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The experiences of the white women
included in Ruth Frankenberg's study, White Women, Race Matters, are
presented in a framework which highlights the ways they describe race as the
absence of whiteness. According to Frankenberg, these women saw their own
race as a norm from which others might vary, even when they made statements
highlighting their interaction with other races.
Frankenberg explains that these
relationships to race are shaped, often, without conscious decision, as part
of political, economic, and geographical forces beyond the scope of these
women's life experiences. Further, they are shaped by experiences of racial
inequality which take place as a result of these forces.
Within the framework for representing
their experiences, the women are spoken of as "resisting" at times,
various explicitly racist attitudes and social structures. Pat Bowen, for
example, relates her resistance (or at least her questioning) of a comment
by her uncle, when he told her, "Don't ever say excuse me to a nigger.
If you bump into them or they bump into you, it's always their fault"
(53).
In her examination of attitudes
towards interracial relationships, Frankenberg explains her view that "...whether
or not an individual woman chooses to participate in reproducing a racist
discourse, the discourse has an impact on her life" (78). Therefore all
of the women that she interviewed were implicated inexorably in the discourse
against interracial relationships, whether they chose to comply with, disregard,
or openly oppose such discourses. The point, according to Frankenberg, is
that subverting and transforming racial discourses "are long-term, collective
projects" (78), rather than matters of individual choice.
Using this framework to understand
the stories which I've told in this text, it is a simple matter to see Frankenberg's
arguments at work--to see my own implication, beyond personal choice, in racist
discourses, as well the futility of my efforts to examine this implication
through personal narratives. While part of the project of this text is to
acknowledge and explore my inextricable complicity in systems of racism, I
also feel the need to find ways to value personal experiences (both my own
and those of the women that Frankenberg presents) as part of a network of
personal experience that shapes behavior.
Along
with Sandy Alvarez, one of Frankenberg's subjects, I have described "succumbing
to the pressure of the discourse" (78), in my refusal to have relationships
with African American males. But even as I place myself within the text I
am experiencing the pain and shame of those refusals -- and struggling to
examine how my attitudes are shaped by those experiences. 
I find myself wondering if Sandy
Alvarez looks back on her experiences and thinks about how she would react
now. I suppose my point is that these events have power as memory, beyond
the evidence they give of a discourse or a state of mind at a particular moment
in time. And while I understand the importance of acknowledging my place in
a framework of racist discourse, I don't want to lose the ability to examine
my experiences as part of a framework of personal experience and growth in
addition to their relevance as part of a long-term social framework.
I suppose I am trying to create a space where I can work with "multiple
and competing subjectivities while also allowing for the possibility of resistance
to ideological pressure" (Nedra Reynolds, P.58-9, "Interrupting
our way to Agency.")
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