rarely count their racial blessings

Peggy McIntosh

In Shakti Butler's documentary film, Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible, Peggy McIntosh recalls the genesis of her groundbreaking essay on white privilege:

In 1980, I had read two essays by black women who had laid it out just like a given: "White women are oppressive to work with."

And I remember reading those two essays with astonishment. They were so factual about it: “White women are oppressive to work with. And I had two thoughts, in 1980, and I still remember them.

One was, “I don’t see how they can say that about us. I think we’re nice!”

And the second, which is outright racist, but this is where I was in 1980, “I especially think we're nice if we work with them.”

Then I thought, “Did we fill the reading lists, and the programs, and Women’s Studies, with white people’s stuff?”

And at first I said, “maybe,” and then I said, “yes.”

And then I asked myself, “If I have anything I didn’t earn, by contrast with my African American friends in this building, show me.”

And I had to pray on it, and I asked my unconscious mind to answer my question. And after three months, forty-six examples had swum up, most of them in the middle of the night.

And if I didn’t flick on a light and write them down, they’d be gone by morning, because I didn’t want to know them. They were messing up my view of myself as a person who’d earned everything I had.


I first read Peggy McIntosh’s essay about a dozen years ago, and I’ve been trying to keep my own white privilege in mind ever since. As McIntosh says in her essay, though, it’s a “fugitive and elusive subject,” and keeping an awareness of white privilege up front in one’s consciousness throughout the day can be difficult. White-majority environments discourage that kind of self-awareness.

I also find it difficult to remember specific examples of my own white privilege, and so like Peggy McIntosh, I write them down.

I’ll end this post with some examples from my recent life—from today, actually—and then with the trailer from Shakti Butler’s lucid and moving film.

• As I walked around in several stores today, I never felt self-conscious about my race.

• I never felt outnumbered by people of a different race.

• As I drove down the highway at my usual ten miles per hour over the speed limit, I never worried that my race could make me a more likely target for a ticket.

• As I drove through small towns on my lengthy commute to work, I never felt a need to remind myself that some of them were, until quite recently, sundown towns, and that most or all of them still weren’t exactly welcoming to people who are not the same color as me.
  

• When I cut my finger while cooking tonight, the bandages that I’d hastily grabbed from a grocery store shelf pretty much matched the color of my skin.
  

• When I spoke with a white colleague about the extra and excessive scrutiny that a recent black job candidate had received compared to the white ones, my claims were met with skepticism, but I never felt that my own race further discredited what I was saying. I realized that instead, it did the opposite.
  

• As I thought about the conversation afterward, I realized that I have never faced the many stress-inducing trials that a successful black job candidate would face in my workplace—and that in fact, my whiteness continually paves a smoother, less stressful path before me as I navigate that workplace.
  

• Throughout the day and into the evening, no negative incidents occurred that made me wonder if what happened had something to do with my race.
  

• When I had dinner at a multiracial gathering, I never felt self-conscious in racial terms about which foods I should eat.
  

• When I arrived late for that gathering, I didn’t worry about whether my lateness was a bad reflection on me in terms of my racial status.
  

• As I conversed with my friends, I never worried if anything about my manner of speaking or the words and phrases that I used might reflect badly on me in terms of race.
  

• As I sat in my car alone on a quiet street at night, waiting for some friends to emerge from a house, I never worried that my race could make me a potential target for harassment by police.
  

• As I sat in my car alone on a quiet street at night, I realized that if I had encountered the police at any point during the day, the law enforcement official would probably have been a member of my own race. Even if he or she had not been, I would be likely to trust that person to deal with me fairly and respectfully, and I would not have worried in either case that my race would put me at risk in the encounter.
  

• As I now head for bed, I realize that I’ll probably sleep better than I would if I were not white, having had that much less of a stressful day.

[Here's another video that combines McIntosh's interview, quoted above, with her list of forty-six examples of white privilege from her own life.]

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

think they have the right to go wherever they like

[cross-posted, with a long and interesting comments thread,
at Racialicious]

When you look from outside at your own white people and their actions you can't help but feeling alienated. This is something nobody can do for a white. And perhaps this is an unconscious knowledge whites have - because if this happens you don't have this feeling of belonging anymore. You realize as a white that this white world [that] is meant to be 'your place' isn't your place. And what follows is a sometimes quite painful journey. You leave the comfort zone of 'whiteness' because surrounded by whites only no longer makes you feel comfortable and being 'exposed' to whites can then become quite stressful.

Difficult to explain what I mean, I guess, but I hope that some can follow my thoughts.

--jw (an especially insightful reader
of “stuff white people do”)

About ten years ago, I was lucky enough to visit Indonesia with three travel companions. We visited several of the islands and did the usual Lonely Planet things (yes, I did have a copy of Lonely Planet’s Indonesia), seeking out places to sleep and eat on our own, looking for authentic cultural practices, and avoiding the (white) crowds.

We congratulated ourselves on being different from "tourists," those people on package tours that kept them safe and clean from the more “seedy” and contaminating features of a crowded, relatively impoverished country. But now I realize that in some ways, I was worse than those tourists, and that the habits of being that I’d acquired from my life-long training into whiteness contributed to that effect.

I wasn’t a “tourist” doing a “tour” of Indonesia. I was a “traveler.” Maybe even an “adventurer.” My companions and I sought out sights and experiences that were “off the beaten path” (the clichéd nature of that phrase alone should have tipped us off to how much our supposed independence was in itself a kind of conformity). We hired guides with cars to take us to weird little villages and deserted beaches, quiet restaurants and cheap inns—places that Indonesians themselves actually used, or so we thought. And when we bought souvenirs, we tried to find authentic Indonesian stuff, not the cheap t-shirts and masks and pots and feathered things that were clearly made for those other “tourists.”

Before Indonesia, I’d been to other places in the world on similar terms, and I’d also worked as an English teacher in other countries. I think that overall, my extended encounters with other people, and thus with their very different perspectives and practices, gave me some different ways of looking at America, especially its peculiar racial obsessions. Maybe because I’m a rather introspective person, I also began thinking as well about my place in the world as a “white man.”

That mode of introspection was accelerated in Indonesia. Something about myself as a “traveler” hit me there, and that trip actually killed my itch to “travel.” It made me wonder just what the hell I was really doing when I ventured outside “my space,” and why I thought I had the right to do it.

Some experiences in Indonesia made me a bit of a stranger to myself. I suddenly wondered, for one thing, if I was really so different from those pampered hordes of American and Australian and British and German tourists. Having thought more since then about my status as an American, and especially as a “white” American, I now see that having been trained into whiteness made me feel especially entitled to go wherever I liked, and to do pretty much whatever I pleased when I got there, as long I was willing to pay for it. And pay for it I could, because the places I went to were cheap, man, a real bargain!

I think the thing that hit me came from the extreme poverty that I encountered while poking around on one of Indonesia's less “touristy” islands. I’d never seen such poor, hungry people as some of that island’s inhabitants. One especially disturbing encounter came after we’d hired a car to take us to a quiet beach, where I had an incident with a couple of strangers that echoed all too closely another racially charged encounter, that famous one Camus created in the bewildering sunlight of an Algerian beach.

Our driver, who spoke enough English to work with us (or rather, for us), had given me a business card that some Australians had made for him—the card identified him as “Johnny Asshole.”

As we grabbed our towels and set out across the hot, white sand, “Johnny” (who insisted on being called that) told us again not to go more than a hundred meters down the beach in either direction.

“Not safe!” he said again, refusing to answer my question about just what the danger was.

As Johnny waited for us under the shade of a tree, we splashed around in the water for awhile, happy to have this beautiful spot to ourselves. It was a warm, totally sunny day, and the water was a shimmering bluish green that I’d never seen before. When we climbed out and spread our towels for some deeper sun worship, I saw that Johnny had fallen asleep. I looked up and down the beach, which seemed to curve for a quarter mile or so in both directions around a bay, and then I decided to take a walk.

I strolled along the water line, marveling at how fine and soft the sugary sand was, and how quickly my footprints disappeared in the gently lapping waves. I was so transfixed by these sensations, and by the beauty of the place and of the whole day, that I hadn’t noticed a little boy standing in front of me until I almost walked right into him.

He looked to be seven or eight years old, and he wore nothing but a pair of ragged shorts. I gathered that he didn’t speak the one language I spoke when I said “hi there,” and he didn’t respond. He had a split coconut in his hand, with what looked to be a straw sticking out of it. The straw had been fashioned from some sort of plant, and he held the coconut out to me. I didn’t have any money, though, which is what I was guessing he wanted, so I shrugged, waved my hand, and said, “No thank you.”

Then I saw another boy, coming at us quickly from the tree line that was forty or fifty feet away. This was an older boy, and instead of a coconut, he was carrying a machete. Like the younger boy, he wasn’t smiling, and when he reached us, he stepped between me and the other boy. He planted his feet in a broad stance and crossed his arms, with one of his hands clenching the machete at a defensive angle. His face was set in what looked to me like an unfriendly frown.

I wasn’t sure what this was all about, but I thought it best to back away and return to where I’d been told to stay. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the two boys returning to the woods. The older one swung the machete loosely as he walked with an arm over the other boy’s shoulders. He was talking to him in what looked like a serious, admonishing way.

In her essay “White World-Traveling,” white American philosopher Shannon Sullivan writes about people like me—white people, that is, who feel entitled to go pretty much anywhere they like. She also writes about the resistance of non-white people (in her case, Latina and African American) to the efforts of well-intentioned white anti-racists to enter ongoing, intraracial dialogues on solutions for racial injustice.

Those non-white dialogues tend to include words, phrases, and coded understandings that outsiders don’t know about. The trouble here with white interlopers, Sullivan writes, is that in addition to obstinately insisting that they see no good reason to resist the inclusion of white voices in such dialogues, they also tend to expect that this “unfamiliar” material be translated for them. Not only does this slow down the dialogue—it can also change it. Translation for the sake of white anti-racists can also reveal modes of resistance to whiteness that non-white people don’t necessarily want to open up to white people, however well-intentioned they may be.

Sullivan has also written elsewhere about the general common white tendency at work here, which she calls a white habit of “ontological expansiveness”:

As ontologically expansive, white people consider all spaces as rightfully available for their habitation of them. A white person’s choice to change her environment in order to challenge her unconscious habits of white privilege can be just another instance of ontological expansiveness. This problem leads to the question of whether white people can attempt to change their unconscious habits and simultaneously live space in antiracist ways. While the danger of ontological expansiveness cannot be entirely eliminated, the answer to this question can be “yes.”

As I walked back from my encounter on the beach with those two boys, I did realize that I’d probably intruded on their space. Perhaps that stretch of beach and the coconut trees behind it belonged to their family. One of them might have meant to welcome me with a refreshing drink, or maybe he did want money. The other seemed to see me as a threat, which confused me—me, a threat? How could that be? I certainly meant no harm, and I saw no reason for anyone to want me to stay away. Was there something criminal going on behind those trees, something they thought I would alert the authorities about?

In other words, what that moment did for me was it shook me, in a way that I eventually realized was about ME—about who I was, and what I thought I was doing on that foreign beach, and in that foreign country. I also began thinking about what my real relations were with the people who inhabited this island, and just how they did and didn’t welcome tourists. Despite the higher regard I had for myself as a “traveler” rather than a “tourist,” it could well be that Indonesians in general were more welcoming of the restrained, contained package tourist than the Lonely Planet white guy like me, who felt entitled to enter their private spaces, and to turn their private lives into mere, exotic curiosities.

I felt even more upset about all this the next day, when my little group hired a canoe to take us across a lake. The owner of our lakefront hotel, who seemed to be the brother of the owner of the canoe, had told us about a village over there that laid out its dead above ground for a month or two before burying them. It was actually an illegal, and therefore secret tradition, he said, but he could arrange for us to see it.

We gladly took this opportunity to see something different, and didn’t mind paying what seemed like a pittance to get there. It took about twenty minutes for the canoe’s owner to row us across the lake, and as we approached the village’s creaky wooden pier, an elderly man was there to greet us. He clasped each of us by the hands with both of his own, and then led us to the bodies. And there they were, seven or eight desiccated corpses with dried flowers draped all over them. The village elder refused our thoroughly stupid request to take photographs. The four of us gawked, shivered a bit, and then headed back to the canoe.

By this time, many of the inhabitants of the village, which seemed to consist of about fifty houses, had come out to watch us. They all looked extremely thin to me. “Emaciated,” I thought, “that’s the right word.” Some had their hands out, and as we stepped onto the pier, about ten elderly people lined up along the shore. As our canoe slowly pulled away, these people walked into the lake fully clothed, with outstretched hands. They were sort of smiling at us. Few of them had any teeth left. I realized why the owner of the canoe was pulling away very slowly—it gave us more time to thrust money into these people’s hands.

I pulled out my wad of confusing Indonesian bills, reminded myself which were the smaller ones, and put some into several hands. By this time, the water was almost up to the necks of those who’d been able to venture out that far. As our canoe turned around to head away, they held their money up over their heads to keep it dry as they made their way back to shore. It didn’t look like all of them actually knew how to swim.

I hadn’t enjoyed the visit at all, but I didn’t know what was bothering me. It wasn’t the ghastly sight of dead bodies. I’d seen dead people before.

Maybe it was my own dead body. A sort of figurative “white” body. That of a white man who’d been trained to think that it’s okay to intrude on such private spaces, simply to satisfy his curiosity, his privilege-induced desire just to see something he’d never seen before. A white man who had been trained away from feeling any real empathy for such people, and for seeing them as a spectacle instead. And a white man who had also been trained away from understanding, by way of such a stark contrast, anything at all about the connections between their apparently desperate poverty and his own, relatively enormous wealth.

dance stiffly

Is it racist to say that white folks don't dance well?

I'm pretty sure it's not racist to say they even if they don't dance well, they still should dance more often.

fan video for "Air War"

by Crystal Castles

[this post is part of a series on white dancing, including "dance sweetly" and "dance at whites only parties"; hat-tip for the video to Ortho at Baudrillard's Bastard]

misunderstand non-white gatherings

Yang Liu
"Lebenstil (Life)"
East Meets West


This post is different from those I've done before--instead of having something to say, I have something to ask.

Karen, a regular white reader of this blog, asked me a question in the comments to an earlier post about the presence of white people at explicitly non-white events. I replied in part that her question reminds me of a post I've been struggling with for awhile on one aspect of the same topic--the way white folks feel left out and even actively excluded from such events; the lack of white understanding about why such events occur; and why whites are sometimes not welcome at them. I haven't been able to boil down my thoughts on this topic's many facets yet to something concentrated enough for a blog post.

So, in the meantime, as I work on my post about why white folks feel entitled to attend such events and gatherings, I'm using this post to take up the suggestion of another regular reader, Just Me. We have a lot of different readers at this blog now, and he or she suggested asking readers about the other side of this topic: why do non-white people seek out non-white spaces, gatherings, and events? Also, when whites are less than welcome at such events, why is that?

The following might help spur your thoughts toward any reply you might leave in the comments.

The topic came up in an opinion column in the Kent State University's student newspaper, the Kent News, where columnist Beth Rankin wrote about her frustrating efforts to take part in events labeled something other than "white."

Here's part of Rankin's article:

While covering a fashion show for Uhuru magazine (I was the photo editor at the time), an angry black student hissed, "Why are you even here, anyway?" when I sat my photo gear next to him on a chair.

Weeks later, while covering a Black History Month talk by Malcolm X's daughter, a man behind me - who apparently was unhappy with my camera - yelled, "Get out of my way, white bitch."

Shortly after, while silently shooting another BUS event, I was called a white bitch again.

Shelley Blundell, a Kent journalism school graduate and native of South Africa, used to be a member of the Stark campus BUS chapter. But when she began attending Kent BUS events, she said she felt extremely unwelcome.

And after a controversial column on separation, Blundell said she received numerous e-mails from BUS members calling her, too, a "white bitch."

In 2005, after humor columnist Aman Ali wrote a satirical column called, "Black people need to start sharing," BUS made one phone call and the two days later, the Ohio Civil Rights Commission and NAACP converged on campus, demanding Ali be fired. Some even pushed for his removal from the university.

Yes, Ali's column was inappropriate and the editor made a major mistake in running it, but when pressured, the editor folded like a card table and gave in to every single demand made by civil rights groups. Since then, the Stater has been very careful about BUS coverage, and when I told them I wanted to write this column, they were nervous. I can't blame them. BUS has showed its muscle numerous times over the years.

Now, this is not a column bashing BUS for past mistakes. This is a means to a dialog. I truly believe that BUS should embrace its non-black supporters, because there is power in numbers. We support your cause; now can we please be embraced the same way you embrace your black peers?

So this is what I say to you, current members and leaders of BUS: Tell me again. Tell me again what your goals are. I certainly hope they differ from those expressed to me in 2004.

Tell me what you are doing to reach out to non-black students who support your cause. As a straight girl, PRIDE!Kent has always welcomed me to their meetings and functions because they knew I supported their cause. I want to be able to attend BUS functions and feel the same love.

Racism is still a problem in this country, and it will never be solved if we continue to divide black from white. I have been called names and ostracized for the color of my skin, and I have been ridiculed for sharing my life with a man who is not white.

I am not a white bitch. I am a straight, white girl who will always do everything in her power to support the plight of all minorities.

I don't use the color of your skin against you, so please do not use mine against me.

Please, BUS: Tell me how you plan to use your powers for good. I want to hear your voice, and I want to become a united front in the fight against prejudice.

I am not a white bitch. I am not whitey. I am not a cracker. I am not the man.

And I never want to feel ostracized because of my race ever again. Don't you feel the same?

As Karen wrote in a comment on this blog about Beth's article,

The idea of people of similar hearts being the only categorization to live by, is an ideal one, but Beth goes to a black event where she's apparently not wanted, and doesn't see that people of color is a valid separation too...

So, a question from a white perspective to non-white ones, be they Af Am, Native Am, or Asian Am, or others--why, when the Civil Rights Movement ended de jure segregation, are these forms of segregation still valid?

fail to see institutional racism

Now that Barack Obama has made history as the first "black" nominee of a major political party, the significance of his racial status is sure to receive more scrutiny than ever. The fact that he's also "biracial" might receive more acknowledgment as well. Despite Obama's efforts to distance himself from or "transcend" race, the issue nevertheless accompanies almost every public move he makes, and almost every event in which he participates. On the other hand, while the parallel issue that seems to matter for Hillary Clinton is her gender, her race also projects itself in significant ways in every public appearance she makes. White people in particular, though, just don't think much about her whiteness, unless her appeal to certain white voters becomes an obvious factor, and thus gets deemed worthy of discussion.

So again, now that we have our first major "black" nominee instead of our first "female" nominee, the matter of race is sure to receive even more attention, more than it has for a long, long time from white America, especially from the largely white-centric corporate media (and by "white-centric" I mean that the general perspective of the corporate media, the general framing of and approach to things, is an unmarked, generally unexamined white perspective). However, because the corporate media, as well as other American institutions, is largely white-centric, one form that racism takes will surely receive very little attention--"institutional racism."

I hestitate to refer to Wikipedia as an authoritative source, but the definition there of institutional racism matches my understanding of the term (if this definition doesn't quite match your understanding of it, please let us know in a comment--the Wikipedia entry on it also asks for help):

Institutional racism (or structural racism or systemic racism) refers to a form of racism which occurs specifically in institutions such as public bodies, corporations, and universities. The term was coined by black nationalist, pan-Africanist and honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party, Stokely Carmichael. In the late 1960s, he defined the term as "the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin."

For most white folks, Obama's historic first is likely to confirm their sense that aside from rare, isolated, and insignificant incidents involving deranged individuals, racism is more or less a thing of the past. Or, somewhat conversely, some will see Obama as an "affirmative action candidate," and thus as confirmation that racism does still exist, but it's only significant remaining form is "reverse racism" against whites.

These common white delusions occur because white people individualize racism; they operate with a narrowed, shrunken conception of it. They thus usually fail to see, for one thing, that many interactions with non-white people, including many of their own, are racist, and they also tend to believe that just as "racism" has faded into insignificance, so has the number of "racists"--who are thought to be the only people who commit "racist acts." They also fail to see that racism is embedded in institutions, and that in many ways, that kind of racism has gotten worse, not better.

In the following five-minute audio clip, Tim Wise explains this increase in the power and effects of institutional racism, which he especially attributes to the white reaction to the end of the Jim Crow era; an increased white focus on "violence"; and the new "War on Drugs."

I also want to recommend a powerful, heart-wrenching post at a relatively new blog, Keep It Trill, that describes a specific example of institutional racism. In "I Wept in the Courtroom," Kit describes her efforts to save her son from repeated instances of blatant racial profiling and abuse. Go read it--you'll probably weep too.

think that black people are wasting a wealth of opportunities

I sat down to lunch the other day near a couple of white men who looked to be in their forties. We introduced ourselves and started talking. One said he’s a history teacher and the other teaches science. They also said their school’s student population is about 60% black, and that the black students are lagging far behind the other students.

This high school history teacher said some things that I thought demonstrated some common white ways of thinking about race. I wanted to point these tendencies out to him, but I also wanted to keep talking to him. So, I had to bite my tongue sometimes, though I did say at one point, “That’s mighty white of you. That right there is a mighty common white thing to say.” Here’s most of what we said to each other.

Early in the conversation, I asked how things were going with their different student populations.

“Well, the few Asian kids we have are doing great, and the Hispanic kids are keeping up pretty well, but not so much the black ones,” said the history teacher. “I teach a lot of AP [Advanced Placement] courses, though, so I don’t see many of them.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because pretty soon after they get in, most drop out.”

When I asked why he thought that happens, he said, “Well, it’s the same as a lot of other situations. They have this opportunity of an AP course, but like so many opportunities out there for them, most of them don’t take it.”

The other teacher nodded his head in agreement.

“What do you mean, they don’t take it? Aren’t those classes hard?”

“Sure they’re hard, but they don’t study. They think they don’t have to study.”

“Why not?”

The other man jumped in. “Because they think they don’t have to. Bill Cosby had a lot of good things to say about that, but communities like the one these kids come from don’t want to hear that.”

“Right,” said the history teacher. “They don’t want to hear that it’s on them to pick up opportunities and USE them. Did you know,” he said, leaning forward, “that it’s considered politically incorrect for us to pass too few black students?”

“No, I didn’t. What do you mean?”

“I mean that we have a lot of pressure on us to so-called ‘prove’ that we’re working hard enough to help these kids. What that translates to is, we have to pass a certain number, no matter how well or badly they do.”

“And the kids know that,” said the science teacher. “When I ask them why they don’t put in more effort, they come up and tell me, ‘Cuz we know that you have to pass some of us!’”

“Right, right,” said the other teacher. “So that means there’s a sense of entitlement now for them. It’s this idea that at least some of them can get by without doing any work. They think black people are just entitled to getting into and passing things like AP courses.”

“That's strange. So, do any black students work in your classes?”

“Oh sure, of course, some do. But most don’t, and that’s why most of them have to drop out. And they don’t only drop out of my classes, they drop out of high school.”

“What percentage do that?”

“I don’t really know. But a lot more than other groups.”

“So,” I asked, “what’s the cause of that? I mean, I don’t think that pressure to pass a certain amount of black kids is the only reason a lot don’t do well enough to study.”

“Right, it’s not,” said the history teacher. “But, the thing is, I don’t concern myself with what causes them not to study. My job is just to help them study, however I can. To provide them with opportunities. And most of them just don’t take those opportunities. My belief is that it’s up to them to take what they’re offered, and to suffer the consequences if they don’t.”

“We provide so many opportunities,” said the other teacher. “Like, we have special mentoring programs that we’re trying to get volunteers for. But again, they don’t take it. Some of these volunteers can’t find students.”

“Look at Oprah,” said the history teacher.

“Oprah?” I asked.

“Yeah. She’s building schools in South Africa, right? Instead of here, where a lot of black kids could use schools like that, newer, better schools. Well, you know why she went there instead? Because the black communities here don’t want those new schools. That opportunity she’s offering them isn’t appreciated. And that’s just like so many of the opportunities we’re trying to provide.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about Oprah’s refused efforts to build schools here, I’ll have to look into that. I have wondered why she’s so interested in education there instead of here.”

We munched our sandwiches for a minute.

Then I asked, “But, if that general thing you’re talking about is true, where does it come from? Why do you suppose black kids aren’t taking all these wonderful opportunities they supposedly have?”

“Supposedly?” said the history teacher. “Look, there’s a wealth of opportunity out there, for anyone who wants to get up and grab it, especially for black people. All sorts of set asides!”

The science teacher nodded vigorously as the other went on. “Okay, you see, I might have a different perspective. I’m Irish American, okay? Third generation. My people suffered, and struggled, and look where so many of us are today. Look where I am. Okay, history teacher, not such a big deal, but I was born in deep poverty—welfare, absent father, the whole bit. I pulled myself out of it. And so when chances and options get dangled in front of people, I think it’s up to them to grab it. Like I did.”

“Right, I suppose. But, why do you think they don’t grab it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, right at the same time that the other one said, “Who knows?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe they’re discouraged from grabbing it. And maybe you as a white kid were more encouraged to grab it.”

“By what?” said Mr. History [that’s easier to type than “the history teacher.”].

“By internalized racism, for one thing. There’s a lot of messages out there that tell kids that people like you should grab opportunities and run with them, but also telling black kids that they’re not likely to get anywhere if they try to do so.

“Look,” I said, trying to focus my thoughts after eating a pretty big sandwich. “You guys keep talking about giving these kids more and more opportunities, like that’s all that can be done about their lower achievement rates. You keep veering away from the question of WHY so many don’t take those opportunities, WHY those that do don’t usually get very far.”

“But, you see,” said Mr. History, “I had it bad too, and so did my people. I was the one, it was ME, who saw chances and pursued them. No one was telling me that I should do so, in fact my family members and friends basically told me not to. But I did. So again, I think it’s up to the individual.”

“Right,” said Mr. Science, “That’s all we can do. Teaching is the opportunity business, basically. We give them all sorts of opportunities, more and more all the time.”

“You know,” I said to Mr. History, “what you just said, about how what people gain in life is up to the individual? That’s mighty white of you. That right there is a mighty common white thing to say.”

He just looked at me, with a look I found inscrutable.

I continued, “You did get encouraged, just because you’re white, and a white male too. You could easily look around at the world, at TV and movies and advertising and so on, and almost all of the successful people were white people, mostly white men like you were gonna be. Opportunity looked more do-able to you than it does to a black kid, who even today has trouble finding images like that.”

“Are you kidding?” said Mr. Science. “There’s all sorts of successful black people.”

“Oh really?” I said, “All sorts? Does that mean many, as in, like, a lot? There’s not a lot, and black kids can see that. They can see how much harder it is for black people to get there, and I suspect they can also see that they’re still not especially welcome once they do get there. And then there’s other messages, from within their community.”

“Like what?” said Mr. History. “Oh, I know, the lack of a father figure. There’s one.”

“Hmm, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Maybe for a boy especially, without a male role-model. I’m not sure. That doesn’t account for the girls, though, does it?”

We scratched our chins or twirled our soda straws.

“What about a lack of jobs?” I said, “What about poverty, and parents who can’t be there as much to encourage their kids because they’re working two jobs?”

“Well, poor white kids have that problem too,” said Mr. Science. “They don’t drop out as much.”

“Right,” I said. “We could talk about these things in terms of class, too. But it’s a double-whammy for black kids who are poor, in terms of race and class. What about history? You’re a history teacher. Are there any historical legacies in effect here?”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t teach African American history in terms of ‘legacies’ like that.”

“What about a white historical legacy?” I said. “What about generational transference of wealth? Did you know that the average white family is, what, eight or ten times as wealthy as the average black family?”

They both looked at me blankly, but then Mr. History said, “Poor is poor.”

“Yeah, I guess. But some groups have been much more poor, and for a long time, because racism is an extra layer on top of it. And you know, when we were talking about jobs, it made me think . . . does this make any sense? You say black students don’t want to work. What about a community that has a historical heritage of being forced to work, and work much harder than the people around them, and then after slavery, for much less pay? A lot of that is still true, and the chances for advancement are usually much less too. Do you think there could be a general attitude in that community and in its families, an attitude that’s against that kind of work, that’s resentful about 'work' itself? I mean, I don’t think black people work less—I think they work more, if anything. I’m talking about the possibility of a resentment, or maybe a weariness, against enforced and unfair work, and the lack of real opportunities for better work. And so, a part of that might be that any work a person doesn’t HAVE to do is work that a person shouldn’t do. Does that make any sense?”

“I don’t know, sounds a little half-baked,” said Mr. History, as Mr. Science stared out the window.

“Well, yeah, it’s less than half-baked. It occurred to me just now. But, I mean, think about the white side of that. Work really has been an opportunity for white people, especially for white men like us. The possibilities for us have seemed almost limitless, in a way that they haven’t for black people. You mentioned entitlement before—I think it’s white men who’ve felt the most entitled to all sorts of opportunities, and to make or break their own lives.Without even realizing that others haven’t been entitled to that. Not to mention how, because they've been entitled, they've been able to earn more money, and then to pass it down, generation after generation.”

“Maybe. Anyway, all I know is, if opportunity is offered to you, it’s up to you to grab it.”

“Oh man,” I said. “That is so sad!”

“What’s sad?”

“That you’re teaching these kids, with that attitude! Sixty percent of your students!”

“What attitude?”

“An attitude that applies your white experience to their black experience and claims they’re the same! An attitude that shows that you have no concern about where they are, what they’re going through, what the world looks like to THEM instead of to you. It does look different, you know? And they know that. In fact, I suspect that’s a way that they know something pretty important that their teachers don’t know.”

I was a little surprised to be saying this so bluntly to two men I’d just met, and saying it about their jobs, their livelihood, probably their very identities as teachers. They didn’t get upset, though, at least not visibly. They were quiet, and just seemed kind of thoughtful.

And maybe uncomfortable, because pretty soon Mr. History said he had to go, and Mr. Science did too. So we stood up and thanked each other for an interesting conversation.

Afterwards, I found the conversation dismaying. These two white teachers, who work mostly with black students, have very little idea about what race means for their students, and for themselves. I think they believe they’re doing all that they can by providing black students with a wealth of opportunities, and that like Mr. History said, it’s up to students to grab opportunities and succeed, or to waste them and fail. These two teachers seem to have been steered away from thinking or caring about what black students, and their families and neighbors, think and say about a young black person’s pursuit of opportunity.

saturday book rec : white men challenging racism

Few white Americans now announce, as did so many before World War II, “I am a white supremacist.” Few admit to choosing where they live or where their children go to school on the basis of race. Yet we know that overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, even whole towns, not only still exist but are even regarded as prestigious places to raise a family. We know that history as taught in grades 1-12 is largely a justification of our national past, which thus subtly reinforces white supremacy. And we know that without effort by white men, race will remain a problem even as our country grows more diverse.

--James Loewen

White Men Challenging Racism is a collection of first-person essays detailing the inspiring efforts of thirty-five white men who make fighting for social justice and combating racism central to their lives. Thanks to the way the book’s three editors--Cooper Thompson, Emmett Schaefer, and Harry Brod--put together each interview (especially the way they cut out their own questions), the book reads like a collection of very accessible, personal and inspiring stories.

James Loewen, the heroic champion of forgotten history, provides in the foreword an excellent overview of anti-racist white men of the past, from Bartolome Las Casas, a conquistador who convinced a Spanish court that Indians were humans and thus not to be enslaved; to Edward Coles, a governor who prevented legalization of slavery in the state of Illinois; to anthropologist Franz Boas, who fought for an African museum in Washington D.C. during the Nadir:

Like those Jewish Americans who helped found the NAACP in 1909, Boas epitomizes the many “hyphenated Americans”—the term Woodrow Wilson used to disparage recent [soon to be “white”] immigrants—who worked for justice for African, Asian, Mexican, and Native Americans in their new homeland. He also offers a lesson to ivory-towered professors everywhere: he acted in public and wrote for the public, not just in academic journals read only by scholars, because he knew the issue was of paramount importance to the nation.

The thirty-five essays in White Men Challenging Racism are divided into six sections: “Movement Elders,” “Grassroots Organizing,” “Art and Politics,” “Challenging the System from Within,” “Challenging the System from the Margins,” and “The Next Generation.” The white anti-racists include a wide variety of people, including David Attyah, a graphic artist and a founder of THINK AGAIN; radical Historian Herbert Aptheker; former Boston police officer Bill Johnston; and writer, lecturer, and activist Tim Wise.

This book is loaded with endlessly useful details and examples for white folks who want to make a difference. Instead of presenting an overview of its contents, I’ll write about just one man's story that I found especially compelling. I plan to summarize various other "Fighting White Folks" stories in future posts.

Jesse Wimberley is a farmer and carpenter in North Carolina who worked for twelve years as an organizer for the Piedmont Peace Project and on social justice projects in Africa and Central America. In addition to farming and carpenter work, he also does consulting and training for non-profit organizations. He lives on fifty acres in a house built in 1870 by his Scotch-Irish great-grandfather, and he wishes he had the funding to spend all of his work-time with low-income white men.

“I hear the pain in their voices,” Wimberley says, “when they make angry comments at people of color. Their fear is poking through the costume they’re wearing. I just want to go up and hug them, and of course if I did that, I’d get hit.”

Unlike the national media and most of America in general, which hold low-income people up for ridicule, contempt, and scorn, Wimberley sees them as victims of a “patriarchal economic system” that uses “barriers of race and class and sexual preference” as wedges between groups of people to keep class inequities hidden and intact. These barriers, which are variably visible and invisible, separate communities that could see their common ground and work together on the basis of it. They also force individuals within communities apart from each other.

“When you cannot grasp what the larger oppression looks like, the matrix of it,” Wimberley says, “you fight against those close to you. . . . So a big part of the organizing in each community is just helping low-income people of color not to blame each other for the living conditions but to realize that poverty is a political, not a personal, failure.”

Wimberley says that he’s still learning to curb his white tendencies, including that of taking up space in a multiracial setting in ways that shut down black voices. He also finds non-white, non-straight mentors willing to teach him about interacting effectively in non-white spaces. One of these men told him, “Women know a lot about men, Black folks know a lot about white folks, gay folks know a lot about straight folks, but it doesn’t go in the opposite direction.”

Wimberley finds the lack of community among low-income whites “astounding.” As he mourns this lack, he reflects on what it was that killed the close-knit sense of togetherness that he's heard about from his mother and grandfather, back when neighbors knew, talked with, and helped each other:

They’ve told me that it used to function as a community all the time. When your tobacco was done, you would move with all your neighbors to the next farm. There would be square dancing, corn shucking, all kinds of community building. At the end of the day, you knew who you were. You knew where your value came from and could go to bed at night with a sense of self that was healthy.

This might seem like a nostalgic vision of a communal sense that wasn’t ever really “healthy,” especially because it was based so much in a conception of “inferior” blackness. But what Wimberley works for is that kind of community for everyone—the removal, that is, of the barriers mentioned above that have been continuously imposed and reshaped by the patriarchal economic order.

That rapacious profit-seeking system is what destroyed both a functioning sense of community and the part of low-income dignity that came from respectable employment--multinational corporations destroyed subsistence farming, which was replaced by factory work, which has now largely moved abroad in search of even cheaper labor. And again, low-income white men have been socially trained to turn against the people who are nearby, especially those who seem different from themselves, rather than against the forces that are really hurting them.

Since Wimberley recognizes this larger economic context for rural bigotry, he rarely calls out low-income white folks for their expressions of racism and sexism.

I don’t see it as my job to always be correcting people. Bob is not at a place where he can hear that he is a privileged young man. He makes panty hose seven days a week, twelve hours a day to put food on the table. For me to teach Bob that he carries privilege is like teaching a pig to sing. It’s a waste of time, and it irritates the piss out of him. There’s a time to share information and a way to share it that doesn’t come off as preaching or blaming.

Wimberley sees himself as "a low-income white man who has had the luxury to have access to other information,” and his work largely involves finding discreet ways to share this information and to encourage others to work with it.

“What I really see here with low-income white men,” Wimberley says, “is a group looking for community. . . . their backs are up against the wall. . . . Our identity used to be agrarian, but now—making panty hose in a factory? That doesn’t feel good. So what you have left is what you are against: gays, Blacks, Jews.”

The economic degradation of low-income people is the primary source for the appeal of the militia movement and the KKK, according to Wimberley. These groups at least provide a sense of belonging and purpose, and agitation against the gays, blacks, and Jews becomes a primary means of establishing some sense of group-bound identity and pride.

Wimberley also discusses the sexual identities of these men. His most comfortable low-income male friends are gay, because with them he doesn’t have to maintain a macho sense of distance, a sexualized barrier that he wishes wasn’t between himself and other straight men. This barrier also seems to serve the elite economic purpose of keeping people with similar circumstances from banding together against their true oppressors.

For Wimberley, the only hope for significant progress in racial and economic conditions is getting these men to change their xenophobic attitudes and wake up to the true causes of their misery because "they're the voting majority right now.”

As for what it’s like for him to work toward that goal, Wimberley ends with these humbling words:

What I’ve learned about working with women and people of color is that normally, when they enter, they leave something at the door. That becomes a way of life. Now I’m learning about that, and it feels like shit to have to leave part of myself at the door. I’m hoping one day that experience will bring us together instead of keeping us separate.

get used to blackness

[UPDATE: I no longer stand by what this post says. I wrote it in a moment of jubilation over Barack Obama's primary victory over Hillary Clinton. Although I do still think that Obama has had to restrain signifiers of his racial status, I also now think that, as some readers suggested in comments, what I've written here figures "blackness" in some objectionable and trivializing ways. My thanks to these readers, and my apologies to anyone who has found this post offensive. --Macon D]





I want to write about Obama's primary victory (finally!), and in a very specific way. I've written before about Obama's whiteness, but what about his blackness? How black is he? How black does he act, and how black CAN he act, if he hopes to win the biggest prize on earth? Will white America get used to his blackness, or will he always have to restrain markers of it aside from his skin color?

First, please bear with a bit of background explanation.

As I said in yesterday's post, white people don't usually spend significant amounts of time with black people, so they tend to perceive them in terms of stereotypes instead of as individuals. I also think they tend to do so no matter how colorblind they claim to be.

However, when white people are around black people more often, they tend to get used to them, as people who emerge beyond stereotypes to become individuals. At the same time, white people also get used to other common projections of blackness that emanate from many black people. Black people are individuals, of course, and should be treated as such, just as white people treat other white people as individuals. However, black people are also members of a group, and they often absorb modes of thought, belief, attitude, and behavior that are similar to those of other members of the group. These more genuine, group-based commonalities are different from mere, pernicious stereotypes.

And of course, this is true of white people too--just as black people have certain common modes of expression, language, bodily movements, and so on, so do white people. Again, not all whites nor all blacks project these common modes of expression, but many do.

Something else I wrote awhile back was that white people tend to restrain themselves. I meant to describe a specifically white history of bodily, emotional, and vocal restraint, and I didn't mean that other groups don't encourage restraint among themselves in their own ways--collective human life always requires various modes of restraint on the part of any community's members.

For instance, non-white people who interact in largely white settings or appear in public often restrain modes of behavior that would further mark them as different. I don't know what modes of black expression Barack and Michelle Obama are used to using in private, but they certainly must feel a need to check themselves in public.

In this wonderful moment, for instance, which is appearing all over the Internet today, the Obamas find a way to express a celebratory affection for each other that's definitely black. But also, I think, more restrained than what almost happened. It looks to me like Michelle is about to give Barack a high-five, but then he goes for the more restrained fist-bump, or dap, instead:



For white people, self-consciousness while in the spotlight, and subsequent behavioral modification, almost never occur in terms of race (unless, perhaps, a white person is speaking before a a non-white audience). White individuals don't feel in such moments like they're representing white people, but black people usually do feel like they're representing black people. George Bush's continual gaffes and mangled English don't reflect on white people in general, but any by Barack Obama will (imagine what a hindrance it would be to Obama if he spoke as incorrectly as Bush so often does).

Who knows what these two happy people were thinking in this moment, but they knew they were in public, and they probably modified their behavior accordingly. And racial self-consciousness probably had something to do with that. Maybe Barack thought a high-five would register as too black, or too casual, or maybe he just prefers the dap, though that also registers as black, to most American observers. It's interesting that although a high-five could seem undignified, it's become so widespread that the more subdued dap comes across as more black. And thus, potentially, and wrongly, as undignified in another way. My understanding is that both gestures originated in urban African American culture, but the dap hasn't spread as widely into mainstream culture as the high-five has.

One problem that many have pointed out about Obama's candidacy is that if he wins, a lot of white people will see less reason than ever for things like race-based affirmative action. The presence of a black president would make it easier than ever (though also false) to say that racism is a tiny, minor hangover from the past, that "the playing field is level," and that institutional racism is just some intellectual fantasy.

That seems likely, but maybe something of the opposite will happen at the same time. Maybe white people will get more used to blackness, and to markers of it--things like black music, and black gestures, and black words and phrases and names. Today is a day to be especially hopeful, and these are among the things I'm hoping for.

Some white Americans love black culture, or what they think is black culture (especially corporate hip hop). But very few white Americans love to see black culture in their political leaders. Here's hoping that the ascendancy of Barack Obama will expand the confines of the traditional white male model for leadership, and that Hillary Clinton has expanded it in terms of gender as well.

Finally, here's one more especially black moment, performed by Barack Obama. And here's one more hope--that we see more such moments, and that they make white America love him even more, as he helps them get used to blackness.

believe others consider them trustworthy

(This piece has been re-posted at Siddity. Also, Not Like Crazy and The Debate Link have incorporated it into their own discussions of the topic, and The Blog and the Bullet, Alas! A Blog, and Anthropophagous have excerpted and recommended it . . .)


I don’t imagine the man in this mug shot looks trustworthy to you. If you were to meet him on the street, or in a bar, what features or characteristics make him untrustworthy? His tattoos? His broken nose? The desolate look in his eyes?

How about the fact that he's white?

If you're a white person, you're unlikely to list his whiteness as one of the characteristics that would keep you from trusting him. You might cite the "white power" sympathies suggested by his tattooed swastika, but not the simple fact of his whiteness itself. However, if you're a non-white person, there's a better chance that you would list the mere fact of his racial whiteness as a suspicious characteristic.

Unlike a lot of non-white people, most white folks think that the world sees them as trustworthy, reliable, and honest, unless they do something to prove themselves otherwise. White people can dress in a variety of ways or wear a variety of adornments or tattoos that will lower the level of trust other people are likely to place in them. What they rarely realize, though, is that their whiteness itself often provokes mistrust. And that it does so for some good reasons.

Now that’s a strange thing to say, isn’t it? Most of the people reading this blog believe that it’s racist and unfair to mistrust a black person, simply because he or she is black. And I agree. But as I’ll try to show here, in most cases it’s actually realistic, not racist, for a black person to withhold trust from a white person. This is because black people tend to know more about white people than white people do about black people. And what they tend to know is that white people who haven’t untrained themselves can be annoying, and even dangerous.

A problem here is that white people usually spend very little time thinking about what their own race means to them. In a pioneering 1988 article on white privilege, Peggy McIntosh wrote about her early sense of herself as she navigated the world, especially her lack of racial self-awareness as “white.” Instead of understanding that her whiteness had all sorts of significance in her life, McIntosh writes, she was taught to see herself as merely an individual, a sort of free-floating being “whose moral state depended on her individual moral will."

It was only after thinking about parallels between male privilege and her own white privilege, and then writing down a list of 46 examples, that McIntosh began to realize that she is not merely a free-floating individual whose life is pretty much her own to make or break:

If these [white privileges] are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own. These perceptions mean also that my moral condition is not what I had been led to believe. The appearance of being a good citizen rather than a troublemaker comes in large part from having all sorts of doors open automatically because of my color. . . My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make.

Like most other white people, Peggy McIntosh had been trained into oblivion about the significance of her own racial status. One result for such people is that they usually fail to realize that they’re often being taken as white people. Especially when they interact with non-white people (and almost never when they interact with other white people).

If Peggy McIntosh or another white person were to interact with a new black person, they may not realize that while their skin color is often an asset, in this situation it may be counting against them. At least initially, until they prove themselves atypical. For many non-white people, white individuals need to prove that they’re not going to enact an array of common white tendencies before they can be trusted. This can take time.

In an article on the resurgent racism she sees emerging among ordinary white folks during the current campaign season, African American journalist Karen DeWitt recalls her distrust of white folks during her childhood, in Dayton, Ohio: “I was wary of strange white people, assuming them to be unpredictable and potentially violent. I didn't think of these people as inherently evil. I knew they were ordinary human beings, accustomed to a skin privilege they refused to—and continue to refuse—to acknowledge."

At DiversityInc, Yoji Cole (whose race I can’t determine) wrote a column entitled "9 Things NEVER to Say to White Colleagues" (“You’re a carpet-bagger.” “You’re just a typical white person,” “I don’t get white people,” and so on). An anonymous black woman wrote an email in response, pointing out the columnist’s lack of interest in why non-white people might say such things. She also wrote, "As a Black woman I will admit that the typical Black person does not trust any white person (our history nurtures this and it does not help that institutional racism reinforces it)." Cole's response is brief and defensive, and it fails again to acknowledge where "the typical Black person" might be coming from with such distrustful comments to white colleagues.

In another example, from a starkly honest memoir called Makes Me Wanna Holla, another African American journalist, Nathan McCall, writes of his own lingering distrust of unfamiliar white people during one of his early newspaper jobs.

It was obvious that many of my co-workers had had little exposure to blacks. They seemed overpolite and unsure how to relate to me. Likewise, I was guarded with them, remembering lessons learned from others' pain: Keep them at arms' length and out of your personal business. . . . They seldom knew what I really thought and felt about things, and I made sure they got few chances to find out.

McCall remembers being especially wary of invitations for drinks. He’d seen alcohol turn white co-workers into intrusive curiosity seekers, obviously on the lookout for favorable features in him, and for less favorable ones. McCall did feel better about one white person, Ron Speers, a “portly, gregarious editor” who was “one of those rare bleeding hearts who had given a lot of thought to the damage his people had done to the lives and psyches of blacks.”

Nevertheless, as McCall writes, “I sensed that Ron and the others were sincere, but still, I didn’t open up to them. I couldn’t. They were white, and I was convinced that the dumbest thing a black person could do was trust a white man. Ron and the others got surface rap from me, and nothing more.”

As McCall’s career progresses toward a job at the Washington Post, his reservations about white people decreased, but they never went away, and instead lingered in his "psyche."

What I'm getting at with examples from three different black writers is that it's not difficult to find them—examples of something about white people that very few white people know about themselves. And that something is that they aren’t as automatically trustworthy as they tend to think they are. Just as white folks tend to size up new black individuals in racial terms, waiting for the black person to prove herself better than "other black people" (and I believe that most whites do this, whether they realize it or not), black people often do the same thing to white people.

But as I said above, there’s a crucial difference—these mutual sizing-ups occur with different racial yardsticks. I believe that the one in a black person's hand usually takes more accurate measurements. I say that because I've learned to remember something that my white training encouraged me to forget, which is that white people have been in power for a long, long time.

Since white people still occupy most positions of power in society, there's often much more at stake for the black person sizing up a new white person than there is for a white person sizing up a new black person. Black people have to be careful around white people in all sorts of ways that white people don't have to worry about. That was of course an even bigger problem for their black ancestors, and the generational transference of teachings and warnings about the dangerous reality of white power tend to sink in (just as a history of white beliefs and tendencies still manifests itself in common white feelings and behavior).

Because black people have had to live and work with white people, and because they’ve had to be careful while doing so, they’ve gotten used to sizing up white people on the basis of reality, rather than stereotypes. They’ve learned and taught each other how most white people think and act. On the other hand, white people usually have little or no extensive contact with actual black people, so what they learn about them from movies, TV, books, education, and their families and friends tends to be stereotypes.

So again, when they meet each other in person, one usually uses a more accurate measuring stick than the other does. And because white people aren’t usually aware of themselves as white, and thus as typically white, they can’t be trusted not to look for confirmation of their false stereotypes.

I sometimes hear white people complain about being treated differently by black people, different from what looks like the more friendly ways that black people treat each other. “What did I do to deserve such cold treatment?” these white folks sometimes say. To me, such questions reflect a lack of effort—what they’re saying is, “It’s all about me!” What I wish they would say instead is something like, “Now why would a person of another race act like they don’t trust me? If it’s so common, might there be a reason for it?”

Black and white people don’t talk together much about racial issues, and even when they do, I’m sure that this issue of racial trust rarely comes up. I think it’s an issue that black people know a lot more about than white people do. But that doesn’t mean it’s the job of black people to teach white people about it.

What white people should learn, and somehow tell each other, is that when people of color they don’t know seem guarded, standoffish, or even rude, it may be because they don’t trust you. And it’s up to you to show that you can be trusted. Which can take time.

hide their feelings about race behind a calm white mask

As Barack Obama's lock on the nomination becomes ever more certain, all sorts of subsumed white feelings about race are emerging. The common white reluctance or refusal to think about "where I'm coming from" means that a lot of what's emerging from seemingly ordinary white folks is ugly, and potentially destructive.

Much of that calm, rational white training that I've written about before is getting revealed as a sort of mask that many white folks wear, a mask that hides deep-set, irrational, and anything-but-calm feelings about race. I don't blame white individuals for having such feelings. I have them too. But I also realize that we've been trained into having these feelings by a society that's still very racist. I think such feelings can be overcome.

How many white folks are going to tear off that mask in their own ways, as Harriet Christian did a couple of days ago? She's a Hillary Clinton supporter angered by Clinton's impending loss; in this video, she's also clearly upset by the race of the person who's risen up and is about to take the nomination, seemingly to take it FROM Clinton.

I also see a threatened white sense of entitlement here. What do you see?

[hat-tip: Jack and Jill Politics]

Update: Over at The Root, Karen DeWitt discusses resurgent white anger in "The Return of the 'Real' White People," where she writes, "in polling, a very small percentage of white people who object to merely sitting next to an African American on a bus translates into millions of real white people with the same attitude. And this election year is proving it. Masks off. Real white people are back."

talk about race with non-white people

I've been writing this blog for about two months now, and last Friday's post was my effort to think out loud about who my readers are and about what they seem to be getting out of the site. The many responses in the Comments section were overwhelming, and humbling.

Thank you to everyone who committed their thoughts to that discussion thread; I'll be reading it many times over as I assess the future of Stuff White People Do. I'm very satisfied so far that so many readers, both non-white and white, are finding this blog useful in their efforts to think through whiteness, and racism. I started writing here as an effort to think through my whiteness more carefully, and you've all motivated me to keep going.

It's also good to gather that this blog has a mix of both white and non-white readers. White people do talk about race with non-white people, sometimes, and I'm glad that they often do so here. Both sides are getting so many different things out of this blog that it's difficult for me to summarize it all.

Someone else, though, has done a great job of assessing probable white and non-white responses to Stuff White People Do, and I've received permission to include her assessment here as a guest post.

Davita Cuttita blogs at Pregnant Drug-dealing Prostitutes, and she identifies herself as "a Jamaican girl dating a Russian guy." I'm grateful that she took the time to write such a thorough assessment of Stuff White People do, and of its potential place in a broader and necessary discussion on whiteness and racism. I'm honored by her presence here as a guest writer, and of course, we invite responses to her assessment, and to her incitement.

(PS--Via Jannie Sue in the comments to Friday's post, an assessment of Stuff White People Do at White Anti-Racist. Thanks Jannie Sue!)



Hi Macon, ^_^

This is Davita Cuttita coming to you live from Canada!

I've been dipping in-and-out of the internet (busy schedule, work and school!) but I noticed your post "Avoid the topic of race, especially whiteness" so I hope you don't mind that I wrote in; I'm sure with your well-deserved increase in readers, you must be swamped!

Firstly, I think what attracts a lot of non-White people to your blog is quite simple: your honesty and willingness to discuss.

Of course, coloured people talk about many of the issues you do amongst themselves and the general idea is "Oh, White people. They don't care, they don't understand," because when we do talk about these issues with White people, they become uncomfortable, defensive or simply change the subject because, y'know, if coloured people have problems it's all about THEIR feelings, not ours. I guess we don’t have any feelings or lack the cognitive ability to recognize them since racism apparently “no longer exists, it’s 2008” or “maybe the person was just having a bad day.”

Therefore, White people miss out on a lot of insight about how other cultures see them. For example, there are so many movies "exoticizing" the cultures in Africa, China, Japan, Brazil, the Caribbean, etc but very few doing the same to, for argument's sake, America. ‘Cuz, White is White, no need to explain or discuss! They're the default, like Times New Roman font.

Coloured People keep coming to Stuff White People Do because now they know a few things:

1. There is a White person willing to engage in racial discussions with them, encouraging dialogue and taking them and their concerns seriously and asking honest questions.

2. There is a White person willing to listen to what they have to say without getting defensive.

3. There is a White person that doesn't "ignore" their non-Whiteness by being colourblind but accepts it as a valid part of their identity.

4. They now know of a place where they can engage with other White people on racial issues.

5. There is a zone for coloured people to discuss and read of racial inequalities, stereotypes, etc with a White person(s) that won't shift the coloured person's feelings and concerns onto themselves in turn making said coloured person feel guilty for bringing up what is often TRUE.

I know those are the reasons why I visit.

Your site's like sitting in a music studio with a bunch of strangers with different talents. You'll start a tune, another guy will beat-box, someone will chime in on the key-board, etc. It doesn't always "sound" great but hell, it's interesting and we're free to exchange ideas!

As for the White people that think you hate yourself now. . .

I find this type of back-lash always happens whenever a White person speaks up for Coloured People and accepts the facts of our reality and history. It hurts them to know they belong to a group that, historically, is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the wiping out of civilizations, displacing individuals, destruction and inequality that still produces benefits exclusive to the White race even today.

Worse still, to them your site is a slap in the face, a reminder that many of the settlers and founders they cherish and idealize didn't earn any of this land with hard work; no! They just killed, raped, pillaged and enslaved everyone and anything they could. Why are there so few historic coloured people contributions to technology, literature, medicine, the arts and science compared to Whites? Because they'd KILL US if we learned to read! (Also, a lot of technology was stolen and re-appropriated during the Crusades from Indian, Islamic and Black cultures. Did you know the Chinese “discovered” America 300 years before Columbus? Gotta love grade 11 history!)

Hell, we couldn't even chill in our own countries minding our own business without it being a problem.

I'm sure if the White man came singing "Why Can't We Be Friends?" and no one was busy getting killed, maimed or raped, we coloured people could've gotten a 500 year head start too and be waaay better off. White history says they are the best, the most intelligent, the most beautiful and we are beneath them--abnormal and awkward. What, with all their achievements and all! But it just doesn't sound as heart-warming, inspiring and pride-inducing when you read about all the Native babies Christopher Columbus and his men killed for fun or how many thousands of runaway slaves were cut in half.

They cannot face these facts; they don't want to say "Yes, it happened. Yes, I benefit. What can I do? What do you think? DO YOU WANT TO TALK?" No, they only repeat the obvious "I didn't do anything wrong! That was hundreds of years ago!" like broken records and simply don't give a damn. They go into denial and find any means necessary to cut off dialogue because once again, it’s not about acknowledging Coloured People’s feelings and apprehensions. Somehow, our concerns become all about THEIR feelings and THEIR comfort.

Everyone wants to be the victim—that way they don’t have to take responsibility for what happened to them and are free of blame and scrutiny but...

No one wants to be the person holding the blood-stained knife.

"This White guy hates himself."

Oh, please! This White guy doesn’t hate himself; he’s just fed up with ignorance like the rest of us. He has the courage to see something went terribly wrong 500 years ago and like a juggernaut, just won’t stop. He has the intelligence, openness and willingness to listen and admit what he cannot understand and share what he feels he does. He asks questions and unlike the others that just want us to forget and move on, stop talking and just act like everything is OK when we are still systematically discriminated against, objectified and hated.

We Coloured People will always move on but we will never, ever, forget the truth of the matter that slavery happened, genocides happened, bombings happened, rapes happened, intellectual theft happened and keeps happening, all because of our bodies’ melanin levels. The message behind this site and many of the opinions therein never said all White people are evil, but we’re pretty sure most of them are being ignorant about the truth and the truth hurts.

Some White People just can’t handle it, so they take their anger out on you by saying you hate yourself. Maybe they wouldn’t believe that if they consulted one of your Coloured readers for their opinion on your site.

See the pattern here?

I really hope you keep layin' the hurt down on 'um, Macon. They need it.

Congrats on your new readers and keep up the great work!

Kindest regards,

~Davita Cuttita