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"Who is the Ni**er?": Risk The Mirror

8/8/2014

3 Comments

 
First, take six minutes to watch James Baldwin and Toni Morrison (separately) discuss what racism reveals about White America. 
PictureThanks, White Dude!
These clips reveal a truth I've seen as a White American: often, we think of racism as a problem for brown-skinned people. White Americans like me can go through our lives remaining oblivious to the ways in which racism is OUR problem, and how it wounds White people in ways that mainstream society encourages us to ignore.

This brings me to White schizophrenia, a topic on which people like Baldwin and Morrison are experts. Here's what I've seen: if you grow up in America with societal label of "White," you grow up with a system of self-understandings that are fundamentally contradictory. 

On the one hand, as people labeled White, we are taught by mainstream society, over the course of a million little moments, that White people are superior. I only have to look at the books I was assigned in school (almost all White authors), or who starred in the movies I watched growing up (White people), or who controlled the news I watched or read (White people). Scratching the surface of what's most painful of all for me, I think about who myself and other White people marginalized and looked upon as an exotic, dangerous species during my public school experience (Black students). 

Not only are we taught that White people are superior, but we are also taught that it is good and right that White people are on top, socio-economically. We are taught that White people are smarter, more civilized, more morally-sound, and more well-intentioned than other people.

On the other side of this understanding of self, White people must, over the course of our growing up, experience the truth, which is that that concept of White supremacy is laughable. When we can resist relying on stereotypes and instead observe individuals, we see that intelligence and moral character have no correlation with race, and everything to do with context. We see that people who are consistently wounded are more likely to act badly towards others, themselves, and their environment--regardless of their race. We see that people who are loved and accepted--again, regardless of their race--become people who love and accept others and work to preserve their environment.  

Even a White person who grows up with little or no contact with people of color experiences both the depth of awfulness and the height of beauty that other White people are capable of. If you have grown up seeing and participating in the moral vacuum that some White people are capable of living in, you cannot reasonably accept the idea of White supremacy, applied as a blanket belief to all White people. 

                                                           *            *            *

What does this realization of a conflicted identity do to the White psyche? What happens when we are taught, by people we respect and love, to believe a lesson so deeply it becomes instinct, and yet our own experience (which is just as powerful as any teacher) proves that belief to be false? 

And worse, what if this lesson of superiority (now proved false) has formed a basis for the White person's self-image since their early childhood? If I have been taught, day in and day out, that I am inherently superior because I'm White, how do I process my accumulated life experiences that quietly punch gigantic holes all throughout this idea?  

If it's not true that I'm superior in my Whiteness, then what is true about me? 

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Anti-racism begins with internal work by White people. In addition to the moral call for eliminating racism, we White people must see that anti-racist work is also about healing our own wounds (which are often invisible to White eyes), wounds that are inflicted when our learned ideas of White supremacy and the reality of our day-to-day experiences with all-too-human, flawed, and sometimes morally-bankrupt White people collide.

Other relevant stuff I'm currently reading/viewing: Tim Wise, Chris Crass, bell hooks


--Abe Lateiner

3 Comments
Dania
8/9/2014 04:41:47 am

Thanks

Reply
Ben
8/10/2014 04:16:55 am


A few thoughts I've had based on these videos, this post, and discussion with you, Abe. Tangential, but related. Also, almost as long as your post. Sorry? Not sorry?

This might seem like an obvious statement, but I really just crystalized it in my head. "White" is not a racial group -- it's a designation of power. Or, flip it around: racial groups are only and entirely designations of power.

Categories of ethnicity can make a certain amount of sense, in that they tend to be based on regional background, sometimes mixed with religion and language -- they are relatively specific, though hardly ironclad.

Race, on the other hand, as Toni Morrison points out (along with many others), is socially constructed. And Whiteness's only consistent characteristic is access to power based on excluding others from it. Most illuminating to me is the shift in who gets to be White over time -- a century ago, various European "ethnic" groups were on the other side of the line of Whiteness (Italians, Irish, others).

Now, not only are they in (usually), but Aziz Ansari, an Indian American comedian, does a bit in which his White friend says "Aziz, we're the only White guys here" -- he forgets Aziz's pigmentation and includes him in Whiteness because of perceived similarity to himself and/or due to Aziz's speech/manner/cultural reference points/access to power.

A question which really gets to me as a White person is this: does the material quality of my life as a White person -- access to education and real estate, relative lack of harassment by law enforcement, etc. -- is it all dependent on there being other humans being who are Not White? (which goes beyond just the "nigger" of White invention that Baldwin points out, to exclude, you know, everyone else)

That is, could the privileges of modern-day Whiteness be extended to everyone? The Atlantic’s recent article, “The Case for Reparations” suggests that the life I grew up with was consistently built on excluding Non-Whites. So, can social good be developed for everyone without creating an out-group who is denied? And if so, then how/why did this psychologically damaging system come to be, and why can’t we seem to get away from it?

Reply
Abe
8/14/2014 04:19:32 am

Ben, wow...good question. I think your perception of "White" as a status thing (which does include skin color but encompasses much more) is spot-on. And, of course, every other racial category breaks down once you put it under the microscope anyway (ie Barack Obama is as "White" as he is "Black" if we're just talking about skin color, but nobody calls him the first half-White president).

So now to your question: is it possible for all people of a society to enjoy the privileges that our current society only allows to certain people? I think that the privileges enjoyed by American White, cisgender, hetero, upper class men are there thanks, in large part, to the free labor and domination practiced upon people of color and women since forever ago. Does that mean that those privileges can't exist without an underclass in the future? I don't know. I think the kind of lifestyles that are possible for the 1% could not be enjoyed by everyone simultaneously. Not only could our natural resources not sustain it, but also I think about how much American concepts of status depend on being "better than." I'm afraid that our national DNA, as we've created it, depends on domination. If that's the case, the creation of an underclass would be necessary.

But if this is the case, then what are we fighting for? Sometimes I wonder...what if we had a society with the same distribution of money (from preposterous amounts of money and those with almost none) BUT there were no racial, gender, sex, or language patterns as to who was in which group? Maybe that's impossible, but I wonder anyway.

Does the current money stratification of American society depend on the demographic patterns we see along racial, gender, etc. lines? If we couldn't pretty accurately predict a person's money level based on their demographic identities, what would the resulting society look like?

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    Abe Lateiner

    If real change requires people to take risks, what would it mean for a straight, White, cisgender male, tall, thin, able-bodied, English-speaking US citizen with class privilege to take risks?

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