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 21st 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.”
[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.
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