When You’re Not the Center Anymore
One of the tools we will need for a more multiracial future is the ability to loosen our grip on our own way—our convictions, preferences, instincts, and even our understanding of what is right.
For most of my life, I have moved through spaces where the basic assumptions made sense to me. The way meetings worked. The way decisions got made. What counted as professional. What made something fair. How disagreement was supposed to happen. What constituted a reasonable response. None of these things felt particularly cultural to me. They mostly just felt normal.
That is one of the strange things about being white in the United States. Your cultural instincts can spend a lot of time masquerading as common sense.
Of course, I know intellectually that my way of seeing the world is only one way of seeing it. I’ve written about this. I’ve taught about it. I’ve spent years in diverse spaces with people whose experiences and cultural frameworks are different from mine.
But knowing something and experiencing it are two different things.
And the experience can be irritating.
When the Center Moves
There is a difference between welcoming different people into a space and allowing their presence to change the space.
The first is relatively easy to imagine. Come in. Join us. We want you here. Pull up a chair.
But underneath that welcome can be an assumption that the basic architecture will remain intact. The meeting will still work like a meeting. Leadership will still look like leadership. Decisions will still get made the way good decisions get made. Fairness will still mean what reasonable people know fairness means.
Except reasonable people don’t always agree. Neither do cultures.
When people with different histories and experiences genuinely share a space, the result isn’t simply greater diversity. The center of gravity begins to move.
Things that once seemed obvious become negotiable or disregarded.
Ways of communicating that once felt normal become one option among several. Expectations about time, leadership, conflict, expertise, relationship, accountability, urgency, and decision-making bump into other expectations. And suddenly my instincts aren’t the instincts anymore and my way forward might not be right way forward.
Because it means that there are also times when I don’t get what I want.
If I am accustomed to spaces generally making sense according to my cultural expectations, a space that doesn’t can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. If my perspective doesn’t carry the weight I expect it to carry, I can experience that as not being heard. If a decision is made differently than I would have made it, I can experience that as unreasonable. If my understanding of fairness doesn’t prevail, I can experience the result as unfair.
And sometimes maybe it is. That’s what makes this difficult. The goal isn’t to distrust every instinct I have because I’m white. Nor is it to assume that someone from another racial or cultural background automatically has the better read on every situation.
My perspective still matters. It just isn’t the measuring stick. There is a difference between having a voice and expecting my voice to set the terms. There is a difference between participating and expecting the results to be my preconceived decision.
There is a difference between being disregarded and simply not being centered.
The Loss of Certainty
We often talk about racial change in terms of power. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who needs to share it? Those are important questions.
But I wonder if one of the quieter things white people have to give up is certainty. The certainty that the way I experienced something tells me what actually happened. The certainty that what feels reasonable to me is objectively reasonable. The certainty that what feels fair to me is fair. The certainty that if something makes me uncomfortable, somebody must be doing something wrong.
That doesn’t mean abandoning judgment. It means holding my judgment differently. I can think something should have gone another way and remain curious about why it didn’t. I can disagree with a decision without immediately assuming the process failed. I can believe my perspective has something important to contribute without believing it should settle the question.
I can even be right and not get my way.
Let that sink in. That can be a great challenge. But sharing life with people who see the world differently requires more flexibility than that. Sometimes the world isn’t going to bend toward me.
The Work Is to Stay
The temptation when our convictions, preferences, and instincts no longer carry the weight we expect is to pull away. To decide the process is broken. To find another space where things make more sense. Or simply to stay physically present while quietly concluding that everyone else has gotten it wrong.
The work is to stay.
To stay engaged when we don’t get our way. To remain curious when something that feels obvious to us isn’t obvious to everyone else. To notice the frustration that rises when a decision doesn’t reflect what we believe is best. To keep listening when our instinct is to make our case one more time, a little more clearly, because surely then everyone will understand.
This isn’t about becoming passive. It isn’t about abandoning our convictions, withholding our perspective, or pretending we agree when we don’t. Sometimes we should push back. Sometimes the process really is bad. Sometimes we may actually be right.
The work is learning to hold all of that without requiring our way of seeing things to become the center.
And if we can stay there, something more than multiracial community becomes possible.
We change.
Because this isn’t only something white people need to do so that people of different races and cultures can flourish around us. We need it for ourselves. We need experiences that expose the limits of our own instincts. We need to discover that what feels normal to us is not necessarily neutral, that what feels obvious is not universally obvious, and that what feels right may still be shaped by a lifetime of having our cultural assumptions reinforced.
That can be uncomfortable. It can also make our world bigger.
We become more curious. More flexible. Less certain that our first interpretation is the only interpretation. Better able to listen without immediately translating someone else’s experience into our own categories. More capable of being changed by people rather than merely making room for them.
Maybe that’s ultimately what it means to move ourselves from the center: not thinking less of ourselves, but no longer needing ourselves to be the reference point.
And we may discover that life is richer from there.