Whiteness: Proposition Two
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. To even ask the question of my conversation partner, however, required me first to lay out three propositions as well as 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: What secular framework, if any, can we create through which white people can work with one another on the basis of love and compassion, rather than shame, in order to end racism; a framework that does not condone or appear to condone the racism on which whiteness is predicated?
Each of the propositions is contested, and the question may not have an answer. I will explore all of them in the coming weeks. Proposition One is here.
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.)
Racial social systems[i] can withstand negative emotions like grief, anger, fear, and shame — even and especially emphatic ones. In fact, they adapt well to them. Racial social systems are well constructed to co-opt and manipulate negative emotions and put them in service of either markets (e.g., Fox News and its profits) or marginalization (e.g., the stereotype of The Angry Black Man).
What all systems have difficulty withstanding is human connection. This is especially true for social systems based on racial hierarchy. One of the many reasons organizing works is because it requires human beings to connect with each other about things that matter to them. The stories that warm our hearts, that remind us of how we thought the world was supposed to be, are almost always those of people doing right by someone else by breaking a system’s rules and/or risking personal consequence. This includes things like refusing to kick a kid out of line for not having lunch money, courageous, career-risking votes by elected officials, and people who put themselves between another person and a physical threat like a person with a gun.
Shame and fear also have difficulty withstanding real human connection. As a result, human connection is a key ingredient for dissolving and transforming whiteness as well as the systems that are intertwined with it, because whiteness is socialized into white people using shame and fear of losing connection with people who are important to us.
What I mean is, white people rarely have stark stories about injustices against us that characterize our awareness of our own race. What we often have, which Thandeka explores in her book Becoming White, is an awareness, often subconscious, that if we don’t implicitly accept the racial injustice around us, we are at risk of losing social cohesion with our families and communities, cohesion we rely on to survive as children. It becomes a powerful norm for us that we are almost never invited to re-evaluate as adults. As Thandeka says about the stories she heard from white people she interviewed about their early memories of racial identity, “They are stories about children and adults who learned how to think of themselves as white in order to stay out of trouble with their caretakers and in the good graces of their peers or the enforcers of community racial standards. Their motive was not to attack someone outside of their own racial community. They simply wanted to remain within their own racial community — or at least not be abandoned by it.”[ii] (I will be writing more fully about this in a future essay.)
For white people to sustainably enroll other white people into racial liberation work, then, it will be necessary to contradict that shame and fear. To do that, we will need an approach that understands that in order for our social systems to persist, almost all white people are steeped, from a very early age, in our part of racial systems and culture. We are as impacted by social messages about our whiteness and what it means and how it shapes our world as any other race. The methods and the content of those messages are different, but the socialization is just as powerful.
As an example, some of us white liberals and progressives understand on a theoretical level that violence within marginalized communities is at least in part a consequence of systems and the harms caused by those systems. We believe racism and lack of opportunities in our social structures — education, employment, and housing among them — shape options and self-perceptions in those communities in real ways. This belief (along with any bias or implicit bias we still carry) shapes how we assess what solutions will and won’t work to prevent violence or disrupt poverty. We think that the context, including social systems that are not set up well for certain communities, matters for understanding the genesis of violent behavior. Understanding the context also means shaping solutions that change the context, not just an individual.
However, we fail to understand the corollary: In order for racial systems to function, this process of shaping options and self-perception happens to everyone in the system.
It is a part of whiteness that we do not understand that this has happened to us white people just as surely as it has happened to Global Majority and Indigenous people. Our role is just very different in a racialized system and, as a result, the methods used to shape us into our role are different, as well.
Any successful strategy for white people to enroll each other into the work of getting out from under whiteness and turning our energy toward racial equity has got to, at the very least, understand this dynamic and have compassion for it.
If this is true, then we white people get to work with other white people to challenge our whiteness and transform the systems that are based on it on the basis of love and compassion, coupled with expectation and accountability. Compassionate accountability, accountable compassion. Either way, we must build the work based on it. This is work that white people must do with white people.
Often, we white people are tempted to start with accountability, to put accountability in the first position when talking with another white person. We are tempted to start with the ways that whiteness is terrible, and ways we’ve inherited that which are terrible, and the suspicion that we white people are terrible, too. Whether it’s Uncle Phil at Thanksgiving going off about [insert any racial epitaph here] or Jenny in our book group rolling her eyes when Caste is the next book on the list, many of us (if we notice it at all) first (understandably) get mad or scared or upset or all three. Then, if we figure out how to do anything at all in that moment, we are tempted to start with why the other person is wrong and how bad it is that they demonstrated racist behavior. Our urge is to move straight to correction and accountability.
Here’s the thing, though. That doesn’t work very well for actually changing culture and systems over time. If we can sense that another person can’t see us, can’t truly value us in our full humanity — good and bad — then the conversation is over before it starts. If I don’t feel connected to you in some way first, if my humanness is not in the first position, then I am not going to trust you enough to follow your lead. This is true under almost any condition, on any issue, with any people. If my full personhood is not assumed before anything else, not much else of meaning is going to happen.
Now, if you lead with shame or fear or blame or criticism, instead of my humanity, you can get my compliance. I will shut up, or vote the way you need me to (if I am an elected official), or change my language. In many instances, those can be good short-term gains. It might be all you are aiming for in that moment. But the dividends on those gains are resentment and retaliation. As I type this, white people across the country, white people who decried the murder of George Floyd, are also electing leaders who will increase law enforcement in their cities, despite the overwhelming evidence that more law enforcement of the kind they are voting for more of disproportionately harms people of color. They don’t understand what’s in it for them to change how things have always been done (I wrote about that here.) and they’re tired of feeling like they’re being called bad people.
OK, look. I know. When it comes to whiteness and white people, there isn’t some magic way to approach us that isn’t going to ping our defensiveness. Robin DiAngelo writes about this beautifully in White Fragility. Defensiveness about our race is an almost universal feature, not a bug, of 21st-century American whiteness. The goal for us in working with each other isn’t to avoid that defensiveness — at this stage, I don’t think that’s possible. The goal is to couple it with enough connection to allow us to withstand the discomfort of our own defensiveness long enough to hear something in addition to the defensive voice in our heads.
This is one of the reasons I think white people are in a unique position to work with each other. We can identify with one another. We can let go of the judgment for other white people because we have been there ourselves. Then we can connect as people. “Jenny, I have been there. I know the creeping dread that comes over me when I think about having to talk about race. For me it’s really old, maybe for you, too. But we give up too much of ourselves when we stay in that place, and we inadvertently hurt a lot of other people in the process, too. We are all worthy of more.”
One of the reasons can be controversial is because on its surface it looks like side-stepping responsibility, like an easy harbor for the white desire for comfort. Whiteness wants comfort more than almost anything else. An exhortation to compassion sounds like new language for the old habit of the white trend to comfort. That is why I am so clear that it must be paired with accountability and expectation.
Why accountability and expectation, if those engender such defensiveness? Two reasons. First, it’s how we will actually move things. Without it, we really are just telling each other as white people that racism isn’t our fault — so we shouldn’t do anything about it.
Second, it isn’t an act of compassion to leave each other sitting in our whiteness and our racist behavior. Hurting other people every day (unintentionally or not), benefiting from the harm of others, having an asterisk next to our every success — those eat at the spirit of a person and of a people. The mental and spiritual gymnastics we do to avoid facing this reality lessens us as human beings. It is an act of compassion and love to offer another way and another perspective to each other.
Finally, I say all of this in the context of white people who are working with other white people. As a white person, I am not speaking to or attempting to guide the organizing strategies and principles of Global Majority and Indigenous people, unless explicitly invited to contribute to that conversation. The thinking I share here is designed as a basis for building a framework for white people, my people, to do effective anti-racism work with one another.
In sum: If Proposition One and Proposition Two both hold, then it will be necessary for white people to work with one another on the basis of love and compassion to do our part to end racism. What framework do we have that allows us to do that work with integrity? Well, we don’t have one. And that will be the subject of the next essay.
[i] “Racial social systems” and “racial systems” refer to the concept that the policies, procedures, and cultures that tie together how people interact with each other as groups and individuals were and are structured to get better outcomes for white people. Systems include government, health, education, employment, housing, and transportation as well as broader systems like the economy, the family, and politics.
[ii] Learning To Be White by Thandeka, 1999, Bloomsbury Academic, p. 20
