White Ego, Cowardice, and The Violence of Normal
Story #1 of 3: In 1999 I was a graduate student at the University of Florida. (Go Gators!) I needed a lit class, so I took a course on African-American literature. I didn’t know anybody — most of the other students were undergrads — but I ran my loud mouth as usual during class discussions, bashing white supremacy and the obliviousness of white people throughout American history.
One day the professor told us to sort ourselves into study groups and prepare a presentation for the class. I looked around at the 50 or so students and wondered who I might approach, then prepared to ask the professor for a special exemption to do the project solo.
Before I could, however, one of the three Black students in the class approached me and gestured to the other two, standing nearby. “We appreciate the things you’ve been saying in class,” he said. “You wanna join our group?”
I was surprised by how much of an impact this invitation made on me. I hadn’t been speaking in class to impress anyone; I wasn’t really aware of who else was in the class. I had strong feelings about race, though, and our discussions about Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and David Walker gave me plenty of opportunities to sound off.
The study group invitation was a weird rush of affirmation, a stamp of approval for my precious White Ego. I suddenly realized how hungry I was to get that approval, and how dangerous the hunger can be.
Meet the White Ego
The ego is dangerous, because it leads us to do all kinds of weird things on its behalf. I’ve written about the ego elsewhere, and there’s a lot to say about it. Every human has an ego, and each person’s ego affects them differently based on background, experience, ideology, and situation. I can’t tell you what your ego looks like, so I focus on my own experience and understanding. Hopefully my reflections can resonate with other people.
The hip-hop group Lifesavas gave, I think, the best musical examination of the ego in their song “Hellohihey”, and Pema Chödrön has provided some valuable food for thought as well. Fight Club and Revolver and Barton Fink are the best movies ever made about the ego. I could go on, but I won’t.
I want to focus here on the egos of white people. I believe each white person has a unique kind of ego problem that requires careful examination and painful combat. The White Ego makes us do some silly things, some stupid things, and some things that harm other people — especially people of color.
One manifestation of the White Ego is a tendency to hog the mic, and Exhibit A is me. As a cis-het well-to-do white guy in the US, I love to run my mouth and take up space. I’m trying to control this tendency; other people must judge how well I’m doing, because my ego tells me I’m doing great.
By the way: The irony of this point in a piece I’m writing and promoting is not lost on me. I wrestled for weeks about whether writing this was even a good idea. I’m planning to address that question in a follow-up essay. The TLDR for now is: I think this piece might help some white folks confront their egos and, in some tiny way, help dismantle white supremacy. If I’m wrong … well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
The White Ego, like every ego, prizes appearance over reality. It gets us to post black squares on Instagram and make sure we’re seen in the streets, even if only for just a moment. It plays the right song at the right time on the car stereo, so everybody knows how woke we are. It helps us choose our clothing and the books we carry.
The White Ego also tells us that we understand the world very well. It tells us that our blind spots don’t exist, or don’t matter. It allows us to center our experience as a natural and complete lens through which the world should be filtered. (This is not unique to white folks; David Foster Wallace calls it a universal human “default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth”. But white people wield that lens with a frightening certainty.) It prevents us from listening, which is a huge problem for the ego in general, but especially for white people.
Story #2 of 3: In Chapter 23 of Angie Thomas’ landmark 2017 novel The Hate U Give, the narrator Starr is driving with her boyfriend Chris (a white guy), her brother Seven, and their friend DeVante. A chaotic protest against police brutality is breaking out, and Chris is nervous about being around Starr’s father Maverick.
“Think he’ll be okay with me helping out?” Chris asks. “He didn’t seem to like me last time.”
“Seem to?” DeVante repeats. “He straight up mean-mugged your a — . I was there. I remember.”
Seven snickers. I smack DeVante and tell him, “Shush.”
“What? It’s true. He was mad as hell that Chris is white. But ay? You spit that NWA s — t like you did back there, maybe he’ll think you’re a’ight.”
“What? Surprised a white boy knows NWA?” Chris teases.
“Man, you ain’t white. You light-skinned.”
“Agreed!” I say.
There’s a lot going on in this scene — later the group grills Chris on his food preferences as a way to see if he really deserves to “earn a black card” — but it signifies the possibility for white folks (and, crucially, young white readers) to be accepted among Black folks.
This scene made an impact on me, in part because I’ve been a huge fan of hip-hop all my life. As a kid, I wanted to be that little white boy in Run-DMC’s “Rock Box” video. As a teenager I dreamed of getting props from a Black classmate for knowing NWA lyrics.
A lot of white hip-hop fans feel the same way. They feel like they have a deep window into The Black Experience™ because of how many Jay-Z and Kanye lyrics they’ve memorized. For some this is a fleeting sensation during their love affair with the beats and machismo, but others consider themselves unduly enlightened. (Again, I speak from experience. Not until I started reading Malcolm and Cornel West and bell hooks did I realize how little the window of hip-hop had actually allowed me to see.)
Even more treacherous, the White Ego convinces some white hip-hop heads that they can, and should, say the N word when it appears in a song. They think their knowledge of the music gives them the right to wield this uniquely violent term, despite their obliviousness to the context and consequence. Thanks to a variety of hip-hop tracks (and some industrial music and academic discussions) showing me the way, I decided early on that I didn’t have the right to say it — and I soon realized I didn’t want to. (That, I think, is the real question for white folks: Why do you want to say it?)
There Are No Good White People
The White Ego tries to answer a difficult question at the heart of whiteness: Given the horrors of white supremacy and the history of racism in the US and the violence of our modern segregated era, how does one live as a good person if one is white?
The “good” White Ego says: “You’re great. You’re a good person. Your soul is pure.” The “bad” White Ego says: “You’re terrible. You’re a bad person. Your soul is evil.” This question drives some white folks to dwell in guilt and shame. Some people deny their whiteness itself. Others refuse to accept the possibility of personal racism, as if they have transcended the virus of white supremacy.
The hard truth is that you cannot be a good white person, because no one can be a “good person”. That label is meaningless. There is no such thing as Good People (or Bad People). As Diane Nguyen tells BoJack Horseman at the end of the fifth season:
There’s no such thing as bad guys and good guys! We’re all just guys! Who do good stuff, sometimes. And bad stuff, sometimes. And all we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff. But you’re never going to be good! Because you’re not bad! So you need to stop using that as an excuse.
Therefore, white people, stop trying to get confirmation that you’re “a good person”, because there’s no such thing. Obviously this is a difficult place to be, philosophically and conceptually. We cling to oversimplification because it helps us make sense of a messy world. But this is why so many wise friends are urging us to sit with the discomfort, and accept/expect non-closure.
Suppose you take Harvard’s Implicit Bias Test on race, and it tells you that you have no automatic preference for white people over black people. Does that mean you’re racism-free? Are you done fighting racism within yourself? If you check your blind spot at the start of your drive, does that mean you never need to check it again?
In her 2018 book White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explains how this false good/bad dichotomy played out in the evolution of racism after the Civil Rights Movement:
To accomplish this adaptation, racism first needed to be reduced to simple, isolated, and extreme acts of prejudice. […] Racists were those white people in the South, smiling and picnicking at the base of lynching trees; store owners posting Whites Only signs over drinking fountains; and good ol’ boys beating innocent children such as Emmett Till to death. In other words, racists were mean, ignorant, old, uneducated, Southern whites. Nice people, well-intended people, open-minded middle-class people, people raised in the “enlightened North”, could not be racist. (71–72)
This is an especially pernicious aspect of the White Ego: It paints racism into simplistic binaries, so as to reinforce our belief that we’re Good People. This might be part of why we’re seeing such a public display of white solidarity in 2020; we can look at the violence of Derek Chauvin and think: “Now there is a racist person. Thank heaven I’m nothing like him.”
The problem is that we have more in common with him than we’d like to admit.
The Limits (and Pain) of White Empathy
This video, featuring audio from the author Brené Brown, points out that empathy is different from sympathy.
Empathy is a choice, and it’s a vulnerable choice. Because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.
But as the most elementary student of privilege understands, white people can never know what it’s like to be Black. As a result, there are serious limits on the ability of white folks to empathize with Black folks. The White Ego might urge you to show empathy by telling a story about a similar experience, which might then center whiteness in yet another conversation.
White people can know what it’s like to be sad, or angry. Every human knows what it’s like to be afraid or targeted or held back. But we cannot know what it’s like to be a victim of racism. Maybe you’re a white person who got harassed by the cops one day for no good reason. But you haven’t been harassed by the cops because you’re Black. The White Ego will try to trick you into thinking that your experience as a white person is identical to a Black person’s experience, and it’s just not.
Meanwhile, every white person knows what it’s like to get angry when Black people are being loud. The educator Sharroky Hollie calls this the “first thought”, and insists that we admit it — and then keep thinking, so that our first thought is not our only thought. The White Ego keeps those first thoughts hidden deep inside, so we never accidentally reveal them, which might lead to accusations of racism. (Some white folks, on the other hand, proudly shout their first thoughts. When someone demands that they keep thinking before speaking, they cry censorship and insist they have a right to cling to those first thoughts.)
We live in a white-supremacist world, and its tendrils have woven themselves deeply into our souls. We can’t get free from that poison just by watching an Ava DuVernay movie. My White Ego doesn’t like to admit that I get angry when Black folks are being loud, in a way that’s different when I’m around loud white folks. (My White Ego will, however, brag about seeing Get Out in a theater on opening weekend, because the experience would have been very different had I been among quiet white people.) Fortunately, authors like Ralph Wiley have helped me contextualize questions of race and volume, so I can keep thinking after my unenlightened first thought appears.
If we are going to destroy white supremacy, we must be honest about where it lives inside us, and fight back. Then we have to help other white people do the same. It’s like a demon hiding in the basement; the longer you refuse to go down there with a blowtorch and a shotgun, the more damage the demon will do to your soul. Once you start confronting the demon, however, you can share the experience with other white folks and help them confront the demons in their basements.
People who do racist things — especially the relatively small, everyday racist things known as “microaggressions” — don’t wake up thinking “I’m gonna do some racism today.” But the demon leaps out of the basement and hurts a person of color, because the white person has not worked hard enough to confront and subdue it. The White Ego has convinced them that the demon never existed in the first place.
So while it’s tempting to look at someone like Derek Chauvin and think: “How could anyone do that to another human being?” (or — even worse — “I would never do such a thing”), it’s more useful to ask: “What would it take for me to reach a place where I could do the same thing?” After all, if you don’t know where the path lies between you and racist actions, how do you know you’re not on it right now?
This kind of empathy is painful and vicious, but we have to dig into it, because it helps us break through oversimplification and all the binary good/evil nonsense.
The Demon is Scary: White Cowardice
The whole point of DiAngelo’s book is that we white folks need to toughen up, in order to confront the demon and attack white supremacy. If you’re fixated on your own feelings and fear and fragility, you won’t be ready for the coming conflicts. The more we are controlled by the White Ego, the less willing we’ll be to do the work.
Case in point: Are you an ally? A co-conspirator? A collaborator? A good person? A savior? An American? A global citizen? A human being? What do you call yourself? What do you want other people to call you?
Why does it matter?
I understand that enlightened language can lead to enlightened thinking. Some people prefer to think of themselves as co-conspirators, because it demonstrates a willingness to sacrifice something in the struggle against white supremacy. And that’s fine.
But 90% of our fretting about labels is the White Ego at work. It’s prioritizing appearance over reality. When I saw the headline for Catherine Pugh’s piece There Is No Such Thing as a ‘White Ally’, I thought: “Oh great. Another phrase I can’t use.” But once I kept thinking (thank you Dr. Hollie), I realized that was my White Ego, trying to make me comfortable. Had I obeyed it, I would have missed an opportunity to expand my knowledge.
In an 1898 piece for The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, W. E. B. DuBois wrote: “There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.” Unfortunately, many white people choose not to know about racism and white supremacy. Black folks have been documenting the problem of police brutality since the beginning of time. Black poets and journalists and novelists have been telling the world for centuries about what white supremacy does to the soul. And white folks are, in general, too cowardly to embrace this knowledge.
Of course you shouldn’t feel bad if you chose to ignore this stuff in the past. Okay, don’t only feel bad. But now that you’re less ignorant than you were yesterday, summon up the blood and make sure you never choose the path of willful ignorance ever again.
The Violence of Normal
The White Ego wants the protests to stop. It wants the world to go “back to normal”. But as I noted several weeks ago, normal is not okay.
Things were not peaceful before these riots began. Things were peaceful in my neighborhood, but things were not peaceful in Compton, East St. Louis, the west side of Chicago, or southeast DC. Those places — and hundreds of places like them, including parts of my own adopted hometown — have been suffering from slow-motion violence for generations. Too many comfortable white folks like myself have been content to ignore that violence in the name of our own normality.
As Cornel West said in 2017: “Indigenous peoples been dealing with catastrophe since 1492. […] It’s only when catastrophe comes to your house, in your neighborhood, that all of a sudden objectivity is pushed aside.”
The Violence of Normal is fed by the White Ego, because it’s so easy to think of our reality as the One True Reality™, or at least the one that matters. It’s easy for us to say things like “Oh, it can’t be that bad” or “They’re probably being too sensitive”. We learn about one Jussie Smollett and decide that (A) most hate crime allegations are similarly fraudulent; and (B) the Chicago Police Department can be trusted.
The White Ego clings to statues of white people. We love seeing ourselves on a pedestal — literally. We know that, yeah, Andrew Jackson did some bad stuff, but he was a man of the people. The White Ego gives us a lens through which to see a flag, be it Union or CSA, and refuses to accept that it doesn’t mean the same things to every other person.
When protesters started breaking windows in my city, I got scared. “What if someone breaks a window in my home?” Obviously I don’t want to get hurt by broken glass (or the brick that comes through it), and I don’t believe I’m a legitimate target for such an expression of rage — but then a revolution is not a dinner party, so those concepts are academic in any case. Unnecessary property destruction is bad.
But then I started to wonder: What if it is necessary? Suppose a brick through my window is needed, somehow, to destroy white supremacy. Isn’t it worth it? The White Ego says that we white folks shouldn’t have to sacrifice anything (and certainly nothing that belongs to us personally) to make the world a better place.
But we do. Many white folks are outraged by taxes, for example, without realizing how those tax dollars fund programs that benefit the community. So maybe you could subdue your White Ego a little bit, pay more taxes, and skip a few luxury goods next year. (Toni Morrison once told a story about riding in a taxi: “My driver was fussing about his taxes. I said: ‘So what? You pay taxes, so what?’”) Taxes are the admission price for a decent society.
Forward Future: How to Fight Back
Story #3 of 3: The other day I posted a few sentences on Facebook about the ideas in this piece. As with everything I post on every social media, I checked it 50 times each hour to see how many likes and favorites and shares and retweets and hearts and thumbs-ups and egoboo I had earned with my brilliant words.
But as Hannibal Buress once said, I’m a petty person who wants to know which people those likes came from. Before I did, however, my White Ego said: “Ooh, I hope one of your Black friends liked it! That would confirm your woke credentials!” How ridiculous is that?
We cannot kill our egos, or eliminate them. But we can subdue and shrink them. You don’t have to be ruled by your ego; you can fight back. Here, then, are a few suggestions for those trying to subdue the White Ego. As with all matters of the mind, I can only offer what works for me — or what appears to be working. (Perhaps I’ll realize later that something here was misguided. So it goes.) Your mileage may vary.
- Be honest with yourself. The worst thing you can do with your ego is pretend like it’s not a problem. (You know hat voice in your head telling you that you don’t have an ego problem? That’s your ego.) Consider all the foolish, idiotic, hurtful, and maybe even violent things you’ve done at the behest of the White Ego. Learn from these mistakes and think about what kind of thinking led you down the wrong path. Recognize your patterns of thought so you can think in a more enlightened way next time. (Former white supremacists like Christian Picciolini and Derek Black give us some radical blueprints here.)
- Don’t be a coward. Learn and read and grow and listen and evolve and reflect and feed your head. As dead prez said: “Keep on learnin’ and soakin’ up game / We gon’ make mistakes / We gon’ go through some things / Keep on growin’ / Keep on soakin’ up game / If somethin’ ain’t workin’, don’t be afraid to change.” Don’t hide from painful truths, and don’t allow yourself to live inside a comfortable white bubble. As the French writer Colette is rumored to have said: “Look at that which pleases you for a long time, and that which displeases you for a longer time.”
- Be angry for a long time. Never become comfortable with The Violence of Normal, but don’t burn out either. Make anti-racist activism a part of your life. The more deeply committed you are to the movement for justice, the less noise your White Ego will make. (You might develop an Activist Ego, but that’s a conversation for another time.)
- Laugh at yourself (before other people do). The White Ego — like every ego — has no sense of humor about itself. Therefore you should ridicule it relentlessly. When you do something from a place of White Ego, recognize it and roll your eyes and make a joke to yourself, at your own expense. This will allow you to break the tension with humor, and it will attack the source of your problem.
- Be gentle with yourself. The last thing I want to do is coddle white folks, but every human deserves love and respect. You’re no use to anyone if you’re depressed or filled with anxiety or flooded with guilt or strung out or overworked or chasing a million thoughts all the time. Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” Take some time to breathe.
Do it now. Close your eyes and take three deep breaths.
