Seeing White

Scene on Radio, a podcast from Duke University, ran a 14-part series last summer on ‘whiteness’ called Seeing White.

The premise is that we often report on other races/communities but treat ‘white’ as the default, so we never really articulate the specific set of ideas we have about ‘white people.’ The host, John Biewen, is the audio program director at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Study and the author of a book on radio documentary.

I find the premise really interesting — the idea of questioning how we as journalists perpetuate ideas of race by not seeing ‘whiteness’ and how that’s becoming less viable. It’s amazing how much gets rattled just by shifting the spotlight.

The first few episodes look at the history of whiteness, how science views race, and Biewen self-examines his own past reporting. It’s a touchy subject, and it’s treated with respect and sensitivity.

On the same subject on a totally different podcast (well, a radio show turned podcast) called To the Best of our Knowledge, there’s one segment about seeing whiteness that really illustrated how much of a paradigm shift it is. The segment features Debbie Irving, a woman in her forties who describes her own journey to becoming aware of race, and her emotional response to being confronted with what she’d been blind to until then. It’s worth a listen.*

*There’s a tendency to frown on conversations about becoming woke, either because it seems easier to pretend that the world is split between racists, and the always enlightened or because it’s a bit sketch to reward people for not hating black people. But it really isn’t like that, and we should pay more attention to how people move along the spectrum from racism to indifference/ignorance to awareness to wokeness.