Living Under The Same Roof: On The Waltons, Familiarity, and Awareness of Whiteness

image is from here

I've been a fan of The Waltons TV series since it began airing in the early 1970s when I was just a kid. It ran for nine seasons and it has been re-airing, in sequence, over the last many years, on various cable networks. Currently it's on Hallmark Channel which is showing three episodes a day, Monday through Friday.

Originally it aired weekly. So in a month I'd see about four programs. These days I can see a whole season of shows in about two weeks! This is an entirely different way to take in the program and allows me to see things that I'd missed when my viewing of the program and tracking of the on-going plot lines was spaced out. I can now notice patterns of speaking, expressions each character says that eluded me back in the day; being a kid and adolescent also meant I was seeing through entirely different lenses, developmentally. The youngest girl, Elizabeth, is currently grown up into a young adult in the episodes airing this week. One of the people in her many-sibling'ed family is her next older sibling, a brother named Jim-Bob. When he is about to do something really unwise, like fail a science test so he doesn't have to be valedictorian of his high school graduating class because he's afraid of being a leader, she's there to tell him she's ashamed of him. That assessment from his little sister is enough to get him back on track, to push through inner obstacles to his own success or overcome impulses to be grossly irresponsible.

Elizabeth is the moral center of the family which has lost its grandparents and parents as key characters. I hadn't realised this when I originally watched the show in the '70s.

There's a lot I didn't track, I'm realising. Just as the hue of the floral-patterned fabric on the stuffed living room chair and how it is similar to but not the same as the pinker floral pattern of the fabric on the couch. I can see with greater regularity which photos adorn the mantelpiece. I can see what clothes they tend to wear.

As you probably know, you REALLY get to know someone when you spend a lot of time with them, in person. Especially living under the same roof.

“The same roof”, for me right now, is functioning as a kind of metaphor for familiarity among humans.

I grew up around mostly white people. I had opportunities to be around people who were Black but in the place where African Americans and whites co-existed, they didn't get to know each other well. Cultural and class differences, as well as the prevailing antagonistic force of white supremacy, kept Black students at my junior high school separate from most whites. Life was more comfortable that way, I imagine, for the students of color. It was surely more comfortable for the whites, who so clearly preferred to congregate only amongst themselves. This need was projected onto African Americans by the white students, and this has become a stereotype—not of whites, but of groups of people of color of the same ethnicity: “they” tend to “keep to themselves”. And whites don't?

My whole life, through to this day at this hour, I've watched whites keep to themselves while not exactly having the awareness that whites do this more often than other racial groups. I've watched whites be open to getting to know people of color but not under the same roof—not with any great degree of familiarity and bonding. There have been exceptions: one of my female white family members married a man who is Latino. He's the only Latina/Latino person in my family. The white family welcomes him, but not without noticing that he's not “like us”. They do their best to put aside his difference, which usually means they distort and misunderstand what that difference is. The difference, primarily, is one of political location. They are hard-working poor white folks; he's a hard-working man without white privilege. They don't see his difference to them in those terms at all.

Yesterday on The Waltons, there was an episode I didn't remember seeing when it first aired. I'm wondering if I saw it but couldn't let in what it was dealing with. I would have been living with white Christian family then, under the same roof, and the episode was about Jason's girlfriend, Toni, and her being Jewish. The family took this news strangely—making Toni feel strange about being a Jew. Their behavior didn't make them feel strange about being Baptist.

The episode dealt really well with that form of anti-Semitism. I was intimately aware of that level of it as I've gotten exactly the same form from my Christian family members. As I think I've told you before here, I'm the only gay male and the only Jew in my white Christian-majority, white Christian-dominant family. And those in my family who identify as Christian are not “secular” about it. They believe they are “right” about who god is. They believe everyone needs Jesus in their lives—their Jesus, that is; not the real Jesus.

When the Walton siblings acted strangely, Toni felt estranged from the family she was growing to love. Jason felt like they were coming between him and his new love. But one of his brothers, Ben, felt like she was coming between Jason and his family. Ben was the one to behave in ways that came across as most anti-Semitic, although to him it was only fear of losing his brother. What his behavior was to Toni and Jason was anti-Jewish because it made Toni feel like an invading outsider, and it showed no capacity to understand his own behavior as problematic and insulting to her.

I've been around Christian whites a lot in my life—sometimes living under the same roof as them. When I talk about them to other Jews—of any color—what I find is that we can relate to all the many ways W.C.'s have of making Jews feel strange or like we're outsiders invading their precious spiritual-moral terrain. They tend to view themselves as superior, although not necessarily out loud in so many words. It's implicit in most of what they do when encountering someone who isn't Christian but who is identified or affiliated with another religion.

In the last several years, most of my closest friends have not been white or actively Christian. One woman is Jewish; most of the people I know well were raised in homes that were Christian-identified but the women don't identify with Christianity; they, like me, find it to be oppressively heterosexist and misogynistic or otherwise insulting to their humanity.

I don't view Christianity one way. The ways my family members practice it, for example, is very different than how my white feminist lesbian mentor practiced it. There was almost no resemblance at all. They were of different denominations, but the whole attitude about Christianity was radically different. My family needs it—they need it to be something for them, to stabilise their lives. My mentor didn't need it; she embraced it because it held some meaning for her. She brought her wisdom to her faith; my family chooses to believe any wisdom they have comes from Jesus, not from their own mind or the world itself. They worship a male god who lives in the sky; my feminist mentor did not. In fact, she prayed to and honored The Goddess, or Goddesses. My family wouldn't regard her as Christian at all, for that and many other reasons.

What has taken me a long time to see is how whiteness works, in part because I never got enough self-awareness to see how it was operating in my own behavior. Being Jewish and white has been both an opportunity and obstacle to seeing how my own white actions function to protect the power I hold for being white—power that is held for me institutionally, made available when I wish to utilise it.

What I find is that if you grow to know someone or a situation intimately, the details of how it operates become clearer than if you keep that reality at arm's length, or check in with it only every now and then. But intimacy without the ability to analyse what you're experiencing can leave you like a fish in water—utterly unable to describe what wet feels like.

James Huff, an MRA who has not been in contact with me for a couple of weeks now, had written to me his observations about Black and Brown people in the U.S. I haven't published them here because I view them as domineering and dehumanising. He thinks his views are accurate and appropriate. He thinks Black and Brown people can be summarised in ways he'd find unacceptable and bigoted if anyone did the same to his people. That's part of his domineering power: to think he gets to contain people in his observations without being willing to allow others to do the same to him and his.

If the problem were being misunderstood, that'd be one thing. But if the misunderstandings and mischaracterisations are part of an overall program to keep people down, economically and politically beneath others, that's something else that must be radically changed. To deny that's the function of the distortions is to engage in one form of protectionism of the system of oppressive harm that folks on top get to deny. White men deny it by not being able to describe what it means to be white and men, in the political and structural senses of those terms.

What I see now more clearly is that one of the ways white people along the hierarchy of gender do to keep power in whites' hands is to pretend their whiteness has no political meaning or social substance. One of the places I've seen this is at a blog called Rad Fem Hub.

Another time, I may post more about the ways they do that. What they do is exactly what white men do, although as they are women they don't do it coming from the same place as the men. But what they do is classic in revealing how white privilege and entitlements work to keep power invisible exactly at the same time it is being exercised in racist ways. I've been hoping white women would call them out, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon, as whiteness is a very strong political bond few whites want to break.