I've realized something liberating: I don't feel guilty about being white.
I feel
angry about being white.*
Make no mistake: I'm not the person who has the right to the most anger about whiteness. Whiteness is a system for stealing the power, safety, labor, resources, land, lives, bodies, and respect from people of color in order to give it to white people.** It harms people of color (in America, especially Black people) far more than it has ever harmed me. I got the "good" side of this deal.
But even the good side is
shitty. Being white means that I am part of an unjust system, a system that causes untold suffering-- untold because the system works hard to interfere with everyone who isn't white being able to tell and widely distribute their stories. It means that people will treat me unfairly-- to my advantage, but that's not right, and I know it.
Whiteness also takes from me, though, not just in a moral injury way. It made my ancestors a deal: you can be white, but you need to give up your culture. Your language, your food, your stories, your fashion, all the outward signs of practicing your religion-- you can keep them in private, but if you want rights and resources, then you need to adhere to this bland sampling of a few parts of European culture. You have to speak an English language, listen to German music, work inside Italian architecture, and have a very French ideology about the superiority of your nation. These are the "classical" things to like, and if you want to have any access to wealth or power, you'd better own them, know them, and prefer them.
It's not just "white culture," though-- it's white
supremacy culture. One of the most interesting ideas I ran across recently was Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun's
description of these characteristic values of White Supremacy Culture:
1) Perfectionism
2) Sense of Urgency ("get 'er done!")
3) Defensiveness (don't question the system, this is just the way it is)
4) Quantity over Quality ("measurable goals")
5) Worship of the Written Word ("documentation or it didn't happen")
6) Only One Right Way
7) Paternalism (I would call this "hierarchy")
8) Either/Or thinking ("Black and white thinking")
9) Power Hoarding ("America is a meritocracy, and I'll have my father's bodyguards throw you out if you disagree.")
10) Fear of Open Conflict ("unpleasantness")
11) Individualism
12) Progress is Bigger, More ("constant growth is definitely a sustainable and reasonable way to run an economy.")
13) Objectivity ("there is an objective reality, and I know what it is better than you do.")
14) Right to Comfort ("you using that tone to say I'm standing on your foot makes me feel very unsafe, and if you don't stop, I'm going to cry.")
These are not necessarily the ways that European people thought a thousand years ago, any more than anyone else in the world did. But they are all ways of thinking that enable and justify colonialism. And, frankly, most of the clients who come to me with anxiety and depression are struggling with at least one of these, often all of them.
Whiteness tells me that all these ideas are correct, and that any time I suffer, it's either because a) I'm not living up to them well enough, or b) some Other person-- probably a person of color-- is wronging me. The more money I have, the more whiteness will tell me it's a rather than b-- though the more money I have, the fewer solvable problems I'm likely to have.
That is
such bullshit. It's
all such bullshit, all of this, and I
can't get rid of it. No matter how antiracist or progressive or whatever I am, taxi drivers are still going to stop for me rather than the person of color; employers are still going to hire me instead of the person of color unless forcibly stopped; my physical body reflects the nutrition and medical care my family could afford to give me with the wealth that they got from, say, the G.I. Bill which excluded people of color. I benefit from being white in
so many ways that I can do nothing about. I don't
want it, and that doesn't matter at all.
I'm mad about that.
I'm mad about being raised to be "colorblind" in a racist society in ways that twisted me up in miserable, self-blaming knots of shame whenever I couldn't stop noticing a racial difference in how people lived their lives, and was denied access to the understanding of structural racism that caused that difference.
I'm mad about how being racialized takes a perfectly reasonable aspect of my body and makes it into something I don't want. I love my skin; it's interesting and colorful, it has tattoos I chose and love, it lets in as much Vitamin D as it can, which is pretty crucial at this latitude. It heals itself using a process I can actually watch as it happens, it senses the world around me, and it keeps the rest of me safe inside. It burns pretty easily in the sun, but I can always put on sunscreen. My skin is great. I wouldn't change it if I could. But the
meaning that goes with it?
I'm mad that as long as this system exists, it will shape my life, and my child's life, and the life of everyone around me. I'm mad that this system fights hard to defend itself, in part by convincing as many people as it can that it does not exist. I'm mad that for
so many years, one defense it used was to paralyze me with guilt and shame about my privilege, because it convinced me that
my lot in life is due to my own efforts, so if it's better than other people's, that must be because of something
I did, and if that's unjust, then
I am to blame for that injustice.
I'm not. I didn't build that, as President Obama
pointed out.Whiteness was done to me. Whiteness was done to everyone I meet, either defining us as belonging to it, or defining them as outside. Whiteness is an assault, and a deep violation.
I am angry about it. And I swear I will do everything I can to bring whiteness down. I will work my ass off to bring about a world where my child may be Jewish and Italian and Irish and German and Lithuanian-- and a light-skinned American-- and none of that will mean that he's supposed to run the world.***
This is bullshit, and I will fight it.
--R
*This is not "white rage," the phenomenon Carol Anderson
describes of white people using institutions to react aggressively and destructively whenever people of color (in America, primarily Black people) make any gains in the struggle for equal rights and access to resources. It's kind of the opposite, actually.
**Mostly the white people it considers the
most white-- wealthy, Christian, Anglo-Saxon or at very least Western and Northern European.
***Probably not in his lifetime. Possibly not even in his children's lifetime. But, like, I see no reason to expect that my descendants will all be white, so.
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