Intention and Racism: We Have It All Backwards

Author’s note: This article is written specifically for an audience of white liberal folks. This article assumes that you are white and you already agree racism is an issue in this country and that we need to work to end it. Just so we’re clear, when I say things like “you,” “we,” “us,” etc., I mean “you liberal white person,” “we liberal white people,” and “us liberal white people.” This is true regardless of any other privilege, or lack thereof. I’m talking to cis straight white men, yes. I’m also talking to cis queer non-neurotypical white men like myself, white women, white queer and/or non-binary folks of all stripes, white non-neurotypical folks, and so on. I’m talking to all of you, and no one gets a pass. Not even myself, as I’m no exception to everything I’m about to say.

I also want to thank Kim Crayton and Sonia Gupta for everything I’ve learned from them on this topic so far, and for everything I still have let to learn from them. You should go follow them right now if you haven’t already, they’re both totally badass.

I’m sure you’ve seen this argument before, you’ve probably even been the one arguing. I know I have. You get called out for something racist. Maybe you’re called out individually, maybe someone called out white folks in general. The result is the same.

“But I had good intentions, and you just came in here getting angry and divisive. We’re allies and you should treat me as such, instead of dividing the movement.”

This is all bullshit of course, but perhaps not quite in the way most people make this out to be bullshit. When a white person who was called out for being racist says they had good intentions, they’re telling the truth. They actually did have good intentions. And they still screwed up, because intentions are irrelevant. One of my favorite sayings is a very old one, dating back almost a thousand years, that remains true to this day:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Let’s put this another way: virtually everyone has good intentions. The number of people who wake up in the morning and consciously say “gee, I’d sure love to go oppress some African Americans today” are so incredibly few and far between that they’re statistically irrelevant. For example, there are only between 5,000 and 8,000 KKK members in the US today [1]. Saying you had good intentions is like saying water is wet: it’s completely true and it’s apropos of nothing.

Worse, it’s a defense mechanism we subconsciously use to ignore the harm we cause others.

Let me go on a bit of a tangent, but I promise there’s a reason. White west coast liberals love to talk about how racist white Southerners are. And the South is very racist, no doubt about it. I grew up there, I know. I’ve lived in San Francisco for 9 years now, so I also know west coast liberals. I’ve learned over the years that the vision west coast liberals have of Southern racists bears little resemblance to reality. It’s a laughably wrong caricature, like propaganda videos out of Iran and North Korea lambasting the US. Worse, this caricature gives white west coast liberals a chance to ignore their own racism and harm because “clearly we’re not anything like this thing we just made up, therefore there’s no way we could be racist like them.”

The reality is that white west coast liberals are only marginally less racist than white folks in the South, and they get unbelievably defensive when you point this out to them. Just one tiny example: a former coworker of mine, and white male self-avowed social justice activist, utterly flipped out when I called him on this. He immediately proceeded to call me a Nazi and blocked me on all social media, for saying liberal white people are racist. White fragility indeed.

White west coast liberals: white Southern conservatives are a mirror into your own racism. Stop looking away from it!

Think I’m exaggerating? Look into our own history in California. Research the Compromise of 1850, and how California almost became a slave state [2]. Research Kearneyism and the 1879 constitution of California, and how it included provisions that were precursors to the Chinese Exclusion Act [3]. Research the Chinese Exclusion Act [4]. Research the role that California farmers and labor unions played in Japanese internment during World War II [5]. Research how San Francisco destroyed the Western Edition in the name of “fixing blight,” which really was code for getting rid of African Americans…which worked by the way [6]. Research why the Black Panthers were founded in Oakland, and not the South, and why their activism was (and is) desperately needed in Oakland [7]. Research the shooting of Oscar Grant [8]. Research the brutality of the Oakland Police Department during the Occupy protests [9] (I saw them in person, SWAT officers are frightening in a way I could never have imagined before and they weren’t even paying attention to me). I could go on, but you get the point.

The San Francisco Bay Area’s past and present is racist.

There’s a reason that the population of San Francisco shifted from 13% African American to 6% in only 40 years, and there’s a reason we’re still only at 6% [10]. San Francisco, that bastion of inclusivity, is effectively tied with Phoenix, Arizona and San Antonio, Texas for the lowest percentage of African Americans among the top 15 largest cities in the US [11].

Which brings us back to the point: San Franciscans also have good intentions. We don’t want to be racist…but we are. And there’s the rub: if good intentions mattered, then why is this place with some of the best intentions also the worst at results? It’s because there’s something deeper and more powerful going on.

Most bigotry is subconscious but all intention is conscious, meaning our intentions don’t even know our bigotry exists most of the time! They’re unrelated in our brains, and our subconscious brain is almost always more powerful than our conscious brain. Just look at how addiction works for one example. So when we talk about the harm done by racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. we’re talking about the harm that our subconscious brain does. Yet when we get called out for things our subconscious brain did, we push back and get defensive based on what our conscious brain is telling us, a.k.a. our intentions.

And we go round and round on this seemingly never-ending groundhog day nightmare where a person of color calls one of us out for bad behavior, and we push back saying “but that wasn’t my intention.” Everyone gets angry, nothing is accomplished, and the problem persists.

So what do we do about this?

We need to see ourselves clearly and stop conflating what different parts of our brain are doing. We have to recognize that this seemingly rational explanation for why we aren’t racist isn’t actually rational…it’s a defense mechanism that causes us to miss what our subconscious brain is doing.

We need to stop viewing ourselves as a “good person.” None of us are actually good people because the concept itself is an oversimplification. We’re all humans, and we innately have the capacity for good and bad, and regularly do both good and bad. So let’s stop focusing on the concept of a good person, and instead lets start focusing on good actions. Like ally-ship, it’s not a title that gets conferred, it’s a value placed on a specific good deed we do that gets interspersed with all the other deeds we do. We also need to stop weaponizing this concept to ignore the harm we cause. “But I’m one of the good ones” isn’t a real thing.

We have to learn about ourselves, and see ourselves for what we are: complicated beings who were shaped by our history.

For those of us that are white but underprivileged in some other way, we have to be especially careful. In addition to being a cis white guy, I’m also queer and deal with a fair amount of anxiety, both of which have social justice aspects to them. Same thing with white women. But. The ways in which we lack privilege are not comparable to what people of color deal with in this country, especially African Americans and Native Americans.

Whenever we get called out by a person of color and we want to respond with “that’s homophobic,” or “that’s sexist” or anything else similar, we must tread very very carefully. What we feel was bigoted coming from the person of color may be accurate, but it’s a lot more likely that it’s just our brain trying to defend ourselves and find a reason for it to not be our fault. Resist the urge to do this, because it will only make things worse. Even more specifically: if you are a woman, do not weaponize the whisper network against women of color! I’ve seen this happen before, this is not a hypothetical, and it’s straight up racist oppression.

I want to end back where we started: with intention. We don’t intend to cause harm, and we don’t intend to be racist. We’re usually trying for the opposite of that. But intentions don’t matter, and we need to let that concept go entirely. Don’t start at the beginning (intention) and work your way to the end (harm). Instead, start at the end with the results of our actions devoid of intention, and then try and make things right.

I’m learning how to do it, and you can too. It all starts with understanding the actual effects of our actions, and not how our brains perceive them.

I know it sounds like I’m being hard on white west coast liberals, and I am. I think deep down though it’s because, at the end of the day, this is my home now. I am one of you, not apart from you. I grew up in the 80s and 90s in various parts of Texas that ranged from moderate to deeply conservative…all while queer. In my own smaller way I got a glimpse of what it’s like to be an outcast. I know what it feels like when everyone around you hates you because of an innate part of who you are. Something you have no control over, something you were born with. I came to San Francisco almost a decade ago to get away from all that, and I can’t bear the thought that we’re doing the same and worse to others that was done to me.

Let’s strive to become that better place we envision this to be, and it starts with ourselves.

[1] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1850
[3] http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/kearneyism.html
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
[5] https://fee.org/articles/special-interests-and-the-internment-of-japanese-americans-during-world-war-ii/ (Yes this is a Libertarian think tank, but this specific article is spot on)
[6] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Sad-chapter-in-Western-Addition-history-ending-3203302.php
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/occupy-oakland-protesters-1m-police
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Race,_ethnicity,_religion,_and_languages
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population