Whiteness: Proposition One

This is part of a series of pieces that explore what I have learned about whiteness, race, and human beings in the last 30 years. I am writing for readers, primarily white readers, who believe that racism exists and that it is bad, and I assume a basic level of understanding of racial concepts. A word about language: Currently I am using three phrases throughout these essays to encompass people of color, all of which are debated: “people of color”; “Black, Indigenous, and people of color/BIPOC”; and Global Majority and Indigenous people/GMI people”. All of them are meant to encompass the wide range of people, the majority of people around the world, who do not claim European heritage or who claim more than European heritage.

Some of the ideas in here have been and will be explored more fully in other pieces — please subscribe and come along for the ride!

When I left office and began having intentional conversations about whiteness, I began to have a clear question about what framework white people might need to effectively work with one another on issues of race in order to play our part in ending racism. To even ask the question of my conversation partner, however, required me first to lay out three propositions before asking the question.

They are:

Proposition One: It is the work of white people to lead other white people away from an investment in whiteness and out of racist behavior. (White people are not the only people who do or could do this work, but it is work that white people can and should do.)

Proposition Two: Blame, attack, criticism, fear, anger, and shame are not a sound basis for sustainable social change. Long-term change is built on human connection, compassion, love, and seeking what’s truly human in one another coupled with accountability and expectation. (It is not an act of love to treat other people badly or to allow someone to treat other people badly.)

Proposition Three: There is no widespread secular framework through which white people can work with one another explicitly as white people based on love and compassion; the only current secular framework through which that conversation is approached is through white supremacy.

The Question: Can we create a framework through which white people can work with one another on the basis of love and compassion rather than shame in order to do our part to end racism, a framework that does not condone or appear to condone the racism on which whiteness is predicated?

Each of these propositions is contested — and the question may not have an answer. I will explore all of them in the coming weeks.

We begin with Proposition One.

Proposition One: It is the work of white people to lead other white people away from an investment in whiteness and out of racist behavior. (White people are not the only people who do or could do this work, but it is work that white people can and should do.)

It is part of racism — a curious part, when you stop to think about it — that white people expect Black, Indigenous, and people of color to lead us out of it.

I will say that again: It is part of racism that white people expect Black, Indigenous, and people of color to lead us out if it. For we white people who believe that racism exists and believe that it is bad, this expectation is a feature, not a bug, of whiteness.

There are two problems with white people’s expectation that Black, Indigenous, and people of color will lead us out of racism.

1) The first problem is that it puts the burden of the work of getting to something better than racism onto Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

· In and of itself, this white expectation of the intellectual labor and emotional labor of Black, Indigenous, and people of color is inside the racist systems we are trying to dismantle. It indicates that we believe that the problems of racism are not about us, do not meaningfully affect us, do not harm us, and are not our responsibility. (This misconception will be the topic of a future essay.)

· A corollary is that this expectation indicates the tendency of white people to see anti-racism work as a charitable contribution of our time and attention, given to those we see as less fortunate than we are. It undergirds our worst paternalistic instincts, especially in the stance we take to address issues of race.

· It also reveals our belief as white people — which we come by through our socialization and is reinforced by dominant cultural messages — that we fundamentally cannot think about race, so need others to do the intellectual labor for us that we are unable to do for ourselves. This is not true. There is nothing inherent in our biology that renders us incapable of learning about race and whiteness and how they function. It is our social conditioning that creates the white taboos about discussing race (especially our own). It is social conditioning that makes it feel like there are insurmountable roadblocks to understanding how it functions and that those roadblocks are a personal flaw.

2) The second problem with the white expectation that people of color will lead us out of our racism is that there are significant design flaws inherent in it.

· First, our socialization as white people inherently includes a limit on the number of us who will follow the lead of people of color at all. If we expect to be led by people who we won’t actually follow, we will not get where we need to go. This expectation serves the racial status quo rather than an agenda for change.

· Second, even when we white people believe we are willing to follow a leader of color, our race socialization also places limits on the capacity of even willing white people to respect and trust the leadership of a Black, Indigenous, or person of color. We will resist it in ways we don’t even recognize as being about race, and react defensively if this is pointed out. Until we work on our implicit biases, they will run the show.

· Third, as a result of our whiteness, even well-meaning white people have enormous gaps in awareness about our whiteness, how it functions, and its role in the systems of race. We get to shrink these gaps — which requires learning from Black, Indigenous, and people of color, who do not share them — but inside our awareness gaps is often an inability to listen to and truly understand what Black, Indigenous, and people of color tell us about their experiences of race, racism, and whiteness.

· A fourth design flaw is that it doubles down on the cultural norm that white people won’t talk about whiteness, especially to one another. Under some conditions we might be willing to talk about race in general. We might even be willing to talk about white people in the abstract. But the norm against talking about our own whiteness is strong enough to call it a taboo. When I speak to groups composed of a majority of white people, the first time I bring up our whiteness openly I can hear the white people in the room stop breathing. There is a particular quality to the silence that I only hear in that circumstance.

As a result of all this, I posit that talking and working with each other on whiteness as people who experience whiteness as white people is a necessary part of emerging out of our racism and becoming effective advocates for anti-racist policy change — necessary, but not sufficient.

A few final points about Proposition One:

· It is true that there are many things that Black, Indigenous, and people of color understand about whiteness that white people do not. Almost all of what white people have come to understand about race and our whiteness has come as a result of following this knowledge. This is understandable: a notable result of whiteness conditioning is to be left largely ignorant about the dynamics of race, particularly our own. Most of what white people have learned about race in the last fifty years has come from Black, Indigenous, and people of color. People of color have reflected to me that they see certain aspects of whiteness clearly because they have to navigate them every day.

· These understandings that people of color share are necessary for us white people to know and understand in order to emerge out of racism. I propose, however, that, like the work white people do with one another, those understandings, while necessary, are also not sufficient unto themselves to get the job done.

· This is because there is a key aspect of whiteness that white people understand that Black, Indigenous, and people of color do not: what it is like to be white from inside of whiteness. This means white people have a special ability to work with one another inside that particular space. I believe when we do work effectively with each other there, it can hasten the pace of changes that can dismantle racism.

· However, white people’s investment in whiteness means this work must be in consultation with Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Nothing can replace that. With that in mind, I propose that even so, anti-racist work must also be done by white people with other white people.

This is my first proposition for white people working with white people about whiteness and race.