CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Paul Bauer is a white man. Quite a white man. So white he has freckles. So white his beard has grown in orange. "You won't see me on the beach during daylight hours," he says. "I'm just as pink as can be."
He is proud of his whiteness, but not in a white-pride way. No, definitely not. Bauer is troubled by the bad deeds his white ancestors did. And his ancestors were whiter than most.
Four hundred seventy-seven years ago, one of them set foot on Plymouth Rock. This was on his mother's side, Mom being a Warfield. (Dad is second-generation German, which is not only white, it is dangerously white; possibly Aryan.) In the United States of America, it's Anglo-Saxons who first defined whiteness. And you don't get much more Anglo than the Pilgrims.
There were 101 of them on the Mayflower, splashing ashore on the chill cusp of winter, low on provisions and wearing the wrong clothes. They would survive to celebrate the first Thanksgiving, but as every schoolchild knows, it happened only because the friendly local Indians patiently demonstrated how to catch fish and plant corn.
And here, centuries later, stands Bauer ("Like Eddie Bauer," he says, "but not as well dressed") with one finger firmly on the lid of his Starbucks cup so it won't spill on his "Father Sky, Mother Earth" T-shirt. The folding table he minds is stacked with literature from the Council for Native American Solidarity. The banner above his head bids, "Free Leonard Peltier," referring to the imprisoned Sioux the courts call a murderer and his supporters call a martyr.
Rest assured, there are people who feel very, very bad about all of this injustice--people acutely, painfully, obsessively aware of transgressions past and present, real and perceived. Three hundred of these people, Bauer among them, gathered last month on the fringe of Harvard University, and you'll never guess what they had in common.
The Second National Conference on Whiteness was not what you might think. It was not what just about everybody seemed to think.
"A lot of people say, 'Oh, you're going to a Ku Klux Klan meeting,' " says Carah Reed, who flew all the way from Orange County for what was the furthest thing in the world from a Klan rally. The only hate being spewed at Episcopal Divinity School during three gray, introspective days was the self-loathing of committed liberals--anti-racism storm troopers who identify themselves as racists because they are, you know, white.
