The Invisible Lives
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The Invisible Lives
John Paul Derryberry
I sat at a wedding about 15 years ago. I was very young into my social work career. I was not sure where it would take me, but I quickly knew that what everyone thinks social work is, is wrong. As I sat around a room mostly filled with white people, they heaped praise upon my decision to attempt to affect the less fortunate. As the recognition continued, it became uncomfortable because I realized where it originated from; their pitty.
As I sat and listened to their thoughts about working with a population of abused people, it told the story of how these white people viewed themselves versus people who were invisible to them, the people I was talking about. They couldn't fathom that child abuse still existed. They spoke of how great it must be to instill character (translation: valued upper-class, white traits) into these young people's lives. They made it about me and some sacrifices I made to be around these people. Never once did it cross their minds that these young people offered them or me anything.
Finally, a middle-aged caucasian father of three stated, "so most of these kids are black." I swallowed hard on my words, not knowing how to respond. I glanced around the table to see if the apparent racist statement had landed like the trash it was on anyone else. It flew over their heads as a statement only the uninformed privileged would make. I took a deep breath and stated, "Nope, most of them are white, not that color matters in these situations. Mental health problems don't discriminate and abuse occurs across all social-economic statuses." The way their eyes went wide would have made you think I was Aristotle dropping the most earth-shattering wisdom ever on this crowd. At no point in my career have I been Aristotle, and at that time, I only knew surface-level facts about how deeply racial undertones have shaped social work and society's view of our culture.
The people in my care were, and are, invisible to the outside world. Not because we cannot see them, but because we choose not to acknowledge their existence. At one point in my life, I would have begged to be invisible until I met people who were, in fact, invisible within society. This part of our population had no healthy representation in culture. They were boiled down to stereotypes and discarded as a lost cause unless a good white American, like me, came to save the day. I stopped hoping to be invisible, and I don't want anyone else to feel invisible, either.
Some in our culture can't understand the anger around George Floyd and Breanna Taylor because those type of people are invisible to them. It's why the sentence, "even one life lost is tragic", when discussing the deaths due to COVID, is so infuriating. It's a throw-away line to the invisible people of our society. It's why the "if they just followed the rules", line of thinking about police brutality is so juvenile. It reveals that people see police officers but not the people affected by police officers' mistakes.
The real reason we keep large portions of our neighbors invisible is that, when we see them, truly see them, it reflects our lack of conscious and moral action. We hate that feeling. We attend churches with a $10,000,000 campus and only $500,000 outreach program rather than solve homelessness. We use the homelessness of others to feel better about our own situation. We keep them invisible to have someone to complain about not living by the virtues we think we all should live by. We can lecture them about how they should get their act together, so we don't have to get our own act together.
Numerous parts of American culture remain invisible and unrecognized. The statement all lives matter is a way to continue not to acknowledge different sets of rules for people of different races in our society, to keep false moral high ground over people we ignore. Whether it's Black Lives Matter, the LBTGQ groups, or faiths other than Christianity, a large portion of our effort keeps these individuals invisible and charity cases so we can impose white culture upon them. Even after 17 years in the field, I see it every day. And while I'm just an ally in the fight for equality, I hope I've made them feel less invisible by my actions. I see them. I hear them and they make my life better.