Photograph by Michele Fine, "Pure White."

When I was a very young, very white girl, younger and whiter than I knew, and more privileged, I thought my parents, who had been generous with education, clothing, LP records, and bicycles, would permit me the free choice of a husband. That my selection fell on a black man whose experience of the world had been hard is not surprising, for I equated my suburban odd-girl-out suffering with that of the truly dispossessed. However good a girl I seemed to family and friends, I knew the helpless pain and rage that comes of feeling ostracized. The man I had chosen was a poet whose best lyrics transcended rage, fear and pain. His character seemed as noble to me as that of the heroine academics of the women's college I had attended; as noble as the character of my father, who had overcome poverty, a broken home, and alcoholism to head his own sales firm; or as noble as the character of my mother, who had worked her way through college, crocheting her clothes from crepe paper to save for her education, an imponderable and transcendant value, like freedom and poetry.

My new husband had been a burglar, a con man, a brawler. I was frightened when he tore down a young tree or bent a parking-meter pole in two. I was frightened when he put his fist through a plate-glass window in our apartment, then stayed up all night, drinking and brooding, going to work the next day with his arm, torn to the tendons, wrapped in a bloody towel. Yet his poems were richly musical, courtly and controlled in their rhythms. To me, the contrast, the complex relation of the work to the man, was moving. The contradictions that characterized his experience resonated with the contradictions that I savored in my secret heart where I was an artist disguised as a misfit, a person of intelligence and dignity cloaked in the disfiguring guise of a homely eccentric, who, with little grace to commend her, was given to know she had better be good.

Who defined me? Did I own myself or did my family own me? I don't think it's any accident that my struggle as a woman, fought on the ground of patriarchy, sexism and racism, spoke back to the questions posed by the institution of slavery over which a war had been fought a century before. To this day many parents treat their children more as chattel than as the gift of the past to the future. The episodes of my opera radiate an antique melodrama that is hardly of this century -- anguished meetings; a private detective that spied on me and reported to my father on my husband's past; a secret marriage; a disowning; my mother's repudiation of any future "nigger grandchildren"; my husband's mother's refusal to meet me on the grounds that I must be "white trash"; my father's announcement that I was now a dead daughter; my husband's flight to join the urban guerillas who were about to mount a revolution; my father's last-ditch effort to retrieve me from a city that had taken up arms (Detroit under martial law after the assassination of Martin Luther King); my refusal to be rescued; my wish to die in the hip downtown milieu I had made my own. Yet the arias were real. The snipers on the rooftops were real. The soldiers and the tanks were real. The bullets were real.

I have never been a brave person. I feared some things more than others. It was painful to be the dead daughter in my father's eyes. I was terrified of the bullets and horrified by my father's grief and fear. Yet I understood that to capitulate to the authority he was claiming, to acknowledge his responsibility for the definition of my ultimate values, was to assent to my own moral death, to become as vacant as a doll that lives and breathes and has its being for others' sake. A more fearful death than bullets, a more fearful death than the social one of liminality my father would pronounce, is the empty death that grows from within, feeding on the moments an individual disowns himself. Maybe deaths are always all around us. Maybe we know ourselves by the deaths we choose.

There was no refuge for me in the suburbs, so resolutely "white," which had defined themselves by distance from pain and struggle and anger and vulnerability and loss, as well as from the injustice the very distancing created and creates. I faced possible death in the city with the bullets whizzing about; the suffocating sameness and cruel prosperity of the suburbs meant certain death.

The irony was that my husband had left me alone in a furnished room in that city under fire, with very little money, uncertain that he would return, with no substantial reason to trust him, yet still I was unwilling to opt for the anaesthetic security of the suburbs. And, over the years, what shaped me has been not so much the marriage as my having refused to renounce it when it did fail, to renounce my claim to the value of the self that had been a "bad girl."

I am an anxious person, full of apologies, afraid that if I breathe too hard I will suck up more than my share of the air. Certainly I have been aware that it was a source of tremendous grief to my family that I refused to return to the suburbs with my father when he drove through bullets to retrieve me. Yet it has always seemed to me that I had a right, a right given to each person, to claim the life and the death that has meaning for her. I am not the first to observe that the White woman who marries a Black man is guilty above all of flaunting female desire. She becomes thus the unspeakable gorgon. But that is a view from outside the body of the gorgon.

Credo

Every age generates inhuman opportunities for success within the terrible hierarchic engine whereby the strong, the enlightened, the educated, the rich, the shrewd, the fashionable, extract sacrifice from those who are none of the above. The person who is alive to her own mortal essence must reject the claims of power for its own sake, power to ignore, to exclude, to oppress, to kill, in favor of power to grow, power to create, power to give life.

In our time and place, the notion of "whiteness" is a notion that arrogates unto itself the privileges of greed and dominion. Racism is by this definition the rigor mortis of the dead heart, the status quo that petrifies itself, excluding feeling -- "I don't want any nigger grandchildren." Yet for life to be full, for the oppressor as well as the oppressed, it must include familiarity with the full range of human experience, all passion, all sorrow, all joy. Power insulates the privileged and keeps them from the world with its transformative possibilities and its ultimate redemption.

There was a time when I thought the ordeal of an out-of-caste marriage had catapulted me into a social realm beyond class, beyond gender, beyond historical conflict. I now see that the marriage and my subsequent claim to the culture of renunciation were but paradigms for the choice that I would struggle with again and again. I believe with Dietrich Bonhoeffer that action begins not with correct theory but with responsibility.

To me, "white" stood for, and stands for, not so much a degree of pigmentation as a set of attitudes that takes privilege as an exclusive right. We are all of us always members of some groups that can or do oppress others. To be "white" means to be insensitive to the possibilities for oppression within one's self, therefore out-of-touch, for opportunistic reasons, with who one is and who others are. If "white" meant all-inclusive, like white the color of light containing all colors, then "white" would be a term of love and life. But the "white" I am talking about is a whiteness of exclusion, an absence of color, an absence of responsibility and self-awareness. Whiteness is a death trip. And the attempt to break out of it is an attempt to gain life.

To be a person of color means to feel with one's heart that one is mortal among mortals; one takes one's place in a matrix that relationally defines and redefines one's place in one's culture. To be a person of color means to acknowledge that we are hurt as well as blessed in our vulnerabilty; we need to take care not to hurt others. Together we grow toward the bright light that contains all color, the light that is wisdom. Each of us reflects a luster that is part of the full spectrum of human possibility, pleasure, creativity, generosity, faith and beauty. Or should I say each of us at each moment can choose to so grow and so reflect?

Hierarchy may always reassert itself, perhaps; but it is in the heart's refusal that hierarchy hardens into fixed and permanent categories. In the world, the triumph of hierarchy yields elaborate differences in how people work, some for the benefit of others. In the historical world, as well as in the heart, unresponsive and irresponsible hierarchy kills. And each of us must elect and re-elect to live.