What's In it for White Men?

I have been thinking a lot about how the emotional shackles of white masculinity relate to the low numbers of white men showing up for interpersonal anti-oppression work. In a previous post, I reflected on the gender dynamics that play out when men show up in groups that are working on unlearning whiteness. I observed that while women usually do most of the social and emotional labor in these groups, they are also able to get their needs met in terms of working on their conditioning. I speculated about why these spaces might not feel welcoming to white men, but I only touched on what it would mean to do anti-oppression work in a way that truly meets our needs.

“Hey,” you may be thinking (or yelling at the screen), “anti-oppression work isn’t about white men’s needs! It’s about dismantling white male supremacy.” I get that. And, I feel strongly that dismissing white men’s needs is ultimately counterproductive. I believe that no one does this work, over the long haul, unless they’re getting something out of it. I like to tell myself I’m motivated solely by my selfless commitment to social justice. But I know that’s not entirely true, and believing it is dangerous. If I’m not able to connect to how anti-oppression work contributes to my own liberation, I could end up operating out of guilt, and a sense of obligation to help the oppressed. White savior complex, however, is not liberating for anyone.

Last night, I went to a gathering of my white UNtraining friends to bid farewell to a white cishet man who has to leave the Bay Area. He and I shared a tender moment of sadness about his impending departure and mutual appreciation for the ways we’ve been able to support each other as men. I was intensely aware of how rarely I experience that kind of trust and vulnerability with other men (besides my spouse). It was a poignant reminder of the spiritual and psychological price we pay as white men for our involvement with these systems.

I want to be as clear as I can that I am not rehearsing the “oppressed white male” narrative. It is beyond dispute that white men still control all the major social institutions and, as a group, wield disproportionate political power. Not only that, we receive compassion denied to others and get treated with sympathy when we rape or commit mass murder or ruin the country. But none of this alters the reality that many of us experience loneliness because our social conditioning makes it difficult to sustain same-gender friendships. The harried pace of modern life is a factor, but as Mark Greene argues, the source of our loneliness goes to the core of modern masculinity.

As young boys, we’re trained to avoid showing physical or emotional affection with other boys and never, ever to express vulnerable emotions. We’re conditioned to experience relationships as contests for dominance or as means to an end, but rarely as ends in themselves. Authentic connections, however, require emotional safety. I don’t feel particularly safe with most straight white men, and several men have told me they feel similarly. No wonder we experience loneliness!

Male training not only sets us up for emotional isolation, it also instills in us a disconnected, instrumental mindset that prepares us well for colluding with systems of oppression. Paul Kivel has given a name to the narrow and rigid set of attitudes and behaviors that define manhood in opposition to ostensibly feminine traits such as empathy and emotional connection: the act like a man box. This construct not only discourages men from living full emotional lives, it encourages racism, misogyny, and other forms of dominance and violence. This is one of the reasons I believe that healing ourselves and dismantling oppressive systems are not separate projects.

The good news is we have already begun a deep conversation about the culture of hegemonic masculinity and its harmfulness to men. Contrary to what some conservatives argue, this conversation is not a blanket smear of masculinity and men. Their reaction does have a parallel, though, in the way white folks often react to having our whiteness named. In both instances, the group in question has long enjoyed the privilege of being seen as just normal, generic individuals, unmarked by “difference.” This is a hard privilege to give up. I admit that I feel myself flinch every time I’m reminded that my white male identity shapes how I view the world.

The unmarked individualism of white masculinity also allows us to blame harmful attitudes and actions on isolated bad apples. This absolves us from responsibility for, or even awareness of, the ways that whiteness and masculinity create the social conditions and worldviews that reinforce the racial and gender hierarchies we benefit from.

If white men are to heal ourselves and participate in transforming society, we must begin to take responsibility for ourselves, personally and collectively. For me, personal responsibility begins with taking responsibility for my own feelings. Being stoic is great when changing a flat tire in a blizzard, but if I’m unable or unwilling to express vulnerable feelings, I’ll probably end up feeling isolated. Personal responsibility also means being aware of how I cause harm, even unintentionally: by talking down to women or people of color, or talking over them, or expecting them to take care of my ego, for example. It’s difficult to be aware of my impact on others if I’m disconnected from my own feelings.

Collective responsibility might be harder to wrap one’s mind. For one thing, masculine identity entails a basic ambivalence. Though we expect to be seen as unmarked individuals, we also want to be seen as men. For the latter identity to be positive, however, we have to take responsibility collectively for what manhood means. This doesn’t mean we have to be accountable for every bad act of every individual man. It does mean recognizing how we are complicit (actively or passively) in celebrating male violence and domination or punishing those who venture outside the “act like a man box.”

Collectively, we need to replace the act like a man box with an act like a human box. In the latter, we will give one another the space and support to be our full selves. We will call each other on our sexism and racism and “locker room talk.” We will celebrate the strength of character that it takes to tell the truth about ourselves, even when we’re afraid or confused or just sad. And, of course, we will reject any impulse, external or internal, to construe our human feelings, or the sharing of them, as somehow weak or unmanly.

I ended my previous article by arguing that, as white men, we need our own spaces to work on our social conditioning. I want to reiterate that conclusion here. To liberate ourselves from the emotional shackles of our conditioning, we need to cultivate trusting, emotionally vulnerable connections as men. If this sounds as scary and unthinkable to you as it does to me, that’s because our distrust and fear of each other is at the very foundation of white masculinity. And it is why we must begin our work with each other. Our liberation and other unthinkable possibilities await.

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.

White Conservatives and Black Lives

I was about to post this article on the day that Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges in the killing of Philando Castille. That felt like the absolutely wrong moment to share a piece about how to talk across the ideological divide that separates Black Lives Matter from its detractors. It was a moment for the unrestrained expression of grief and rage. Since then, of course, we’ve seen the white supremacist alt-right assert itself more publicly and violently than it had in recent times, so I also want to emphasize that, when I refer to conservatives in this piece, I mean the traditional sort, not the alt-right, though I am under no illusions about the very real connections between the putrid ideology of the latter and the everyday ways white supremacy is implicit in both liberal and conservative politics.

With that said, here is the original piece:

Black Lives Matter is probably the most successful U.S. based civil and human rights movement in a generation. Its simple and elegant message has gone around the world and spawned many imitators. Yet one sector of the U.S. populace has remained largely unmoved by BLM’s message — white conservatives. Indeed, they have fulminated against it from the beginning. It is, of course, commonplace to attribute this communication breakdown to simple racism. And that’s certainly legit. But it’s ultimately not that useful.

I want to clarify at the outset that this should, in no way, be construed as a critique of Black Lives Matter, the movement by Black folks to assert their right to exist with freedom and dignity. I am not here to white-mansplain how they should improve their message. The movement’s success speaks for itself. However, there is no denying it has its limits, as any communication strategy does. The limitation I want to discuss concerns what often happens when white liberals try to talk to our conservative-leaning friends and family.

Moral Foundations Theory

For a good long while, I was genuinely bewildered by the reaction of conservatives to BLM. And it’s not just right-wingers, either. This includes many folks who might identify as independent but have a more traditional outlook on social matters. I was thoroughly perplexed, for example, by the rejoinder, “all lives matter.” How is it possible to not understand that “black lives matter” means black lives matter, too, not black lives matter more or only?

There had to be more going on than lack of comprehension. If that were all it was, a simple clarification would do the job. In reality, when white liberals try to convince conservatives there is often anger and digging in of heels. And the person trying to defend BLM ends up regarding their conservative counterpart as an uncaring, irredeemable racist. This experience is frustrating, of course, but it is also secretly satisfying to know with certainty that you’re on the right side of the issue.

I recently came across research on Moral Foundations Theory(MFT), that kind of blew my mind. The ideas, which are explained in the book, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt offer some powerful insight into the communication fail that happens between liberals and conservatives. Let me start with a brief primer on the theory. MFT was developed by a group of social and cultural psychologists trying to understand the confounding moral diversity found across various cultures. The theory proposes that the wide variety of moral systems governing human societies are based on a common set of moral foundations shared by all humans. This is not to say that nature rather than culture determines human morality. Rather, according to MFT, specific beliefs about right and wrong arise through the complex interaction between nature and culture. It might be helpful to think of these moral foundations as differently colored threads out of which a moral community weaves a unique moral tapestry.

MFT postulates six moral foundations:

• The first foundation is care/harm. It is the basis for admiring those in need and repudiating cruelty.
• The second is liberty/oppression. This foundation informs the conviction that it is wrong to impinge on an individual’s inherent right to freedom from unjust domination.
• The third foundation is fairness/cheating. It informs the principle that people should get what they deserve, but no more. People who work hard are entitled to recompense and people who commit misdeeds deserve appropriate punishment.
• The fourth foundation is sanctity/degradation, which concerns the importance of preserving the sacred. Religious strictures regarding the handling of holy objects and the performance of ceremonies rest on this foundation.
• The fifth foundation is loyalty/betrayal, which is about commitment to an ingroup. It may be expressed as team spirit or patriotism or even racial solidarity.
• The sixth foundation is authority/subversion. The moral duty to honor and respect one’s social superiors, such as parents, teachers, and other authority figures, stands on this foundation.

Countless intersecting historical, cultural, and contingent factors shape the way moral communities draw on these foundations to weave a functioning moral system. White liberals and white conservatives in the United States have constructed distinct moral communities with alternative moral systems (I’ll drop the modifiers “white” and “in the US”, but they are implied). Liberalism tends to emphasize the care/harm and liberty/oppression foundations, almost exclusively. For liberals, empathy for those who are suffering and the willingness to help them is the highest moral good. The actions seen as most immoral, meanwhile, are those that entail intentional harm or the domination of the weak by the strong.

Generally speaking, liberals see the notion of moral duties based on sanctity/degradation and loyalty/betrayal as backward (though environmentalists may see “nature” as sacred). The morality of loyalty is suspect for liberals because they tend to understand moral obligations as universal, meaning that ingroup and outgroup members are due the same moral consideration. Moreover, many liberals are contemptuous of the authority/subversion foundation and reject the notion that we have any moral obligation to obey or show deference to authority. On the contrary, liberals celebrate underdogs who defy the powerful (George Washington, Martin Luther King, etc.). A decent synopsis of the liberal morality might be: take care of the vulnerable and stand up for the oppressed.

That morality of care and liberation may seem like common sense if you’re a liberal, but then that’s precisely what makes you a liberal. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to give all six moral foundations roughly equal weight. Thus, while they value care and compassion, they value respect for authority and ingroup loyalty just as much. And protecting the sacred from debasement is at least as important as opposing oppression, especially if the oppressed are members of an outgroup. If the conservative moral matrix could be summed up in a single injunction, it would be: uphold the social institutions and sacred traditions responsible for preserving the social order. The heroes of this morality tend to be law enforcement officers and military veterans.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Back to Black Lives Matter

From the conservative perspective, society has an unwritten compact whereby the police protect us from crime and social breakdown, and, in exchange, we agree to grant them our trust and even a certain amount of reverence. Yet BLM activists are saying that police abuse their authority by brutalizing and killing innocent people, and that the institution itself is basically corrupt. Since, for conservatives, the compact with the police is sacred and indispensable to an orderly society, this message must be false, and to suggest otherwise is dangerously subversive. After all, the police routinely risk their lives in maintaining the thin blue line between social order and chaos.

In addition to considering it wrong to criticize the police because of their vital social role, conservatives also tend to feel a sense of ingroup loyalty toward law enforcement personnel. Outgroups, of course, may include the liberal elite, the mainstream media, and “social justice warriors.” The ultimate outgroup member, however, not only for many conservatives but for a vast swath of white America, is the young Black male from an inner-city neighborhood with sagging pants and a (presumed) gang affiliation. This figure is seen (implicitly, if not explicitly) as a grave threat to the social order, which is precisely why he is so often abused or killed by police, sometimes for the “crime” of talking back or running away. This stereotype is where the racism of the All Lives Matter crowd is most manifest. It is precisely because of this ingroup/outgroup mentality that many white folks are unable to hear the implicit but obvious “too.”

I should emphasize, parenthetically, that these racist stereotypes are by no means limited to conservatives. It is true, for the reasons I mentioned, that conservatives are more likely to believe that someone shot by police probably had it coming. But liberals, despite their professed care for victims of violence, tend to obsess over the victim’s guiltlessness, often losing interest when a victim turns out to have a criminal record or a gang affiliation.

It should be obvious that the standard liberal strategy of appealing to sympathy for victims of police violence is never going to be effective with those who feel strong loyalty to the police and a reflexive suspicion of their victims.

The Example of Colin Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest, in which he sat refused to stand during the national anthem

(Photo: Kelley L Cox, USA TODAY Sports)

before his NFL football games, represents a near perfect example of this clash of moral foundations. While his protest was extremely powerful on a symbolic level, many saw it as a denigration of our society’s sacred symbols. From their perspective, he was being disloyal, not only to the police, but to the military, and to all those who have sacrificed to make our country what it is.

In addition, conservatives (as well as many liberals) are wedded to a racial progress narrative. This story assures us that our racist past is passed, and nowadays anyone in America can be successful. The wealth and celebrity status of athletes such as Kaepernick is seen as proof that the American dream is fully accessible to Black people. By publicly rejecting that narrative, Kaepernick was exhibiting not only disloyalty and disrespect, but ingratitude. Not surprisingly the backlash was swift and intense, and continues to negatively impact Kaepernick’s athletic career.

Allow me to re-emphasize that it is not the responsibility of Black folks to deal with the anger and resentment engendered by their requests for dignity and human rights. Kaepernick’s actions were an authentic and, in many ways, highly effective expression of his valid disappointment that his country is not living up to its promise of liberty and justice for all. He doesn’t need to change anything. It is on us white folks, those of us who are moved by the movement and want to take the message further, to consider why the message has failed to move our conservative friends and family. And we can begin by understanding how their moral worldview is organized. Simply assuming that our moral concerns are self-evidently right and calling anyone who doesn’t share them “hateful” may offer us a sense of moral superiority, but it isn’t going to reduce police violence.

Some Thoughts on Strategy

The situation may sound hopeless, but I don’t think it is. We may have to be willing to reign in our smug moral certainty, but there are possibilities for finding common ground on the goal of reducing police violence. Inroads are already appearing. For example, an article on The Federalist website argues that police accountability and transparency are essential to protect the integrity of policing. And this post on The American Conservative rejects the oft-heard rhetoric about a few bad apples being responsible for police brutality, and argues that the problem is systemic.

We may be entirely right that “the police have always been at the root of a system for managing and producing inequality.” It may also be true that out of control hooligans with badges routinely get away with murdering people of color because police culture protects them, and the larger society doesn’t care enough to ensure the system holds them accountable. But our righteousness about these things is unhelpful when we’re talking to people who do not share our moral foundations.

If we want to find common ground with conservatives, we (white folks) need to set aside our righteousness and focus on what will move them. We might, for example, emphasize the need to keep bad police from sullying the otherwise honorable profession. We could talk about the cost to taxpayers of settling lawsuits due to police misconduct. I know this one is deeply problematic, but perhaps we should be making a more of a commotion when white people are killed by the police, rather than when they are treated with kid gloves.

These approaches may feel unsatisfying because they don’t address the deepest roots of the problem. That’s to be expected. But the point is not to satisfy our moral intuitions or score moral points; it is to convince conservatives to join us in demanding greater scrutiny of the police. While it is vital that we stay connected to our own moral values, it is equally vital that we recognize the moral values of those we wish to persuade.

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.  

When Whiteness Backfires: Isla Vista and the Hidden Cost of Privilege

Anyone who is paying attention has heard by now about Elliot Rodger's killing rampage in Isla Vista last week and about his misogynist and racist motivations. Even the corporate media is happy to talk about these aspects of the situation. As long as there are isolated bad apples (e.g. George Zimmerman, Donald Sterling, and now Rodger) to blame for racism or sexism, there is apparently no need or desire to look deeper or wider. And the corporate media certainly has no appetite for examining the culture of white supremacist hetero-patriarchy that constitutes the real source of these men's worldviews.  This analysis is showing up in the alternative media and blogosphere, so I will just add one perspective that I have not seen, which concerns the role of whiteness, as a source of privilege and an agent of tragedy.

Rodger was a white-identified male. I know he was technically bi-racial. His writings and videos, however, leave little doubt which half of his lineage he identified with and which half have he found despicable. Moreover, his whiteness formed the basis for his feelings of entitlement to the attention of white women and the homicidal resentment he felt when he saw white women hanging out with men of color. In addition, the intersection of his whiteness and his social class were decisive in shaping the way he was treated by the system. One particular incident speaks volumes about the way whiteness (mal)functioned in the weeks leading up to the tragedy.

Either a friend of Rodger or his therapist or someone from his family contacted either the police of the county mental health service because of his disturbing social media posts. Media reports about this notification are vague and inconsistent, but it is clear that the notification did take place because it prompted the police to visit Rodger's apartment on April 30th, one month before the shootings. The police spoke briefly to Rodger at his front door and then departed, having concluded that he did not meet the criteria for an involuntary mental health hold. Sheriff's officials claim that the officers, "handled the call in a professional manner consistent with state law and department policy."

Let me state, for the record, that I have no quarrel with this official account. Indeed, my critique hinges on the fact that this tragedy happened despite everyone doing what they were supposed to do. Let's begin with the offhand way Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown defended the actions of his officers. Brown said, that when the officers spoke to Rodger at his front door, "He was articulate. He was polite. He was timid." Brown did not say, nor did he need to say, why these factors were considered relevant. Their job, I assume, was to investigate the possibility that Rodger was planning to harm himself or others. What does that have to do with him being articulate, polite, and timid? What if he had been inarticulate, or worse, belligerent, or worse yet black (in which case just being on your front porch may make you suspicious)? Would any of those factors have made him seem more like a threat to himself or others? From what the Sheriff said, it seems that, simply by adhering to the white social norms that signal respectability and self-possession to white-dominated institutions like law enforcement, Rodger was able to override legitimate concerns about his mental health.

Interpersonal whiteness was not the only factor at play, however. Another way Rodger's whiteness protected/doomed him was in terms of his mental health history. Among the reasons cited by authorities for not detaining him was that he had no criminal record or history of mental health crises. But of course he did have a history, one that reflected his race and class privilege. The fact that he had access to private treatment meant that he was able to avoid leaving precisely the sort of institutional track record that would have given the police a legal basis to take more action. It is highly unlikely that a low income man of color with mental health issues could reach 22 years old without having been branded in some way by the system. When people of color are dealing with mental health challenges, school systems often respond with harsh discipline. Behaviors such as truancy and addiction are often criminalized, resulting in young people becoming fodder for the school to prison pipeline. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that the system works for youth of color. Mostly the system works for white people, but, in this case, the privileges of luxury, privacy, and autonomy that go with whiteness simply backfired, taking seven people out in the process.

Finally, we must consider how whiteness protected/doomed Rodger by allowing him to avoid having his home searched by law enforcement. Under prevailing law, the police not only did not have probable cause to seek a search warrant, they could not have confiscated his guns even if they had found them. However, anyone familiar with the way the war on drugs is waged or the stop and frisk practices of big city police departments knows that affluent white communities and low income communities of color are subjected to different standards of probable cause. While the concerns of Rodger's family and therapist about his mental health apparently did not justify searching his home or taking his weapons, in communities of color, all it takes is a tip from an anonymous informant to trigger a SWAT team raid. Indeed, police often end up breaking down the wrong doors, terrorizing and injuring innocent families based on these notoriously unreliable tips. I want to be clear, though, that this double standard is not simply about racist police forces. It is the end product of a complex set of laws and practices that has its roots, ultimately, in the politics of white privilege.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on my argument, let me just spell it out. I am not saying that the white male privilege or misogyny or racism or bad policing or the under-funded mental health system caused the Isla Vista tragedy. It was all of them plus everything else. And, at least part of what made it difficult for anyone to intervene, was the system of visible and invisible protections and privileges afforded to Rodger in virtue of his whiteness. Given that mass shootings committed by alienated, resentful, and aggrieved white men are becoming part of normal life in America, it might be time to consider whether this system, which we white people set up to protect us from scary black and brown others, can protect us from the monsters of our own creation.

               

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.