The experiences of the white women included in Ruth Frankenberg's study, White Women, Race Matters, are presented in a framework which highlights the ways they describe race as the absence of whiteness. According to Frankenberg, these women saw their own race as a norm from which others might vary, even when they made statements highlighting their interaction with other races.

Frankenberg explains that these relationships to race are shaped, often, without conscious decision, as part of political, economic, and geographical forces beyond the scope of these women's life experiences. Further, they are shaped by experiences of racial inequality which take place as a result of these forces.

Within the framework for representing their experiences, the women are spoken of as "resisting" at times, various explicitly racist attitudes and social structures. Pat Bowen, for example, relates her resistance (or at least her questioning) of a comment by her uncle, when he told her, "Don't ever say excuse me to a nigger. If you bump into them or they bump into you, it's always their fault" (53).

In her examination of attitudes towards interracial relationships, Frankenberg explains her view that "...whether or not an individual woman chooses to participate in reproducing a racist discourse, the discourse has an impact on her life" (78). Therefore all of the women that she interviewed were implicated inexorably in the discourse against interracial relationships, whether they chose to comply with, disregard, or openly oppose such discourses. The point, according to Frankenberg, is that subverting and transforming racial discourses "are long-term, collective projects" (78), rather than matters of individual choice.

Using this framework to understand the stories which I've told in this text, it is a simple matter to see Frankenberg's arguments at work--to see my own implication, beyond personal choice, in racist discourses, as well the futility of my efforts to examine this implication through personal narratives. While part of the project of this text is to acknowledge and explore my inextricable complicity in systems of racism, I also feel the need to find ways to value personal experiences (both my own and those of the women that Frankenberg presents) as part of a network of personal experience that shapes behavior. Along with Sandy Alvarez, one of Frankenberg's subjects, I have described "succumbing to the pressure of the discourse" (78), in my refusal to have relationships with African American males. But even as I place myself within the text I am experiencing the pain and shame of those refusals -- and struggling to examine how my attitudes are shaped by those experiences.

I find myself wondering if Sandy Alvarez looks back on her experiences and thinks about how she would react now. I suppose my point is that these events have power as memory, beyond the evidence they give of a discourse or a state of mind at a particular moment in time. And while I understand the importance of acknowledging my place in a framework of racist discourse, I don't want to lose the ability to examine my experiences as part of a framework of personal experience and growth in addition to their relevance as part of a long-term social framework. I suppose I am trying to create a space where I can work with "multiple and competing subjectivities while also allowing for the possibility of resistance to ideological pressure" (Nedra Reynolds, P.58-9, "Interrupting our way to Agency.")