White Kindness: Are White People Really Woke or Are They Just Pretending?

White people are nice as long as your blackness doesn’t threaten their whiteness. When and if this happens, enter the deployment of microaggressions in order to secure back the power they feel they are losing in every transaction with you. Black people beware!

I am the only black person at my job. Day in and day out I sit at a table where 7 other white people surround me. Some days I feel like a tokenized novelty act. Other days I feel like raw meat thrown into a lion’s den. We are all “professionals” therefore we act “professionally” cordial with one another. It is something that I would describe as a little more than perfunctory but a little less than mandatory. Our sense of professionalism demands our congeniality but I wonder some days if it is genuine or merely a disguise to hide a truth I do not think my coworkers are even aware of sometimes, the truth being unrecognized bias with the potential to become full blown racism.

I surmise that most work-related kindness is merely an amenity offered to facilitate the work that is done in most organizations with the goal of completing tasks and in some cases avoiding race-related litigation. No white person in their right mind these days wants other people to know they are racist as it could cost them not only their jobs but also their reputation as “good”. They cannot have others perceive them as anything but innocent so they put on social cosmetics to mask their bigotry usually in the form of excessive kindness. When I go to work, I am inundated with exaggerated smiles and symbols of solidarity be it in the form of simple tokens of appreciation, baked goods, bought lunches or expressed concern. I want to appreciate such kindness but I do not want to be blindsided by the counterfeit gestures as I often question the motives behind such displays of kindness. Symbolic optics offered as real change seems to be the modus operandi when it comes to America’s apology to Black people. Such gestures have historically been Trojan horses used to control the anger of Black America. Knowing this I am led to wonder: Are my white coworkers good for goodness sake or are they trying to buy my silence and somehow tame my rage with their white-gloved generosity?

It is not lost on me that my feelings can at times be perceived as irrational or as “the complex overreactions of an overactive imagination” as I tend to call it. There are many days when I have to check-in with myself and ask “Are you being paranoid?”. “Are you seeing things accurately?” Is there something really happening here or are you just misreading the honest intentions of others?”. I tend to punish my hypervigilance with self-inquiry. But then I go to team meetings where I realize that my suspicions are not only accurate but supremely warranted.

Here at these meetings decisions are made. These meetings represent a power source one that each of us tries to tap into in order to get things accomplished. Often times while sitting at these meetings I feel like my ideas are devalued, dismissed, unduly challenged, undermined and overlooked constantly. I have spear-headed efforts to encourage respect for all ideas by candidly expressing the behaviors that undermine team cohesion as well as things that support team cohesion. These efforts have gotten team consensus however such consensus was not genuine. It was simply a way to ensure that their ideas were the ones being implemented. Their cooperation was infested with hidden motive that being the furtherance of their own agendas and secret desires for power and control.

As the only black person at the table, my ideas have been met with much resistance and suspicion. Many of my coworkers have provided the illusion of support and communion however when it comes down to whose idea we as a team implement, it is rarely my own. I am given local authority over such basic things as what day to do a grocery shop for a client or when to provide an incentive to a client but when it comes to clinical decisions, decisions that truly impact a clients wellbeing, my judgement is often times questioned, dismissed and respectfully rejected all with an air of vicious kindness.

I have been told numerous times by coworkers that I should be in a leadership position within this agency however I refuse to take on such a role. For me it would be more work than it is worth. Always being questioned, usurped, dismissed and rallied against is not worth the money they are offering. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, white people do not respect black power. They see it as a threat to their own power. While on the surface they seemingly respect black agency and vocally encourage its expression, truth is when such power challenges their authority, when it forces them to reckon with the lingering racism that exists within their very soul, they try to destroy it!

The disquieting truth is this: White people are kind as long as you stay in your place! The moment you, a black professional begin to assert your power, white people get afraid and begin to engage in psychological warfare using passive aggression, duplicity and planned/purposeful ignorance to undermine your confidence. They engage in mean-girl high school mob tactics and will try to intentionally exclude you from things while they try to curry the favor and secure the allegiance of higher ups who they can use to turn against you. Did I mention that this is all coming from those supposed white allies who profess to be “woke” but evidently haven’t done their own work?

Truth is as a black professional working in a predominately white space, I do not completely trust white kindness as I often feel it is saturated with hidden motive and agenda. I do not know if my coworkers are truly woke or if they are pretending for the sake of keeping their jobs and reputations intact. I still wonder if racism was legal, how many of my white coworkers would throw a noose on my desk in order to get me out. I also wonder if they lived in Wakanda, would their Wi’Kindness be genuine or merely a means of survival the same way we as Black people have been forced to survive by code switching in order to fit into westernized definitions of professional presentation? So many questions, so little hope…..