Whiteness and Sustainability: Reflecting on Race, Class, and Green Living

Is the movement for environmental sustainability a white, middleclass phenomenon? I imagine that many of us have heard this allegation, and, unfortunately, with the exception of the environmental justice movement, it seems to be, for the most part, accurate. Yet many in the movement respond to this observation with perplexity. The typical attitude can be summed up in questions like: "Why don't these people (working class people, people of color, low income people) recognize the urgency of the ecological crisis?" and "How can we reach them?" We've been asking these questions for four decades and gotten no satisfactory answers. Perhaps the time has come to ask new questions. Rather than asking why they don't get it, maybe we need to think deeply about what we (white middleclass people) are not getting. I think a good way to start would be by exploring how the agenda and worldview of the ecology movement is shaped by unacknowledged race and class privilege, such that it has simply not been able to make itself relevant to people from other race and class backgrounds.

The reason privilege is such a potent source of unquestioned beliefs is that it is itself quite stealth, at least to those who possess it. Indeed, it is in the very nature of privilege to remain unnoticed by those who benefit from it, while it is almost always blatantly obvious to everyone else. This is the result of a psychological process called cognitive dissonance, whereby the brain essentially rewires itself so as to not perceive aspects of the world that present painful contradictions or challenge one's sense of identity. In the context of privilege, this means that we structure our experience of the world so that our social advantages seem natural and/or deserved. Another result is that those who are clearly struggling may be seen as somehow different or deficient. A useful example of this sort of post hoc rationalization is physical ability.[1] Physical access is obviously far easier for those of us who possess physical abilities that have been coded as "normal." After all, who among us thinks about our physical ability as an unearned privilege? Yet that is exactly what it is. Our built environments have mostly been constructed by able-bodied people, for able-bodied people. That we have mostly missed this fact, of course, does not by itself make us bad people. It just makes us human.  

Similar to able-bodied privilege, race and class privilege are unearned and they are built into the structures and institutions of our society. Moreover, cognitive dissonance operates in the same way, ensuring that those of us possessing privilege experience a reality radically different from those who do not. The social consequences of this disconnect are enormous, and include the makeup of the ecology movement and the particular race and class-based perspective that shapes its agenda.  

One example of the race/class perspective of environmentalism is its traditional concern for preservation. Going back at least to John Muir, advocates of environmental protection have been motivated largely by their veneration for the wild, especially for the beauty of so-called untouched wilderness and for the majesty of large charismatic mammals. Even appeals to scientifically legitimate concerns such as biodiversity and ecosystem integrity often tap into these deeper emotional currents, which are rooted in a Romantic or aesthetic attitude, and which are more typical of city dwellers who conceive their relationship to the natural world in terms of leisure outdoor activities. People who depend on nature for their livelihood as well, as those trapped in inner-city settings lacking access to wild spaces, are understandably unmoved by the Romantic appeals of traditional preservationism.  

We also need to recognize the ways in which so-called green consumption, as a response to ecological

concerns, is bound up with race and class privilege. There is certainly no question that those with resources ought to make ecologically responsible consumer choices. The problem is with casting what amounts to luxury consumption in moral terms. Unfortunately, certain forms of consumption, such as buying local, driving a hybrid, or even voluntary simplicity, are often conferred moral weight, despite the fact that the ability to make such choices relies on the systemic unearned privileges that go with being white and middleclass in the U.S.

In the spirit of this examination and with apologies to Peggy McIntosh, I have assembled a partial and provisional list of specific race and class privilege that seem to be taken for granted in the culture of white middleclass environmentalism or sustainability.

Here is my list so far. Please feel free to suggest other privileges that I missed:

1. I can, if I wish, purchase fresh local produce at my neighborhood farmer’s market. 
2. I have the means to access organic produce and other environmentally friendly products at local coops, and other eco-conscious merchants. 
3. I can, if I wish reduce my carbon footprint by driving a hybrid vehicle.
4. I can choose to live in a neighborhood where many local services are accessible by walking or bicycling. 
5. Because I have had access to an abundance of consumer products all my life, I am able to derive both material and moral satisfaction from choosing a simplicity based lifestyle.
6. I can imagine that the consequences of environmental destruction constitute a threat of future calamity rather than an ongoing disaster.
7. I can choose to live in a neighborhood where I feel close to nature and wildlife. 
8. I can choose to take advantage of incentives provided by my workplace to carpool or take public transit.
9. I have access to wild places, where I may deepen my appreciation for the natural world and its diversity of life forms.
10. When I cannot get to wild places, I can enjoy parks and other pockets of natural beauty in my neighborhood.
11. If I spend time in wild places, I will encounter people who look like me, and I can count on feeling welcome there.
12. I am able to appreciate spending time in wild places because outdoor activities have always been accessible to me and my kin.
13. Wild places do not provoke cultural memories that associate the woods with the torture and killing of people who look like me.
14. I can take a nap in a public park without it being assumed that I might be homeless.
15. I can spend time in the deserts of the Southwest without anyone asking to see my papers.
16. My sense of intimacy with the land does not entail spending all day in the hot sun picking strawberries or tending someone else’s lawn.
17. I can work in my own yard or garden without people assuming I am the gardener.
18. I can choose to spend time outdoors only when the weather is agreeable.
19. Because the satisfaction of my basic needs is buffered from the vicissitudes of nature, such as storms, droughts and bad harvests, I can approach the natural world in predominantly aesthetic or spiritual terms.
20. I can enjoy National Parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, imagining them as intact wildernesses because their establishment did not involve the forcible removal of my ancestors.
21. I can take part in Native American ceremonies and adorn myself with their cultural artifacts without considering the struggles of actual Native Americans to preserve their culture in the face of genocide and forced assimilation.
22. I can take part in Native American ceremonies and adorn myself with their cultural artifacts without considering how Native Americans may feel upon seeing their culture appropriated (and often profited on) by non-native people.
23. I can take part in Native American ceremonies and adorn myself with their cultural artifacts without considering how Native Americans continue to be oppressed and impoverished and have their culture imperiled by U.S. policies.
24. I can adopt an uncompromising attitude about the protection of ecosystems & wild land habitat without worrying that my own livelihood will be threatened or that I will be unable to access the products I use in my daily life.
25. I can choose to blame the whole human species for the ecological crisis, rather than looking at how my lifestyle depends not only on ecological destruction, but also on inter-human violence, exploitation, and oppression.
26. Because my children attend a relatively safe school, are not suffering from asthma due to poor local air quality, and are not harassed by the police or surrounded by gang culture, I have the emotional space to feel agony over the imminent loss of iconic species such as polar bears, African lions, and dolphins.
27. For the most part, I do not have to concern myself with the impacts of the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on illegal immigration, or the right-wing war on the social safetynet because none of these action directly target me or people who look or live like me, leaving me time and energy to focus on ecology.
28. I have time and energy to think abstractly about ecology because my lifestyle is supported by a vast and semi-invisible labor force.
29. I can choose to focus my energies on causes that appeal to me, and I prefer ecology because nature is beautiful and the wildlife does not express anger toward me or cause me to feel guilty about the crimes of my ancestors.
30. I can work on environmental issues and feel good about myself for my good intentions rather than feeling guilt and shame for stuff that feels beyond my control.  
31. Unlike much of the human family, I can believe that ecological destruction is separate from and more urgent than racism, sexism, or other forms of ‘merely’ human oppression
32. My decisions about which issues to focus on have no direct or immediate impact on my physical well being.

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[1] I owe this example to Reverend Deborah Johnson. 

Whiteness and Corporate Social Responsibility in China

There's been a good deal of discussion in the corporate media lately about the harsh and often unsafe working conditions in Chinese factories. It turns out that the folks who assemble those shiny gadgets that dominate the American consumer landscape - the smart phones, tablets, laptops, and such - lead less than shiny lives. They routinely work six day weeks, ten to twelve hour days, and spend much of that time standing or sitting on backless stools. They are sometimes forced to work double shifts or given corporal punishment for minor infractions. And they live in overcrowded dorm rooms, with as many as twenty people sharing three rooms.

A recent episode of PRI's This American Life featured monologist Mike Daisy describing some extremely disturbing things he learned from talking directly to Chinese factories workers about their treatment. A few of weeks later, as part of their iEconomy series, the New York Times published an exposé detailing similar safety problems and labor abuses. Although the fact that most electronics products are manufactured in China by exploited workers could not have been a big surprise to anyone who's been paying attention, this story received a flood of attention. The reason for this, I'm guessing, has a great deal to do with what these factories were making, for these were not just any factories. These were the factories where the Apple Ipad is assembled.

Apple's most brilliantly realized product may in fact be its brand image. It is seen as different from other companies, as holding itself to a higher standard, as somehow embodying antiestablishment, countercultural values. These stories, however, threaten to cast the company as just another corporate miscreant, willing to think differently about product innovation maybe, but sticking with tradition when it comes to labor exploitation. This contradiction creates a sort of cognitive dissonance for many Apple fans, engendering the sort of moral shock that animates Mike Daisy's This American Life story.

The ensuing conversation has, predictably, taken shape as a debate about corporate social responsibility and whether Apple is ultimately good or bad for Chinese workers. Critics of Apple, like Mike Daisy, point to the harsh working conditions in the factories and the meagerness of Apple's efforts to improve them, especially compared to the resources they put into ensuring product quality and brand image. According to these critics, Apple has a responsibility to ensure that working conditions among it suppliers meet internationally accepted standards. Their position is not really that Apple is bad for workers, just that they are not nearly as good as they ought to be.

Meanwhile, some supporters of the status quo argue that Apple is good for Chinese workers because, they claim, what China is going through is a necessary and inevitable phase of industrial development. These commentators suggest that the sweatshop phase of development is itself beneficial because it lifts people out of poverty, gives them an alternative to village life, and improves the status of women. They even suggest that working conditions are bound to improve, as employers are forced to compete for workers. The critics reject, meanwhile, the notion that brutal exploitation is necessary or inevitable and insist that everyone, everywhere, is entitled to the basic protections that workers in developed countries take for granted. 

While these debates tend to be focused on how workers are treated and the degree to which corporations should be held responsible for working conditions in their supply chains, one obvious issue rarely comes up in the corporate media. That is the question of workers' ability to determine their own working conditions through collective bargaining. Although it occasionally merits a passing mention, as just one right among others, collective bargaining is rarely acknowledged as the fundamental right that made all the others possible.

Organized labor has always been the only effective counterbalance to the power of corporations. Perhaps this is one of the reasons labor history is unfailingly marginalized by the corporate media. At the same time, of course, our collective memory is being steadily degraded by corporate funded think tanks constantly working to turn the labor movement into a historical footnote. The fact remains, however, that the labor protections taken for granted in developed countries did not originate from corporate good will or from a competition for workers. And they certainly did not develop out of some deterministic progression to the next stage of social evolution (an ironically Marxist notion for a capitalist to hold). They were hard won through a difficult and often bloody struggle by workers to organize and make demands.

There is another subtle but insidious factor helping out in the effort to downplay the significance of organized labor for the Chinese workers' struggle. That factor is racism, which should come as no surprise, since labor control is the original reason for racism. Consider the way in which the issue is typically framed. As I said, rather than discussing the reasons why workers' are denied the right genuinely to affect their own circumstances, most critics focus on the responsibility of corporations and U.S. consumers to insist on better treatment. When we cast the labor rights debate as a debate about corporate and consumer social responsibility, Chinese workers end up in the role of helpless victims.

This tendency to see the predicament of Chinese workers as something that companies like Apple or their customers can solve by insisting on improved working conditions is simply another instance of white savior complex. This attitude, like its colonial antecedent white man's burden, is a form of paternalism rooted in a tendency to view colonial others as somehow less than fully human. The sine-qua-non of the white supremacist imagination is that only white people are seen as individuals who exist for their own sake, and possess their own intentions, aspirations, and dignity. The rights of workers to organize may be getting short shrift in this debate, in part, because of a difficulty among white liberals to imagine Chinese workers' capacity to determine for themselves their own best interests.  

Well meaning white liberals cannot advance the cause of human liberation as long as we imagine that we have a special responsibility to intervene in the suffering of poor victims in far off places. The problem is not only that this strategy is ineffective; more often than not, it reinforces the very structures of oppression that are the true source of the suffering. The emphasis on corporate social responsibility, for example, accepts and even endorses the unchecked power of the corporation. These white savior strategies thus distract attention from the deeper structural issue. By concentrating on ostensibly bad actors, we are able to avoid looking at our own complicity in the neocolonial, neoliberal institutions of global capitalism, the very existence of which depends on an unending supply of exploitable labor.   

 Barry Deutsch / CC BY 3.0 

Reflections on Community and Spirituality

I found myself in a church service recently, where I had gone to hear a sermon given by my friend Nichola Torbett, founding director of Seminary of the Street. I'm glad I went, since the sermon was as brilliant. Sitting through the service, however, I noticed in myself a longing for the sense of community that the congregants seemed to enjoy. Although the church was exceedingly warm and welcoming to us non-regulars, I felt unable fully to take comfort in their acceptance. The problem is that I'm a not a Christian believer, which means that the full experience of Christian community must remain out of reach, no matter how much kinship I may feel with particular Christians. 

Moreover, it's difficult, in the church setting, to remain stealthy about one's lack of belief because of that unambiguous moment of truth called Communion, when the congregants are called on to testify to and literally embody their faith. Whatever one may think of this ritual, it works well to establish who the genuine Christians are. Yet, "communion" moments are by no means exclusive to Christianity. They are a standard element of group psychology, which usually manifest as subtle pressure to show that one shares the group's worldview. In my own circles, which tend to include many "spiritual but not religious" types, there is often a moment when someone says something about past lives or "indigo children," and I immediately feel like an outsider, a spy for the skeptic police. I become conscious only of my intellectual resistance and, as a result, the prospect of staying fully connected with these comrades feels like a threat to my integrity (or is it just the integrity of my identity?).

As I ponder this situation, I wonder if my inability to believe and the alienation it fosters might somehow be products of the dominant culture, a sort of ruling class "strategy" evolved to keep the population isolated and fragmented. I realize this may sound outrageous, since, after all, religious belief is supposed to benefit the ruling class. The conventional view, at least on the political left, is that religion is an “opiate of the masses,” keeping people passive by placating us with ultimate meaning and the confidence that our oppression and suffering in this life will be redeemed in the next.

It is certainly true that, for some populations, religious faith functions to rationalize suffering and justify inequity. But that’s a topic for another blog. Here I want to focus on another kind of faith, the kind that represents a threat to powerful interests because of its capacity to unite and empower the oppressed. This is the faith that got Jesus and Martin killed, along with who knows how many other spiritual revolutionaries. And I want to consider the possibility that, as a gay man, my capacity for this sort of faith was part of the price I paid for my individual liberation. I’m wondering, in other words, if I’ve gained my sense of liberation by identifying (however unconsciously) with my whiteness. Racial solidarity most definitely is a ruling class strategy.  

Of course, I’m not suggesting that whiteness is somehow antithetical to faith. That is obviously false. Whiteness is not a fixed category with a specific ideology. As I’ve argued consistently on this blog, it is a value system; a worldview; a cosmology. As Thandeka explains in Learning to be White, the acquisition of white identity often involves learning to deny or repress sensual, embodied feelings (and often to project them onto racialized others) in order to be seen as suitably self-possessed and rational by white culture. Children are praised and rewarded for valued qualities, such as emotional restraint, self-control, and competitiveness, and they are penalized for such devalued qualities as spontaneity, vulnerability, and emotional expressiveness. Is it just a coincidence that these latter qualities are precisely those that make genuine communal life possible?

For me, the path to whiteness was clear and wide, having woken up with much of it already behind me. I grew up in a working class town at a time when groups of European immigrants were still struggling to claim white identity. My racial status was secure enough, but, being gay, I found that I still fell far short of the patriarchal (not to mention puritanical) standards of whiteness, for they cannot abide any deviation from its strictly proscribed sexual norms. I dealt with this predicament in some of the same ways as other white, middle class, gay men: I developed those of my qualities that are esteemed by the dominant culture – careerism, the appearance of social conformity, and, of course, good grooming – while avoiding the messy complications of embodied existence by overdeveloping my critical intellect. 


So I came to identify very strongly with my critical stance, and my faith was one of its numerous casualties. According to the story I typically tell myself, my critical outlook first undermined my belief in God, which was fairly strong in my youth, and then proceeded to render all intimations of cosmic purpose and meaning untenable to me. The last vestiges of my faith were finally swept away once I began to think about whiteness and to see the ways in which dominant conceptions of the divine coincide with white middle class privilege.

What I have not reflected on until now is how my critical stance also serves white middle class privilege. As I said, one of its main consequences is that it keeps me from feeling deeply connecting into the communities I move in. Maybe it's not my faith or lack of it that I should be focused on, but the satisfaction and rewards I get from remaining separate. Perhaps I’m simply addicted to alienation, to my identity as an isolated individual. Indeed, it is this identity that allows me to feel that I'm in control of my circumstances, that I'm responsible only for my own private choices. As an individual in an individualistic society, I get to imagine myself as free from social obligations and communal accountability. Alienation serves individualism, and individualism, by casting relationships as voluntary and/or transactional, supports and promotes the group interests of middle class white men like myself (see Whiteness and the Utility of the Colorblind Paradigm). 


The impulse to remain separate is obviously problematic, but individualism may also undermine spirituality in less direct ways. I've participated in a variety of spiritually oriented classes and workshops, from which I have definitely learned and grown as a person. I've noticed, however, that, due to their focus on personal transformation, many of them seem to have been designed to produce some sort of big insight or "peak experience." These experiences, though often valuable, are likely to be unstable and unsustainable. For me, the peak experience has usually been the feeling of group bonding that often happens among the participants. It is beautiful, in its way, and yet I can't help but wonder if this is actually just a sort of spiritual buzz.

In the safe container of a weekend workshop, the dictates of the dominant culture are temporarily suspended. Participants are permitted to show vulnerability and express genuine feelings, which makes it possible for us to connect in a way that seems to satisfy our longing for community. However, because these experiences are bracketed from normal life, it is possible to enjoy them without actually having to risking the real world benefits of individualism. I can bond with a group in a weekend workshop without questioning my white middle class privileges, and more importantly, without becoming accountable to anyone. Not surprisingly, this communal buzz eventually dissipates, and the seemingly insatiable longing for connection and community returns. This creates something like an addiction cycle. 

I am becoming convinced that spirituality as an individual path (as distinct from an individual practice) is actually a contradiction. Not only does individualism produce and perpetuate unjust and violent social relations, it may be fundamentally incompatible with genuine spirituality. The latter may simply be impossible in the absence of sustainable human connection and community. Where does that leave me with my hypercritical attitude, my addiction to individualism, and my longing for genuine community? Well, at the moment, I am participating in a number of ongoing groups, and although it is often a struggle, I am not allowing myself to disengage. I have come to recognize that cultivating genuine community is the true essence of my spirituality. I guess for now I just need to keep showing up and doing my best simply to stay engaged, which may be the most demanding a spiritual practice I can think of.

David Brooks and the "Right" Inequality

Barry Deutsch / CC BY 3.0

In his recent  op-ed about the Occupy Movement, New York Times columnist David Brooks draws on a tactic long favored by the 1% and their apologists - locate a potential conflict within the 99% and use it to sabotage the possibility for solidarity. Amusingly, he begins this exercise in "divide and conquer" with an irony-free grumble about our society being polarizing.  

The point of contention he identifies is between what he calls “Blue Inequality” and “Red Inequality,” He argues that the Occupy Movement is focusing on the wrong one. While Brooks concedes that in big coastal cities like New York, LA, and San Francisco, the excessive wealth and influence of the 1% is increasingly conspicuous, this Blue Inequality is getting too much attention from both occupiers and the media. Red Inequality, the inequality between those with and those without college degrees, is widespread in cities like Scranton, Des Moines, and Fresno (he might have just said the “real America”) and should really be getting the more attention.

Brooks explanation for the occupiers’ lack of attention to Red Inequality sounds familiar. To paraphrase, perhaps unfairly, the reasons include the narcissism of urban media, class resentment, and the antipathy of hippies for yuppies. That’s my interpretation. Here’s what he says:

That’s because the protesters and media people who cover them tend to live in or near the big cities, where the top 1 percent is so evident. That’s because the liberal arts majors like to express their disdain for the shallow business and finance majors who make all the money. That’s because it is easier to talk about the inequality of stock options than it is to talk about inequalities of family structure, child rearing patterns and educational attainment. That’s because many people are wedded to the notion that our problems are caused by an oppressive privileged class that perpetually keeps its boot stomped on the neck of the common man.

Ah, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as turning your opponents into Straw Men by accusing them of exaggeration and oversimplification.

Red Inequality is more important than Blue Inequality, Brooks says, because it is decimating the social fabric of the bottom 50%. These people are not only making less money, they are also experiencing lower rates of marriage, higher rates of divorce, and greater numbers of children born outside of marriage. And these trends are perpetuating themselves intergenerationally, leading to legacies of social stagnation and a tragic squandering of human capital.

Well, he is exactly right about the plight of what he calls the bottom 50%, but his analysis of causality is hopelessly muddled by his conservative ideological commitments. And while his division of the world into Red and Blue is tried and true Republican political strategy, it has little to do with real world economics. I can’t say what Brooks sees when he looks at the world, but from here it looks distinctly like the fabric of U.S. society has been ravaged by precisely the policies advocated by Brooks’ ideological co-travelers (and implemented by both political parties, of course).

Is it possible that Brooks really can’t that both income inequality and the deteriorating social fabric are related to the radical restructuring of the U.S. economy since the 1970s? Could he be unaware that decades of cuts in state funding have caused the price of a college education to skyrocket? Or that weak labor-law enforcement along with the industry deregulation and trade liberalization has produced 30 years of wage stagnation? Or that fighting endless wars has put an enormous burden on military families (who almost always come from the 99%) Or that the war on drugs has resulted in the mass incarceration of low-income men of color? Or that the unavailability of affordable healthcare puts millions of marginal workers one serious illness or injury away from homelessness. Or that lack of access to healthy food and disproportionate exposure to toxic air pollution means that chronic health problems are more prevalent in low-income neighborhoods? Or that the foreclosure crisis and the economic collapse, created by the reckless speculation and predatory lending practices of the 1%, has disproportionately impacted precisely the folks Brooks says Occupy is ignoring?

Maybe Brooks’ center-right worldview renders him unable or unwilling to hear what the Occupy Movement is actually saying, which is that the issues are the same in San Francisco and Scranton. While incomes at the very top are exploding, many are lucky just to keep up. Health care and retirement benefits are being cut, the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, home values have collapsed, and those fortunate enough to attend college are graduating with crippling debt and lousy job prospects. The 99% suffer, while the 1% who drove the economy off a cliff get bailed out and make a killing. These are foreseeable consequences of structural inequality run amok. Extreme inequality is not a fetish; it is the malignancy at the heart of our economic and political institutions.

Of course the rhetoric of the 1% and the 99% is simplistic. That's the nature of political speech. Regardless, in terms of how the system works, the 1% vs. 99% metaphor is at least more fitting than the old story of a “middle class” where each generation is able, with hard work, to move up the ladder. There was a time when that story approached reality (for white folks, at least) but no more. Contemporary American workers are embattled. Children have less and less reason to expect they will do better than their parents, and it is no longer just Brooks’ bottom 50% who are losing ground. Sure, it might be more accurate to talk about the .1% and the 80%, but not only would that be less compelling, it would miss the point. The 99% is not a scientific measure; it is a call for solidarity against the creeping feudalism of “too big to fail” Capitalism.

Whiteness and the Enduring Mythology of the American Frontier

Popular historical nonfiction can be a great thing. It can enrich our understanding of the past and bring its events and characters alive in a way textbooks typically do not. Usually such books are written by professional scholars, and we have good reason to trust the soundness of the research and the relative impartiality of the approach. If the writer is an amateur, however, the situation is not so straightforward. History, like any academic field, is complex, and entails an understanding of prevailing methodologies and a deep familiarity with consensus knowledge. If a writer is not a professional historian, and particularly if she or he engages in original research[i], readers need to be highly circumspect.

It would be helpful if, in these circumstances, readers could rely on book reviews to alert them to potential problems. Unfortunately, literary critics are typically no better equipped than the general public to assess the scholarly merits of historical research. A case in point is the failure of the entire literary world to recognize the problems with Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne. I found this book deeply troubling, and perhaps the most troubling aspect of it is the warm reception it has received from the literary establishment. This is not to excuse Mr. Gwynne for his mistakes and blind spots, but he is only one person, and no book is the product of a solitary individual. This book was edited and released by a major publisher, reviewed widely, and ultimately nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Yet, I am not aware of a single professional reviewer [ii] who voiced concern about the book’s ultimately Eurocentric take on “how the west was won.” The real lesson here concerns how easily the dominant (white supremacist) culture reverts to its old colonizer mindset.

Besides entertaining and informing, Empire of the Summer Moon is an attempt to bring balance to our understanding of frontier history. Beginning with the reference to “Empire” in the title, this retelling of events seems designed to counter the notion that Indigenous Americans were simply passive and innocent victims of the territorial ambitions and racist policies of the U.S. government. And indeed Gwynne's description of the four decade conflict between settlers and Comanches on the Texas frontier offers ample support for a more nuanced perspective. Far from simple victims of U.S. aggression, the Comanches were formidable military opponents. Unfortunately, while Gwynne’s portrait does remind us of the tenacity and resourcefulness of Native American resistance, it is far less successful in reminding us of their humanity.

Let me begin with a brief overview of the book and what I take to be its main themes. The book traces the history of the Comanche nation from its beginnings as a simple hunter-gatherer society in the high country of present day Wyoming, to its military dominance of the southern plains, culminating in its protracted war with, and final defeat by, a rapidly expanding U.S. empire. Woven through this narrative are the fates of two key characters, Cynthia Ann Parker and her half-Comanche son Quanah. Cynthia Ann was the daughter of white settlers, kidnapped from their farm on the Texas frontier during a Comanche raid in 1836. She adapted completely to Comanche life and, with her Comanche husband Peta Nocona, bore several children, including Quanah. She was eventually captured by the U.S. cavalry and, along with her young daughter, forcibly returned to her white family. Quanah, who was 12 at the time of his mother’s capture, remained with his Comanche band, eventually becoming a notorious war chief. He continued to lead raids on the frontier and hunt buffalo on the plains as long as that way of life remained viable. After finally surrendering to the U.S. Cavalry in 1875, at the age of 28, Quanah began to make his way, quite “successfully,” in the white man’s world (i.e. earning money and accumulating property), while keeping one foot planted on the reservation and encouraging his fellow Comanches to follow his lead.  

Old Fashioned Indian-Hating

Indian-hating has a long and rich pedigree in Anglo-American thought [iii]. I use the phrase to refer specifically to the ambivalence at the heart of Anglo-America’s attitudes toward North America’s indigenous people. First, of course, there is the stock racist stereotype of Indians as possessing a unique capacity for violence purportedly absent among the more “civilized” English and other Europeans. This attitude is epitomized in the Declaration of Independence, with its reference to “merciless Indian savages.”[iv] Second, there is the Romantic notion of the Indian as a paradigm of independence and dignity. This view, exemplified by Rousseau’s “Noble Savage,” is generally recognized as a product of European anxieties and aspirations. In the figure of the Noble Savage, the European projects the natural vitality and independence he fears he may have traded for the stability and comfort of civilization. I include both contempt and flattery under the label “Indian-hating” because both attitudes dehumanize the real, flesh and blood people behind the projections. Both attitudes are on display in this book.   

On one hand, Gwynne claims that the Comanche male enjoyed a “peculiarly American sort of freedom.” Although he may believe he is offering a neutral report on the absence of “onerous social institutions” in Comanche society, his tone evokes a familiar stereotype. And when he writes, without a trace of irony, that “the Comanche male was … gloriously, astoundingly free,” or remarks that “much was made of the noble and free life of the American Savage,” he signals no awareness that he is rehearsing timeworn racist mythology. I realize that Gwynne is setting up a contrast with the hard life of Comanche women, especially captive women like Rachel Plummer, but literary license is not a license to add insult to historic injury. Incidentally, we should not overlook how frequently the hard life of women in peripheral societies has been used as a rationale for colonial domination.   

The main qualities for which Gwynne flatters the Comanches is their horsemanship and military prowess. Citing the admiration of a contemporary observer who described the Comanches as “the finest light cavalry in the world,” Gwynne declares that they were “geniuses at anything to do with horses.” After describing the Comanches’ talent for handling, training, and even stealing horses, he describes the “sheer military superiority” their expertise gave them over their first European opponents. In recounting the clumsy efforts of the Spanish to push into Comanche territory, Gwynne asserts that, in carrying out the San Saba Massacre, the Comanches lured the Spanish Empire into “its greatest military defeat in the New World.” I support giving the Comanches their due, but given all the battles the Spanish fought in the Americas, it seems a stretch to call the loss of 52 men the “worst [defeat] inflicted on the Spanish in the New World.” In the Battle of Ayacucho, by contrast, the Spanish suffered 2500 casualties and lost control of the South America. 

Along with flattering Comanches for their independence, nobility, and proficiency as warriors, the book indulges plenty of negative stereotypes, which, to make matters worse, are often directed at "Indians" in general. For example, Gwynne declares that “American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them.” The frequency and intensity of warfare before and after Europeans arrived is not even relevant. Even if it could be shown that every Native American group fought frequent wars with its neighbors, which is doubtful, “American Indians were warlike by nature” is not a claim about history; it is a claim about racial essence.

Moreover, besides being a fallacy, treating “Indian” as a racial category can result in oddly counterintuitive reasoning. For example, Gwynne states at one point that the Lipan Apaches, “could always be counted on to betray their old tormentors [the Comanches], to sniff them out and go running to the [white] authorities.” Huh? By what logic is the forming of an alliance against a long-established enemy judged a betrayal? The only way this bizarre reasoning makes any sense is if you’re expecting actual material enmity to be superceded by racial solidarity. 

By the way, the phrase “running to the authorities” conveys a contempt that pervades the book’s treatment of the Apaches and Tonkawas. Unlike the Comanches, who are at least admired for their warriorhood, the Apaches and Tonkawas are largely portrayed as weak and pitiable. It is probably no coincidence that these were the very people on whose expertise the militias were forced to depend in their pursuit of the Comanches. Militiamen may have felt the need to compensate for their own dependence by reassuring themselves of their racial superiority. Since Gwynne apparently recognizes the racism of his sources, noting one leader’s assessment of Indians as subhuman, it is unclear why he either echoes their sentiments, as he does with the above, or simply allows their mocking remarks to stand without comment. One example of the latter is where he quotes a militia captain from one difficult expedition reporting with undisguised disdain that “some of the horses froze to death … and the Indians, loath to see so much good meat go to waste, ate the flesh.” Passages like these, which are peppered throughout the book, left me feeling like I was expected to share the Indian-haters’ view of their native allies as lesser beings. 

Meanwhile, while the Comanches are not treated with the outright derision directed at Apaches and Tonkawas, neither are they represented as possessing the intellectual capacity of white people. Gwynne writes, for example, that “the Comanches had a limited vocabulary to describe most things – a trait common to primitive peoples.” He is primarily setting up a contrast with their horse-related vocabulary, but the result is that he reinforces a myth colonizer societies have long used to justify their dominance.[v] Elsewhere, in discussing how polygamy and women captives provided the labor to support the Comanches’ trade in Buffalo hides, he states that “these changes were perhaps more instinctive than deliberate.” Since the author presents no evidence to support this contention, it strikes me as a rather gratuitous denial of Comanche agency.

Another way the book implies that the Comanches do not quite measure up to Anglo-European standards concerns their worldview, though the author seems somewhat conflicted in this regard. On the one hand, he describes them as “primitive,” “low barbarians,” who are “immersed in an elemental world that never quite left the Stone Age – a world of ceaseless toil, hunger, constant war, and early death.” From this description, it sounds like the Comanches needed civilization to remedy their hopeless backwardness. On the other hand, the Comanches’ world was one of “pure magic … an intensely alive place where nature and divinity became one.” And the story he tells about Cynthia Ann Parker’s refusal to accept “civilization” also contradicts his more Hobbesian depiction of Comanche life. Rather than reflecting on this inconsistency, however, Gwynne ends up falling back on an archetype of prelapsarian innocence, sometimes writing about Comanche society as if it was an exotic relic uncorrupted by modernity. He describes how it was being “polluted by the white invaders,” noting that one deserted Comanche camp “was littered with … white men’s goods, evidence of the deep cultural contamination” (italic mine). This view of Comanche culture as either pure or polluted reflects the aspect of colonizer mentality that assesses the value of a culture based on its authenticity and integrity, on its being unsullied by colonial influences. This represents yet another way of erasing the agency of colonized people.  

Whiteness: the View from Somewhere

The issues I have been discussing are only symptoms of a more fundamental problem, which is a direct consequence of the author’s methodology. The most persistent weakness in this book is the ease with which it slips into the perspective of the frontiersman. Despite being written in the 21^st century, little of the book, it seems to me, would ruffle the sensibilities of a 19^th century pioneer. Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but the explanation for this seems straightforward. Gwynne spells it out in his Bibliographical Note: “as I hope will be apparent to the reader, much of this book was constructed using a large number of firsthand accounts from the era.” Original research of this kind is best handled by professionals who are trained to take into account the biases and limitations of their sources. This is precisely what Gwynne seems to miss. He treats his culturally bound, ideologically motivated informants, virtually all of whom represented the Anglo point of view, as if they were impartial witnesses. At the same time, by giving us such a vivid window into the mind of the 19^th century settler, Gwynne has actually done us a valuable service. His book offers us a chance to observe the cosmology of whiteness at one of its key formative moments.  

Nowhere is the author’s over-reliance on the settler perspective more evident that in the way he celebrates the character of settlers and “Indian fighters.” The vanguard of western expansion, he tells us, “was not federal troops, but simple farmers imbued with a fierce Calvinist work ethic, steely optimism, and a cold-eyed aggressiveness that made them refuse to yield even in the face of extreme danger.” These were “the sort of righteous, hard-nosed, up-country folk who lived in dirt-floored, mud-chinked cabins, played ancient tunes on the fiddle, took their Kentucky rifles with them into the fields, and dragged the rest of American civilization westward along with them. … They, more than columns of dusty bluecoats, are what conquered the Indians.” Why so? Because the Texans were “tougher, meaner, almost impossible to discourage, willing to take absurd risks to secure themselves a plot of dirt, and temperamentally well-suited to the remorseless destruction of native tribes.” Wow! Those people sound like genocidal sociopaths to me, but the author’s tone conveys an unmistakable note of admiration for their grit and determination. The Comanches must have also had grit and determination, but we are never invited to consider it.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t the “hapless” farmers who did the real dirty work of killing Indians. It was the Texas Rangers, who, according to Gwynne, were “young, reckless, single men with a taste for wide open spaces, danger, and raw adventure … They were sharp-eyed, audacious, and fearless twenty-four-year-olds with little sense of their own mortality and a distinct taste for combat. … They were highly motivated to track Indians and kill them and happily did it without pay or reward. Comanches, of course, had never seen anything like this breed of men.” It is difficult to imagine this sort of glorified language being used to describe anyone whose objective was to murder as many white people as possible. Indeed, when it comes to Comanche exploits, Gwynne finds it “impossible” to read about them, “without making moral judgments.”

Even when the author ascribes ostensibly negative attributes, such as “mean” and “remorseless,” to Indian fighters his tone betrays a certain admiration, especially compared to his descriptions of “Indians” as “hostile” and “savage.”[vi] Moreover, when it comes to the genocidal actions of the Texans, Gwynne seems mostly impressed by their optimism. The only Comanche to whom Gwynne attributes optimism is Quanah, who also happens to have been half white. Of course, with the advantage of hindsight, it is obvious that the white settlers had more reason to be optimistic about the future than the Comanches. Given the demographics of white settlement, the spread of European diseases, and the distribution of technology and power in the 19^th century, the ultimate outcome of the “Indian Wars” was perhaps predictable. Political/economic predictability, however, is not at all the same thing as racial destiny. 

Yet, the extent to which Gwynne blurs the distinction between the predictable and the predestined comes uncomfortably close to nostalgia for Manifest Destiny. Consider, for example, how the book frames “getting rid of the Comanches” as a perfectly natural and reasonable goal for the Anglos. Gwynne condemns the federal government’s “incompetence, stupidity and willful political blindness” for their failure to mount a “concerted effort to pursue the [Comanches] into their dark heartland, to destroy them.” Meanwhile, the violence of ongoing Comanche raiding, according to Gwynne, eventually “exhausted the last of the white man’s patience, and ruined forever the arguments of the peace advocates and pro-Indian humanitarians.” After one particularly brutal season of raiding, “whatever sympathy the horse tribes may once have inspired was gone.” For Gwynne, apparently, it was not that the Texans were simply facing resistance from a people who refused to accept the theft of their land and the obliteration of their culture; rather, the Texans were patiently and foolishly trying to negotiate with “irremediably hostile Indians.” Notice, also, how the references to the “patience” and “sympathy” of the colonizers imply that it was the Comanches who were ultimately to blame for their fate.

Finally, Gwynne seems to take on the colonizer perspective when framing the larger meaning of the frontier. Particularly revealing is his description of Comanche territory as “undiscovered,” “untouched,” and “the edge of the known universe.” The implication is obvious and familiar – that only the gaze of the white man constitutes discovery, and that only white man’s knowledge counts as knowledge. In addition, Gwynne refers repeatedly to the “advance of western civilization,” which the Comanches were “holding up.” He writes, for example, that, in the 1860s, “the frontier rolled  backward … canceling two decades of western progress.” Again, one could get the impression that the spread of Anglo-European culture on this continent was preordained.

A Systemic Failure

Needless to say, I found this book deeply disturbing. But let me reiterate that, though my criticisms are directed at the author, the most troubling aspect of this book is how it has been received. I understand how difficult it is, as a solitary writer, to be aware of one’s blind spots. But this book must have been read by dozens of intelligent, educated, and literate people on its journey from draft manuscript to Pulitzer Prize finalist. Did no one along the way notice its limitations? How is that possible? Was there no one among the editors, critics, and Pulitzer committee members who could provide a Native American perspective, or at least recognize its utter absence? Was there no one with expertise in scholarly practice who could call attention to the problems of methodology and voice? In my view, responsibility for this book reaches well beyond S. C. Gwynne. This book is one more product of a system that continues to rely almost exclusively on the voices and perspectives of white people (mostly straight white men), while remaining all but unaccountable to the rest of society.

There is something those of us who are white can do to disrupt this process. We can notice when non-dominant voices and perspectives have not been included in conversations where they have a stake, and simply speak up. I don’t believe most people want to produce one-sided histories or to make decisions based on partial perspectives. But most of us have been badly mis-educated and we need to help each other.

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[i] For the uninitiated, original research is research that relies on materials from the historical period in question, such as diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and official documents. While these are the richest sources of historical knowledge, they are also potentially the most misleading, particularly if the researcher lacks a deep understanding of the larger historical context.

[ii] There are a few user reviews on Amazon.com that do recognize this problem. 

[iii] Melville coined the phrase “The Metaphysics of Indian-hating” in his last novel The Confidence Man.

[iv] “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

[v] On Native American vocabulary, see Bright, W. (1994). "Native North American Languages" in D. Champagne (Ed.), Native America : portrait of the peoples (pp. 397-439). Detroit: Visible Ink Press. 

[vi] While it is true that Gwynne uses the word “savage” in describing behaviors on all sides, he only uses the word as a noun for indigenous people. 

Reflections on Whiteness and the Ecospiritual Movement

I consider myself somewhat of a veteran of the Northern California counterculture, or at least the Ecospiritual aspect of it. I graduated from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I studied, among other things, the history of the modern worldview as it has developed in politics, economics, philosophy, and especially science. My own research examined the roots of mechanism and vitalism in biology and the alternative paradigm that is now taking shape at the intersection of evolutionary and developmental genetics. Yet, some of my deepest learning took place well beyond the academy, at places like Esalen and at workshops and retreats, where practices such as talking circles, ceremonies, and encounters with nature were employed to cultivate deep personal and full-bodied integration of the alternative paradigm to which the movement is committed. Indeed, this integral approach comprises the true heart of the Ecospiritual movement.

The reason the Ecospiritual movement emphasizes the integration of personal/spiritual growth and intellectual development derives from the way knowledge itself is understood within the new paradigm. The dominant worldview, which sees the universe as a collection of essentially disconnected things moving in space and interacting according to fixed laws, tends to imagine the human mind in terms of a disembodied rationality, passively receiving information and analyzing it to arrive at an objective representation of the world. The last hundred years of science, however, has revealed that the universe consists of an intricate web of interdependent relationships and processes. Science has demonstrated the embeddedness of human cognition in that web and is reconceiving knowledge itself as a profoundly participatory process, inseparable from the lived body and its milieu. For the Ecospiritual movement, therefore, knowing involves embodiment, rather than merely memorization, and education is part of a much larger agenda, namely, the creative transformation of our civilization.

What, you may be thinking, does any of this have to do with the cosmology of whiteness? Well, it is an open secret that the Ecospiritual movement is overwhelmingly white. In the decade I spent in graduate school in San Francisco, my classmates were almost exclusively people of Anglo-European descent. Outside of the academy, the situation is better, but only slightly. When this lack of racial diversity is pointed out, folks often express some regret, but, in my experience, their attitude is just as often characterized by bewilderment and defensiveness. After all, their reasoning goes, everyone is welcome. It would be nice if there were more people of color around, but we can’t be blamed for who shows up and who doesn’t.

So why does it really matter that there are so few people of color in this movement? Given that the goal of the movement is to transform our civilization in order to head off the catastrophic human and ecological consequences of unsustainable industrial growth, it matters for a couple key reasons. First, never in the history of humanity has a social movement led by the people who benefit from the prevailing order succeeded in bringing about real change.[i] Every major advance in human liberation has been won through the struggle of those seeking to liberate themselves. Second, there already is a massive global liberation movement underway, which is responding to the ongoing catastrophes wrought by the industrial expansion. This unnamed and leaderless movement, documented by Paul Hawken in his book Blessed Unrest, is comprised of and led by those people and communities of color directly impacted by the hyper-exploitation of the Earth and the large scale ecological instabilities generated by these practices. Can the Ecospiritual movement be relevant if it fails to align itself with this larger revolutionary force?

The question remains: what is it about the Ecospiritual movement that makes it appealing predominantly to white people? How might it be expressing itself in ways that reproduce the cosmology of whiteness? I think part of an answer can be found by looking at the Human Potential Movement, which has had a foundational influence on the Ecospiritual movement. The Human Potential Movement (HPM) emerged in Northern California in the mid 1960s based largely on the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. HPM is rooted in the conviction that people are inherently good and endowed with much greater potential than they ever realize. Our highest capacities usually remain unrealized because we are, in various ways, conditioned to accept a limiting story about who we are and what we are capable of. Once we recognize the ways in which we have been mistaken about our limitations, we can become empowered to transcend our self-limiting stories, take responsibility for our lives and, most importantly, begin to make a positive difference in the world.

This sounds pretty good, but there are a couple of things we need to consider. First, I want to suggest that the presumption of individual self-determination, central to HPM, depends crucially on white privilege. The right to determine one’s life conditions has not, by and large, been something people of color in this country can take for granted. From slavery and genocide, to Jim Crow and Native American boarding schools, to Japanese American internment, to the war on drugs and racist anti-immigrant laws, people of color in the U.S. have been and continue to be denied the sort of control over their lives to which those of us who identify as white often feel entitled. The assumption that genuine personal power is equally available to anyone with sufficient self-awareness reflects an obliviousness I encounter all too often among my Ecospiritual co-travelers.  

Another potentially problematic tendency within HPM is the emphasis it often places on sudden and dramatic personal change, due to some revelation about one's personal history. I have heard seemingly countless stories of individuals experiencing remarkable transformations after coming to see the self-limiting ways in which they had been interpreting their lives. My point is not that these sorts of personal shifts never happen. I’ve had a breakthrough or two of my own, after all. Rather, it’s the exaggerated way that these personal transformations tend to be characterized. I too often hear these personal breakthroughs described in transcendent terms, as if one’s personal and collective history can simply be sloughed off as so much dead skin. Though rhetorically compelling, the discourse of radical personal renewal tends to discount the very real power of social and structural influences and the dependence of those influences on legacies of oppression and privilege. Of course, everyone can benefit from less fear and greater self-awareness, but I suspect that people of color suffering real daily oppression might feel less than supported by white people telling them that their problems are self-imposed.

The Ecospiritual movement inherits these tendencies from HPM, but it goes a step further, imagining that transforming individuals is sufficient to transform society at large. Having blamed Descartes and Newton for the mind-body dualism and mechanistic materialism that characterize modern thought, we Ecospiritual types seem to think that once everyone understands the new paradigm of self-organization and interdependence, social change will somehow just follow. Once everyone sees how the universe works, and how everything and everyone is interconnected, we’ll be able bring forth the equitable, peaceful, and sustainable world we all want. Let me be clear. I’m not saying that the people I know actually believe it’s this simple. But whether we believe it or not, its logic still haunts our conversations.[ii] This attitude, however, exemplifies the individualism and habitual innocence that characterizes the white American psyche. Like colorblindness, it denies the momentum of history and disregards the immense institutional power invested in the prevailing order.

Finally, while it might plausibly be argued that the foregoing tendencies are distortions of valid HPM principles, there is a deeper problem, I think, which goes to HPM's philosophical underpinnings. Recall that one of the main forebears of HPM is Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow’s theory, the pinnacle of human potential, self-actualization, exists atop a hierarchy of human needs. Before people experience higher needs, such as the need for self-actualization, they are expected to have met what he called their “deficiency needs,” which begin with food and shelter, and culminate in esteem and respect. Given this structure, the fact that HPM, and, by extension, the Ecospiritual movement, attracts a relatively privileged population should surprise no one. Personal growth workshops must seem pretty extravagant to someone struggling just to keep themselves and their kids safe and fed. 

Needless to say (if you read my previous post or any of the many other accounts of  institutional and systemic white privilege) people of color in the U.S. continue to face significant extra burdens in trying to meet their most basic needs. Besides this obvious fact, Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t necessarily even work the same way for people of color in this country. It may not be possible for black and brown folks in the contemporary U.S. to have their deficiency needs reliably met. Being elected to the highest office in the land was not enough to garner President Obama sufficient respect that he could escape the humiliation of having to show his papers. And, as the recent murder of two Sikh men in Sacramento demonstrates, not even physical safety can be taken for granted when you are perceived as different than the white norm. 

So where does all this leave us? Clearly, if my analysis is correct, white privilege is practically written into the charter of the Ecospiritual movement. But I want to be clear that it is not my intention simply to critique the movement. I consider myself hopelessly committed to it, and I think it has a valuable role to play. I do believe, however, that in order to have the impact we wish to have in the world, we must build genuine alliances with the wider movement for human liberation and justice, which is lead primarily by people of color. And this cannot happen unless the white folks in the Ecospiritual movement are willing to confront our own racial privileges. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I am convinced that the Ecospiritual movement is going to be rendered irrelevant unless challenging racism and white privilege becomes a basic premise of our work.  

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[i] I have no research to support this negative claim, but if anyone has an example to disprove it, I’d love to hear it. BTW, I certainly don’t mean to suggest that individuals cannot be committed, to the point of risking their lives, to causes that do not serve their personal or collective interests. The Civil Rights movement provides plenty of counterexamples to that, and the US military is one big counterexample.

[ii] This habit of thought draws its psychic sustenance, I suppose, from the millennialism that continues to characterize Western thinking about the future.

Whiteness and the White Privilege Paradigm

Barry Deutsch / CC BY 3.0

In the previous post I offered some critical reflections on colorblindness, the paradigm that dominates the mainstream conversation on race in the United States. In this post I will discuss the white privilege paradigm. The white privilege paradigm represents a formidable challenge to the paradigm of colorblindness, and it constitutes a vital dimension of the stand I take throughout this blog. White privilege helps account for the durability of institutional and structural racism by reminding us that systemic oppression continues to have real beneficiaries in post Civil Rights America. In addition, the white privilege paradigm reframes the question of racial progress. Whereas the colorblind paradigm portrays a post-racial America, where racism has been all but eliminated, the white privilege paradigm enables us to see the ways in which the advancement of formal human rights for people of color has coincided with the consolidation of informal structural and institutional advantages for those able to identify as white Americans.

As I discussed in the previous post, those who believe in the narrative of racial progress point to the removal of formal barriers, legal and otherwise, which excluded black Americans from certain schools and neighborhoods, from access to public accommodations, and from voting. They also cite surveys that reveal a steady decline in explicitly prejudiced attitudes among white Americans. The reason that these particular types of evidence are considered convincing is that the colorblind paradigm relies on a mechanistic conception of society, in general, and racism, in particular. The methodology appropriate to understanding a machine is to analyze it into its component parts and evaluate its parts in isolation. With respect to racism, the parts appear to be OK. As I said, the laws are no longer explicitly racist and most individual white people at least know how to avoid sounding prejudiced in a phone survey.[i] For those with a strictly mechanistic understanding of society, therefore, the conclusion that racism is largely behind us makes sense.

The white privilege paradigm, on the other hand, derives from a view of society based on systems thinking.[ii] Systems thinking entails a methodology quite different from mechanistic thinking. The methodology associated with the study of systems, especially biological and social systems is twofold. First, because such systems are complex and non-linear, their behavior cannot be evaluated based on isolated observations. Only statistical methods can reveal if there are meaningful patterns in the behavior of such systems over time. I referred in the previous post to the crucial difference between performing a statistical analysis of racial equity in the U.S. and citing individual anecdotes, such as Obama’s election. Interpretations may vary, but no one can deny the persistence of major patterns of racial disparity in virtually every measurable domain. The data leaves little doubt that the ability to claim a white identity in the U.S. corresponds to significantly greater material wellbeing and social mobility.

In addition, in order to understand how the patterns revealed by statistical analysis came to characterize a particular system, one must study that system’s history. If we examine the history of racism in the U.S., and avoid trying to fit it into the preexisting narrative of advancing freedom, we may notice a consistent pattern. Despite significant racial progress in certain areas, the advancement of people of color, as a whole, has been limited, at every juncture,  by the unwillingness of white people, as a whole, to relinquish the unearned benefits we derive from our white identity. I’m not saying that individual white people are necessarily acting deliberately to perpetuate large scale systemic injustices. We are usually just acting individually to preserve social benefits that we have been trained to regard as entitlements. We are like bees, who’ve been blindly following simple local rules, while building and maintaining an elaborate hive of white supremacy. The white privilege paradigm provides a framework for conceptualizing the history of racism in the U.S. in a way that reframes the question of racial progress and exposes its built-in limitations.

The privileges of whiteness include concrete material advantages such as access to “safe” neighborhoods, well-resourced schools, and favorable or fair treatment by most private and public institutions. They also include less tangible advantages such as a confidence (not always warranted) that the system will be forgiving of your and your children’s  “mistakes,” that your bad habits won’t be seen as racial flaws, that portrayals of your race in the media and in history books will be mostly positive, and that your race will remain a norm against which racial and cultural difference is measured and judged. It should come as no surprise that white people act collectively, if not always consciously, to preserve these benefits.

Cheryl Harris and George Lipsitz have each argued that whiteness in the U.S. is treated as a type of property. This means that the system regards the privileges of whiteness as rights, which naturally take precedence over demands for social justice. Harris, for example, shows how whiteness has been treated as property by the legal system. In her landmark paper Whiteness as Property, she notes that, at the very moment when the land ownership requirement for voting was being eliminated, the right to vote was being actively denied to free Blacks, through legal and extra-legal means. The property requirement for voting was thus effectively replaced with a race requirement, explicitly turning whiteness into a form of legal property. Government policies have subsequently protected and enhanced the property value of whiteness, often through laws that make no direct mention of race. The New Deal offers a prime example of this phenomenon. When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, farm labor and domestic service, the main job categories occupied by people of color at that time, were excluded from benefits. So Social Security, as originally enacted, was meant for white people. In addition, the New Deal housing programs, such as the FHA and the HOLC relied on explicitly discriminatory underwriting policies. As a result, practically all available federal home loan assistance went to fund white migration to the suburbs, while people of color remained trapped in substandard inner city housing. 

In his book, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Lipsitz reveals a continuity between erstwhile strategies for preserving white power and new, less overt practices that have emerged during the post Civil Rights era. Sticking with the real estate example, although fair housing laws eliminated race-based FHA underwriting guidelines and outlawed restrictive covenants, informal practices of racial steering and mortgage discrimination have continued up to the present. Moreover, according to Lipsitz, private lenders, developers, and speculators exploited the provisions of the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act in ways that actually exacerbated segregation, promoting white flight, creating price volatility, and of course producing large profits for themselves. Besides having measurable negative impacts in terms of education, crime, health and employment, residential segregation is also self-perpetuating for the obvious reason that suburban real estate has tended to appreciate over time. This has produced greater intergenerational wealth for suburban home owners, and widened the racial wealth gap over time.

Another way in which whiteness has functioned to maintain its privilege and power in the U.S. is through an ideological backlash against race-conscious public policies. As Lipsitz points out, policies designed to advance opportunities for people of color tend to be accepted precisely up the point at which they are perceived to impinge on privileges that white people regard as entitlements. The most obvious example of this is affirmative action. For centuries, people of color were actively excluded from educational and employment opportunities, and many continue to face formidable challenges due to structural disadvantages such as residential segregation, as well as old-fashion discrimination. Yet, the modest efforts undertaken to correct for these very real disadvantages, such as a little extra consideration in hiring and college admissions, have been met with a sustained and largely successful campaign to reframe affirmative action as unfair discrimination against white people. Meanwhile, the fact that most of its beneficiaries are white women typically gets lost in the rush to cast the affirmative action in racial terms.

Finally, white privilege persists because white people are motivated to preserve the status quo and at the same time are shielded from responsibility by the singular privilege of obliviousness. Indeed, this covenant of ignorance/innocence is perhaps the primary way that whiteness protects its privileged position.[iii] Our cultivated inability (sometimes refusal) to see how the institutions and social structures of U.S. society favor white people allows us not only to enjoy our racial advantages but to defend them tenaciously. It is ironic that, in a society where so many of us are so poorly versed in science and history, the average white person, when challenged, turns out to be capable of expounding eloquently on abstract liberal principles, such as free market competition, individual choice, and the merits of meritocracy.[iv] Indeed, a statement such as “the best person should always get the job” probably sounds like common sense to most people. However, for this to be realized requires not only that every potentially qualified person has an equal chance of being considered, but also that there exists an unproblematically universal standard for making these decisions. In addition, the abstract terms of this discussion presuppose that the race of the people empowered to do the deciding can safely be ignored.

The notion that racism is sustained through our “innocent,” race-neutral actions probably constitutes a pretty radical paradigm shift for most of us. I know it did for me. The shift is made even more difficult by the fact that accepting this analysis of our society entails a responsibility to change it. You are welcome of course to reject this whole argument; that after all is the essence of white privilege. I only ask that you consider: what if this analysis is right? What if, when we fail to question the status quo because it’s hard and because we don’t have to, we are engaged in a collective enterprise to preserve unearned privileges that flow to us at the expense of people of color? Just think about it.

For the white privilege paradigm, racism is not a mechanical process that can be disabled simply by removing race from the law and race prejudice from individuals’ minds. Though originally created by design, racism persists as an emergent property, which perpetuates itself through institutional momentum, social and residential segregation, and countless seemingly race-neutral acts of rational self-interest. While the colorblind paradigm obscures the true nature of this system, the white privilege paradigm lays bare its inner logic, dramatically remapping the moral landscape and brazenly transgressing the cosmology of whiteness.  

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[i] The claim that race prejudice has dramatically lessened among individual white people does not hold up so well in detailed studies.

[ii] Systems thinking has by now influenced every scientific discipline, but it should be noted that the it actually has roots in sociology.

[iii] In his book The Racial Contract, Mills calls this covenant an “epistemological contract.” It functions through the ideology of individualism, the discounting & distortion of history, the mechanistic conception of society and of course the colorblind paradigm. 

[iv] See Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla Silva.