My Privilege

A friend linked to this article, which originally came from Good Black News.   According to the author, she "was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism."  She then answered this friend's question, at length, giving personal examples of encounters with white racism, and did a good job of it.  What I want to do here is to say what is wrong with the way the friend, Jason, expressed himself; one aspect of white privilege, it seems to me, is that I am allowed to question the motives and bona fides of other white people, where it might be considered rude for a person of color to do so.  Not only am I allowed to speak up, I think I'm obliged to.  So here's the friend's post, as quoted by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, the editor of Good Black News.

    “To all of my Black or mixed race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this ‘White Privilege‘ of which I’m apparently guilty of possessing. By not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I’m now hearing.

    “Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I’m somehow complicit in the misfortune of others. I’m not saying I’m colorblind, but whatever racism/sexism/other -ism my life experience has instilled in me stays within me, and is not manifested in the way I treat others (which is not the case with far too many, I know).

    “So that I may be enlightened, can you please share with me some examples of institutional racism that have made an indelible mark upon you? If I am to understand this, I need people I know personally to show me how I’m missing what’s going on. Personal examples only. I’m not trying to be insensitive, I only want to understand (but not from the media). I apologize if this comes off as crass or offends anyone.”

There are several red flags here, culminating in the faux apology at the end.  He's not "trying to be insensitive," but he achieves insensitivity effortlessly, without even trying.  He makes it look so easy!

I'm skeptical of his claim that he has treated "everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know)."  I've known numerous white people who made exactly that claim, and then proceeded to make some bluntly racist statements.  In general, announcing one's respect and humor is a direct prelude to saying something vile.  I'd never make such a claim myself, partly because I know that I have my own blind spots and have failed more than once in treating everyone with respect (a tricky word anyway), but even more because one aspect of structural / institutional bigotry is that the dominant group is shielded from feedback on its conduct.  Those on the bottom mostly know not to speak up, most of the time; they know they'd damn well better laugh at the little jokes of the Privileged.  One symptom of white or other privilege is wondering loudly why These People are suddenly making all this noise and trouble, the Privileged One thought things were mostly all right, this is America, and besides, the Privileged One has always treated people with respect and humor.

Humor, of course, is a minefield, and a Priviliged One who assumes that his or her jokes are as funny to the less privileged as they are to him or her is probably assuming far too much.  As Ellen Willis once wrote,  “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.”  I’ve noticed over the years that when I repeat this quotation, women usually laugh delightedly, but men usually look unhappy. (The more so if the men had previously been complaining about “humorless feminists.”) 

But what I noticed right away was the opening reference to "ignorance of this 'White Privilege' of which I’m apparently guilty of possessing."  There's been a lot of complaining -- almost all by white people, naturally -- about the term "White Privilege" lately; and also many attempts to educate the complainers.  I think I'd be cautious about using that term myself, not because it's inaccurate but because it is the kind of idea that gets people's backs up, and even if they're wrong, if you want to communicate with them you want to find ways to express what you want them to learn in ways and words they'll be able to hear.  It's going to be hard enough in any case.

Anyway, here's the thing.  White privilege is not something you're "guilty of possessing."  It is assigned to you, and you can't divest yourself of it.  No matter how respectful and humorous you are, no matter how much you oppose racism, you will be perceived and treated as a white person -- accorded white privilege, in other words.  You will not be followed around by store personnel who are convinced that you're a shoplifter, even if you are a shoplifter.  You will not be stopped for Driving While White, Walking While White, even for Carrying a Gun While White.  You're a lot less likely to be gunned down by police while you have your hands in the air.  You will not experience what John Howard Griffin called the hate stare, just for existing.  Barriers that black Americans learn to take for granted will not be there for you.  (It is possible, however, to have your white privilege taken from you, if you become a race traitor effectively enough.  White privilege didn't protect Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, or numerous others.  But I doubt Jason wants to go that far himself.)

This doesn't mean that white people always have it easy.  Privilege is never absolute.  I had privileges as the oldest child in my family, but that didn't mean I could do whatever I wanted.  My parents were explicit that as the oldest, I had obligations as well as privilege.  Which is why it's absurd when apologists for racism point to the existence of white poverty (or to the existence of black wealth) to refute claims about white privilege.  When someone invokes poor whites in West Virginia, I want to know how poor blacks are doing there.  One symptom of white privilege, indeed, is the conviction that no black person should get a job or be admitted to a historically white college or own a pair of shoes until every white person has been taken care of, first.  Such people see Oprah not just as a disproof of black advantage, but as an insult to poor white people, who presumably would be better off if Oprah hadn't gotten all those Special Rights.

Also closely involved here is "guilt."  I've never felt guilty for being white, or for being male, nor have I ever felt that black people or women were trying to make me feel guilty or wanted me to.  (Which is odd, because personally, I am very susceptible to guilt most of the time.)  Whenever a Privileged One complains about being made or expected to feel guilty, I feel pretty sure they're projecting.  I qualify that because I can't say for certain that guilt hasn't been used at times by some people in this way.  I'm sure that it has not been an important factor in the movements or the discourse.  Besides, feeling guilty, expressing one's guilt, confessing one's guilt to the congregation is often a way to avoid doing anything, either to make reparation for what one did or to change one's behavior in the future.  It turns one's offenses into something that is all about Me Me Me, and distracts attention from the people who've been hurt by those offenses.  This may not be deliberate, but it is damned convenient.

So I have severe doubts about Jason's good intentions in posing his question.  For one thing, how can someone who's been out of school for several years, and who claims to have "numerous Black or mixed-race FB friends," and who further claims to treat everybody with respect, be as ignorant as Jason claims to be about what people of color experience in this country?  Someone's living in a very effective and impermeable bubble.  I'm glad Lori Lakin Hutcherson answered Jason's question, and I'd be very interested in seeing how Jason responded to the answer he got.  In my experience, people who ask such questions rarely stick around to hear the answer, and tend to get all spitty if they do.  From the tone and spirit in which he wrote, I feel pretty sure Jason will find some way not to hear what Lori Lakin Hutcherson tried to tell him.

Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Feel the Bern!

I first read John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me in seventh grade.  I found a paperback copy in a classroom at my junior high school, picked it up and began reading, and couldn't put it down.  I have a vivid memory of sitting there reading it in the failing light of late afternoon.  I believe it belonged to a teacher, who let me borrow it.  Which, now that I think of it, took some courage on his part, in Indiana in 1963.  What if my parents had objected?  The book's radical (for the period) racial politics were only one reason to worry about parental backlash in those days and that place; it also contained many sexual references, most of which I didn't understand very well at the age of twelve.

Since then I've read Black Like Me at least four more times.  Until recently the only book that equaled its impact on my understanding of American racism was Jonathan Kozol's first book, Death at an Early Age, which I read soon after it was published in 1967.  But perhaps "understanding" is the wrong word, though both books have a lot of intellectual content: they affected me on a gut level, ensuring that I would never tolerate white racism or give any credence to the excuses and rationalizations white racists make for their bigotry.  Death at an Early Age brought home for me what it would mean to children to lose the opportunity for education because racism gave them destructive schooling: even if the Boston schools Kozol described had been repaired and improved immediately, it would do no good for the children who'd passed through them.  Meanwhile whites dragged their feet to ensure that the destruction of children's hearts and minds would continue.  The issue of reparations is relevant here; reparations are needed not just for slavery, but for racist oppression that continues right down to the present.  

Black Like Me showed me what it was like to be on the receiving end of what Griffin called the "hate stare," to have to waste hours searching for a public restroom, a restaurant that would serve you, a bank that would cash your traveler's checks; to know that any white person could view you as their servant, and demand not only obedience but subservience, always with the threat of lethal violence if you didn't comply.  (It occurs to me now that any kid, of any color, knows what this is like.)

I was bothered, though, by a theme Griffin took up a couple of times in the book.  First the white doctor who helped him darken his skin, and later Griffin himself in conversation with an older black man, lament the bad behavior of many blacks that prevents them from getting equal rights.  The older man sums up the situation:

"... So a lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up.  They take what they can -- mostly in pleasure, and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what else have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid?"

"Yes [replies Griffin], and then it's these things that cause the whites to say we're not worthy of first-class citizenship."

It seems to me that Griffin had it backwards here. "These things" don't "cause" white racists to conclude that blacks are inferior -- they're invoked to rationalize the conviction that racists already hold.  (Karen Fields and Barbara Fields hammered this point home repeatedly in their brilliant Racecraft.)  What occurred to me when I read these exchanges was that white men, and not only poor ones, also "make the grand gesture, the wild gesture" and die in car wrecks or knife fights or something else equally stupid.  Better-off white men like George W. Bush will simply be bailed out of the trouble they get into; white trash may not, but no one will argue that whites are obviously inferior because of their propensity for violence and self-degradation.  The misbehaving, self-destructive whites are pathological individuals, a few bad apples, not representatives of their race.  Since whites are unmarked racially, nothing they do can give them a bad name as white people, in mainstream (i.e., white) discourse anyway.  Later still in the book, Griffin points out to a white interlocutor that certain social problems cited against blacks also occur among whites, but neither goes near the implications this fact has for white supremacy.

After Griffin published his experiences, the backlash, while predictable (and he'd predicted it), was still chilling.  He was hung in effigy in his Texas hometown, and the standard threats of death and mutilation were phoned in by cowards.  Judging from later statements, some of which are included in the Griffin Estate edition I read this time, Griffin became much more radical about American racism than he was in the 1950s, and was harshly critical of white media that tried to use him to speak for African-Americans, while refusing to turn to African-Americans themselves.  Of course it's doctrine that blacks can't be trusted to talk about American racism -- as the white racist philosopher Antony Flew put it, they're "prominently positioned to discover racism," because they're "generously paid" to do so. 

Damn, there I go again, pissing myself off; but it's not over nothing.  I've been reading a number of things lately that both informed and infuriated me: not just Black Like Me and Racecraft, but Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (Norton, 2005).  Katznelson details how white racists were able to hijack social programs, from veterans' benefits to the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, so that American blacks would be excluded from coverage.  In general, liberals gave in quite easily to their efforts.  So, for example,

The South's representatives [in Congress] built ramparts within the policy initiatives of the New Deal and the Fair Deal to safeguard their region's social organization.  They accomplished this aim by making the most of their disproportionate numbers on committees, by their close acquaintance with legislative rules and procedures, and by exploiting the gap between the intensity of their feeling and the relative indifference of their fellow members of Congress [22].

It didn't help my mood when, a few weeks ago, some (white male) Bernie Sanders boosters erupted angrily over Black Lives Matters' decision not to endorse a presidential candidate: "Cutting off the nose to spite the face, by not supporting Sanders at this important time ..." wrote one.  Another wrote, "This group seems to be wearing blinders, only focusing on what they want to see. It is a great big world out there and economics is always the key no matter what race or ethnicity you may happen to be part of. Senator Sanders appears to be focusing on income inequality which certainly affects at least 99 percent of ALL people. We can all work together or we can all go down the toilet together."

They were sure that a Republican would become President because of BLM's treachery.  So, I asked them, no one will vote if BLM doesn't endorse a candidate? Or everyone will decide to vote Republican if BLM doesn't endorse a candidate? No one is capable of making up their own minds?  I didn't get a satisfactory answer, just more fulminating about how these blindered traitors were giving aid and comfort to the Rethugs.

I can think of numerous reasons why BLM might choose not to endorse a candidate.  It might be, for example, that the organization was too divided within itself to select one.  Partisans love to claim that they are political realists unlike their airy-fairy idealistic critics and opponents, but this simple political reality escaped these guys' notice entirely.  Maybe neither Clinton nor Sanders, in their belated and rather resentful attempts to 'reach out' to communities of color, persuaded BLM that they really deserved to be endorsed.  Sanders has talked about "making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, basically targeting our federal resources to the areas where it is needed the most and where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African American and Latino."  This sounds very nice, and might have impressed me more before my recent reading, which taught me that white supremacists are very effective at making sure that such "massive investments" are structured so as to exclude black people, and that white liberals and progressives are not very effective at preventing these exclusions.  Sanders no doubt means well, but it seems that he doesn't realize just how "divisive" (the word he used to dismiss reparations) it will be to invest in communities and people of color as well as white ones.

This wasn't the first time I've encountered such authoritarian behavior among Democratic partisans during this cycle (leaving aside past ones), and once again I'm amazed by their evident belief that they can win votes for their candidate by insulting and abusing the voters they're ostensibly trying to win over.  Put simply: you want my vote, so you must give me a good reason why I should comply.  Attacking me, whether honestly or dishonestly, doesn't seem like a good way to persuade me.  Castigating BLM as ungrateful darkies doesn't seem like a promising tactic for persuading them to reconsider their decision.

Now, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, I intend to vote for Sanders in the primary and will surely vote Democratic in November.  Doing so doesn't mean I can't criticize Sanders, Clinton, or any other candidate or politician; and criticizing them doesn't mean I hate them or will vote Republican.  I'm not going to change my vote because some of a candidate's supporters are assholes.  But if I were Sanders (I'm not sure about Clinton), I would not be pleased to know that my supporters are behaving like assholes on my behalf.  It's curious, really: liberals and progressives like to fantasize that they are well-informed and rational as opposed to the idiot Rethuglicans, but they also believe that the electorate (everyone except them, I guess) are stupid and can only be won over by appeals to emotion.  Even if they're right about that, you win more flies with honey than with vitriol.

Benign Malignity

Ta-Nehisi Coates had a great post at the Atlantic site last week. (I'm just now catching up with some unfinished posts.)

I want to highlight one of the comments on the piece, which read in part:

Unfortunately, acknowledging that you might be racist is akin to admitting that you're a pedophile in this country. So let's try it this way, though it's pretty basic and I don't mean to insult anyone. I think the point is that many white people experience the world as pretty benign. They are presented with, for example, more-or-less ample opportunity to get ahead if they work hard. When they hail a cab, they generally get a ride. When they ask a cop for directions, they don't get frisked, when they ask a bank for a loan, they don't get overly screwed, when they apply for a job, they get a fair hearing, etc. So when they see a disproportionate number of black people are poor, they think they are not taking advantage of the opportunities that are on offer and so define problems getting jobs, etc., as of their own making. They certainly don't think they bear any resposibility for the situation and resent policies that are specifically race-based. 

My immediate reaction was to agree, in part, and then to wonder when "acknowledging that you might be racist" began to be "akin to admitting that you're a pedophile in this country."  White racism has always been the historical norm in the United States.  (Saying that doesn't mean I think racism is unique to the US.  I'm just talking about my country, the country whose history I know best.)  It's perfectly acceptable to be racist, 'privately' among white people and in public as long as you refrain from using the N-word.  At worst it's an open-secret peccadillo, like Uncle Bob's mistress that everyone knows about but doesn't admit they know about.  As long as you don't talk about it, you don't have to take a stand.  Even those people who do openly throw around racial epithets, however, deny that they're racists and become indignant or distraught if someone calls a spade a spade.  Nobody cuts pedophiles the kind of slack that white racists routinely enjoy.

However, I disagree that white racists "experience the world as pretty benign."  (I say "white racists" instead of the commenter's "many white people," because the people he's talking about -- whites who claim that racial minorities are getting unfair special treatment -- are racists.)  From what I've seen and heard, racist whites don't experience life as largely benign.  On the contrary, they protest furiously that they have no privilege, that no one ever handed them anything on a platter, that they worked hard for everything they have, yet here they're being robbed by the government that spends their tax dollars on lazy welfare bums who want to sit at home doing nothing but expect to be supported.

While I'm talking about Coates, I also want to point out his response to a passage from one of Obama's speeches.  In 2007 Obama told a (presumably black) audience in Selma, Alabama:

Folks are complaining about the quality of our government, I understand there's something to be complaining about. I'm in Washington. I see what's going on. I see those powers and principales have snuck back in there, that they're writing the energy bills and the drug laws. We understand that, but I'll tell you what. I also know that, if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

Coates wrote:

But Cousin Pookie did vote -- at historic levels, no less. And Cousin Pookie's preferred candidate has taken that vote and continued about the business of busting all the other Pookies out there for things the candidate did in his youth. And those busts are happening at rates well beyond Pookie's other American neighbors. There is no reason to think this will change any time soon. That saddens me.

Obama used the "Cousin Pookie" trope several years before 2012, when black voters did come out in record numbers, so perhaps someone who wanted to could quibble with Coates on that point.  But I don't think that's important.  More important is what he goes on to say, that Obama's Presidency has underscored the useless of voting as a means of producing social change.  What did Cousin Pookie get for getting off the couch and voting?  Contempt from the man he voted for, who climbed to power on his back.  As an African-American icon, Obama is much more like Clarence Thomas than, say, Thurgood Marshall.