see white analysis of whiteness as a form of self-hatred

As I analyze whiteness, here on this blog and elsewhere, I often encounter white people who wonder if I'm really white, and if I am, why in the world I hate myself so much.

"How in the world," these white folks often ask, "could you say such things about white people? And thus about yourself? Why do you hate yourself?"

Since I'm aware of this portion of my audience, I often slow down to point out, again, that

(1) I'm talking about common white tendencies, not white people;

(2) I believe that while white people are often nice, well-meaning folks, there's very little that's positive, in historical or contemporary terms, about racial whiteness itself;

(3) white people are subtly, yet thoroughly, trained into becoming the bearers and enactors of common white tendencies, many (or all?) of which are negative, and yet, most of which most white folks aren't even aware of;

(4) and that on the other hand, most non-white people are very aware of these common white tendencies, and they often wish white folks would wake up and stop enacting them.

I recently received another e-mail asking about my self-hatred. I'm reposting it here, with my further thoughts (which the sender requested) afterwards. I welcome, very much, your further thoughts in the Comments section:

I was reading through Stuff White People Like one day and the thought came to me to check for other sites like it, focusing on other ethnic groups. Of course, there were many. So I stumbled upon your website.

The main question I need to ask you is: Are you really a white person? If so, I really don't understand the self-loathing.

Sure, white people have done some ridiculous things in the past and can all make fun of themselves. As a race, they are also responsible for some great tragedies throughout history. However, I find your own blog blatantly racist, not only to whites but people of other races.

Most offensive is the fact that you somehow believe you exist outside of racial lines, whereas everyone else does. You present yourself as some omniscient raceless judge, completely above criticism. You also group everyone into lump categories, then proceed to chastize [sic] white people for relying too heavily on stereotypes.

In one post, you mention white people interact with blacks very little, which causes them to think of them in stereotypes...not as people. However, your blog title alone "Stuff White People Do" throws 500 million people into a uniform group, you being the only outsider of course.

You paint African and Asian Americans as the lowly victims of white evil, stereotyping them as weak and moldable, something that I think you would agree is not true. You contradict yourself in many other instances as well. You have two consecutive posts that illustrate this best.

The first is that whites avoid the topic of race. Immediately following this, you accuse whites of bringing up the topic of race too often around minorities. One of your posts is also (not so) subtly demeaning to the Jewish people, impying [sic] that anger should be redirected at them.

You write as though you have just taken a college black history course and need to atone for the sins of the white race. Honestly, there is no way you could have always thought like this.

It's okay, we are all people. However your groupings of all societal functions into racial boundaries shows that you are unable to see outside of them. I'm not saying that all of my opinions need to be taken as fact, I am just offended that you do. Maybe the best way to heal the wounds of racial strife is not by placing all blame on the hands of the white race. Or maybe you are stuck with the notion that nothing unites like a common enemy. Either way, you are not going to [be] made an honorary minority.

I would love to hear a response back from you.

Okay, here's a response, in addition to what I said above:

Thank you for your e-mail. Such criticisms, and the chance to address them, help me think through what I'm doing with this blog.

Yes, I really am a "white" person, and have been all my life, even though my skin is actually more like a slightly pinkish beige color. One of the things I'm still trying to do is understand why the color (or lack of color) of a piece of paper got applied to the very non-"white" skin of people like me.

Regarding some of your more specific points, you wrote:

Sure, white people have done some ridiculous things in the past and can all make fun of themselves. As a race, they are also responsible for some great tragedies throughout history.

You write as if the ridiculous things that white people have done are all in the past, and that whatever white people do now that can be identified as "white" is so trivial that it merits little more than laughter. I've written before about some of the problems that I see with discussing today's forms of whiteness in terms of laughter. I think it's mostly white people who want to laugh at white people in terms of their being white, rather than take that whiteness seriously. And I think it's mostly non-white people who wish white people would take their own whiteness, especially their own common white tendencies, more seriously. Mostly in the hopes that they'll stop inflicting them on non-white people, and also in the hopes that they'll see just how thoroughly white favoritism still permeates American society and its institutions.

You also wrote:

In one post, you mention white people interact with blacks very little, which causes them to think of them in stereotypes...not as people. However, your blog title alone "Stuff White People Do" throws 500 million people into a uniform group, you being the only outsider of course.

Thanks for pointing this out. I know the blog's title is monolithic, and I've considered adding a subtitle along the lines of that in the epigraph to Langston Hughes great book, The Ways of White Folks: "The ways of some white folks, that is." (In fact, I've even considered changing the title of the blog to the title of Hughes' book, and adding that epigraph as the blog's tag-line/subtitle.) Again, I continually emphasize that I'm talking about "common white tendencies," and not ALL white folks; I don't think I should have to do that everywhere and always--it would get redundant.

I'll address your other point here, about my supposed claim to being an outsider to whiteness, below.

You also wrote,

You paint African and Asian Americans as the lowly victims of white evil, stereotyping them as weak and moldable, something that I think you would agree is not true.

I don't understand how I do that. In fact, I think I do quite the opposite. As I have repeatedly said, black people, like other non-white people, often know far more about white people than white people know about both themselves, and about black people. I think white people should listen more to black people, and also think about their own white selves as they do so.

To say that black people and other non-white people continue to suffer from the naive and often unconscious actions of white people is not to say that they're the weak, lowly victims of white evil. It's to say instead that white people should wake up to what they often do, and one source of information in that regard could be non-white people. I also think, though, that white people should do that work on their own, and among themselves--finding ways to understand our white selves better should be OUR job.

You also wrote,

One of your posts is also (not so) subtly demeaning to the Jewish people, impying [sic] that anger should be redirected at them.

I think you misread this post. What it says instead is that during election coverage, the corporate media in general has found much to look down upon and laugh at in the common attitudes about race that are held and expressed by rural white folks. However, they generally ignore some very similar attitudes to be found among elderly Jewish Americans. The post points out a disparity in media coverage, rather than claiming that anger should be "redirected" at Jewish people. Uneducated white people are seen as an available target for "classist" criticism and derision, and when other white groups express similarly objectionable opinions, they seldom receive similar criticism.

Finally, you also wrote,

You write as though you have just taken a college black history course and need to atone for the sins of the white race. Honestly, there is no way you could have always thought like this.

Honestly, there are many other routes besides a black history course to white self-understanding (and in fact, I've never taken such a course). I've been a student of African American issues and Asian American issues in some college courses that included them, but in terms of racial whiteness, I'm self-taught. There are at least one hundred scholarly books out there from that last fifteen years or so on racial whiteness, and hundreds more essays, stories, movies, and so on, and most of them nod to earlier African American studies of whiteness.

I'm not trying to atone for the sins of the white race. I'm trying to understand whiteness, and all that it has encouraged people to do, and all that it still encourages people to do.

More generally, I'm surprised that from your readings of non-white blogs, you didn't gather that a lot of non-white people don't find common white tendencies at all laughable. In fact, they often find common white tendencies quite a pain to deal with. So if you can see that, then don't you think that white people should try to understand that which makes them less than "nice" sometimes? And less than "fair"? That's basically what I'm trying to do here.

One thing I'm not doing is trying to claim is the status of "honorary minority," whatever that is. I realize that in America (although not in the world as a whole), I am in the racial majority, the "white" people. I'm not trying to escape that status--I'm trying to face up to it.

I often say in my posts, such as the one immediately below this one, that I'm a white person who enacts many of the white tendencies that I write about. I write at times from a personal perspective, partly in order to demonstrate this point. So I don't consider myself somehow "outside of racial lines." I'm trying to learn what being placed inside the racial lines, in the white group, has meant for me. What it's done to me, and what it encourages me to do.

So I in turn encourage you to do the same. I assume that you're white, so I have a couple of questions for you--what does being "white" mean for you? Do you see yourself as an enactor of any of the common white tendencies that I've described on this blog, or perhaps of others?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings, and I look forward to hearing from you,

macon d