Whiteness

Ooh...let's talk about racism...and white privilege...and rape culture...said very few people...ever.

Despite my observation that Twitter can be a real sewer, partly because you can't delete nasty things that people say to you, I've learned a lot about racism and misogyny and their nemesis, privilege, white, or male, or hetero or cisgender or anything else that is ascendant in our culture.

Let's start with white privilege.

No, let's back up and start with whiteness.

Whiteness is an invented concept. Go back far enough and people didn't talk about being white. The ancestors of today's white people, the inhabitants of Europe, didn't consider themselves a homogeneous "race". The Germans would be very insulted to be equated with the Italians and everyone would be insulted to be put in the same category as the Irish! It wasn't until coming into contact with people with less-advanced military technology, who coincidentally had darker-hued skin color, that the concept of whiteness as a characteristic of superior peoples came about. This differentiation between white and non-white was used as the pretext for colonizing and enslaving the "lesser races". It is interesting to me that to the early European-descended Americans, who were largely from the British Isles and Northern Europe, not only were Native Americans and Africans not white, but Italians and other Southern and Eastern Europeans weren't white either. Amazingly, the Irish who came over in the late 1800's weren't white either, despite the absolute pallor of the typical Irishman.

Even when slavery was outlawed, there was an assumption that former slaves and other blacks were somehow inferior, and that the Indians were just savages. It took another hundred years for non-whites to be legally granted equal rights, and then after a long fight. So there was a long history of white privilege in this country, it is in our national DNA.

White privilege doesn't mean that you didn't work for what you have or that anybody handed anything to you "for free". It also doesn't mean that you're county club privileged either. What it does mean is that just because you are part of that vast, amorphous category dubbed "white" you are the cultural default. No one assumes that you're breaking into your own apartment because you're white, you aren't pulled over in certain neighborhoods because you're white, you don't have to demonstrate that you're "one of the good ones" because you're white. This doesn't mean that you won't get pulled over for unfathomable reasons, or you'll never get fired from a job or shot by the police or wrongfully convicted, but these things will not happen simply because you're white. You aren't the victim (or recipient, if you don't like the "V" word) of racism, defined, for the purpose of this blog post, as institutional and systemic bigotry and prejudice against a group. It's more than just "I don't like people from that group", it's "I don't like people from that group and I'm going to use my power and influence to prevent them from getting any influence and power themselves". It goes even further than that. When the foundations of a society are rooted in racism, it doesn't go away because people say it's gone away. It doesn't even go away in individuals, not completely, when the surrounding culture is steeped in so many racist assumptions.

Something very specific that I've learned is that for a white person who doesn't consider himself to be a racist, the response "but not all white people" is not very helpful. (Similar to the "not all men" battle cry that many of us men reflexively throw out when we hear about the Kavanaughs of the world). The other response "how is that racist?" is similarly unhelpful. It implies that you are dismissing the perception, solidified by years of similar experiences, of the person of color who sees what you said as racist. Something to remember is that you can say or do racist things, even if you do not believe yourself to be a racist. The fact that what you said wasn't intended to be racist doesn't mean that it wasn't. Humbly, without defensiveness, ask to have it explained to you, or at least do some introspection and see if you can figure it out for yourself. Pro tip: just because you framed it as a joke doesn't make it less offensive!

Of course a common rejoinder is that some people throw out "the race card" when it's really their behavior, without respect to race, that's the problem. Sometimes the wielder of that particular "card" just wants to excuse their bad behavior by putting the onus back on the white person. Sometimes you have to dig deep to find out why they think the way they do. Are your hurt feelings over being called a racist more important than a person's day after day being treated as less than a person? It's pretty easy to assume racism when it's not when most of the time it is.

Racism won't go away by wishing it away, or by pretending that it's not structural, or thinking that it hasn't infected us, or that most white people haven't benefited from it.