Where the White Men Aren't

Deep and sustainable social change requires not only legislative and institutional reform, but also personal and cultural transformation. I first encountered this principle in the ecology movement, which sees the environmental crisis as having its roots in Western culture. Racial justice activism, by contrast, has tended to focus on law and policy, leaving the personal and cultural work to corporate diversity trainers. This strategy has failed to address the deep culture of whiteness that upholds white supremacy with or without racial animus. There is a growing realization among racial justice leaders and others that white supremacy is a spiritual crisis, which includes white people among its casualties. As a result, more of us white folks are beginning to investigate our white racial conditioning as a means to heal ourselves, and hopefully the culture.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the work of exploring whiteness with groups of white people is close to my heart. I am deeply concerned, however, that I encounter so few other men* doing this work. I feel strongly about this for two reasons. For one, white masculinity continues to be a source of needless violence and misery for women, trans and non-binary people, and of course men. Second, for reasons I’ll get to, it is difficult to do meaningful work on my own white male conditioning without the support of other men.

So why aren’t white men showing up? Are we just averse to internally-focused work? That’s surely part of it. However, how much of that is simple avoidance, and how much of it is that the work is not meeting men where they/we are? I have some reflections based on my experience doing this work as both participant and facilitator.

In general, women have a huge head start. As a man, I wasn’t taught the basic competencies needed for “inner” work. Unlearning social conditioning, in particular, requires a solid foundation of emotional intelligence, intellectual humility, empathy, and an ability to show vulnerability with virtual strangers. These capacities were largely drummed out of me during childhood. My male peers and elders taught me to hide my vulnerabilities, disconnect from my feelings, and revere competition. These are ideal lessons for a society built on conquest, exploitation, and resource extraction, but not so useful for exploring our inner lives, especially in a group.

That said, I have come up against some challenges that are not just about my male underdevelopment. They are also about differences in how men and women embody whiteness. White conditioning is based on shame, and, as Brené Brown points out, shame is organized around gender. Both women and men are taught to feel that being worthy of love and belonging is conditional, but the conditions are different.

Men’s worthiness for love and belonging is conditioned on the ability to manifest self-reliance and independence. Besides being ironic, this belief is profoundly self-defeating since it constitutes a major obstacle to working on this very conditioning. Women—especially white women—while also promised the possibility of independence, are not taught to see it as a condition of their worthiness. Indeed, they receive contrary conditioning, since society—especially men—depends on them for all sorts of unpaid and invisible labor, including the social and emotional housekeeping that sustains social life.

Meanwhile, white conditioning runs on shame, and the best antidote to shame is talking about shame. This means, first of all, we need to build a sense of group trust and cohesion. Ideally, everyone in the group would participate in this process. However, because building authentic relationships (as opposed to forming teams or business alliances) can cause feelings of vulnerability in men, we typically let the women perform this labor, which they generally do, almost reflexively. As a result, those of us most in need of this practice are able to sit back, wondering when the “real work” will begin.

This isn’t the only way our gendered conditioning around creating and maintaining social relationships affects how my male peers and I engage the work. It is a common practice in these groups to share times when racism or privilege impacted an interpersonal interaction. The expectation is that participants will report racial blunders or racially-charged conflicts with friends of color. They can express any feelings of guilt or shame that come up and receive support and encouragement from people who’ve had similar experiences. This work builds awareness of the emotional undercurrents that inform our intentions to connect across difference. Plus, when we can get support from other white folks, we’re less likely to burden our friends of color with our feelings.

That’s the idea, anyway, and it seems effective for the women I’ve worked with. As a man, though, I’ve had trouble connecting with these activities. I used to assume I was doing something wrong, not being honest enough, real enough, vulnerable enough. As I reflect on my experience being one of so few men in these spaces, however, I’m realizing that my co-facilitators and I have not been considering the ways shame is “organized around gender.” What if the reason many white women experience shame when whiteness interferes with their relationships is that their feelings of worthiness are conditioned on their competence in social and emotional housekeeping? If so, this would help explain why these activities seem to work well for women but fail to resonate for me and perhaps for other men. I do of course feel embarrassed by my social and emotional missteps, but I don’t tend to feel shame. Maybe, I should. That’s a separate question.

My white conditioning has, without question, malformed my sense of worthiness, but in gendered ways. I feel shame, for example, when I need to ask for help, and when I lose a debate, and in a dozen other situations that reveal my lack of strength, independence, or control. These are the sources of shame that implicitly shape my behavior in ways that (directly or implicitly) perpetuate white supremacy and patriarchy. And it feels nearly impossible to meaningfully address this conditioning in a mixed group, especially when men are a tiny minority.

We men need to be doing this work for society and for our own liberation. We need male affinity spaces. There is already a growing awareness that we need to work together as men on our toxic masculinity, but there is almost nothing available for white men who want to explore the intersection of whiteness and masculinity. We need spaces where we can have our stories of shame and loneliness heard and mirrored, so that we can examine how we’ve been molded into witting and unwitting agents of oppression and begin to heal ourselves in service of collective healing and transformation.

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*Throughout this piece I refer to “men/women and male/female.” I acknowledge that sex, gender, and social conditioning are not binary. At the same time, the conditioning itself is binary, and it’s that conditioning that I’m attempting to explore.

What I Said When My White Friend Asked for My White Opinion on What a Black Woman Said When Her White Friend Asked for Her Black Opinion on White Privilege

My title is an homage to a wonderful blog post by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, entitled “What I Said When My White Friend Asked For My Black Opinion on White Privilege.” That post was the stimulus for the following exchange. I am sharing it in the same spirit in which Ms. Hutcherson shared hers, to offer support to curious white folks who are just starting to explore how racism has shaped us and the world around us.


Dear Gregory,


A friend posted this article, which I read. It helped me understand what white privilege means. I was wondering what your view was on this article? I want to make sure I am filling my head and heart with truth. Also, I feel like there is white shame that goes along with this. Is the antidote to shame, telling the truth? Advocating for change? Acknowledging racism? Something else? Thank you.


Becky (name changed)


Dear Becky,


It is very nice to hear from you. It is especially nice to hear from you on this topic. It warms my heart when fellow white people begin to get curious about what it really means to be white. It also gives me hope for the world. So thank you!! To answer your first question, I think this article is wonderful. It is an act of profound generosity when a person of color shares their experiences of racism because, as the author says, these experiences can be painful to relive. Furthermore, though the author didn’t mention it, I have heard from others that it is extremely vulnerable for people of color to report on the racism they experience because they are so often not believed. It is hard for people who benefit from white privilege to acknowledge the racism that many people of color must deal with on a daily basis because this knowledge provokes shame.


Which brings me to your second question: I believe shame is one of the biggest hurdles we face, as white people. It arises naturally as we begin to awaken to the enormous suffering caused by structural white supremacy, which despite being all around us, we have somehow failed to see. It comes as a shock when we begin to realize the degree to which our lives are shaped by systems that use terror and brutality to maintain structural inequality.


To look for the first time at the true history of genocide, slavery, lynching, and racist housing policies, and to see how that history lives on in the violence of racist policing, mass incarceration, and gentrification can overwhelm us with shame, not to mention guilt. One of the hallmarks of white privilege is that we are typically oblivious to the violence that sustains it. One of its costs is what Robin DiAngelo calls white fragility. Those of us who suffer from this condition lack a certain emotional resilience and tend to become highly triggered when the topic of racism comes up.


The antidote to shame for me has been engagement, but engagement is no magic bullet. Thanks to my own white fragility, I still get knocked off center by the emotional currents surrounding this topic. The only way to build stamina is to stay engaged, especially when we feel uncomfortable. Because this is difficult emotional labor, we may be tempted to look to people of color to receive our remorse and our tears. We must resist this. Comforting and reassuring white people requires energy that people of color, for whom racism is a matter of life and death, cannot spare. Moreover, it is not their responsibility to attend to our feelings. I have found that my own sustainability in this work depends on having a community of white people. It is crucial, I think, that white people find or create spaces where we can share support and encouragement so that we can show up for the struggle as fully resourced as possible.


Once we have begun to really feel what it means that our society is rooted in white supremacy – that we are embedded in its systems and its systems are embedded in us – we are ready to act with authenticity and accountability. Acting with authenticity means confronting white supremacy, in society and within ourselves, not from a desire to “help” people of color (as if they need our help) or to feel better about ourselves (by trying to fix other white people), but from a foundation of understanding that our own liberation depends on it. Acting with accountability means taking leadership from and be willing to answer to those communities that are likely to be impacted by our actions, however well-intended they may be.


How we each engage in the struggle is a personal matter. There is no formula for dismantling white supremacy. But there are endless ways to step up, from interrupting racist jokes to challenging workplace practices; from talking to our neighbors to shutting down freeways; from writing letters to running for office. What matters is that we show up and do what we can, with the knowledge that ending racism is essential for our personal and collective healing, as white people and as humans.


Best Regards,


Gregory

Reflections on Whiteness, Fear, and the Culture of Separation

                               Photo: Twitter         

"One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don’t know who they are or where they come from. That’s why you think I’m a problem. I am not the problem; your history is. And as long as you pretend you don’t know your history, you’re gonna be the prisoner of it. And there’s no question of your liberating me, ‘cause you can’t liberate yourselves. We are in this together. " 
- James Baldwin

I have been seeing pictures on social media of protesters holding up mirrors to the police so the officers can see what they look clad in full riot gear. While this is a powerful tactic, I want to suggest that the reflections in those mirrors, the helmets and body armor, and the police state they symbolize, are actually a direct expression of the collective fears and anxieties of our society, especially white society. As white people, it is not only dark skinned people we fear. We also fear our own repressed history. And we fear looking at our ongoing complicity in the violence that afflicts communities of color, even as we displace our seemingly limitless capacity for violence onto them, thereby magnifying our fears and justifying the police state we've created to allay them.  

And then Ferguson happened. We have had more than enough of our young brothers and sisters of color being killed by police, vigilantes, and other panic-stricken white people. If you've been paying attention, it's obvious that this has been building for some time. Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, Alan Blueford, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, and on and on. It may be a surprise to some, but there is nothing new about black people in this country being killed with impunity. Most black folks have noticed the low value this society places on black lives. What is new is that white people have finally begun to notice the pattern and to look at it through the lens of white privilege.

There have been a good deal of discussion on social media about the very real differences in the way we, as white people, are treated, especially by law enforcement. One particular meme consists of white folks holding signs citing outrageous behaviors that did not get them shot by police. There is an excellent blog post on XOjane in which a white mother lays out all the ways she knows her white sons will be able to roll through their young lives without fear of being bothered, much less killed, by police.

As important as recognizing our white privilege is, however, this is not enough. Admitting that, as a white man, I am treated with respect and deference by institutional power (and don't ever worry that any mistreatment I may receive is due to my race) is a crucial first step. However, observing that the system is unjust in my favor does not, by itself, remedy the situation. This awareness must be coupled with collective political action. Having recognized that, as white people, we have special access to institutional power, we must use that access to demand genuine accountability and begin to co-create a truly equitable society. This is what being an ally means.  

It isn't always easy to hold institutions accountable, of course. In the case of law enforcement, according to Mother Jones, "no agency appears to track the number of police shootings or killings of unarmed victims in a systematic, comprehensive way." This, in itself, is a profound indicator of the depth of the problem. To fill this void, following in the footsteps of Ida B Wells' anti-lynching campaign, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has issued a report documenting 275 unjustified killings of black people by police, private security, and vigilantes in 2012. As the report shows, very few of these killings resulted in the shooter(s) even being charged, let alone convicted, a fact that attests to the deep and tangled roots of white supremacy in the U.S.  

The virtual police occupation of communities of color in the U.S., along with the school to prison pipeline, and the racist mass incarceration system, is not a product of individual-level racism. It is a product of us as white people acting collectively and consistently based on a distorted idea of our racial self-interest. We may not explicitly support law enforcement tactics that result in human rights violations, but our failure to oppose policies that promise to "keep our streets safe," by being "tough on crime," constitutes our tacit support.

That probably sounds a bit harsh, but I really don't mean it as an accusation. The race discourse is rife with accusation already, whether it's white conservatives and their black allies blaming black culture, white liberals blaming other white people, or activists calling out their fellows. This all helps to create and sustain the culture of separation, which is one of the centerpieces of white culture. What is most needed is healing and reconnection, and where we need to look first (and deeply) is to white socialization. White socialization teaches us not only to see ourselves as separate individuals, but to fear each other. And it teaches us to value separateness, not only from each other, but also from the parts of ourselves that are not acceptable to the false standards of whiteness (innocence, independence, reason, culturelessness).

As white people, we need to build a new consciousness and a new sense of who we are as members of the larger human family, which begins with unlearning some of our white socialization. This is certainly challenging and deeply personal work, but it is not work we can do on our own. There is no individual credential to earn or penance to pay. There is no competition to win. There is simply the opportunity and responsibility to reawaken long dormant capacities for being together in community. Thus it is work that can only be done collectively. Indeed, the real revolution begins the moment we come together with our vulnerability, our uncertainties, our fear, and our longing.  

Whiteness, Microaggressions, and the Threat to White Innocence

Barry Deutsch / CC BY 3.0

A recent article in the New York Times by Tanzina Vega entitled "Students See Many Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions’" highlights a new movement intended to bring attention to the experiences of people of color interacting with supposedly non-racist white people. Initially, I was pleased to see the dominant media reporting on the issue of racial microaggressions, but I was quickly disappointed by Vega's attempt to offer a balanced take on this "trend." She purports to present both sides, but her superficial notion of balance, which is firmly rooted in whiteness, severely limits the article's potential to add anything useful to readers' understanding of the issue.  

The problem with this article is its unflinching commitment to the white racial frame, and specifically to its post-civil rights liberal offshoot, the diversity frame. According to the diversity frame, the relevant context for understanding microaggressions, as with all  race-related issues is difference, and specifically, difference from a largely unnamed norm of whiteness. Beginning with her implication that microaggressions are occurring as a result of "an increasingly diverse culture," to her closing with Henry Louis Gate's call for equal opportunity oppression, the overall moral picture she paints is of a world where racial differences are more or less neutral, and bear no larger historical or political significance. From the vantage point of Vega's diversity frame, it seems, microaggressions are being discussed now primarily because people from "diverse" groups are interacting with each other more frequently. There is no acknowledgement that microaggressions are actually about white people (consciously or not) perpetuating white cultural dominance.

After characterizing "microaggressions" as "the social justice word du jour" and describing the proliferation of blogs, facebook pages, academic papers, and student theater productions documenting the phenomenon,  she traces the term's popularity to Columbia psychology professor Derald W. Sue, author of an influential book on the topic. This would have been a great opportunity to get a clear articulation of the theory of microaggressions directly from the source. Unfortunately, all we get from Dr. Sue is a conjecture that the increased use of the term is due to the changing demographics of the country. The article is peppered with quotes from few individual students of color describing their experiences of being targets of microaggressions, but the author lets these stand on their own, making little or no effort to situate these experiences in the context of the theory.

 

Meanwhile, Vega is fairly generous in giving voice to those who are more of less skeptical of the concept. She quotes Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter, who suggests the need to distinguish truly abusive statements - like assuming that every black student on campus is an affirmative action case - from more innocent speech such as an assertion of colorblindness. Vega also cites more serious skeptics, such as Harry Stein (an author noted for his conservative views on race), who criticizes the term microaggression for exaggerating the significance of these encounters and encouraging a victim mentality. The article ends with the venerable Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasizing that, in the interests of genuine multiculturalism, "the public airing of racial microaggressions should not be limited to minorities."   

An all too familiar feature of the white racial frame is the urge to portray reports of white racial insensitivity as exaggerated and as the cause, rather than the result, of racial tension. Vega makes no secret of her suspicion that much of the discussion of microaggressions may be a matter of "divisive hypersensitivity." This attitude is exemplified by her treatment of Dr. McWhorter's defense of white folks' professions of colorblindness. When McWhorter says that, "whites do not have the same freedom to talk about race that nonwhites do," Vega lets this statement stand unchallenged. This uncritical acceptance makes sense from within a diversity frame which recognizes difference but not power and privilege.

Illustration by Gabriel Ivan Orendain-Necochea/CSUN Daily Sundial

A writer with a critical race frame (which is what is called for here) would have pointed out that the training of whites to avoid talking about race is one of the defining features of post civil rights white supremacy. It is a primary means by which the white power structure maintains itself. Whether the scene is a family holiday, where talking about controversial topics is impolite, or a political campaign, where mentioning racism is "playing the race card," or a community college classroom, where white students are able to shutdown a conversation on race because it's making them uncomfortable, white social norms and white institutional power are very effective at silencing race talk. Moreover, the opportunity to benefit from whiteness while refusing to acknowledge racial differences is the sine qua non of white privilege. Precisely for this reason, from the standpoint of the critical race frame, white people who oppose racism actually have a moral responsibility to talk about whiteness and racism whenever possible.

Another consequence of Vega's white racial frame is her failure to offer any explanation of the theory behind the "trend." Indeed, she fundamentally misrepresents it. In their landmark paper on the topic, Dr. Sue et al. define racial microaggressions as "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color" (italics mine). The definition, which is conspicuously missing from the article, is quite explicit that the psychological impact of racial microaggressions is assumed to be independent of the intentions of the speaker. Moreover, all the literature supporting the theory emphasizes that the negative effects of microaggressions do not arise from isolated interactions, but are cumulative in nature.

No idea is immune from criticism, of course, but there is a significant difference between critique and obfuscation. Rather than challenge the idea of microaggressions on its merits, Vega leaves her readers with the mistaken impression that the discourse is about ascertaining the true intentions of a speaker in order to figure out whether a particular interaction should count as a microaggression. This is clear from the outset, when she wonders if the discussion is useful or whether it represents a "new form of divisive hypersensitivity, in which casual remarks are blown out of proportion." Whether her confusion is genuine or strategic, it comports well with her white racial frame. By concentrating on the question of intentionality, she managed to change the subject in a fairly predictable way. Rather than helping her readers understand the life experience of people of color who are routinely confronted with minor insults, indignities, and invalidations, she opted to wring her hands over the possibility that some "innocent" white people might feel unjustly accused of racism.

This article is a heartbreaking missed opportunity. It could have given Times' readers the gift of a genuine appreciation for the suffering caused by racial microaggressions and made a contribution to the healing of our society's collective racial trauma. Instead, by remaining solidly within a white racial frame, the article ends up simply re-perpetrating that trauma, while giving us white folks more fodder for our claims of innocence.

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.