems also created a career for me. What I did not understand was my own investment and implication in her suffering. Most white “saviors” do not see their systematic relationship with those they are “helping.” There is distance: I am privileged here; you are oppressed over there. When in reality, it is dialectical. We aren’t trained to see the relational aspects, where I am privileged because she is oppressed, and she is oppressed because I am privileged.

Excerpt

The Makings of a White Matriarch

I was a case manager for Job Corps in my mid-twenties before I was a teacher. Job Corps is one of the last Great Society programs from the Johnson administration in the 1960s that was supposed to provide residential training in a trade. Students, who were from age 16 to 24, lived in dorms and went to classes for their GED and to learn a trade like plumbing or secretarial skills. My job was to assist students leaving campus once they graduated, hopefully finding them jobs, transportation, housing, childcare, and possibly community college.

The vast majority of my caseload was people of color, primarily Latinx and Native American. To say that nothing qualified me for this position is an understatement. I had a history degree, which carved out no career path that would not require an advanced degree or at least a teaching certificate, options I was not ready to take. I had worked my way through college through various forms of retail, warehouse work, and eventually, I became a courier at a law firm. Once I was out of college, I sold car insurance for a large corporation, I was a barista, a secretary, and worked on commission at a local jewelry store. As someone who worked through high school, I was very flexible and familiar with various forms of low wage work. Aside from insurance sales, this was my first professional opportunity and all they were asking was that I owned a car, could network, and would be able to get along with the students who were not much younger than I was. I was also required to be on call 24 hours a day in case students needed me for something.

It was a confusing concept, the concept of students living in poverty, facing systematic racism, and intergenerational trauma “needing” something. When would they not need something? What was I supposed to give them? I was completely overwhelmed with calls about problems I had no idea how to solve and no guidance about how to find out. I was handed a hundred or so cases, made up of teenagers and young adults I was supposed to track for a year, some leaving the center, some who had already left, and others who had been gone for a few months. The goal of the position was to account for where students went after they left the center.

Job Corps receives a huge government grant that we had to answer to, so we needed to show that our program worked, evidenced by stable employment of graduates. My 24-year-old self had no skepticism about this. My older self knows that they probably put unqualified people like me in this position because I would be kind enough to take the calls, responsible enough to gather the data needed, and compliant enough not to question long-standing beliefs and practices that went on in a center like this.

This was also was my first job as a white matriarch. I believed in my own benevolence and the ability to solve peoples’ problems. I was also acting out the part of white savior. White saviority, prevalent in films like Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers and the Blind Side, always includes the notion of an antiracist white hero or heroine who believes that they are helping people of color overcome obstacles in their lives. White saviors believe they counteract racism by seeing the humanity in all people but really hold racist notions of the people they are tasked with helping (Maurantonio, 2017).

The notion of white saviority works together with colorblindness to mask the significance of race and racism in the supposed benevolent actions of white people. For example, I could believe that I was the same as my students by erasing their specific struggles related to structural inequality, but I could also simultaneously believe that my caseload needed me because the success of people of color was something dependent upon white people.

The problem with white saviority is not that whites are completely useless to people of color. It is that white saviors believe that people of color could not solve their own problems, cannot teach their own children, or manage their own families. It is, of course, part of white matriarchal maintenance. The belief that I would be able to handle these issues at my age is part of how white women gain power over people of color. I was going to be in their homes, their workplaces, and I was going to be surveilling them at best, interfering with their lives at worst. How my lens about their lives was considered competent is deeply rooted in notions of white women’s moral superiority and competence in all things having to do with schools or helping professions (Feimster, 2009; McRae,2018; Spring, 2008).

The second day on the job, a sixteen-year-old 1.5 generation Mexican immigrant, Lucia, came into my office, furious because she was going to have to leave the center without her GED or her training because she was pregnant. The center was not able to house pregnant students in their third trimester. She had nowhere to go except her boyfriend’s family’s house and she was not sure that she wanted to be there. My job was to transition her into schooling or a job at this point, and so I took up the task of trying to figure out where she could go and what she could do. Attempting to help Lucia took me down a path that I had not anticipated and that haunted me afterwards. If I were to name an event that led me to where I am now, it would be getting to know her, her struggle, and failing miserably to find my way with her through a system that does not care about her at all.

I learned about what it meant to try to navigate schools, workplaces, hospitals, and social services for immigrants. I also learned about some of the underground networks for work and money that many immigrants depend on in order to survive. Because my job was nebulous and the goal was to help students stabilize after the Job Corps center, I accompanied her on appointments with doctors, social services, and visited her in the hospital when the baby was born. Many times though, toward the end of her pregnancy, I would just pick her up and take her to Sonic or drive around and talk.

I had a genuine concern and affection for her. She entered my own life at time when I felt rudderless, alone, and distant from family, and I needed company too. Her life had been full of violence, obstacles, and instability, which had landed her at Job Corps like many of her peers. She usually tried to have a lighter mood with me, but some days she shared her deep sadness and fear. One day, we sat at Sonic. She had become quiet, the way women do at the end of pregnancy, and she said, “Miss, why do I have to suffer?”

I did not understand then, but I understand now how my life is built upon her suffering. She is systematically marginalized to do low-wage, unstable work that affords me the ability to purchase services, products, and a lifestyle because of race/gendered/class/citizenship privilege. The managing of palliative solutions to her problems also created a career for me. What I did not understand was my own investment and implication in her suffering. Most white “saviors” do not see their systematic relationship with those they are “helping.” There is distance: I am privileged here; you are oppressed over there. When in reality, it is dialectical. We aren’t trained to see the relational aspects, where I am privileged because she is oppressed, and she is oppressed because I am privileged.