Whiteness in Crisis
One day during the first decade of the 21st century, I found myself standing in front of a classroom of graduate students asking for straight white males to participate in a study of racial awareness development in straight, white, USAmerican males. The response wasn’t so much crickets as it was stifled locusts. I stood in the frantic silence until it was broken by a member of the class, a black man, who said, “That’s a good study.” His endorsement was permission for the room to exhale. By the end of the class, three of the white men present had volunteered.
Much has changed since then, both for me and for the United States. If I were to do that study today, one change (among many) I would make would be to add the dimension of cis-gendered to the participant identity parameters. The goal was to understand the awareness of the group that has always been disproportionally powerful in our society. I was hoping to do some good for the world, but I was also doing this study to pave a road I was walking myself. I had so few resources to develop a multicultural white racial identity that I felt I needed to build some. Along the way I’ve also found people and institutions that have been fundamental in my development. We whites can’t develop racial awareness alone even though, ultimately, we have to do it for ourselves.
As a white man who’s life’s work includes whites’ racial awareness development, a historic moment when mainstream whites seem gripped by new awareness of whiteness and racism is hopeful, disorienting, and honestly, a bit frightening. At a time like this I find that I have my own new awakenings. Witnessing people of color around the world rise up against racism in the midst of the greatest public health crisis in 100 years inspires literal awe in me, a state that opens both one’s mind and one’s heart. I also find I have a new sense of physical and economic vulnerability within the pandemic, whereas before I felt much more insulated from physical and financial suffering. I have no doubt that my new vulnerability is contributing to any epiphanies I may be having. Vulnerability opens hearts and minds as well, and makes us see fellow humans’ suffering in a new light. This is literally biochemically true: brain research shows that the less power we have, the more active our mirror neurons, the “empathy” part of our brains, become. Whatever the bio/emotional cause, I, along with many other whites, feel driven to take more action. The amount of human suffering and rage I need to witness for me to become aware and change is at least one indicator of my privilege.
It’s disorienting to suddenly see new commitment to ending racism from so many whites. For decades people of color have been telling those who would listen that we well-intentioned whites are, at best, a mixed blessing. Many will say that we are no blessing at all. Van Jones recently echoed this long-held sentiment regarding “even the most liberal, well intentioned white person.”
When we attempt to change the world without developing new skills first; when we have a limited or non-existent analysis of race and racism; when we act with little or no input from the members of the groups we are trying to “help,” or blindly follow these same groups with no sense of partnership; and when we act with a fundamental lack of understanding of ourselves as racial beings, or refuse to accept that we have racial biases that impact our behavior without our awareness and how that means we can espouse all manner of beautiful values and still be driven by ugly ones; when we do these things, we invariably recreate white supremacy. As Audre Lorde famously said, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” I once heard the brilliant Jelani Cobb describe the master’s tools at work by saying: “Affirmative action is what we got instead of actual change.”
White supremacy dehumanizes both the transmitter and the receiver of racism. Its impact on people of color is obvious if we’re willing to look. What is less obvious to us is the impact white supremacy has on the way we treat ourselves and each other as whites. I see it in action in my and many fellow whites’ tendency to constantly police each other for racism, especially in the absence of interpersonal connectedness. This is not to say that we shouldn’t hold each other accountable for our racist behavior or personal awareness development. On the contrary, holding ourselves and each other responsible for our racism is a fundamental habit without which we are not only doomed to fail, but we are by definition, failing. But those of us who struggle alongside other whites to dismantle racism know the deadening pall of a group of us all poised to pounce on each other for the slightest perceived transgression. We see the very biases that we keep hidden from ourselves much more readily in others. While this may be all too human, it is the opposite of humanization. It is why the American conservative movement, as uncoupled from reality and driven by racist animus as it clearly is, has a valid critique of the white left. Our perfectionism creates a kind of totalitarianism. It’s no small irony that in this critique conservatives are taking issue with the workings of white supremacy. Only, in this case it’s directed at whites.
Much of the conservative approach to race is based on the belief that the way to achieve equality for all is to obliterate our differences, ignoring the fact that to be “different” is to be different from someone else, and that in this case, that someone else is them. No one ever takes the approach that their own differences from others need to be obliterated unless they have to in order to survive in relation to a dominant group. Conservatives’ answer to racism is to do what they believe is “nothing.” The fix is to not intervene in the belief that “free” people, unfettered from any form of regulation, beget free people. They believe this in spite of the evidence of, well, all of history. It has often taken the might of the just to protect people from the wrath of the unjust. Or they throw up their hands and say that it’s human nature for us to dominate each other as if somehow one can comfortably accede to one’s own dominance and still be a moral person. Or perhaps they simply bank on the all too real possibility that even if, to paraphrase Paulo Freire, “the oppressed rise up and try to become the oppressor,” the police state will be able to repress them. The conservative “answer” to racism is more racism, and, as we’re seeing now, the descent into its own explicit fascism. And it is people of color who have now once again stepped in and, as Nikole Hanna-Jones has asserted, been the ones to have made America a democracy.
As awe inspiring as that is to see, the thought of millions of newly minted, outward looking, white antiracists seeking to check each other into oblivion is almost as frightening as the baseless confidence of the millions of avid supporters of the 45th president, with their alternative facts, alternative news cycle, and, in their belief that whites are the truly besieged people, alternative genocide. These two seemingly opposing stances are actually different denominations of the same currency of white supremacy. As I heard Ron Chisom once say, “White people in this work will tear each other apart.” I don’t know where I would stand if the roles were reversed. I might very well think, “Let them hack at each other, at least they’re leaving me alone.” But chaos in society will probably harm people of color more than us whites, since every ill visited upon our nation visits them more harshly. Mr. Chisom certainly hasn’t given up on us whites.
Of course we need to understand and intervene on our privilege if we wish to live up to our espoused values of justice for all. We need to be able to work through our defensiveness and build relationships of mutual care to help each other effectively dismantle the workings of white privilege, both within ourselves and within the world. And we have to know the role that privilege plays in our society. Privilege is the reception that is reserved for those who are “one of us.” It’s the default setting when difference is not present among members of the dominant group. The first problem of privilege is that only some people have it. Those that don’t are excluded and often treated with apathy or cruelty. The fix is not so much to strip us white people of the benefits that privilege confers. The fix is extending those benefits to everyone. We need to learn how to broaden our world enough to include everyone as “one of us” so that we are all fully members of the default group. We need to approach each person with equal compassion, not equal cruelty. We need to humanize ourselves more deeply than we have. And we have to do that now.
There’s an old riddle: Three frogs were sitting on a log. One decided to jump into the water. How many were left? Three. The one only decided.
Peter DiCaprio, June 2020
