Tips on preparing your family story

An integral part of this discussion group will be sharing our family stories. The purpose of this activity is to help us to see specifically how we personally benefit from being white. As Peggy McIntosh notes, we like to think that we have earned everything we have, but if we stop and really examine our lives we can see how we have unearned advantages that made it possible to get where we are.

Please speak with your parents or other relatives to find out specific details that you might not know about your family's history. Since this might be difficult, please start asking sooner rather than later. Spend most of your time talking about yourself and your parents rather than distant relatives (you may with to start with yourself and work backwards). Please write down your family story.

Below are some questions to think about, but this is not a comprehensive list.

How did you and your family obtain your apartment(s)/house(s)?
Who lived there before your family?
How did you and your parents get jobs?
What are the racial dynamics of your and your parents' jobs?
Where does your family's money come from?
What type of neighborhood did you grow up in?
What is your neighborhood like now?
What was your school like?
If you attended school after high school, how was that possible?
Who was/is in your religious community?
How has your health been?
How would your life have been different if your family wasn't white?
Did any of your appropriately-aged family members serve in Vietnam? If not, why not?

Keep in mind that the point is to implicate ourselves and our families in the system of white supremacy – to see how we benefit from being white. Take the time to really think about it. The goal is not to re-tell the stories as they are told in our family, but to create our own conscious versions. Things to avoid saying:

My family never owned slaves / my family came here after slavery was abolished.
My family is working class -- we don't benefit from white privilege.
My great grandparents arrived here with nothing and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
My family is Irish, and Irish immigrants were discriminated against so we didn't benefit from being white.