Oh jeez Erynn, I wish it were that I had always been “switched on” but I spent decades infatuated with my own “good white liberal” stance until a bit over 2 years ago I had an experience that was bizarre enough to light a fire under my butt to start digging into race/racism as it operates here in the U.S. (In brief, 4 “good white liberal” women who, along with me had founded a vegan advocacy group, got the vapors because I suggested a video which advocated for animals was doing so by mocking African Americans (I referred them to an essay by an African American vegan chef who nicely laid all this out.) Well, they let me know they were incapable of such awfulness because they were “good white liberals” (my words) and something must be really wrong with me…maybe I was “gasp” a racist and they proceeded to boot me out of the group).
Up until that time I’d never encountered the “colorblind” meme from folks (they were in their 40s and I’m a child of the 1960s and talk about race and racism was everyday stuff when I was a young man) and I was astonished at the self-righteous ignorance that they were spouting and I was also astounded at how deeply ignorant I was too. This all made me suspicious as hell about what was going on and whew…nothing has been the same since.
I have a doctorate in psychology but I left grad school many decades ago and since then the academy (African American Studies and Women’s and Gender studies were just forming when I left school) has done some tremendous work on theorizing and excavating some of the dynamics of whiteness and how it works to warp the piss out of consciousness and to con white people into thinking they know all they need to know re race/racism when in fact we white folks tend to be horribly uninformed about this culture/society of ours.
We are taught we know when in fact we’re uninformed and what little info we do have is mostly erroneous and misleading and worst of all we’re taught to disregard and ignore the voices of those who do know (African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and on and on). It’s a pretty effective set of stupid making dynamics that are in place and they’re damn well good at flim-flamming most of us into going along with patriarchal white supremacy all the while believing ourselves to be “good folks”.
The best way to prevent resistance is to make folks think there is nothing there…make it invisible…but…once you start looking (and comprehending) it’s absolutely horrifying how drenched in white supremacist patriarchal oppression this society is.
This stuff is powerful and effective and amazingly difficult to grapple with.
Working to recover or to gain some accurate perception of reality from this veil of whiteness is much closer to psycho-therapeutic process than uncomplicated “education”. If you encounter serious resistance when presenting easily ascertained and accurate information to folks then that’s a good clue that you’re fooling around with motivated disconnects from reality that are designed to protect against harmful and/or painful irrationality and/or trauma and/or painful recognitions about the self.
I’ve read enough and studied enough articles where unsuspecting university professors have had white students go into major meltdowns upon being presented with what is just factual information to be pretty well convinced that we’re dealing with some societally induced emotional/cognitive dysfunction.
A friend of mine, an African American female professor once told me that until she was 20 years old she was convinced that all white people were simply deranged. I didn’t genuinely appreciate what she was saying at the time but looking back I totally understand where she was coming from and why she would think that. Depressingly, she wasn’t too far off the mark, we’re powerfully conditioned to distort reality.
A philosopher, Charles Mills, named a construct the “epistemology of ignorance” that seems very useful and accurate. White people (everyone is subjected to this stuff but many/most people of color see through the flim flam) are taught to be unknowing and unaware and also taught to resist the hell out of becoming aware and this crap has been in place for several centuries and over that time it has morphed and evolved and insinuated itself into damn near every facet of what passes for “normality” not only here in the U.S. but colonialism has spread this horrid destructive stuff all over the planet (Frantz Fanon).
I’m embarrassed and chagrined that I fell for the insane idea that passing a few laws in the 1960s “fixed” everything. Jeez, it irritates the hell out of me that I didn’t catch onto this sick crap sooner…but…hey…all I can do is work to do better.
I’ve found that the most excellent folks around writing about and thinking about (with clarity and precision) social justice and liberation tend to be black feminist scholars. There are a few white folks who do some good work…but reference back to the works of people of color must always be made…especially to the efforts of women of color.
Patrica Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw, bell hooks and Patricia Williams are superlative sources and some good work is also being done by a few white folks…Robin DiAngelo and Allan G. Johnson and Joe Feagin, for instance.
A great rule I ran across is that in any dominant/subordinate configuration in society, members of the subordinated group will (on average) know much more about what’s actually going on than will those positioned in the dominant groups. Since I’m a white male that generally means I stumble around and run into stuff I don’t see all the time.
David Shih writes some wonderful blog posts and this one about Downton Abbey explicating that dominant/subordinate ignorance/knowledge dynamic is a classic…give it a read you might enjoy it. (The general rule seems to be, the more social power you have…the more oblivious you are. Which means…those in charge don’t know what on earth is going on…which pretty accurately describes much of human society. Spooky eh?)
David Shih also wrote a post titled “White Happened to You” and it would be a good thing, I think, if every white person on the planet was required to memorize the whole thing and to recite it once a week. It’s so spot on that it’s spooky.
There was no internet when I was in grad school…now there are some terrific resources that are easily accessed about all this stuff. I have a number of bloggers and writers I follow regularly because they are such excellent and insightful sources of information. There’s no excuse for we white folks being such ignoramuses anymore (there never was, really)…all we gotta do is read and hear and think. But…it’s not fun and it’s painful and embarrassing and sorrow making. And…many white folks will turn on and/or attack anyone who threatens to interrupt their “good white liberal” dream. So, be careful.
As you can see, I could talk about this stuff all day too. :-)
