She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once revealing her true identity. She listened to the women with whom she worked discuss their worries-their children's illnesses, their husbands' disappointments, their boyfriends' infidelities-all of the mundane yet critical things that made up their lives. She came to know them but they did not know her, for my grandmother occupied a completely different place. That place-where white supremacy and economic domination meet-was unknown turf to her white co-workers. They remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their awareness and yet were present in their very midst. Each evening, my grandmother, tired and worn, retraced her steps home, laid aside her mask, and reentered herself. Day in and day out, she made herself invisible, then visible again, for a price too inconsequential to do more than barely sustain her family and at a cost too precious to conceive. She left the job some years later, finding the strain too much to bear. From time to time, as I later sat with her, she would recollect that period, and the cloud of some painful memory would pass across her face. Her voice would remain subdued, as if to contain the still remembered tension.
-Whiteness As Property by Cheryl I. Harris
Harvard Law Review, Volume 106, June 1993, Number 8,
pg.1711
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