Reflection

1

White People Are Exhausting

White people can be exhausting. Particularly ex­

hausting are white people who don't know they are

white, and those who need to be white. But of all

the white people I've met-and I've met a lot of

them in more than three decades of living, study­

ing, and working in places where I'm often the only

Black woman in sight-the first I found exhausting

were those who expected me to be white.

To be fair, my parents did set them up for fail­

ure. In this society where we believe a name tells

us everything we need to know about someone's

race, gender, income, and personality, my parents

decided to outwit everyone by giving their daughter

a white man's name. When I was growing up, they

explained that my grandmother's maiden name was