Coverpage

What does "Whiteness" mean?

Elana Baurer

“Somewhere down in our guts we understand that in an oppressive system such as white supremacy, the unearned privileges with which we live are based on the suffering of others. We know that we have things because others don’t.”

-Robert Jensen

Whiteness as Privilege

While it may be easy to recognize that racism exists and that certain individuals may be oppressed by the color of their skin, it is not easy to implicate ourselves in that racism. Nor is it easy for a white person to recognize that hir whiteness provides many advantages that serve to benefit white people in a society founded on racial hegemony. The ability to refuse to acknowledge the advantages to having white skin is, in itself, a privilege. “The definition of privilege {is} the institutional power of individuals to construct systems based on their needs and values.”[1]

Robert Jensen describes this in The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege. He writes, “…Part of white privilege {is} the privilege to ignore the reality of a white-supremacist society when it makes us uncomfortable, to rationalize why it’s not really so bad, to deny one’s own role in it. It is the privilege of remaining ignorant because that ignorance is protected.”[2] Frances E. Kendall adds to this idea when she says, “Being white enables me to decide whether I am going to listen to others, to hear them, or neither. I also silence people of color without intending to or even being aware of it, by talking over them, talking around them, not asking their opinions, or not considering the omnipresence of race as I view a situation… White privilege allows us not to see race in ourselves and to be angry at those who do.”[3]

The Challenging White Supremacy Workshop defines privilege as the “right, advantage, favor, or immunity specially granted to one, especially a right held by a certain individual group or class and withheld from certain others or all others (Webster’s Dictionary, italics added by CWS). U.S. institutions and culture give preferential treatment to people whose ancestors came from Europe over people’s whose ancestors are from the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Arab world and exempt European Americas – white people – from the forms of racial and national oppression inflicted upon peoples from the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Arab world. This web of institutional and cultural preferential treatment is called white privilege. In a white supremacy system white privilege and racial oppression are two sides of the same coin.” [4]

Another aspect of white privilege that Kendall brings up is using personal hardship to distance ourselves from our responsibility for those privileges we receive as white people. He writes:

The pain and sense of being less-than, often based in reality, may emanate both from our personal life experiences (for example, my father died when I was four) and from our membership in groups from which privileges are systemically withheld (being poor or Jewish or gay or deaf). In our minds, this somehow lessens our responsibility for receiving or colluding in systemic white privilege… We shift the focus back to us, even when the conversation is not about us. A classic example of this is white women crying during conversations about racism because they feel guilty about being white and women of color having to put their pain aside to help the white women who are crying. African Americans and gays and lesbians, in particular, are expected to take responsibility for other people’s responses to and discomfort with them.[5]

In Peggy McIntosh’s widely-quoted article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” she says, “White people are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege… whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’” McIntosh goes on to list some of the privileges of whiteness including examples such as: “I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time”; “When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am told that people of my color made it what it is”; “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race”; “I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the ‘person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race”; “I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.”[6]

Banking, housing, employment policies, education systems, the criminal law system, etc. are some of the areas in which people of color are systematically disadvantaged and white people are systematically privileged. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a perfect example, as Joy James points out. She writes:

The racist bias reflected in sentencing has created a society in which a black person is eight times more likely to be sentenced to prison for committing (or being convicted of) a similar offense as a white person. Defendants receive the same sentencing for the sale or possession of one unit of crack – considered a black or latino urban drug – as for one hundred units of powder cocaine considered a white suburban indulgence. Although the majority of cocaine and crack offenders are whites, most of those sentenced to prison for drug use and sale are African American and Latino.[7]

Additionally, James points out “In nearly every death penalty case, the race of the victim is white; in fact, a person is four times more likely to be sentenced to death for being convicted of killing a white person than for killing a black person. Of the 229 executions in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty, only 1 involved a white defendant for the murder of a black person. The American Bar Association has called for a moratorium on executions given the racial bias in death sentences.”[8] For additional specific examples please see our “White Privilege” list on page ______.

Jensen additionally points out, “In most cases, white people can decide whether or not they want to go into a predominantly black neighborhood. In most cases, black people have no choice but to deal with a predominantly white world.”[9] Therefore, white privilege extends beyond the political system into daily experiences like buying a magazine or turning on the television.

Kendall explains, “All of us who are white receive white privileges. They are bestowed on us impersonally and systemically, but they affect us personally. We can’t not get them, and we can’t give them back. Our choice is to use them in such a way as to dismantle the systems that keep the superiority of whiteness in place. One of the primary privileges is having greater influence, power, and resources. White people make decisions that affect everyone without consulting anyone else. As white people, we keep ourselves central, thereby silencing others. We can include or exclude others at our whim.”[10]

White privilege extends beyond the tangible to language itself. Kendall writes about her observations of whiteness shaping language. She says:

I have watched politeness and civility become cardinal rules in predominantly white institutions. More times than I can count, I have observed the stated need for ‘civility’ used to silence faculty, staff, and students of color, and white activists. We use our white privilege to define the parameters of conversation and communication, keeping our culture, manners, and language central. We do this by requesting a ‘safe’ place to talk about race and racism. This often means ‘safe’ from hearing the anger and pain of people of color while being able to say racist things without being held accountable for them. We set up informal rules for communicating in the organization, failing to share those rules with people who are different from us, and penalizing them publicly and heavily when they make mistakes. We create institutions that run by our culture’s rules but we act as if the rules are universally held, such as what time meetings start, how people talk to one another, the ‘appropriate’ language to use.”[11]

Whiteness as Property

Another way that whiteness functions is as a form of property. At the time of the foundation of the United States of America, whiteness literally legally defined whether or not an individual was considered human and was therefore synonymous with very tangible economic, psychological and social benefits. While slavery is now abolished and persons in the United States can no longer be legally considered property, Cheryl Harris discusses how property does not only refer to “things” but the “right to things” and “rights in things.” Harris expands upon this by citing James Madison:

In James Madison's view, for example, property 'embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right,' referring to all of a person's legal rights. Property as conceived in the founding era "included not only external objects and people's relationships to them, but also all of those human rights, liberties, powers, and immunities that are important for human well-being, including: freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom from bodily harm, and free and equal opportunities to use personal faculties."[12]

Therefore Property is, itself, a right.

Harris suggests that we focus on the modern concept of property which “emphasizes the more contingent nature of property.” She explains that property, in a broader sense, “encompasses jobs, entitlements, occupational licenses, contracts, subsidies, and indeed a whole host of intangibles that are the product of labor, time, and creativity, such as intellectual property, business goodwill, and enhanced earning potential from graduate degrees.”[13] In an extension on that idea, Harris explains that in a society founded on racial subordination, white privilege became the expectation and therefore the “property for personhood.”

If whiteness is property, then there is a clear interest on the part of owners of that property to protect and maintain it. That is to say, it has been and continues to be in white people’s best economic and social interests to maintain a system that places property value on whiteness. This interest is both individual and collective; therefore, racism does not only fall on the individual but rather on the systems that both uphold and are upheld by individuals. As Harris writes, “When the law recognizes, either implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of whites built on the privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy, it acknowledges and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that reproduces Black subordination.”[14]

Maintaining the racist systems of our society also preserves the concept of whiteness as essential to determining a person’s humanity. An extension of this is the automatic Othering of all people who do not identify as white or who are not identified as white –if they are not white then they are not “real” persons and therefore they are “less than” human. The consequence of such Othering is exclusion and oppression. Hand in hand with this Othering comes the normalization of whiteness.

Whiteness as Power

What is the difference between prejudice and racism? Jensen explains, “Prejudice - negative or hostile attitudes toward members of a group based on some shared trait, perceived or real – becomes racism when one group has the power to systematically deprive the members of another group of rights and privileges that should come with citizenship and/or being a human being.”[15]

It is not hard to recognize that whiteness provides Power – one must only look at the people in positions of power in our country. But it is not enough to recognize that most of the people in positions of political and economic power are white; it is important to acknowledge that whiteness on the more collective, systematic scale is also powerful. Like all Power systems, it works to perpetuate itself and maintain the monopoly on Power. Kendall writes, “We have created and sustain a pathological system in which our positive sense of self is based on the negative sense of someone else. Our whiteness and superiority are dependent on others being nonwhite and inferior.”[16]

The term “white supremacy” is therefore clearly much more than just a label for openly racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan; it applies to a far more subconscious, systemic thought process and the repercussions of that belief system. According to the CWS Workshop, white supremacy is “an historically based institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent for the purpose of maintaining and defending systems of wealth, power, and privilege.”

The idea that our society is a white supremacist one goes back to the white European foundation of the United States. In his discussion of white supremacy, Jensen explains:

By ‘white supremacist,’ I mean a society whose founding is based in an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites, an ideology that was used to justify the crimes against indigenous people and Africans that created the nation. That ideology also has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white immigrant group, and is used to this day to rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution of wealth and well-being in this society. It is a society in which white people occupy most of the top positions in powerful institutions, with similar privileges available in limited ways to non-white people who fit themselves into white society.[17]

The continuous maintenance of the system by whites is an essential part of white supremacy. As Jensen writes, “In any struggle to end a system of oppression, those on the bottom of the hierarchy have an obvious motivation to resist the system… however powerful that argument from justice, we can observe that it does not always motivate people with unearned privilege to work to change the system that gave them the privilege.”[18]

Ian F. Haney López talks about how legal precedent suggests that Whiteness has considerable value to white people and therefore “Whites are much more likely to embrace than dismantle their identity.”[19] Haney López says, “…When confronted with the falsity of racial lines, many Whites – even those in the highest positions of public trust and under the greatest charge to do justice – will choose to entrench White identity and privilege rather than allow its destabilization.”[20]

Whiteness as Terrorism

Some white people think that after the Civil Rights movement, racism ceased to exist in America. A common defense that white people present when confronted with the idea of the United States as a racist society is that the civil rights movement created equality under the law and therefore created social equality as well. Most white people who acknowledge that racism is still a reality tend to distance themselves from it and deny any role in racism or investment in white supremacy. When a white person makes a racist comment that person is often still not called racist, rather ze is perceived to have “made a mistake.” (Noteworthy examples of this are the Michael Richards incident and Don Imus’ comments on the Rutgers women’s basketball team).

Paulette Goudge writes, "It is not easy to demonstrate the existence of something which is, on the whole, kept well-hidden, and of which most of us who are in some way implicated are entirely unaware, though it nonetheless constantly and profoundly impacts upon both what we say and what we do... Furthermore, the absence of overt recognition of imbalanced power relations renders them less likely to be subject to any form of challenge."[21]

Furthermore, Kendall explains, “Racism is one of several systems of oppression. Others are class, sexism, heterosexism, the institutionalized primacy of Christianity, and able-bodiedism. These systems work toward a common goal: to maintain power and control in the hands of wealthy, white, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied men.”[22]

Beyond individual instances of racism, it is important to understand the systematic racism that pervades our society. Kendall writes, “…African Americans ‘still hold less than 1 percent of senior-level corporate posts.’ Unless we believe that white people are inherently more capable than men and women of color, we have to acknowledge that our systems are treating us unequally.”[23] As Jensen says, “It is relatively easy for white people to focus on the struggle to change racist behaviors and attitudes at the personal level but ignore questions at more systemic levels.”[24] This systemic oppression perpetuated by whites is a form of terrorism.

The term “terrorism” is most often used to describe acts that threaten white bodies and/or white supremacy. Inherent in this definition is the idea that whiteness can never be terror. bell hooks explains, "...One fantasy of whiteness is that the threatening Other is always a terrorist. This projection enables many white people to imagine there is no representation of whiteness as terror, as terrorizing."[25]

Yet, whiteness is terrorizing and has been since the first white people stepped foot on this land. From the time Europeans touched “American” soil, white bodies terrorized, killed, exploited, and enslaved nonwhite bodies. hooks continues:

If the mask of whiteness, the pretense, represents it as always benign, benevolent, then what this representation obscures is the representation of danger, the sense of threat. During the period of racial apartheid, still known by many folks as Jim Crow, it was more difficult for black people to internalize this pretense, hard for us not to know that the shapes under white sheets had a mission to threaten, to terrorize. That representation of whiteness, and its association with innocence, which engulfed and murdered Emmett Till was a sign; it was meant to torture with the reminder of possible future terror.[26]

In many ways white supremacy is synonymous with white racism. The idea of whiteness and its inherent Othering and subordination of non-whites maintains a system of white supremacy and therefore maintains oppression and terror. It follows, then, that every white person is implicated in the system of whiteness as racism and terror. While imagining oneself as contributing to terror and oppression is painful, so is the terror and oppression painful for its victims. To truly understand white privilege and white power is to look at the historic meanings of whiteness and to acknowledge the history inscribed on every body. White bodies are inscribed with the terrorism that white people have perpetuated throughout history and which continues today. This must be realized for the systems of oppression and domination to be changed.

Kendall writes, “…Racism is as devastating, as costly, and as psychically obliterating as robbery and assault; indeed they are often the same. Racism resembles other offenses against humanity whose structures are so deeply embedded in culture as to prove extremely resistant to being recognized as forms of oppression... As in rape cases, victims of racism must prove that they did not distort the circumstances, misunderstand the intent, or even enjoy it.”[27]

---

[1] Kendall, Frances E Understanding White Privilege 59

[2] Jensen 10

[3] Kendall 67

[4] Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, Tides Center

[5] Kendall 71-72

[6] McIntosh, Peggy “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”

[7] James, Joy Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics 24

[8] Ibid., 26-27

[9] Jensen 10

[10] Kendall 62-63

[11] Kendall 72

[12] Harris, Cheryl. "Whiteness as Property.” Black on White. 104

[13] Harris 106

[14] Ibid., 108

[15] Jensen 16

[16] Kendall 35

[17] Jensen 3-4

[18] Ibid., xix

[19] Haney López White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race 107

[20] Ibid., 197-198

[21] Goudge, Paulette The Power of Whiteness: Racism in Third World Development and Aid. 41

[22] Kendall 63

[23] Ibid., 63. Bold added.

[24] Jensen 17-18

[25] bell hooks "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination." Black on White 50-51

[26] Ibid., 50-51

[27] Kendall 73

Talk

by Emily House

This is about race.

It’s about a white girl talking about race.

And I want to put that out there,

‘cause when I write,

it’s easy to for my body to erase race

with metaphors and easy listenin’ symbolism.

This is about talking about it.

So let’s be clear.

We do not arrive.

There is not some set demarcation point

a conductor’s coppertin voice dictating

that this is where the rails stop

and you begin.

No, friend, we are in a constant state of

getting there, of seeing the horizon

and stretching out our finger bones,

grasping, catching,

letting go.

We don’t capture the horizon,

can’t wrap it in our palms and

smell the distance suddenly present.

There is no point at which we will sit up

at the of the world’s sidewalks,

edge

share a twilight glance and say,

This is it.

And to wait for that moment…

well, it’s been done.

I have turned my ear bones inside out this year, listening.

My watch hands have grown feet and walked on without me

as I have waited

and waited

and waited

and waited

and waited

and waited.

Maybe the words would tiptoe through my drumming ears

around my jaw, and lead a surprise attack on my tongue.

maybe

if I gave it enough tiiiiiime

my mouth would start speaking in blossomed ideas.

It would lead my brain around the stiletto steel structures

whose stone seeds I have happily eaten,

and whose roots now strike through my white skin.

They

no, I

impale those beside me.

With time, I thought, if I just opened my blank pores

I could be Inundated

with an o c e a n i c understanding.

How to:

mime a conversation

script an observation

see my own miseducation

and know how to Call People Out.

Smell the heath of my own shit

as I brought it to the table.

Waiting, I sat SILENT

in the putrid tropics of my color

unconsciousness.

Silence

is place whites need to shake hands with

*oh, a little more.*

When we can finally swallow our jug band egos,

silence is where the work begins.

But when our wordlessness

grows pornographic shadows,

and we start to Instruct ourselves

to the heat of others

speaking the lines for us,

this voyeuristic violence quietly sighs,

masturbating.

so This is my beginning

again

traincar-coupled with more beginnings

more and more

again

again

And now i’m scratching WORDS

into my body’s steel beams,

conducting self-surgery and laying them in front of me

my own, stationless tracks.

these, though, these are newly etched

painful, illegible, splintered,

pale echoes of intent

insufficient poetic incomprehension.

But nonetheless

they are My words.

Nonetheless,

My horizon.

Silent Death

Latonja Sinckler

A compilation of words from White Privilege and Male Privilege by Peggy McIntosh, The Heart of Whiteness by Robert Jenson, and The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audrey Lorde, expressing the sentiments of a world gone wrong.

These words and phrases are not my own. They come from the articles themselves, however I have edited sentences by merely subtracting words and adding punctuations, to create that below.

A lot of what we live is roles. We act this stuff out over and over. You might start as “your nigger” and end up as “that nigger.” You call yourselves the Human Rights Campaign and support Shell. Obliging women not to scream rather than obliging men not to hit. Maybe that’s a clue something is wrong.

Some white people I meet, assume. I have to face that, it’s very disappointing. I am not connected. They show colors by using the word nigger; talking about other people of color. People of color weigh their interests, avoiding issues that reinforce distorted public perceptions. The cost of suppression seldom recognized. The failure to discuss. The issue shapes perception. How serious the problem is white supremacy?

The whiteness erased, and it’s just about … but it’s never just about anything because oppressions and -isms are. Home is a castle a safe haven from indignities of life. Antiracist discourse to regard the problem, countless first-person stories begin with a statement like, "I was not supposed to be..." White supremacy is rarely acknowledged, White privilege, systematic racism. Whiteness erased or we never survive.

We all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end.

What words you do not have? What do you need to say? Love matters in this world, claim humanity, dream of being a human being, reject a system that conditions your pleasure on someone else’s pain. Tell me I better learn, lest we waste ourselves- fighting truths.

(Re)Covering (from) Racism: An Insider's Critique of White Liberal Ideology

Stacie Szmonko

I am a recovering racist.[1]

It is difficult to trace the origin of ideas that have been slipped into me from every facet of society, but some combination of family, friends, school, and the media[2] have taught me how to participate in, benefit from, and maintain a White Supremacist society. They have taught me to do this not through the values preached by Fox News, the Bush Administration, neo-Nazis and other “hate” groups, but through the mainstream values of liberal white Democrats.

The American Dream

I was raised by two white middle class parents in a small city twenty minutes outside of Boston. While my mom’s family had been around for a few generations (Russian Jews), my Dad was first generation American (Russian Orthodox). They both grew up working class in and around Boston’s city limits.

My Dad has an irrelevant Associate’s degree in an area he’s never worked in, and my Mom couldn’t afford any college at all, even though she went to a renowned public school and aced her SATS. Now they both make at least double the national average in income, and enough, with refinancing of the home I’ve lived in my whole life, to send me to Wesleyan with only loans as financial aid. In a way, they are poster children for the American Dream. Hard work has allowed them to send me, their daughter to a private elitist institution and begin my adult life with more advantages than they ever had. Hard work and white privilege, “the gift that keeps on giving.”[3]

For those of us who are white and socialized in the US, the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myth is constitutive of our very identities. It is the center of our colorblind ideology-- the single largest re-producer of the idea that we are all on equal footing, regardless of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality. Because the American Dream claims that anyone can “make it” with hard work, people who do not have access to class mobility because of systematic oppression are easily dismissed as lazy and/or criminal—in other words, poverty is the fault of the individual, and not a racist capitalist system. We see this most explicitly in a paternalistic welfare discourse that rarely hides its racist nature. However, it penetrates everything in our society. As long as the blame is on the individual, whites don’t have to account for systematic racism in employment, education, housing, healthcare, banking, the prison industrial complex, or the law (among many other areas).

As Frances E. Kendall writes, “We are able, almost always, to forget that everything that happens in our lives occurs in the context of the supremacy of whiteness. We are admitted to college, hired for jobs, given or denied loans, cared for by the medical profession, and walk down the street as white people, always in the context of white dominance. Part of the reason that doors open for us is our unearned racial privilege. But we act as if, and often believe that, we have earned everything we get. We then generalize from our notion of our deserving the opportunities we get to thinking that, if a person of color doesn’t get a job or a loan, it’s because she or he didn’t earn it.”[4]

We don’t have to account for poverty—we can just police the symptoms. We can hold Clinton as our ideal liberal president and watch as he reforms welfare without questioning him. We can call for universal healthcare and education without addressing the reasons that people of color have significantly less access to these things. We can call for education reform without trying to change the law that makes property taxes a significant part of school funding, essentially guaranteeing that schools in poor neighborhoods remain poor in every sense of the word. Most essentially, even if we do choose to address these things, as white people in a white supremacist system, we have the privilege of doing it without implicating ourselves.

My parents lived the American Dream, and I can tell the story without having to use the word white. It would be a lie, but many people wouldn’t notice. I could cover the racism of the system by ignoring the fact that if my parents were not white, their journey to the middle-class would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. My parents did not have to deal with employers who immediately questioned their intelligence and integrity upon seeing them. If they made mistakes, they were forgiven and trusted to learn from them. They were admitted into jobs for which they had little experience without doubt that they would learn quickly. If they raised issues with their employers, they were never seen as disruptive. There are a hundred examples like this, but I will give one more.

Earlier this year, I told one of my close white friends who self-identifies as “very liberal” that I’m not sure I would be at Wesleyan if my parents weren’t white. She asked what I meant, and there could have been many answers, but that day I was thinking about my parents’ finances. I said, “I’m not sure that they would have been able to get a mortgage.” My friend looked baffled, and I said something vague about racial discrimination in banking practices, expecting her to know what I was talking about. To my great surprise, she didn’t believe me. This is for her, and the other doubtfuls:

Given the exact same financial history, white people in the United States are two and a third times more likely to get a housing loan than African Americans and one and a half times more likely than Latinos. Further, the types of loans, prime (those at the best interest rates) and subprime (those at a much higher rate), vary dramatically by group. In 2002, only 7.5 percent of housing loans made to whites were subprime, while 26.4 percent of loans made to African Americans were subprime, as were 20 percent to Latinos.[5]

On Diversity

Sometime in high school my Mom told me that they chose to live in Waltham because it was one of the “most diverse” Boston suburbs. My mother never explained why this was a better option than the surrounding towns that were almost all-white, richer, and had better public schools. I never asked. I was raised to believe that diversity was an inherently good thing, even though we lived on the mostly-white side of town, on a street whose first Black family moved in just a few years ago. In my white, middle-class existence, diversity meant the brown people who mostly lived in lower-income neighborhoods across town, the ones who sat on the opposite side of the cafeteria. This is something that I used to call “self-segregation;” it was the way I explained to myself why most of my friends and most of the people I interacted with were white. It was harder to explain why there were only two black people in my Honors/AP classes for my entire high school career or why there were no Latinos in these classes even though this was the largest and fasting growing “minority” population in Waltham. Of course, I didn’t have to explain these things—I had the privilege of ignoring them.

Like many others, when it came time to apply to college I was sold on Wesleyan’s motto: Diversity University. For most white liberals, diversity is a cherished, essential value. However, the pursuit of diversity or multiculturalism, when not coupled with systemic change, serves to further white supremacy. When the focus is put on culture instead of power, oppressive systems are erased and white people get to feel better about their role as oppressors while also benefiting from the difference of others. Jensen writes:

Instead of focusing on diversity, we should focus on power. The fundamental frame for pursuing analyses of issues around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class should not be cultural but political, not individual but structural. Instead of talking about diversity in race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, we should critique white supremacy, economic inequality in capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexism. We should talk about systems and structures of power, about ideologies of domination and subordination—and about the injuries done to those in subordinate groups, and the benefits and privileges that accrue to those in dominant groups.[6]

Moreover, in predominantly white institutions where people of color serve to “diversify” schools and other organizations, a heavy burden is placed on people of color to constantly educate ignorant white folks. As Joy James writes, “Investments in multiculturalism give schools the appearance of being academically enriched in ‘diversity,’ where colored students (like those faculty members who are raided or recruited) share their narratives and appearance to become part of the unpaid educational performers in service of diversification; this service is unlike that which ethnic majority faculty, staff, and students perform.”[7]

American Dream Part II.

Yes, white America is still dreaming. Dreaming of a world where racism no longer exists, a world where we white liberals are not its beneficiaries. This dream is kept alive by every media outlet, but more importantly, by our schools. By erasing and downplaying a centuries-old system of brutal racist oppression by whites, our schools also erase context for our current thoughts and actions. As bell hooks writes in Talking Back, “When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do white-supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they profess to wish to see eradicated” (113).

Moreover, by making invisible thousands of years of creation and hundreds of years of resistance by Native Americans on both continents, Africans, Arabs, Asians, Pacific Islanders and their descendants, our current school curricula rob us of alternative narratives, knowledges, epistemologies and ways of being. Rather than being taught to de-center the false universalisms of whiteness, we are fed lies that allow us to produce and re-produce oppression, sometimes without even knowing it.

FORMAL EDUCATION: An abridged history of my experiences with my socialization[8] at Waltham Senior High School.

In my high school, as in many others, World History meant European history from the time of Christianity and American history meant the history of whites, mostly men. Things like the genocide of Native Americans and Northern slavery were never mentioned, and neither were the variety of democratically-elected governments we’ve overthrown, the dictators we’ve installed and supported, or the “territories” we’ve occupied and colonized. In my high school’s American history, we were the just, righteous, powerful and free country that I occasionally wish I could still believe in. We entered World War II to protect the Jews - even though we had done nothing to interfere for the first few years we knew they were being slaughtered. The internment camps were mentioned briefly but then the class moved on, much like the other times that any people of color were mentioned. Communist and socialist beliefs were never explained, even when we momentarily passed over the Red Scare, and Africa did not exist in my classrooms, even though I know now that African countries were the places that suffered the brutal, sustained violence of a supposedly Cold War. Asia was limited to China and Japan; the only Pacific island that existed was a Hawaii whose indigenous history current reality was erased and replaced by Pearl Harbor. Latin America was the white-washed version of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the occasional cultural facts in Spanish class. I don’t remember ever hearing the word colony to describe something other than a young, English America.

I’ve heard many people say that we learn history so that we don’t make the mistakes of the past. But my high school’s version of history deliberately sheltered me from a past that could have made me learn about my place in the world. Even in English class, when To Kill a Mockingbird led us to talk about a Jim Crow South, racism was located in a specific time and place, and it was certainly not my body, our classrooms, or anywhere in the Northeast. If it did exist in the 21^st century, it was located in a distant South that I had never visited. In a clear memory, my English teacher who I loved dearly asked us about To Kill a Mockingbird, “What is the equivalent of this struggle today?” and answered for us “Gay Rights.” And at that moment, as a sixteen year old struggling with my own emerging queer identity, I was extremely grateful. But now, years later and for the first time, I realize the complications of that statement. Because it suggests that the civil rights movement is over, that widespread racism has been defeated, that the criminalization of people of color is a problem of the past.

This is how we (don’t) discuss racism in mainstream (white) America. I was taught growing up that racism today couldn’t be compared to its old, massive forms. I was taught that racism was something only perpetrated by evil individuals and groups full of hate.[9] Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, the KKK, neo-Nazis, and more recently George Allen and Trent Lott—these were just a few of my models for racism over the years. Racism was saying blatantly fucked up things or committing overt violent acts that could be classified as hate crimes. Discussions of racism never involved the word POWER, and they never implicated me. This is how I swallowed the greatest (white) lie of liberal ideology: colorblindness.

On (Color) Blindness

“A central theme of…the civil rights era was that color should not determine someone’s worth or allege intelligence, nor should it affect someone’s right to vote, see a movie, drink from a fountain, or get a fair trial. Many of us fought to remove color from a list of indicators of anything important—who you should date or marry, who should be president, who you go to school with. Color shouldn’t matter, period. It was just something you ‘happened’ to be. Integration in the United States was about assimilating Black people into white society; the goal was to make them more like us. Today the objective of being ‘color-blind’ is much the same. I put it in quotation marks because I don’t believe being color-blind is possible in terms of race. I think it is used to obscure what is really going on. If we aren’t forced to deal with color—ours or others’—we can pretend that we don’t live in a society totally stratified by race.”[10]

Colorblindness is the belief in a universal humanity—the belief that we should all be treated with the decency because after all, we are all human beings. If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it is because you’ve heard it in almost every human rights campaign, including calls for universal healthcare and education in the US. On the surface, it sounds like a good thing. The idea is that people have been discriminated against because of perceived racial difference, so ignoring people’s race and treating everyone the same will cure the world’s ills. Yet, in seeking to erase difference, colorblindness tries to erase the effects of hundreds of years of white supremacy, and pretends that that system ended with Lincoln’s proclamation. This leads to a popular hallucination created and driven by neo-conservative backlash against Blacks who began rising into positions of power. By calling negative, usually racist attention to people of color who have benefited from official programs of Affirmative Action, it disavows the unofficial, violently upheld affirmative action program that has benefited whites since the time of Columbus. Commenting on this, family legacy, and the claim that Blacks who benefit from Affirmative Action suffer low self-esteem, Julian Bond says, “elite professions have been near exclusive preserve of white men – I doubt that these men are suffering low self esteem because their race and gender helped them get their job.”[11] Colorblindness also reinforces the already dominating normalization of whiteness. This is how a supposedly liberal ideology comes to serve neo-conservative, racist causes.

Rather than attempt to articulate the work which has already been done by people much more brilliant than myself, I leave most of this section to a few theorists who I admire.

bell hooks writes of her white students, “Often their rage erupts [when whiteness is criticized] because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of ‘sameness,’ even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think…Even though the majority of these students politically consider themselves liberals and anti-racist.”[12]

Toni Morrisson writes, “The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous liberal gesture.”[13]

In white liberal discourse, colorblindness often takes the form of keeping the focus on class instead of race. In one example, an article I recently read about the problems of affordable housing didn’t discuss public housing or mention practices of predatory lending, redlining, and environmental racism. By focusing solely on class-based issues, white liberals allow continuing racist practices to go unnoticed, thereby strengthening and re-creating the systems from which they benefit.

Nelson M. Rodriguez writes, “Color-blind discourse is not…benignly looking past race…Instead, it is a project set up to ‘protect’ white privilege and power by, as educational theorist Peter McLaren (1997) notes, permitting ‘white people to construct ideologies that help them to avoid the issue of racial inequality while simultaneously benefiting from it’ (262). In other words, the rhetoric of color blindness enables Whites to erase from consciousness not only the history of racism and how that history plays itself out economically, politically, socially, and culturally in the present; such an insidious discourse also dissuades both the individual and institutions from engaging in antiracist strategies for dismantling white privilege and for reworking the terrain of whiteness.”[14]

On the subject of “minority ‘set aside’ programs,” Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall says, “A profound difference separates governmental actions that themselves are racist, and governmental actions that seek to remedy the effects of prior racism or to prevent neutral government activity from perpetuating the effects of such racism.”[15]

Joy James writes, “The fact that affirmative action gains are overwhelmingly attributed to blacks in national racial rhetoric and imagery, although quantitatively the greatest beneficiaries have been white women and increasingly other people of color, attests to the endurance of the black/white binary in the American mind and the racialization of the deserving industrious sector as ‘white’ and the parasitic sector as ‘black.’”[16] She also argues, “Anti-affirmative action race rhetoric obscures white group interests by positing the notion of competing and deserving and ‘undeserving’ individuals, when in fact the battle is about racialized groups juxtaposed with the subordinate status of blacks.”[17]

Colorblindness depends on the circulation of this concept that the only racism that still exists in our society occurs between individuals, it in order to have validity and perpetuate itself. As I white person in the Northeast, this is what I was raised to believe.

It was not that I was completely blind to the institutions—I saw that many people of color were poor; I saw the bad schools. But I was not taught to see white supremacy. I didn’t understand that racism in America amounted to systemic discrimination in access to housing, banking, capital, healthcare, good schools, and jobs that paid a living wage. I didn’t see the way capitalism relied on an underclass and the way that underclass was racialized. I didn’t understand the racist and paternalistic discourse surrounding welfare that put the blame for a dehumanizing and oppressive system on individuals of color. I didn’t understand prostitution, immigration issues, gentrification, stereotyping, widespread interpersonal violence, rape, and sexual assault. I, like all Americans, “knew” about gang violence, but I didn’t know about the systemic violence perpetrated against people of color by the military, the police, and the rest of prison industrial complex, all of which claim to protect American citizens. It took me a long time to realize that American citizen meant white.

And even when I did begin to understand these things, I didn’t understand the way that I benefited from them. Something in me, something power-hungry, stopped me from understanding that Other people’s unjust systematic disadvantages were my unearned systematic advantages. As Peggy McIntosh writes in White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, “My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture…My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’”[18] Of course, this fits into our broader societal concept of America as a melting pot: everyone will love each other as long as people of color assimilate to unmarked white standards.

I wish I could tell you there was a single moment of reckoning. But I can’t remember the first time I heard the words White Privilege and I can’t remember the first time I let them sink in. All of the people I quote in this article were essential to my learning, and this gives me hope for various types of re-education. I know now that it is a heavy, heavy knowledge to be carrying around. What does it mean for my skin to carry the history of missionaries, colonialism, slavery, genocide, segregation, poverty, dehumanization, war, development, the prison industrial complex, capitalism, and other forms of exploitation? What does it mean for me to benefit from the suffering that Others face because of these systems?

Audre Lorde writes that white people’s gravitation toward the idea of colorblindness is bound up in trying to escape responsibility. She writes, “For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt.[19]” Colorblindness allows us to escape white guilt—to escape implicating ourselves in a system of domination that we benefit from. It allows us to disengage with our own racism and the structural hierarchies of racism that are the very foundation of our culture. While I believe feeling this guilt is often useful motivation for change, Jensen writes that just as often “Guilt is a way for white people to avoid taking action. If one feels guilty it is easy to feel paralyzed, which makes it easy not to act.”[20] While guilt is a good way to understand how we are implicated, as Professor Aradhana Sharma once said to my class, “Paralysis is not an option.”

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[1] This is a term I first heard in a weekly Anti-Racism forum for white folks in New Orleans. My understanding is that it is used widely by anti-racism groups around the US, to reference the disease of racism as something that one never fully recovers from as long as we live in a White Supremacist society. The idea is that there is always work to be done, both within the self, and in our society.

[2] I use the term media broadly to encompass magazines, newspapers, television (all of it, not just the News), movies, art, books, and music.

[3] Julian Bond lecture at Wesleyan, 4/10/07

[4] Kendall, Frances E. Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race. New York: Routledge, 2006. Page 75.

[5] Ibid. 63

[6] Jensen 78.

[7] James, Joy. Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics. New York: Palgrave 2002. 23.

[8] It is essential for us to conceptualize education as socialization. Schools indoctrinate us with behavioral patterns; they teach us how to exist in a White Supremacist American Society. Much like in our families, we are taught rules that are enforced by various types of punishment, and we are taught to submit to authority. We are taught about race, class, gender, and sexuality, even if these words are never mentioned. We are taught what is valued by society and what is disvalued, what “proper” behavior is and how we are to abide by it. In America’s public schools I was taught (among many other things) to value the United States, Democracy, Capitalism, Whiteness, Christianity, Enlightenment Reasoning, Maleness, Technology, The Written Word, Expertise through Formal Education, Heterosexuality, the Middle Class, Standardized American English, and of course, the American Dream. I was taught to dis-value things that did not fit in to these categories. In my experience, all of these ideas were naturalized—they were deemed to have inherent good and I believed in most of them. In this way, they fit Gramsci’s model of hegemony exactly—systems of power that rule by consent of the governed. It is also important to note—as I’ve heard both Joy James and Demetrius Eudell say on multiple occasions—elite schools like Wesleyan (even while they can offer an alternative education) reproduce bourgeoisie society and the U.S. class structure.

[9] It is interesting to think about the ways that this sort of social stigmatization could be useful if America’s relationship to racism were more honest and allowed its realistic complexity.

[10] Kendall 51

[11] Lecture at Wesleyan 4/10/07.

[12] Hooks, Bell. “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Black on White: Confronting Whiteness 41

[13] Morrison, Toni. “Black Matters.” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. 10-11.

[14] Rodriguez, Nelson M. “Projects of Whiteness in a Critical Pedagogy.” 8.

[15] As quoted in Racial Formations by Omi & Winant

[16] James 21

[17] Ibid. 19

[18] McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Napsack.” 1988. 3

[19] Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984. 118

[20] Jensen 47.