gaudior | WWS: On race, on fear, on anger.

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WWS: On race, on fear, on anger.

In a comment to a recent post of mine,

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

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I think I needed to read this post today, even though I didn't know that before reading it.

Thank you.

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."

This isn't about racism, but it is about anger. My mother told me a story recently. She grew up with parents who had met in graduate school, fallen in love, and three months later gotten married—and then, so far as any of their children could see, gone on to have a perfect marriage. They never fought with one another. They never shouted. They never disagreed. Or, if they disagreed, it was over small things and easily resolved and nobody was hurt or upset about it. All of which is, in fact, not the case. My grandparents, like any normal couple, did have arguments and fights and disagreements with one another. But they did it behind closed doors; their children never saw it. (Yay, the 1950's?)

And so my mother talked about how she and her siblings grew up thinking that not only were you supposed to take less than a year to recognize the person you wanted to marry, you were never supposed to get angry with the person you loved. If you were in a relationship and found yourself fighting with the other person, that meant something was totally wrong—with you—and this wasn't the right person besides, because as the paradigm of the parents clearly demonstrated, healthy couples don't shout at one another. Apparently this idea took quite some time to get over.

(And this was instructive for me: I'd never thought about the negative fallout from a happy marriage before.)

So I really agree with this: I want to teach them that anger is okay. That it's okay to yell; that anger doesn't cancel love. Yes.

All very true and perceptive. I let that last discussion slip past me, but I want to add to the idea of "White Women Syndrome" - I think it's not simply that we expect people to love us because we're pretty and perfect, but that it's the only kind of power that we often see ourselves as having access to. Because the correlation to being a Pretty Princess is that you are seriously fragile and need protection. My parents didn't intentionally treat me that way, G-d knows, but like you, I'm still trying to unlearn the idea that I will crumple when faced with anger or unkindness.

(btw, your link is wrong)

Re: "White Woman Syndrome"--yet another confusion of race with class.

Interesting.

I don't think that anger is ok.
Sometimes it is justified.
But however you express it--with loud yells, or verbal sniping, or even just with a quiet talk of the this-made-me-angry-let's-work-on-it variety with someone you care about--it is the symptom of something important that is broken or breaking, and needs to be fixed.
The thing that is important and breaking needs to be fixed; the anger will leave.

An example: I am very angry right now with the government's actions as a whole. Is this ok? No. (The anger hurts me).
Is it justified? Yes.
Is it making me do stuff? Sure; it is even useful.
But it is never non-harming. It points to something broken or breaking.

I also think that anger is threatening in and of itself; it threatens the wellbeing of the person feeling it, if nothing else.

Currently, I am working on two things:
- Reminding myself that the emotion of anger does not have to be connected to physical and verbal violence (and, in fact, physical violence can be much more effective when it is disconnected from anger).
- Reminding myself that the anger I feel can hurt others even when it is not mine, theirs, about them, or directed at them or even myself.

I think these are worthwhile things.

--
why is the person being so inconsiderate as to be angry when it makes me uncomfortable?

I also think a world in which everyone really asked themselves this question would be a world in which things were really genuinely fixed, and in which everyone would have less muscle tension.
Instead of people getting angry at the other person being angry, they could see an underlying cause to the anger, work on dealing with that, and see the other person as a person instead of a little ball of spit and flame.
Anger is a tool that makes people uncomfortable so they can do something about what is causing them discomfort and the anger will go away, but so many people see the anger as an end rather than a means.
--

Thoughts?

Anger is, however, *necessary*, because it's a good deal of what motivates us to fix the things that are going wrong. And expression of anger is necessary for the person who has the anger, or it goes inward and hurts the person far worse than the anger could.

One of my favorite aphorisms is something I actually use as a mantra: 'Depression is aggression turned inwards. Aggression is depression turned outwards.' I forget where I heard it or who said it, but truer words were never spoken. Expressing anger, turning it out, keeps it from festering. And so anger is okay, it's okay to express anger because that is our natural system of dealing with things and causing change. Anger is not wrong because it is not unnatural, and because it can be expressed and channeled in ways that do not hurt people and are very productive. What I think is wrong is the ways in which our culture (fails to) deal with anger and the fact that people are not taught how to use it toward change, that we are taught to use it as a cathartic expression and not as a source of self-knowledge.

This is pretty insightful stuff. When I'm less tired/more coherent, I'llcomment in detail. Meanwhile, permission to post a link to this in my journal?

Brava, brava. This is well-thought out and made me think, and I want to read it again. I'm not really certain about letting go of my fear of anger entirely, though. After all, it is a passion, and I think impassioned people tend to think a little less clearly than people of calm emotions.

Of course, I suppose my fear of anger isn't really helping anything. I'll work on that. (Coincidentally, fear is one of my issues this year.)

I want to ask you both about the concept of emotions as motivations, though. If you are motivated to do something *because* you are angry, and you want to make the anger go away, how are you not a slave to your emotions? How is that not like the scenario of taking a drug to make a bad feeling go away, rather than focusing on the underlying cause of the feeling/emotion?

Also, I'd love to hear more about the idea of anger as a source of self-knowledge, if you've got time.

Also, I'm thinking about anger being okay, and about anger hurting others or ourselves, and beginning to wonder if it is a valid conclusion that hurting others or ourselves is okay (in that it is a condition of human life that we can minimize but not escape, and may even find useful at times- like anger).

Why, pray tell?

I'm in the same middle class demographic as the people suffering from WWS, as are many Black women I know, and NONE of do the WWS crap--mainly because we are taught, and taught *early*, that we will get crap because of our race and no one will care. We are taught that, no matter what we accomplish, to someone, we will always be "just a nigger," the kind of thing White people are not.

So no. I disagree with you completely about it being a confusion of race and class, because *race is a factor*.

Very good post. *nods*

May I suggest checking out debunking_white and blackfolk as some other comms to look at? And if you're looking at the idea of anger and expressing it...yeah, blackfolk is unabashedly full of it.

And you know, I can understand where you're coming from with the "expressing anger is bad" and anger making one uncomfortable. My mother was a hotbed of irrational angry flare-ups, and as a child, I used to hate waking up to hear my mother and big brother screaming at each other. To this day, people yelling makes me incredibly uncomfortable and puts me on edge, even if they aren't yelling at me. Likewise, I tightly control my temper, because I know if I ever truly lost my temper, it would be a frightening, frightening thing, and so I rarely get angry, because it's rarely worth it.

Another aspect that might be interesting to look at is the idea of entitlement and guilt--I had a recent post ranting about cultural apropriation, but I didn't really touch of the idea of entitlement that's running through appropriation. There's an idea of sorts, like an undercurrent in American thought, that we *deserve* things--that we can take what we want because we want it, but without thought to how it will affect the culture we take from. And as a result, being called on it--and by the same token, being called on benefiting from white privelege--makes people gget defenseive and angry, because how *dare* someone suggest that either a) they can't take something or b) their way of viewing the world isn't the way that everyone sees it.

And I fear I'm rambling; I don't think I'm making very much sense, all things considered. I'm kind of veering into directions I hadn't intended to and thus, hadn't really thought about.

I never said race wasn't a factor--it just isn't as simplistic as that. The kind of woman parodied in "White Woman Syndrome" is a very small minority among white women. Yes, the mainstream beauty ideal is a white woman--but she looks and acts nothing like most white women. Yes, some upper-class women think the world revolves around them--but most white women are not upper-class, and of the ones that are, many expect hostility (not deference) from others, or feel their status as extra responsibility rather than extra privilege.

I grew up in a rural area which was almost entirely white, and to say that most of the women there expected the world to revolve around them--or even thought of themselves as the beauty ideal--would be completely, ridiculously wrong. The racism there took the form of anti-Semitism, and was obviously a displacement of class resentment--most of the anti-Semites were from the lower-class, long-established families who were losing their farms or never had any to begin with, and their resentment was against the upper and middle-class people (some of whom were Jewish) who had begun to move in and influence things.

The lower-class (white) women were taught, and taught *early*, that they would get crap because of who they were, what they looked like, and where they came from. They didn't expect to "accomplish" anything, because those weird rich people had taken the few good jobs there were and kept most of the slots in the good schools for their own children. Even if they or their daughters did manage to become a token employee or scholarship student, the culture of the schools or jobs would be alien to them, and they would face subtle or even overt prejudice against people like them. After all, everyone--conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike--thinks it's okay to pick on white trash.

Also, I think it's a little suspicious that white women are the target here rather than white men, who have more privilege than the women and are more likely to expect things to go their way. Is there a corresponding concept of a "White Man Syndrome"? I can't help but suspect that whoever came up with the idea of "White Woman Syndrome" thought that it's a woman's job to nurture and serve others, and was offended at the idea that a woman might expect someone else to serve her.

Also, I think it's a little suspicious that white women are the target here rather than white men

Agreed. My own thoughts on this include that WWS is about "whiney" women. I also personally think that "whining" is simply more likely to be applied to women because we generally have higher-pitched voices. Men don't "whine," they "complain."

Please.

I don't want to comment on racism. Having worked retail for many, many years now I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have reactions to people based on a number of superficial initial impressions. There are types of people that are mroe likely to try to cause trouble, and I concentrate more energy on keeping an eye on those people than on people who are less likely to cause trouble. (Though I never discount the strong likeliehood that the polite white middle-aged gentleman in the expensive suit could be stuffing DVDs in his case when I'm not looking.) Race, age, dress and demeanor all influance how I react to people. But I TRY to be universally suspicious of everybody.

That said: I have encountered entitlement issues from people of every walk of life. There are people who want a special break because they think I'm being racist to not give it to them. There are people who want a discount because they're old (not uncommon, but Blockbuster does not happen to have any senior citizen discount, so why do they make such a big fuss about it?) There are people who can't understand why I won't just give them whatever they want because they're clearly rich and deserve a break (and let's face it: nice people don't get rich. Only greedy bastards do. This is a fact of life, I think.) I even had a hard of hearing (but not deaf) gentleman threaten to sue me for discrimination because I wouldn't give him a free rental when he claimed his DVD player could not display subtitles or closed captioning on a disk (I tested it in the store DVD player and it had both subtitles and closed captioning.. he just was used to getting free rentals because he couldn't hear good... though I didn't say so to his face.)

So to conclude: work retail and you will realize that most people are scum, want to steal from you and want free stuff. Oh, and they look down on you because you are there only to serve them, take their shit and thank them for it. And the race, gender, sexuality, age, physical ability or disability and creed of a person is only one of many factors that influences in what way that person is mean, embittered, and needy.

Yes I'm bitter.

Thanks.

I have a difficult time talking about racism as well, but sort of from the opposite end. I'm angry, and I know I'm angry, but I also know that expressing that anger will make people defensive, less likely to listen, and more likely to categorize me as "Angry Asian Chick" and ignore me. It's really weird double-bind, because in some sense, I feel like my anger is being taken away from me.

So yes, totally agree with the whole teaching people that anger is ok thing.

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WWS: On race, on fear, on anger.

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