Facebook Publication Date: 10/21/2019 1:10
Claire here. Please have a seat on the closest real or imaginary couch.
It’s Time to Talk about Whiteness
Here is an uncomfortable truth for white people in the US.
We are, in our own minds, “non-raced.” We are ignorant of our whiteness and the ways it organizes our identities, views of the world, and responses to events and to others. “Race” is a concept that we apply to other people – Black and Brown people. The fallout from this special kind of ignorance is vast and dangerous.
Why? Because as long as we believe others are “races” and we are not, we can see ourselves as “regular people” or “the norm” or “just a person.” If I am the Center of the Normal Universe, everyone not like me is orbiting in a distant solar system that is not normal. They are dehumanized. Once dehumanization happens, the doors open and hatred, economic injustice. violence, and bigotry flow out. Normalization privileges the “norm” and implicitly elevates it to supremacy. I don’t have to detail this reality for you if you have been reading Lace on Race for more than a day or so. Lace’s life’s work is to enlighten white women and wipe out our ignorance so we will stop causing harm to Black people. But until we see and reflect on our whiteness, our white racial identity, and our white supremacy, we are going to keep causing harm.
It is time to focus on whiteness. It rests in culture, attitudes and vocabulary we are explicitly socialized into – we are taught it and we learn it. Dismantling racism requires us to understand that we are part of a collective of white people that has existed in the New World for hundreds of years. Our Western European forebears were colonizers, primarily driven by the opportunity for profit. It is naïve to believe otherwise, no matter what we were told about the Pilgrims and religious freedom in school. The majority of the colonizers were in it for the money.
Marlise and others commented about white woman patterns of behavior. It is important to see that a pattern is not a random set of nasty comments. Patterns consist of linked phenomena – if you have ever tried to knit something you know this. White women may believe that we are originals, and individuals, and in some ways we are. But our whiteness derives from the collective, even though we may enact it as individuals. And, if you read the traumatizing exchanges on LoR in the last week, you saw patterns of belief and values expressed in the comments.
There are many resources on the internet that list aspects of whiteness, most of them written by Black activists, researchers and business people. It shouldn’t surprise us that Black people know more about whiteness than white people do. That point is not up for discussion. But what do they know? And how can we take that knowledge and learn how to recognize and manage our own whiteness? First we need to see how privilege and its benefits, and power, the force we use to protect and defend our privilege and our whiteness moves operate together. Patterns based on privilege and power capture most of what we white women need to pay attention to.
Here’s the first entry in my “Whiteness Starter Kit.”
Let’s look at a statement we hear regularly: “I never owned slaves, I wasn’t even alive back then.” We are knitting with privilege here – I can choose to never think about racism, because I am white, the non-race. I can even claim that I am not privileged because I can intentionally misunderstand what privilege means. I can claim I am not responsible for history because I can deny that I am part of the collective. I can claim the right to be seen as an individual. (See below). Linked inside this pattern is a set of supposed rights – the right to comfort, the right to approval from Black people, the expectation of validation (and a pat on the head or a cookie for being a nice white lady,) the right to be treated with politeness. This leads to the next link – doing anything to avoid conflict and discomfort. Lying, insulting, being inauthentic, fleeing, violence, exploiting emotion, escalating and name calling, pouting and crying. And this leads us to the complete delusion – “Racism goes both ways.” Prejudice is all over the place. But racism? The way things are set up, racism does not go both ways. Why? Because racism rests on power, and power relations are never reciprocal. It is a delusion of privilege that racism goes both ways, and it is the essence of whiteness.
Our imagined American right to be seen as individuals, an outgrowth of privilege, can be tossed around in power moves, too. We saw quite a bit of resistance and defensiveness on Lace on Race over the last week. (And to be honest, regularly. About once a month someone joins the conversation without reading any of the pinned posts. She gets angry. This usually devolves into ugly power moves during agonizing private messaging with Lace. And it always generates angry, pouty defensiveness.) All of us white woman can probably recognize defensiveness because it’s exactly what we felt when we first tried to develop ourselves into anti-racists. It’s how I felt, and I understand why – I had no knowledge about my own whiteness, I didn’t know what privilege was, and I felt completely powerless. I was wrong about all of it. When an indignant white woman throws her power around and says “Don’t make assumptions about me. You don’t know me,” she is deploying her status as a non-raced individual and trying to use her power to make her case. She is ignorant of her whiteness, she believes that only the KKK are racists, and she denies that she is only the latest in a centuries-long collective of white Americans. She is also wrong, because Black women do know us, and our patterns. They do not have to know us as individuals because they have lifetimes worth of experience with the collective. A white woman who says “My achievements are MINE. No one helped me” is grabbing power, demanding to be seen as an individual, denying that she has benefitted from being white, and trying to erase every person of color who sees what privilege offers us. We also see power moves when white women argue using their levels of education, their degrees, their expertise, their credentials and their personal relationships to put themselves above Black women. Ironically, although it’s deployed as if it is power, it actually weakens their arguments. Their degrees and credentials do not make them better, or give them power over others on Lace on Race. These moves only show them for who they are – desperate to protect their power and to avoid accountability. All of us are both individuals and part of a massive collective that stretches over space and time in the U.S. Adults have to understand that, and, despite the mythical white American values we have been taught, to resist demanding that we are always and only individuals.
Last, I want to address an area where whiteness and ignorance of our own whiteness creates serious and ongoing harm. Here it is: Lace asked us to think about the consequences of anti-racism work being conceptualized by, organized by, and managed by white women. Lace suggested that the idea of “race relations” doesn’t sit very well with Black women. By now you probably know what the problem is. White women haul loads of good intentions to so-called race relations. But ignorance of whiteness means double ignorance – because we are also deeply ignorant of Blackness. So we find white women doing anti-racist work so that they can “help” women of color enter the white sphere, and be more manageable Black replicas of white women. And “race relations” means white women summoning Black women, “Get over here and let us talk to you and tell you how to be.” Often when our whiteness is challenged, things escalate, people like Lace get called “monsters” and “cult leaders.” The result is trauma and more harm piled on. Go back and think about the patterns of privilege that white women consciously and unconsciously use. Think about the power we are so protective of, our denial of our collective roles in injustice, and the accountability that we are desperate to avoid. Are these the people we need to lead us forward?
I say that they are not. More whiteness is not what anyone needs. What we need is recognition of our whiteness, and awareness of our patterns so we can get rid of them and replace them with reliability and integrity. The Relational Ethics series introduced us to Claudia Rankine. This Black woman has invested real money – her Macarthur Genius Award – in the study of whiteness. Some think her interest in whiteness is a waste of her resources. But here is what she thinks: “Rankine says she understands why people don’t want to focus on whiteness. “I think we’ve seen whiteness centralized forever, so they’re no longer interested in making it the subject, putting it in the subject position. But I think that it’s been centralized in order to continue its dominance, and it’s never been the object of inquiry to understand its paranoia, its violence, its rage.”*
If it’s good enough for Ms. Rankine to make the object of inquiry, it’s good enough for me. And it should be good enough for all of us. I’m looking forward to adding to my list of whiteness-based offenses – to inquire about it, to understand it, and to dislodge it from my repertoire.
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/19/claudia-rankine-macarthur-genius-grant-exploring-whiteness?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2v9FZ7GgmJBJvFiTGJtgCD-FrCvGJRy34dP-MpQgMdiDiqfwk10FwS9tM
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