listen poorly during discussions of racism

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way.

--Peggy McIntosh

I've been closely watching the comment thread for the most recent post here, in which guest writer RCVBard kindly explained her experience with the common white tendency to question non-white knowledge and authority. I don't remember another instance on this blog where some of the commenters have demonstrated so clearly the common white tendency that the post itself was about.

As several readers pointed out, it was as if some people had read RVCBard's post and thought they understood it, and yet completely missed her main point. After reading a post about the common white tendency to question the knowledge and authority of non-white people, many apparently white readers went on to challenge the expressed knowledge and authority of the post's non-white author.

I think the discussion there (which at this point is still going on) calls for some review, partly in order to emphasize that main point -- that white people often challenge non-white knowledge and authority. Basically, some readers still don't seem to get what the problem is. Also, a large gap between common white and non-white perspectives became evident in that thread, and I'm now trying to pin down just what that gap is -- exactly how, that is, the two sides see things differently. As a white person, I'm not sure I entirely get that, but I'll do my best to explain it here, as well as some of what happened in the comments. Please correct me as you see fit.

Very early in the thread, three readers in a row expressed doubt about the post. The first wrote,

Is this really a racial thing? Maybe they're just incurable know-it-alls, and wouldn't take advice regardless of who gives it. Or have you seen a pattern that they are more accepting of input from other white people?

I've seen this basic, common white response to non-white explanations of racism many times. The skeptical white listener basically says, "So far, I doubt what you're saying is true. Surely something else accounts for what you're saying is racism. Give me more evidence, or else I will remain unconvinced." This commenter's demand for a evidence of a "pattern" came despite the fact that the writer of the post, RVCBard, is a black woman -- and therefore likely to have encountered, analyzed, and understood racism many times in her life -- and also, despite the writer's explanation in the post that her encounters with this phenomenon have been "too many to count," and thus constitute a "pattern" of the sort that the commenter asked for.

Since I was raised as a white person in the U.S., I too used to think of black people as biased when it comes to race -- as ever anxious to "play the race card." I now understand that people of color tend to know that they're likely to be thought of that way when they point out instances of racism, so they do so sparingly.

Since I now understand this dynamic, I suspect that when people of color do decide to explain their experiences with racism to white listeners, they've usually made a careful decision to do so, despite the skepticism they're likely to encounter. This also suggests to me that I should listen carefully, instead of skeptically, because there's a good chance that I'm going to hear something insightful about my own unconscious white behavior.

This common white skepticism also appears in the next comment:

Not that I doubt that this is something white people do to POC's, but these two anecdotes also sound a lot like stuff men do to women. I would be more convinced of racial as opposed to gender bias if both parties were male.

Translation--"I don't doubt what you're saying, but really, I doubt what you're saying."

The next two commenters expressed their direct agreement with this one, and like many subsequent commenters, they repeated the rather obvious claim that the questioning of subordinated knowledge and authority by the privileged happens in terms of other categories, especially gender.

Here's how I read a familiar white opinion that was taking shape -- as I jumped in to summarize that opinion in a comment,

"Hmm, yeah, maybe that happens, but I HAVE seen something like that happen to me, in other ways. It may be true that white people do that to black people and other races, but ya know, men DO do it to women, young people do it to old people, and so on."

I also asked people of color reading the blog what they think and feel when they hear such responses to their efforts to explain racism. Many replied, including Rufus, who wrote,

I feel they're deflecting. I feel that by them providing those types of unrelated examples, they're trying to somehow dilute the situation... sort of like a "it happens to everyone, so suck it up."

As for what I think, usually it's "I'd like to jump off a roof right now..."

Later on, the author of the post, RVCBard, commented,

Quite a few posters here are illustrating the main point of my post.

As if I, as a queer woman of color, who's lived with this my whole life, cannot tell the difference between racism and sexism and need someone else to set me straight because I'm "confused." As if by some fluke, they're some sort of so-called neutral observer and not an active participant in the dynamic I'm talking about.

I find it quite intriguing how people decide that it's my job to convince you that the dynamic I'm talking about is real and that White people are overwhelmingly the main culprits.

I also find it interesting that my using an experience to illustrate my point is being critiqued as though I am drawing my point from these isolated incidents instead of picking my most recent examples from a lifetime of similar experiences.

You all seem incapable of believing that I actually know what I'm talking about.

It's hard to put into words how hurtful and irritating that is.

I think the entire comment thread contains a wealth of honest non-white reactions to a common white tendency, a tendency that most white people don't even know about on a conscious level, but one which they repeatedly exhibit, unconsciously. Habitually. It also contains many examples of common white habits, especially that of failing to listen well when someone non-white is talking about racism. Which, again, is exactly what the post itself was about.

Getting over bad habits can take a lot of practice. And a lot of repetition of a new form of behavior to replace the bad habit. I think that when it comes to listening to non-white explanations of racism, that right there is one new habit that most white people still need to develop -- listening, and doing so respectfully. As well as staying on topic. And resisting the urge to connect with the experiences of the explainer by saying that those experiences remind you of something else that you've been through (that, my white friends, is such a common form of derailment). And resisting the urge to basically argue that you somehow know more about non-white experience than non-white people themselves do. And resisting the urge to defend yourself (and other white people) when you get called out for doing such things, instead of trying to understand why you (and they) were called out.

So just what is that gap that I said I could see in that comment thread, the one between common white and non-white perspectives in such discussions? What is the basic difference here in the two sides' perspectives?

So far, I would say it's something like this -- white people don't have to think much about race; however, given the ongoing reality of racism, most non-white people do have to think about it, and analyze it, and figure out how it works. As a result, most white people know less about racism than most non-white people do. Nevertheless, a great, sad, and even tragic irony is that when non-white people take the time and effort to explain examples of racism, white people often doubt what they're hearing, they often think they know more about a phenomenon with which they've had less direct experience, and they often want to talk about something else instead. They also commonly fail to understand how dismissive they're being when they do those things.

If you participated in or read that other comment thread, do you think I'm missing anything here?