I want to write about kindness, but I keep coming back to Switzerland.
The reason involves hot chocolate and a hailstorm, 6,300 ft. up in the Alps, with plenty of cowbell and a geriatric Swiss baker in a post-Soviet Saab with a stick shift and Rastafarian seat covers. Someday I might write about how I ended up in Melchsee-Frutt taking shelter with C. and her family from a summer hailstorm and an unbreakable cycle of depression – but for now, suffice it to say that I was in a place to receive kindness from strangers who delivered.
This summer, K. made me listen to an audiobook called White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better, written by Regina Jackson and Saira Row. The title just about obviates the need to summarize it – racist-misogynistic power structures and intersectional feminism and such – but the book is worth a read if you are still struggling to understand how “All lives matter” is an inappropriate response to Black Lives Matter, or if you’d care to explore the more sinister side of “Karen” culture. White women – if you know, you already know.
There is a term defined in this book, though, that has begun appearing in our vocabulary with disturbing regularity: white nice. It is a phrase K. and I spring on each other when one of us is beating around the bush to soften a blow so excessively that it never actually lands. When one of us is obfuscating, deflecting or dismissing unpleasant confrontations to the point where it is becoming an unkindness to the other, we say they’re being “white nice.”
When K. and I define white nice, we usually reference the culture shock we experienced going to and coming back from India, where different understandings and expressions of kindness than what we are used to are commonplace. White nice is easygoing and pleasant – not kind. It is letting someone go out with food in their teeth because you didn’t want to make them feel self-conscious by letting them know you could see it. White nice is telling your friends or partner you don’t care where you go out to eat or what you get, then going to sleep hungry and dissatisfied. It is slamming on your brakes as you are getting on the freeway with traffic behind you because you didn’t want to inconvenience the driver in the merge lane.
“White nice,” Regina Jackson says, “can be the polar opposite of being kind.” It is the good intentions behind what Big Sean calls “white silence” on his Detroit 2 album. Not even the Rev. MLK Jr. rolled with the “white moderate… who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Is this landing? Nice is good. Kind is best. White nice? Convenient, but toxic – overall, pretty bad. In 2024, I am trying to be more kind.
That drive to always be polite when the situation demands someone who will be accountable and kindhearted has been a hard one for me to shake. I am, after all, a Nice Guy – a fact I interestingly only feel compelled to point out when I am not. With a few embarrassing exceptions, I have always striven to be nice, even at the expense of being genuine and kind.
I grew up on Good Christian Manners, with “please” and “thank you” – and before I knew it, “sure” and “it’s fine.” My Caucasian sensibilities equated kind with agreeable and unpleasant with bad. So I’ve eaten meals, done things and entertained situations that I didn’t want to – which was an unkindness to everyone involved. In the past few years I’ve fallen into the habit of calling it “social anxiety”. But anxiety is unpredictable and overwhelming. I can control being nice, which gives me more agency to be authentically kind.
Why, then, Switzerland?
I have written this story many times, in many ways. One day, I will post it.
Know until then that I, a lone American student accidentally backpacking the Alps for the first time, had found myself crammed in a Saab on a dirt road with two strangers – the older one in the driver’s seat thrusting a baklava in my face while the younger one translated for her from the back.
“She says you look like you need it,” C. said, holding a stack of baking sheets up in the other seat. We were coming directly from the woman’s small diner. Hail thundered on the roof. “She made it just before closing today. She said you must eat the whole thing.”
“Danke,” I said, taking the plate in both hands as the woman shifted gears. “Hey, have you—?”
“She says you need to eat it right now,” C. translated for our driver, who was suddenly talking over me and gesticulating impatiently.
We had met about twenty minutes before, taking shelter from the storm under the only roof for a kilometer, and this was my third plate. The relentless woman spoke no English, I spoke no German, but C., a Russian hiker who understood both, informed us all that the cable car – our only way down from the mountain – would be closing at the top of the hour. I could not follow their conversation, but when the old woman grabbed her keys, C. motioned for me to follow them outside. So here we were: me womping back a pastry and licking my fingers as C. checked her watch and the Saab pulled up at the entrance to the gondola station.
“Thank you,” I said to the baker, who took the plate from me without a word and set it on top of her stack of trays in the backseat. Then she put her hand on my sopping wet shoulder, said something, and smiled at me.
The air was moist and thin when we got out, the hail lightened to become rain, but I do not remember being cold. We watched the woman back out and drive away without waving goodbye. I like to think she is still up there in her cottage by the lake, baking and rolling around the Alps with her colorful seat covers.
“Do you know anyone here in Switzerland?” C. asked later, as we sat with cups of hot chocolate, waiting for a cable car delayed by the hail.
“I don’t know anyone here,” I answered, because a simple No would have been rude. C. had shared that she, her husband, and her children had recently moved down from Russia. I asked, “Do you have any friends here?”
“Not many friends, no.”
I hemmed and hawed. “Ah,” I said. Or maybe, “Hmm.” Or maybe I just slurped my hot chocolate nice and polite like.
“What do you think of Swiss people?” C. asked next.
“What? They’re… nice. Very nice, I guess. Very efficient.”
She thought about it – then said kindly, “No.”
“No?” I laughed, perplexed. “You haven’t had good experiences with the people you’ve met here?”
“I would not say they are nice,” she stated. “Switzerland is very efficient, but Swiss people are not always nice. They take their customs very seriously here. There is structure, order. They can be strict – but they are kind, often.”
“I don’t see the difference,” said young, stupid me. “Everyone I’ve met has been pretty nice.”
She smiled like a mother of two and drank her hot chocolate. “You will see,” said C., expat from one of the coldest places in the world. “There is a difference.”
Today, I walk half as many steps on a given Saturday as I did any day of the week that summer. I am older and wiser, still young and very dumb, and a generally nice guy – though now a nice guy with a mustache. As 30 gets closer and closer every day, I am realizing that C. was right – there is a critical, fundamental difference between someone who is behaving nicely and a person who is being kind. I cannot always be intentional, loving, honorable, honest or frankly kind if I am always a nice guy. And I am trying to be a good man.
I hope to be white nice less often, and more frequently kind.
TG