By John McWhorter
Sunday, March 15, 2015
If you’ve been white lately, you have likely been
confronted with the idea that to be a good person, you must cultivate a guilt
complex over the privileged status your race enjoys.
It isn’t that you are doing, or even quite thinking,
anything racist. Rather, your existential state of Living While White
constitutes a form of racism in itself. Your understanding will serve as a tool
… for something. But be careful about asking just what that something is,
because that will mean you “just don’t get it.”
To be sure, there is, indeed, a distinct White Privilege.
Being white does offer a freedom not easily available to others. You can
underperform without it being ascribed to your race. And when you excel, no one
wonders whether Affirmative Action had anything to do it. Authority figures are
likely to be your color, and no one associates people of your color with a
propensity to violence. No one expects you to represent your race in a class
discussion or anywhere else.
These are the basics of White Privilege, disseminated in
key campus texts such as Peggy McIntosh’s foundational “Unpacking the Invisible
Backpack” from 1988. It’s become a meme of Blue America’s mental software,
recently focused by the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric
Garner.
But “White Privilege” is more than just a term these
days. For example, some of New York City’s elite private schools are giving
White Privilege lessons to their student bodies, teaching them, for example,
that when affluent white students talk about their expensive vacations this
could be hurtful to students of color from humbler circumstances. The
Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service kicked off its community
meetings in Ferguson with White Privilege teachings. There are college courses,
and even a yearly conference. White Privilege is suddenly a hot topic and
cottage industries have sprung up around it.
However, one can thoroughly understand how racism works
and still ask just what this laser focus on “White Privilege” is meant to
achieve.
“This is messy work, but these conversations are
necessary,” says Sandra Chapman, director of diversity and community at Little
Red School House in New York City. Okay—but why? Note that the answer cannot
be, “So that whites will understand that they are the privileged … etc.” That
makes as much sense as saying “Because!” So I’m going to dare to ask a simple
question: What exactly are we trying to achieve with this particular lesson?
***
I assume, for example, that the idea is not to teach
white people that White Privilege means that black people are the only group of
people in human history who cannot deal with obstacles and challenges. If the
idea is that black people cannot solve their problems short of white people
developing an exquisite sensitivity to how privileged they are, then we in the
black community are being designated as disabled poster children.
On the American version of The Office, Michael Scott
fakes a physical disability and solicits sympathy from black salesman Stanley,
designating him as “disabled” by “obstacles” because of his color. “I am not
disabled and neither are you,” grouses Stanley—and in the scene, he is the wise
one and Scott is the buffoon. But those urging us to think about White
Privilege are not buffoons.
Is the goal to urge people into activism against the
conditions that afford whites their privilege? White Privilege spokespersons
would surely agree. After all, the White Privilege Conference’s website noting
that it is “About Creating Change.”
But two things seem hard to miss.
First, making a lot of the changes White Privilege tutors
seem to suggest would tie us up into knots, especially in the educational
realm. If no one asks black people to comment on racial issues, then the charge
will be that whites are turning a blind eye to … White Privilege. As to
discomfort from being suspected of being an Affirmative Action hire, to have
any but the tiniest of criticisms of racial preferences is considered
blasphemy, displaying an ignorance of … White Privilege.
I went to a private school in the seventies with white
kids happily talking about their vacations and lavish bar mitzvahs; some of
them had VCRs before I even knew what one was. For what it’s worth, I did not
feel hurt that I didn’t live on their scale. And in any case, what good would
it have done to tell these white kids to not talk around black kids about their
toys and trips? Wouldn’t that have implied that kids like me were
pathologically delicate, and wouldn’t the next complaint have been that white
kids were holding themselves back from the black kids, i.e. segregating
themselves, ignorant of … White Privilege?
Second, it’s hard not to notice that amidst the White
Privilege rhetoric, the activist goal is largely implied. Obviously, no one
puts it that way, but as those interested in White Privilege know so well when
it comes to racism, what people say is often an approximate reflection of their
true feelings and intents. McIntosh’s essay refers in passing to something as
hypothetical as the “redesign of social systems” at the end of her tome,
calling whether we want to seek such a thing “an open question.” The discussion
hasn’t changed much since 1988. The White Privilege Conference bills itself as
being about “understanding, respecting, and connecting.” Those are all
admirable aims but they apply to the White Privilege teach-ins, not applying
the lessons to actually changing society. White Privilege puts a laser focus on
the awareness raising. The awareness raising is what it is about.
***
Of course, the idea is supposedly that we need to
disseminate this awareness of White Privilege before we can start on the
political part of the project. But the case for White Privilege as a necessary
prelude to change relies on a premise that America is a nation “in denial”
about racism past and present. That premise has rhetorical punch, but doesn’t
comport with reality.
Take the usual phrasing that America needs a
“conversation” on race. Our country engages in an endless “conversation” about
race year round, in the media, academia, and barstool talk, while schools,
museums, the media, the publishing industry, and government organizations treat
coverage, exploration and deploring of, as well as apology for, racism as
ingrained aspects of their mission.
Many foreign observers would be baffled by the notion
that this is a nation that refuses a “conversation” about race or even
racism—just last year involved fervent discussions of not only police
brutality, but microaggression, gentrification, the N-word, reparations, and
much more. The fact that this conversation doesn’t lead to all whites bowing
down to all black complaints, an outcome tacitly desired by a certain cadre of
academics and journalists, does not disqualify it as a conversation.
The question, then, becomes: Precisely what benefit do
White Privilege 101 lessons add to all of what there already is? (Again,
“knowing about White Privilege” is not an answer.) What are we hoping will
happen in the wake of these lessons that hasn’t been happening before, and
crucially, upon what evidence has that hope been founded?
America is by no means post-racial, but it is not 1960
either; change happens. Example: the U.S. Justice Department has officially
faulted the Ferguson police department for discriminatory ticketing and could
even shut it down. I cheer that development, but the protests over the Michael
Brown verdict, magnified by social media, are what created this attention. The
White Privilege lessons the DOJ’s outreach body imposed just made local whites
angry. What popped the lock was good Old Fashioned Civil Rights law. What’s the
gain from White Privilege rhetoric?
And yet, quite often to even ask a question like that is
heatedly dismissed as missing the point.
* * *
This is what suggests that the activism part is, indeed,
not the real point. There are some key giveaways. White Privilege 101 lessons
require endless reiteration of key principles to retain. In many ways, taking
them from words to action is such a logically fragile proposition that it must
be billed as endlessly “subtle” (or “messy”)—a strange kind of pitch for
something supposedly so urgent. And those questioning the whole affair are
heatedly dismissed as “not getting it.” It all sounds familiar—but less as
politics than as religion.
Politics is about society. Religion, however, is
personal. The White Privilege paradigm seems to be more about feelings than
action.
In a society where racism is treated as morally
equivalent to pedophilia, what whites are seeking is the sweet relief of moral
absolution. Inside they are pleading, “Please don’t hate me!” And I wouldn’t be
surprised if there is an accompanying feeling of purification (redemption,
even) that comes with such consultant-given absolution. I can honestly say that
I would be engaging in exactly this kind of moral self-flagellation about
racism if I were white in today’s America.
However, not being white, I can’t help but see it from a
different perspective.
If “I know that
I’m privileged!” is a statement made largely for one’s own sense of security,
then it’s unclear to me how, say, the private school programs’ White Privilege
sessions are “challenging” White Privilege, as the Times story’s headline put
it. Semi-coerced self-interest rather than genuine enlightenment or
understanding seems to be the vehicle for this racial revelation.
And as for the black folks committed to fostering
awareness of White Privilege, I frankly wish so many whites weren’t interested
in this, because it ends up enabling us in some bad old habits. When your
people have been enslaved for centuries followed by another century of
lynching, Jim Crow and worse, the racial ego suffers. A suffering ego is ripe
for using the status of the Noble Victim as a crutch; you gain a sense of worth
in being a survivor of the evil one’s depredations. The Noble Victim is in
control—of the conversation, as it were, of the parameters of moral judgment.
The Noble Victim, most certainly, matters. He is, in a
sense, whole. But meanwhile, no one gets a job; no one gets fed; little
tangible progress is actually made. The Struggle, as it used to be called, sits
on hold.
The White Privilege 101 course seems almost designed to
turn black people’s minds from what political activism actually entails. For
example, it’s a safe bet that most black people are more interested in there
being adequate public transportation from their neighborhood to where they need
to work than that white people attend encounter group sessions where they learn
how lucky they are to have cars. It’s a safe bet that most black people are
more interested in whether their kids learn anything at their school than
whether white people are reminded that their kids probably go to a better
school. Given that there is no evidence that White Privilege sessions are a
necessary first step to change (see above), why shunt energy from genuine
activism into—I’m sorry—a kind of performance art?
Indeed, as Barney Frank writes in his new memoir: “If you
care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf
that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others,
you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.” The White Privilege
movement should take heed.
* * *
It is often assumed that someone expressing views like
these has roughly the take on race of Samuel Jackson’s character in Django
Unchained. Not. I am neither criticizing activism nor saying that everybody
needs to just pull themselves up by those proverbial bootstraps.
I get too much hate mail from the right to submit
gracefully to the sellout label. I deplore the War on Drugs, linguistic
discrimination against black people, and naïve dogma that keeps poor black kids
from learning to read. I support prisoner re-entry programs, supported the
Ferguson protests ardently, and was behind Barack Obama earlier than many black
writers. I have never voted Republican in my life.
However, I firmly believe that improving the black
condition does not require changing human nature, which may always contain some
tribalist taints of racism. We exhibit no strength—Black Power—in pretending
otherwise. I’m trying to take a page from Civil Rights heroes of the past, who
would never have imagined that we would be shunting energy into trying to
micromanage white psychology out of a sense that this was a continuation of the
work of our elders. I am not “being a contrarian” or “stirring up the pot”—I do
not consider this a renegade position. Plenty of ordinary black people nationwide
would agree with me on the difference between White Privilege teach-ins and
continuing the struggle.
For that reason, I question this particular focus on
sessions, modules, readings, and talks commanding whites to reflect endlessly
about their privileged status. When parents are watching their eight year olds
herded into racial groups for White Privilege teach-ins, they are neither
racist nor “privileged” in being angry (especially since a lot of them aren’t
what would have been considered “white” a decade or more ago). They deserve
civil answers to their questions. The white high schooler who doesn’t get why
she needs to be smilingly commanded to recognize her status as an unjustly
“privileged” white person is not a racist because she doesn’t “get” it. She
deserves to be given a rationale, and if that rationale is essentially a
repetition of the White Privilege lesson paradigm, then we need to ask some
more questions.
So let’s start this stage of our “dialogue on race” with
a simple question. When our mandated diversity director says, “This is messy
work, but these conversations are necessary,” we have every right, as moral
persons, to ask: Why, and for whose benefit?
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