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WWS: On race, on fear, on anger.
In a comment to a recent post of mine, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
homasse described "White Woman Syndrome," or WWS, a phenomenon discussed on a lot of the minority-focused forums on lj. She said that the usual explanation people there come up with for why White women sometimes act like complete, entitled twits is that "White women, being considered the ideal for beauty and such, fully expect the world to love them and make everything perfect for them because they were the Perfect Little Princesses, and when it's *not*, they can't deal." She says she's not sure she buys this completely, but she can't deny the phenomenon.
Neither do I, and neither can I. But I think I have some ideas about where it comes from.
A lot of people who study racism talk about the idea of "aversive racism." This was a concept first discussed (I believe) in J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner's 1986 integrated model of racism (Good article here). The idea is that many people believe consciously that racism is wrong, and try their damndest to not act in racist ways. However, these people also have unacknowledged negative feelings of "discomfort, uneasiness or fear" in the presence of people of color-- feelings for which Dovidio and Gaertner could find no definite explanation. The cognitive dissonance between what people believe they (we) should feel around people of color and the discomfort we actually feel makes us try to avoid thinking about issues of race. In more extreme cases, it makes us try to avoid people of color themselves, and the lurking discomfort and resulting self-dislike makes us more likely to act in biased ways in situations which are unclear-- we pointedly don't discriminate based on race in situations where this discrimination would be obvious, but we do when the question is more debatable.
Note my use of the word "we"-- I included myself in this group because I have definitely seen these behaviors in myself; the conscious belief in equality, the feelings of discomfort, and the avoidance, for many years, of even wanting to think about issues of race. But I have a different explanation for these feelings than that it "may be built into the social fabric of our minds" or comes from " our biologically based fear of strangers." I think it is, very simply, about anger and fear.
Namely: a lot of people of color have a lot of anger about issues of race. And I was very carefully raised to be terrified of anger.
I'm not sure how common my experience is, but it seems worth describing. When I was four, my parents followed months of screaming fights with a divorce. My mom, previously a fairly quiet and timid person, found herself suddenly a single mother with almost full-time custody. She was lonely, miserable, stressed out, shaken and, as a result, short-tempered.
Now, for years, I thought my mother was borderline-verbally abusive. It's only this year, dealing with kids whose parents are actually verbally abusive, that I can see the difference. My mom never hit me. My mom never said anything really hurtful to me; she never swore, never told me I was a bad kid or a bad person-- just that she was pissed off at my behavior. She was loud, and I was scared (I had just seen that yelling = Dad leaving), but she never said or did anything really wrong. No, the damage wasn't done by the yelling-- it was by her reaction to it. After she would yell at me, she'd go to a different room-- and then, maybe twenty minutes later, she came back absolutely contrite. She would apologize, sometimes tearfully, for having lost her temper. She seemed horrified by what she'd done. And from this, I learned that anger was scary. Anger was something that took her over, over which she lost control, and which made her act in ways that were obviously terribly wrong-- why else would she be so upset about it? Yelling, I learned, was a terrible offense against a person, and I became desperate to not make her angry, because obviously, if she could do something so awful as yell, then maybe she'd do something worse, whether she wanted to or not.
And so I learned the lesson which I think my mother learned when she was young: anger is bad. Anger is a horrible loss of self-control, anger is dangerous, anger is unacceptable. If I wanted to be a good person, I would not be angry. And if someone were angry at me, then I must appease him/her, right away, because anger has no limits and there's no real difference between yelling at someone and killing him/her-- only a matter of degree.
I'm not sure how much this lesson carries over to White women in general. Lila says that she didn't learn exactly that anger itself is bad, but that she did learn that if someone (specifically someone in authority) is angry at her, that this means she did something very wrong. I think, though, we both share the same discomfort in the face of others' anger, the same wish to avoid the anger, and possibly by extension the person. She described the bushes at Bryn Mawr being full of seniors ducking behind them to avoid their thesis advisors, who might be angry about missed deadlines. Which is funny, but which also suggests that there were a whole lot of young women so afraid of someone's anger that they avoided meetings which would only have helped them-- that their fear of an advisors' anger was worse than their fear of actually flunking out of college.
Now, I've been lurking on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ap_racism for a month or so, reading and thinking. It's a closed community, and I haven't applied to join yet. Partly, that's because I'm still learning, but it's mostly because I want to wait until I stop feeling so damn defensive about some people's posts. There's a lot of anger there, and a lot of it is at White people. The anger I see there seems to have three sources: 1) anger at actions of individual White people, built up over hundreds of anonymous and nonanonymous encounters over a lifetime, 2) anger at the historical injustices that White people committed against people's families, and 3) anger at the racist system of White privilege and at people who accept its benefits unthinkingly or try to propagate it further. Of those three causes, I personally have tried to avoid 1, but probably failed sometimes, and have certainly benefited from 3. (I certainly didn't do anything to anyone's ancestors.) So I have done some things which would make people legitimately angry at me, and I personally have not done nearly enough to merit the amount of anger which people feel.
But this doesn't matter. Because, despite what I learned as a child, other people's anger doesn't hurt me. Someone being angry over livejournal will not do me any physical damage. And anger is just an emotion. Like all emotions, it can motivate actions, but in and of itself, it's not threatening. One of my books describes emotions as being like arms and legs-- most people have them, and they aren't harmful in themselves unless you use them to hit someone. If someone on a forum writes a blistering tirade against White people, I am not harmed by it. I'm learning, as a therapist, how to handle "transference"-- the phenomenon wherein something from a client's past brings up strong emotions which s/he then feels about the therapist. As a therapist, I'm to learn to hold feelings for people-- to create a space where it is safe for them to feel whatever they feel, because I can handle it. I can know that these feelings are theirs, not necessarily a reflection of or aimed at me, and my only responsibility is to help them feel them.
Now, I don't, obviously, want to treat other people in my life like clients-- that's no end of bad. But I don't see why I can't use the same skill. Why not, when someone is very angry at White people, acknowledge the anger? So often, I see people try to defend themselves-- try to say "But I didn't mean it like that!" or "You're being oversensitive!" or "See those people over there, how racist they are? Doesn't my disgust with them make it obvious how racist I'm not?" I've certainly done the same thing myself. The secret hope is that I can prove to the angry person of color--or even the person of color who isn't angry at all, but certainly has the right to be, considering the culture we live in-- that s/he shouldn't be angry at me. Possibly, even that s/he shouldn't be angry at all. Anger is so scary, after all-- why is the person being so inconsiderate as to be angry when it makes me uncomfortable?
But the answer is not for people of color to not be angry, or to not express their anger. Because anger isn't bad. I find it interesting that I started exploring issues of race at the same time as I started to work, in therapy, on being less uncomfortable with anger. It's very worthwhile work. I'm loving the way I'm changing-- the way I feel that it's okay for me to have a voice that expresses when I don't like something, the way I can have someone yell at me and know s/he still loves me. I love a lot of things about White people, White women in particular, but I think that this fear of anger is a major weakness. I want to change it for me, and I want to change it for my children. When I lose my temper and yell at my children, what I want to say to them afterwards is not "Sweetie, I'm sorry I yelled," but "Sweetie, I'm sorry I scared you. I yelled because I was mad. People yell sometimes. But even if I yelled so loudly that I blew the whole house down, that doesn't mean that I'll hurt you or that I don't love you. I will always love you-- even if you yell at me so loudly you blow the block down." I want to teach them that anger is okay. And I want to know it myself, so deeply that I never feel the need to defend myself against people of color's anger at White people again.
Racism hurts White people. Who knew?
--R
homasse described "White Woman Syndrome," or WWS, a phenomenon discussed on a lot of the minority-focused forums on lj. She said that the usual explanation people there come up with for why White women sometimes act like complete, entitled twits is that "White women, being considered the ideal for beauty and such, fully expect the world to love them and make everything perfect for them because they were the Perfect Little Princesses, and when it's *not*, they can't deal." She says she's not sure she buys this completely, but she can't deny the phenomenon.Neither do I, and neither can I. But I think I have some ideas about where it comes from.
A lot of people who study racism talk about the idea of "aversive racism." This was a concept first discussed (I believe) in J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner's 1986 integrated model of racism (Good article here). The idea is that many people believe consciously that racism is wrong, and try their damndest to not act in racist ways. However, these people also have unacknowledged negative feelings of "discomfort, uneasiness or fear" in the presence of people of color-- feelings for which Dovidio and Gaertner could find no definite explanation. The cognitive dissonance between what people believe they (we) should feel around people of color and the discomfort we actually feel makes us try to avoid thinking about issues of race. In more extreme cases, it makes us try to avoid people of color themselves, and the lurking discomfort and resulting self-dislike makes us more likely to act in biased ways in situations which are unclear-- we pointedly don't discriminate based on race in situations where this discrimination would be obvious, but we do when the question is more debatable.
Note my use of the word "we"-- I included myself in this group because I have definitely seen these behaviors in myself; the conscious belief in equality, the feelings of discomfort, and the avoidance, for many years, of even wanting to think about issues of race. But I have a different explanation for these feelings than that it "may be built into the social fabric of our minds" or comes from " our biologically based fear of strangers." I think it is, very simply, about anger and fear.
Namely: a lot of people of color have a lot of anger about issues of race. And I was very carefully raised to be terrified of anger.
I'm not sure how common my experience is, but it seems worth describing. When I was four, my parents followed months of screaming fights with a divorce. My mom, previously a fairly quiet and timid person, found herself suddenly a single mother with almost full-time custody. She was lonely, miserable, stressed out, shaken and, as a result, short-tempered.
Now, for years, I thought my mother was borderline-verbally abusive. It's only this year, dealing with kids whose parents are actually verbally abusive, that I can see the difference. My mom never hit me. My mom never said anything really hurtful to me; she never swore, never told me I was a bad kid or a bad person-- just that she was pissed off at my behavior. She was loud, and I was scared (I had just seen that yelling = Dad leaving), but she never said or did anything really wrong. No, the damage wasn't done by the yelling-- it was by her reaction to it. After she would yell at me, she'd go to a different room-- and then, maybe twenty minutes later, she came back absolutely contrite. She would apologize, sometimes tearfully, for having lost her temper. She seemed horrified by what she'd done. And from this, I learned that anger was scary. Anger was something that took her over, over which she lost control, and which made her act in ways that were obviously terribly wrong-- why else would she be so upset about it? Yelling, I learned, was a terrible offense against a person, and I became desperate to not make her angry, because obviously, if she could do something so awful as yell, then maybe she'd do something worse, whether she wanted to or not.
And so I learned the lesson which I think my mother learned when she was young: anger is bad. Anger is a horrible loss of self-control, anger is dangerous, anger is unacceptable. If I wanted to be a good person, I would not be angry. And if someone were angry at me, then I must appease him/her, right away, because anger has no limits and there's no real difference between yelling at someone and killing him/her-- only a matter of degree.
I'm not sure how much this lesson carries over to White women in general. Lila says that she didn't learn exactly that anger itself is bad, but that she did learn that if someone (specifically someone in authority) is angry at her, that this means she did something very wrong. I think, though, we both share the same discomfort in the face of others' anger, the same wish to avoid the anger, and possibly by extension the person. She described the bushes at Bryn Mawr being full of seniors ducking behind them to avoid their thesis advisors, who might be angry about missed deadlines. Which is funny, but which also suggests that there were a whole lot of young women so afraid of someone's anger that they avoided meetings which would only have helped them-- that their fear of an advisors' anger was worse than their fear of actually flunking out of college.
Now, I've been lurking on
ap_racism for a month or so, reading and thinking. It's a closed community, and I haven't applied to join yet. Partly, that's because I'm still learning, but it's mostly because I want to wait until I stop feeling so damn defensive about some people's posts. There's a lot of anger there, and a lot of it is at White people. The anger I see there seems to have three sources: 1) anger at actions of individual White people, built up over hundreds of anonymous and nonanonymous encounters over a lifetime, 2) anger at the historical injustices that White people committed against people's families, and 3) anger at the racist system of White privilege and at people who accept its benefits unthinkingly or try to propagate it further. Of those three causes, I personally have tried to avoid 1, but probably failed sometimes, and have certainly benefited from 3. (I certainly didn't do anything to anyone's ancestors.) So I have done some things which would make people legitimately angry at me, and I personally have not done nearly enough to merit the amount of anger which people feel.But this doesn't matter. Because, despite what I learned as a child, other people's anger doesn't hurt me. Someone being angry over livejournal will not do me any physical damage. And anger is just an emotion. Like all emotions, it can motivate actions, but in and of itself, it's not threatening. One of my books describes emotions as being like arms and legs-- most people have them, and they aren't harmful in themselves unless you use them to hit someone. If someone on a forum writes a blistering tirade against White people, I am not harmed by it. I'm learning, as a therapist, how to handle "transference"-- the phenomenon wherein something from a client's past brings up strong emotions which s/he then feels about the therapist. As a therapist, I'm to learn to hold feelings for people-- to create a space where it is safe for them to feel whatever they feel, because I can handle it. I can know that these feelings are theirs, not necessarily a reflection of or aimed at me, and my only responsibility is to help them feel them.
Now, I don't, obviously, want to treat other people in my life like clients-- that's no end of bad. But I don't see why I can't use the same skill. Why not, when someone is very angry at White people, acknowledge the anger? So often, I see people try to defend themselves-- try to say "But I didn't mean it like that!" or "You're being oversensitive!" or "See those people over there, how racist they are? Doesn't my disgust with them make it obvious how racist I'm not?" I've certainly done the same thing myself. The secret hope is that I can prove to the angry person of color--or even the person of color who isn't angry at all, but certainly has the right to be, considering the culture we live in-- that s/he shouldn't be angry at me. Possibly, even that s/he shouldn't be angry at all. Anger is so scary, after all-- why is the person being so inconsiderate as to be angry when it makes me uncomfortable?
But the answer is not for people of color to not be angry, or to not express their anger. Because anger isn't bad. I find it interesting that I started exploring issues of race at the same time as I started to work, in therapy, on being less uncomfortable with anger. It's very worthwhile work. I'm loving the way I'm changing-- the way I feel that it's okay for me to have a voice that expresses when I don't like something, the way I can have someone yell at me and know s/he still loves me. I love a lot of things about White people, White women in particular, but I think that this fear of anger is a major weakness. I want to change it for me, and I want to change it for my children. When I lose my temper and yell at my children, what I want to say to them afterwards is not "Sweetie, I'm sorry I yelled," but "Sweetie, I'm sorry I scared you. I yelled because I was mad. People yell sometimes. But even if I yelled so loudly that I blew the whole house down, that doesn't mean that I'll hurt you or that I don't love you. I will always love you-- even if you yell at me so loudly you blow the block down." I want to teach them that anger is okay. And I want to know it myself, so deeply that I never feel the need to defend myself against people of color's anger at White people again.
Racism hurts White people. Who knew?
--R