The Perversions of My White Privilege and Racism
I wrote this over the course of several weeks of re-educating myself. The first perversion is this process in and of itself: I have learnt from BIPOC authors, educators, activists, and filmmakers — the very people historically and currently oppressed, who have taken up the mantle to educate people on their human experience. The very people oppressed have educated me, the oppressor. I have relied on their hard work to contextualise my white privilege and racism. I am extremely grateful, but I cannot help feeling how distorted this all is. But the real distortions — the real racism — lies within me, certainly not within the dissemination of important information from groups of people to other groups of people. It lies deep within my core, dormant and unperturbed. This is an attempt to get what I experience — privilege, the opposite of oppression — on the table, not to rid myself of it simply through some words.
To be honest, I didn’t really care before. I expressed outrage at “I can’t breathe” when it came from Eric Garner, then I listened to “The Blacker the Berry” by Kendrick Lamar. I was appalled when Philando Castile was shot, then I read Vox and The New Yorker. I saw what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, at that point familiar with my own reaction of turning towards perspective and not towards action.
These were videos made reality television by their ubiquity. All too real, but repeated so much to not be felt, the viscera unscathed in my whiteness. The commonplace of gunshots, tasers, bodies, and deaths remained trapped in footage — embodied in seconds, not lifetimes. I was a passerby in these public lynchings, able to comment on the injustice, the callousness, the obvious racism and the prosaic death, but truly unaware of their gravity. An added irony was that I was reading The New Jim Crow at the time, fascinated by the legacy of racism but unable to make the present-day connection.
This, I have learnt, is white privilege at its finest. It’s intrinsically perverted: the privilege within me creates the opportunity to engage in boundless intellectual fascination with the plight of Black lives, but a disconcerting empathy gap with the death of Black lives. It doesn’t take the same “intellectual fascination” to tell me that this particular perversion is particularly racist.
The white privilege in me also affords a certain freedom in faith. My father — who is, or at least was self-proclaimed “colour-blind” — always told me that “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.” This was easily cherished by our whiteness. Only now am I learning that the teaching of this aphorism has an ironic cherry on top: Martin Luther King, Jr. popularised it, but my colour-blind father adhered to it and instilled it in me. Funny? Interesting? Unwittingly, pervertedly racist? But still, endless videos of Black deaths could only be met with eventual justice, I was always free to believe. But without a fight, the arc and that freedom travel well past Black people. That justice doesn’t really care about Black people is a worn and torn understanding among Black people, but a nascent realisation among White people. That is a large part of my white privilege and my racism: I am realising that hope and faith need to be forged in protest and activism, not just assumed as acts of tomorrow — and that my passivity is complicity. Paradoxically, I already espoused the belief that protest and activism are necessary to bring about positive change — my upbringing and my political science undergrad proved this to me. But I still made the naïve and privileged assumption that hope, faith, and change would be forged the ones naturally taking up their cause, and that I did not have to take any part in it. I could sit back and wait for tomorrow. Having made this assumption countless times in the past is without a doubt racist, as it assumes that I don’t play a role and that those with skin unlike mine are solely responsible for their justice, even when people with skin like mine have been solely responsible for their oppression.
My white privilege also allows me to define myself and to redefine myself: yesterday a passerby, today an activist; yesterday an observer, today a doer. I am not profiled or pigeonholed by who I am because I grew up with the privilege to get involved and play many roles, to don any mask without question or reprisal. I can be multiple people; I am not a monolith. And I am not discriminated against when I express a belief because my whiteness allows me to hold any belief I want, my freedom of speech intended to compliment and reinforce the versatility of my whiteness. I can be true and authentic, racist and corrupt, but no mask or reality is called into question.
I think the worst manifestation of the white privilege and flat-out racism I have internalised came to life in the summer of 2018. On our annual pilgrimage to the US, some friends and I found ourselves driving around South Buffalo, New York. We were in “the hood” — deeply in “the hood” as we observed, in awestruck silence, the dilapidated homes, rundown strip malls, graffitied signs, and swaths of people crowding the streets. The sweltering heat made the moment feel more visceral, more agitated. We eventually cut through the silence with vague acknowledgements of where we were, our best descriptors drawing racist analogies from The Wire or Pusha T songs . We were four White people in a freshly rented, mint-clean SUV, obviously not “from around here” but more subconsciously feeling as if we were soon to be the archetypal victims of the “super-predator”. None of us said it, but this was the deeply internalised racism we were projecting on this neighbourhood: gangsters and crime; not people and community. Decades of voyeurism into Black culture and lifetimes spent listening to politicians and the media vilify Black people gave us a sense that if Black people congregated in places shrouded in graffiti, it could only be a “war zone” — even if, on a different day, we would deny such racism. So our mint-clean SUV trod on in a slum safari, our racist eyes more wide through the sort of “ghetto museum” we tacitly felt this place to be.
Eventually we stopped. One of my friends wanted to paint a graffiti piece on the wall of an abandoned factory. We parked in the vacant lot of the factory — a towering testament to the decadence of the Rust Belt. But it wasn’t the emblems of the dying era of blue-collar factories that caught my attention; I was still gripped by my deeply racist fear of being in this neighbourhood, only now in a parked vehicle, not safely travelling through. The fear gripped tighter. Without a single moment’s recognition of how irrational and intensely racist my fear was, I sat there with trepidation, imagining scenes from a movie, not from life.
I truly feared for my safety in a neighbourhood I recognised as predominantly Black. Around the same time in my life, I saw videos of Black deaths at the hands of police. But I didn’t fear the same way. At all. More than that, our car-ride conversations on the way home spoke of racism and demography, as we engaged in those “boundless intellectual fascinations with the plight of Black lives.” Of course, my pithy and insufferable contributions were stolen straight from the pages of books like The New Jim Crow. Because I read a Black author once, I felt to be the erudite arbiter of the Black experience — directly after fearing the Black body. I don’t even know what to call this level of racism. It’s ironic and perverted; shameful and hypocritical; unwitting and corrupt. I guess that’s just what racism is, though. And in this instance, it was racism to my core.
A couple days earlier, another group of us ran into some cops while skateboarding. It was a big group, skating some spot in Syracuse. After a while, they were approached by the police, as I suppose the skateboarding of ten to twenty people was an annoyance. Fair enough. Or maybe it constituted loitering. But they didn’t show up to “bust” anyone. Instead, they embraced my friends, one of them borrowing a board for a kickflip attempt. Cool. But not combative. Respectful. Not confrontational. Friendly. Not profiling. And while skateboarders have historically been at odds with the police, often defining ourselves deep within a counterculture almost explicitly anti-police, none of my friends seemed to feel any sense of unease or trepidation, or any “anti” this or that. The whole thing was completely harmless, and even resulted in a nice little squad-up photo with the officers — the encounter locked and loaded in the memory books of the trip. But looking back at that photo, who’s to say it wasn’t all the white faces that made the situation so amicable? Could it have been so easy without white privilege? I can only contemplate what could have happened if my friends were Black. I feel that, at the very least, the photo wouldn’t exist. Other outcomes seem much worse.
I could go on. I could speculate how my white face always made encountering the police through skateboarding a fairly anodyne experience. I could mention other times when my White body felt insecure because my racism gravely misrepresented people in my head. I could mention my white male privilege, but that’s a reality fit for, at minimum, an article unto itself, not just a quick plug. When you really start to reflect, there are truly endless perversions and manifestations of white privilege and racism. But reflecting only gives some truth to my words. My intention here is not optical, nor is it performative (that’s probably inescapable, though arguably can act as a moral good anyway). It is to recognise the role my white privilege and racism play in oppression, so that I may begin to disentangle the complex layers of racism of which I am inherently a part, and so others may more closely reflect upon their white privilege with the intent to do the same.
At this point, I should add that if your reflex is to call out the merits of this article, the imperfections I am sure are within it, or even the reasons for sharing it, then, really, we haven’t engaged in anything constructive, and you’ve probably only coddled your white fragility, having battled against a deeper sense of self-reflection. (This is not to imply that I am not open to criticism; I just hope that this doesn’t fuel unproductive, internecine arguments.) Instead, let’s recognise the writing on the wall. Through social media posts, we (White people) have been staring at the calls to help unwhitewash and help undo the tragic mess we’ve created, so I believe — coupled with the conversations we’re invariably having — it takes further admissions to unravel the pernicious effects of our white privilege and to more closely realise the systemic racism we’ve built for ourselves.
Plainly, I’ve learnt a whole lot from the resources posted and shared on Instagram and in other places (for which I am eternally grateful), so my attempt here is also to synthesise the information shared with me, as it relates to me/us as members of the White race, complicit in structures of white supremacy, not just passively, but actively in ways I mentioned above. It’s simply not enough to proclaim or repost “I understand that I will never understand” and then move on; it must be explained within you why that is exactly — why your/my/our White race makes us active in something much greater than an inability to understand.
We should also recognise that we are a race; we are not some race-less group just because we haven’t been racialised, profiled, and compartmentalised in the media, in politics, in the streets, in culture, and in every crevice and intimate facet of life, ad nauseam. We are not some post-racial group and we are not, and have never been colour-blind (another fallacy which becomes particularly perverted when you consider how much we’ve co-opted Black culture to define our own). We should take responsibility for our race being the dominant one — the one that has manufactured history and culture to meet only our goals and to purposefully, blatantly shred to pieces the goals of others because they purportedly threaten our dominance.
In 2020, it’s become face-slappingly obvious that one of the most insidious ways that our dominance manifests itself is in our white privilege. It’s been made abundantly clear by voices much greater and far more relevant than mine that one of the quickest ways to recognise and reconcile our white privilege is to understand the privilege of apathy and inaction. To truly care is to act upon that seriousness, not simply to reflect upon sincerity or to wax revolutionary. This, I believe, begins with accountability. It was here that I initially chose to end this paragraph with an exhaustive list of anti-racist pledges upon which I would action through life. But if this article hasn’t been insufferable enough, then stating my proposed solutions would surely overflow the high-ground boiling within these words. So I guess I’ll just say that the resources are obviously out there, and if you haven’t accessed them yet, then you’ve got a long way to go. And if you’ve denied to yourself your history of flash judgements on Black people and the amenities and freedoms your deep-seated white privilege affords, then you’ve simply dove further down the rabbit hole of white privilege and racism.
What’s undeniable here and now is that the White race in which I/we exist benefits immeasurably from its privilege and racism. We are safeguarded from physical and psychological damage, kept comfortable in our skin, and even placed on a pedestal for doing so. This has been the truth forever. It shouldn’t have taken George Floyd’s death — and the incredibly hard work of millions of people flooding the streets and social media — to get here. And since you’re probably like me — someone who is only now reflecting on your racism and your powerful position within structures of racism — you owe it to these people, and to George Floyd and countless others, to, at the very least, reflect on and understand the harmful mutations of the white privilege and racism that sits comfortably at your core.
