A Sidebar On Whiteness
Two days ago I wrote the words “sometimes Oregonians […] have this weird sense of self-flagellating pride in confessing Oregon’s sins”. What most of you probably didn’t even notice, as I didn’t until later, was that this was an example of speaking in the white default because of course what I was really talking about were white Oregonians, specifically—but I didn’t actually specify, because white people tend to think of themselves in and as the default.
I don’t want to turn the blog today into a series of posts about white people discovering, explaining, and explicating their whiteness habits, because that’s not the story, but it’s important to bring to the attention of white people fellow white people who are thinking and talking about these things, as long as we do it as a kind of sidebar.
So, I’m going to bring several different things I’ve been reading today together in this one post, rather than post them individually; if I run into any others over the course of the day I’ll just add my remarks about them as addenda here. As it turns out, I think each of the things I’m going to mention here actually will work better through this sort of juxtapositional interplay.
Eric J. Weiner offers a comprehensive take on what he terms “the mis-education of white folks” (via MetaFilter)—comprehensive in a “big picture” sense, not a details sense, specifically about the ways in which we white people misapprehend the nature of our own whiteness in American society, including some very basic dead angles.
White people are rarely asked to think about their successes as connected to social systems and structures, just as black folks are discouraged from thinking about their personal struggles as public issues.
Thinking in terms of systems and structures is one of the things that perhaps is increasing in America right now, as support for both the Black Lives Matters movement and “defund the police” strategy has been growing fast, and we white people haven’t thought collectively about systemic abuses—including the abusive nature of the system itself—on the basis of race in any real or concerted sense for awhile now.
C. M. Condo has some lengthy thoughts about discovering that there just might after all be a “white culture” and just what that means. Condo goes out on a limb in a way few white people do to list (some of) the prejudices not just of white culture but also of their own—which also gets into some talk about systems.
And for the record, systemic racism does NOT mean people in the system are racist. According to the eloquent Rodney Balko, it actually does not speak to the beliefs or actions of the people in the system at all. Instead, Balko affirms that systemic racism refers to the “systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them.”
I’d only note that it’s important for white people to do both things: examine and help dismantle the structures and systems in place from which they benefit and under which black Americans struggle, and examine themselves and their own whiteness. (Condo does this, so this isn’t a call-out.) The fact that systems and structures can be racist, specifically white supremacist, shouldn’t be used as a shield against self-examination. At the same time, the fight to dismantles those systems can be joined even by those white people who aren’t yet quite up to more the also-necessary personal reflections.
All of this personal and political self-reflection upon the part of white people gets to the issue, as Weiner does, of silence.
The deafening silence emanating from white folks regarding what it means to be white under the regime of white supremacy must end.
It’s here that I turn to Alan Jacobs’ ideas on what he terms “the mania for unanimity” which seems to be something of a defense of silence.
Consider this: Several of the largest tech companies in the world have banded together as The Technology Coalition: “We seek to prevent and eradicate online child sexual exploitation and abuse.” Why is no one — literally no one — demanding that businesses and other institutions make statements against the sexual exploitation of children? Why, for that matter, did I feel that I needed to write something about police brutality in America but not one word about Central African wars, or child sexual exploitation, or China’s treatment of the Uighurs, or a dozen other atrocities that by any rational comparative assessment are worse than police brutality in America?
Jacobs does lay out some fairly cogent arguments for some of what has driven such public clamor and outcry over systemic racism and police violence—“the murder of George Floyd (1) happened in America, (2) was captured on a video that seems agonizingly long but is just short enough for people to watch fully, and (3) was shared widely on social media—but then goes on to offer an apologia for those who might not so much be engaged in either the clamor or outcry.
It turns out that the biggest problem with the herd mentality is the hatred generated for anyone who won’t — for any reason — join that herd. There’s no violence in silence about a problem the great majority of the angriest weren’t thinking about in April and won’t be thinking about in August either.
What this misses—and it’s a huge miss given that Jacobs goes out of his way early on to mention that “[he’s] been thinking and writing about American racism all [his] adult life”—is that white people in America have a moral obligation not to remain silent. Silence in the face of the benefits of one’s own whiteness in a structure and a system of white supremacy very much is a kind of violence.
The moral matter confronting white people in America is searing and striking and unique among all the various moral matters (e.g. Jacobs’ endless wars in Central Africa or child sexual exploitation) with which anyone might be faced. The fact that there are many terrible things which need confronting is not actually an argument for white Americans avoiding their whiteness.
I’ll leave it to Weiner.
Our silence does protect us just as it continues to leave untroubled our culpability in the violence and exploitation being done to people of color.