No, Your White PhD Doesn’t Confer Black Cultural Authority
Now is the time for us to show up, listen, and learn to follow.
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A progressive white professor published a Medium piece this week called “The Real Danger of the George Floyd Protests.”
In it, the author charges activists not to conflate one-off actions with long-term or “genuine” progress. “Let’s not confuse virtue signaling for real social change,” he wrote.
Not entirely off-base. There were some fundamental truths in his pleas for long-term planning. But, as with most guys who self-identify as Liberal but cannot abide what they call “virtue signaling,” some well-intentioned white fuckery was afoot. I could smell it like a fart in a car:
Focused, organized, peaceful protests can help create this spark [for change]. But we must go beyond the passion of the moment and keep our eyes on long-term social justice, and all of those issues that are not on our front pages today but are also important: climate change, gun violence, fake news, the opioid crisis, and all the rest.
When I pointed out that Black people are the ones best qualified to set the terms of “productive” protests about their own lives, that their voices — not ours — must say whether violence is justified, I was educated:
I (mostly) disagree with your statement that black people, and not white acadmics [sic], are the rightful leaders of converations [sic] on racial justice. That’s because in order for change to happen, we all need to have a stake. The tricky thing about privilege is that if you have it, you can’t not have it — so you have to use it in the most productive way you can.
Yes. This white man with a PhD said the quiet part out loud.
I sat with that for a moment.
This author’s words reminded me of white academics’ bottomless capacity for repackaging stale, white supremacist entitlement into eminently reasonable-sounding (but basically self-serving, status-quo-reinforcing) rhetoric. I knew this was so. I’m a white woman confronting my own racism and unearned privilege. I’ve been in the academy and I’ve organized alongside many white PhDs in nonprofit circles since. I know their works. I know how they materialize when there is foundation money to be raised and career-advancing networking to be done, then vanish from non-white movement circles they cannot dominate. Mostly, I know how much damage that white academic facade of Reasoned Competence does to people whose bodies are on the actual frontline of movements for racial justice, which are movements for human rights.
I say to this white academic: How do you imagine our “stake” outweighs those whose lives and humanity are immediately at risk? Sir, it doesn’t. Not even close. Middle class whites are not — have never been — the people primarily impacted by racial violence. For this reason, we cannot be the arbiters of how that system must be dismantled. For us the stakes have always been pitifully low.
Of course we must invest (materially, physically, mentally, spiritually) in establishing “stakes” in racial justice. But the white academy enables our delusion that the way to do this is by Dominating. By talking more. Consuming maximum oxygen, money and time. Centering our white feelings and asserting our white opinions.
Empirical sense, lived experience of frontline justice movements, and collective cultural wisdom have no time for this white noise.
Empirical sense tells us that our best thinking got us here — a morally and politically degenerated culture in crisis — and that 400+ years of uninterrupted privilege is enough.
Empirical sense tells us to show up, shut up, listen, and learn to follow Black leaders.
Empirical sense is not what’s taught in the academy. The opposite is taught: white liberal academics have long cherished an image of themselves as frontline “progressives,” while collectively enforcing what the Reverend Dr. King called “negative peace.” King describes the concept of negative peace in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”: roughly, it is the white demand for Black nonviolence in the absence of justice; a hushing of social disruption at all cost, including human life. That document names white moderates — not Klansmen, Southerners, or even cryptofascist tyrants — as the primary obstacle to racial justice in America.
Sit with this for a moment.
The paragon of American antiracist activism told us that nice white liberal professors who just want to bolster their careers by monopolizing conversations about race are more dangerous than the KKK.
For half a century, we have quoted King’s lines while refusing to indict ourselves on his terms. While refusing to locate our own “peaceful,” “productive” behaviors within his named collective crime of negative peace.
Why? Because the white imagination balks at any prospect of a conversation whose terms it cannot dictate absolutely. To the entrenched white academic, the right to hold forth at length on any topic — whether it relates to one’s area of study or not — is conferred by virtue of expensive credentials. And ah, when male entitlement compounds racial and class privilege…! Too often this describes a person who has been socialized from childhood, throughout his long education, and well into his career to believe that his opinion doesn’t just always count; it’s the authoritative one in every room.
Here is the subtext of the claim that white academics are the rightful, or equal, leaders of conversations on racial justice in America.
Black people leading dialogues on Black justice, power, and political autonomy…? Whoa! That’s discriminating against me as a white person.
I feel silenced. I mean, of course they’re entitled to their opinion. But I’m educated! I have status! And we All have a stake. Can’t we All agree that this affects us All equally, whether we’re All being paid or afforded civil rights or murdered equally? Can’t we All agree that the same people who have dominated social dialogues since America’s inception as a genocidal settler nation-state should keep dominating those dialogues? I mean, as long as it profits us professionally to talk about Race? And as long as no actual sacrifice or abdication of white power is asked of us? Or as long as They ask it civilly, in a peaceful and nonthreatening-to-me-personally manner…?
Have I mentioned I have a PhD?
Doesn’t my PhD position me on The Frontlines?
Doesn’t my PhD prove I can’t be racist?
Doesn’t my PhD make me one of the Good Ones? Shouldn’t the Good Ones lead these dialogues about Black lives? Aren’t I the right Good One for the job?
Doesn’t my voice matter as much as Black voices?
Don’t white educated voices matter?
Don’t white voices matter?
Don’t white lives matter?
Don’t All Lives Matter?
#AllLivesMatter!”
It doesn’t take an advanced degree to read between those lines.
To my fellow whites I say: Don’t ever tell me that our privilege is static, that it is terminal.
That’s insulting to everyone who knows better and is doing better. We can’t change our ethnicity. But we can make honest and searching inventories of the racist aggressions and assumptions we make every day. We can recognize and stop our aggressions. That is how we dismantle privilege. Black leadership is central to that process.
Perhaps we are rewarded for refusing to dismantle our privilege by the validation of our fellow racist whites within the academy — where we have always been the racial power majority. Perhaps we are applauded, advanced, awarded tenure for taking up more than our share of space.
But Black activists, movement leaders and cultural workers aren’t our students in this movement. We are theirs, when it comes to racial literacy.
So I reject the system whereby white academics profit from talking, talking, talking about racial injustice (talk about “virtue signaling”!). And I won’t be party to their imagined “right” to reinforce whiteness in activist spaces to which they contribute little. Let us recognize: The business of academics has historically been seizing their white prerogative to tut-tut revolutionary Black resistance, then commodifying #resistance in the name of “diversity” and “education.”
#NotAllWhiteAcademics, you say. But enough of them. More than enough. Far too many.
The real danger of the George Floyd protests is that more Black people will be murdered. Not that privileged whites will be denied status or find ourselves annoyed by “virtue signaling.”
Black, indigenous, and immigrant genocide is the “real danger” of America, not just of these uprisings. If we don’t get that, we have no business attempting to “educate” people on the frontlines of racial justice.
