In his book, Black in White Space, Elijah Anderson powerfully demonstrates how Blacks must learn to navigate White space in our society, whereas Whites hardly ever enter Black space.

His book has made me reflect on my time in the 1980s, when I spent almost my waking hours surrounded by White people.

While at Simsbury High (1975-1979), I actively sought out friendships with the three young men from ABC entering their sophomore year at the same time I did. Once I left high school, though, I studied, lived, and worked in one White space after another for nearly a decade, with little to no interaction with African Americans at all.

How did this happen?

In the fall of 1979, I enrolled at Clark University in Worcester, MA.

I don’t know the exact numbers, but in guessing, there were probably, on average, no more than 25-30 African American students throughout my four years at Clark. I was friendly with a few guys, mainly through intramural basketball, but most of my interactions remained superficial my entire time there. As might be expected, most Black students stayed in their tight social circle, given that Clark was mainly a White space. Although I loved my college experience, it is one of my sole regrets during that time not to have befriended any of the African Americans on campus.

When I moved to Worcester, the city was completing its third decade of significant population loss. It had never recovered from losing most of its manufacturing base from 1950-1980. Clark resided in one of many declining neighborhoods—South Main—in the city.

At the time, Worcester was one of the few majority White cities in the Northeast in 1980, hovering around 90%; the Black population did not reach 5%, in part because the core of Worcester’s Black neighborhoods were demolished in the 1960s—like so many were in the 1950s to 1970s—to allow for the construction of I-290. Even today, Worcester is majority White at 67%; the Black population has risen to about 13%.

By my second year at Clark, I realized while volunteering for the Big Brother/Big Sister program that most of the city's lower-income households were White. Having grown up in an upper-middle-class White suburb, it had never dawned on me until then that White people could be poor. Until then, my exposure to cities had been very limited. I lived 12 miles from Hartford; my grandparents lived in Brooklyn until the late 1960s. Thus, my stereotype of poor people, until then, was they were Black—or, in some neighborhoods in Hartford, Puerto Rican. This shows, to a degree, how powerful mainstream media was in the 1960s and 1970s—feeding the stereotype of poor equaling Black.

All my summer jobs during college, I only worked for White bosses and with White staff, both in Simsbury and Worcester. After my sophomore year, my father linked me with a unique summer jobs program sponsored by Hartford’s Department of Transportation. In a city with so many Black youth needing jobs more than I did, the department hired three suburban White kids for the program instead. I was one of those three.

This was a perfect example of privileging Whites to the exclusion of Blacks. Without a doubt, this type of discrimination happened in summer jobs programs across the country at the time.

After I dropped out of a Ph.D. program in meteorology at Oregon State University in early 1985 – where the only diversity across the faculty, staff, and graduate students was a student from Peru and two from Sri Lanka – I landed a summer job some months later at The Omega Institute, a holistic retreat and education center in Rhinebeck, New York. No one from the full-time and summertime staff was a person of color. Nearly all the faculty were White; I can’t remember seeing a single Black attendee (although there may have been a few) that entire summer.

In 1986, I fully committed to my anti-nuclear activism and joined a large-scale Great Peace March, in which 450 people (more at the beginning and the end) walked from California through the Southwest, Great Plains, and the Midwest to New York City and concluding in Washington, DC to protest the nuclear arms race. Out of the 450 marchers, only five were Black (for those doing the math, that is 1.1%). A dozen or so marchers from Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Germany, and Mexico served as the primary diversity on the march.

In 1987 and 1988, I served as a regional organizer for International Peace Walk, Inc., where we organized three American-Soviet Peace Walks in Russia, Ukraine, and America. Each time, 200 Americans and 200 Soviets walked and camped together for five weeks. On those walks, a single African American and a single Native American participated out of more than 500 Americans across the two years.

You’re getting a clearer picture of how pervasive my White spaces were in the 1980s.

When I moved to D.C. in the summer of 1988, my first job was as a temp at the National Science Teachers Association. I noticed that the only Black program assistant, a woman in her thirties, was deferential in everything she said and did around Whites, almost as if she was playing a maid role in The Help. It was painful to watch, and I couldn’t help believing that her behavior was taught to her while growing up, to be largely subordinate and less visible in White spaces.

In my second temp job that lasted through 1989, I actually had a Black boss, a middle manager at the National Academy of Engineering. I saw no other mid-level or higher-level Black manager in my nine months there. All other Blacks worked there either as secretarial or janitorial staff. Mind you, this is 25 years after the Civil Rights Act passed.

I then spent three and a half years in a support role and then a publications manager at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in downtown DC. Not a single Black faculty member taught there. All the Black employees were staff level. All the janitorial staff were Latino. Out of a student body of several hundred, there were less than a dozen Black students. SAIS, however, was the first time in more than a decade that I became friends with African Americans – both on staff and those studying in the program.

For middle-class Whites of my era, I doubt that my young adult, almost universally White experience was that unusual. We grew up and were socialized into a system that centers Whiteness.

Where Whites dominate.

Where Whites were almost universally in leadership and managerial positions.

Although that’s changed somewhat in the ensuing decades for middle-class Whites, because nearly three-quarters of Whites self-segregate in their own neighborhoods and only 1 percent of Whites have an African American in their friend circle (yes, that’s what research shows), has it really changed that much for most White people?

In fact, in my postgraduate jobs from the early 1990s through 2013 (a national association, two boutique consulting firms, and a national non-profit), all of the organizations I worked for—and most of those I worked with—had the same dynamic: high-majority White staff, almost always White-led, and African Americans in mid-level jobs and, more often (with Latinos), in more subordinate or support positions.

Image courtesy of Chat GPG 4.0