For Joe: More on Racial Identity and White Privilege

The discussion of Joe's essay over at OSP has been, well, interesting to say the least. My biggest concern throughout has been, to Joe's great dismay, not the neat Philosophy 101 arguments he prides himself in crafting. To paraphrase:

The Posse Comitatus believes in Racial Identity.
The Posse Comitatuts is a racist organization.
Earl/ Prometheus 6 has a strong black identity.
Therefore, Earl is a racist, too.

It's a nice little piece of inductive reasoning, but so simplifies the complex fabric that is racial identity that in the process of pissing of Earl, Joe has given me what I live for: a Teachable Moment.

Yes, for those of you who don't know or haven't been paying attention, I teach high school. I teach in Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest urban center, and the city with the only significant minority population. My school is very much majority-minority; my classes feature few if any white faces--even the upper-level, college-bound senior classes.

I, on the other hand, am white. I'm like the whitest guy I know. I'm so white, I've been known to bid on folk-music concert tickets during the public TV fundraising auction. You just can't get any whiter than that.

I was raised and educated, however, in an integrated suburban school district outside of Cincinnati. I was in those upper-level, college-bound classes at my own high school, with a handful of black and Asian students along with us white kids. However, (cliche alert!!!) my best friend was black. I was on the forensics team and chess team with kids who were not white. Even the theatre group had non-white students.

Hold up, you might be thinking by now. This is about you and Joe, you want to say. What's up with the autobiography?

Good question, even if you weren't thinking it: What's up with the autobiography is that to have any discussion of race or identity, you've got to be clear about where you come from, what your biases are. If everything's not on the table, the discussion will be dishonest, hollow. You need to know where I've been to know why this is such an important conversation to be having with Joe.

See, in high school, I was oblivious to the true nature of my identity, and of the identity the black and Asian students I knew had constructed for themselves. Well, maybe I shouldn't say the nature of my identity; perhaps origin is a better word for it. At some point in the comments section to Joe's original essay, I cited Socrates' notion that the unexamined life is not worth living. I don't know about you, but I, for one, had never even considered examining my life by the time I was 18.

College brought the first inklings that perhaps my life needed examining. A seminal moment came my first year when, spurred by an alarming amount sexual assault and the college's reticence to deal with it, women on campus organized a speak-out. (amarettiXL, in the comments to Joe's essay, provides a solitary example of that kind of thing.) The whole campus, virtually, turned out to listen as a group of women read other women's stories of having been sexually assaulted on campus. The microphones opened, then, and other women could tell their own stories, including my friends. It was one of the single most powerful events I've ever witnessed: In terms of how much it created upheaval in my own psyche, I'd rate it up there with watching CNN on the morning of 9/11. (Note: I am not trying to deny or denigrate the power of 9/11 for anyone--this is just my own personal history here.)

There is no way to put in words the feeling of having your worldview rocked so completely as mine was that night. All of the questions I had never asked--had never thought to ask--about being male were suddenly staring me in the face, demanding answers. For the first time I realized that I was, in fact, accountable for trying to answer those questions.

I was left horribly, horribly uncomfortable, and horribly, horribly numb. That's a good thing. Change is not--should not be--comfortable. Ever.

My college, despite a strong feminist/ activist faction, was sorely lacking in racial diversity. The city the school was located in diverse, though not majority-minority, like Milwaukee. The campus I was on, though, was overwhelmingly white, even moreso among the faculty. So I never really had to deal with questions of race as much as I did questions of gender while there.

But I have found myself, in my professional life since college, constantly confronted by race. It is not uncommon for me to find myself the only white person in a room. While the banality of such situations--now, at least--does not bring on the shock of upset that I felt the night of the speak-out, I have had to continually re-assess my own sense of self, how I react to those around me, and my overall understanding of how identity--particularly white identity--is constructed.

So I read things. I take classes. I listen. I try to learn. As I said to Joe in that long comments thread, I am not the same person I was at ten, and I am not the same person I will be at fifty, and it's not just because my age will change.

A few summers back I had the opportunity to participate in the PEOPLE program at the UW-Madison. It's a summer enrichment program for college-bound kids geared specifically at minority students from urban centers like Milwaukee, Racine, and Beloit. Teachers from those school districts are teamed up with UW education students, and they teach writing and science seminars to kids from those districts.

The teachers also got the chance to take a three-credit graduate seminar for free. Plus we got paid. It was a sweet deal all around, really. But that's not the point.

The point is that the seminar instructor, Mary Curran (now at Rutgers), a grad student wrapping up her PhD at UW, took her job seriously, and the title of the class, too. It was "Teaching Writing to the Urban Adolescent," or something close to that. And so the group of us teachers, mostly white, mostly young, had quite a remarkable conversion experience.

It was then (and now we finally get to the relevant stuff!) that I first really, really, really examined what it means to be white in America, to consider withe privilege. Some of what I read then I think bears repeating:

Notice that I have been able to say all of the above [a short description of her life to this point] without mentioning race, whether as a defining feature, as impediment, or as benefit. And that, in fact, is part of the trick of whiteness, in this historical moment and in those parts of the world wherein I have been white. [. . . R]ace pivilege is the (non)experience of not being slapped in the face. [. . . F]or us, whiteness is "a privilege enjoyed but not acknowledged, a reality lived in but unknown.

That's from Ruth Frankenberg's opening essay, "When We are Capable of Stopping, We Begin to See," in the book Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity (you can actually see the first couple of pages of Frankenberg's essay scanned if you click "search inside.") Frankenberg is probably best known for White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (which you can also look inside). The titles can probably give you a sense of where she's coming from.

One of the things that drove me nuts about Joe's responses to what I and others were telling him is that he kept denying whiteness as a social construction and saying that "white privilege" remained unproven. In comments to my "Identity Politics" post, below, he said to me

[Y]our use of "white privilege" is unsubstantiated and makes several fallacies at the same time--ad hominem (you take my race into account when you evaluate the argument, which is racist and illogical), and ad nauseam (you say the same buzzword several times as if it'll make it true).

Hiding behind ad hominem has been one of Joe's favorite tactics in this debate. Yes, taking his race into account may well be, technically, ad hominem, but in a debate about race, and about identity, the race and the identity of the debaters is certainly fair game. For example, I cite, in that "Identity Politics" post, repeated in comments at OSP, James Baldwin's words about coming to grips with a cruel paradox of race in this country.

These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use--I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine--I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I would have no place in any scheme.[emphasis mine]

Joe asked me, "Baldwin is an authority . . . why?" Simple: When it comes to matters of black identity, I trust a black man (or woman) to address them far better than I can.

Frankenberg, as a white woman, has a claim on addressing white identity. Note: This is not the Posse Comitatus's "white (or Christian) identity." This is how Frankenberg came to become herself, as seen through the lens of race. And in her passage above, she, well, substantiates the idea of white privilege.

Frankenberg's not the only one to do so, though. Peggy McIntosh's classic 1988 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" opens with one of my favorite lines about race, ever: "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." I think Joe suffers from the same problem.

Now, this is not a problem that is necessarily bad to have: Joe first called Earl at Prometheus6 a racist because Joe sees these individual acts of meanness:

Earl Dunovant is black. He's not black like some people I know, who simply have a black skin; Earl is a self-professed "black partisan" who has a strong black identity. [. . .] The concept of a black identity is as racist as this of a white identity. [from his original post] Define "white identity." Then, define "black identity" in the same terms. Then, show that there's a qualitative difference between them. The fact that the KKK kills more doesn't excuse Nation of Islam and Malcolm "non-violence is criminal" X. [. . .] The fact that you're oppressed doesn't excuse groupthink and racism, and yes, defining oneself according to race is racism. [from the comments]

Joe wouldn't be a good liberal if he didn't stand up against what he saw as a wrong. And, in fact, I trust that Joe is the kind of guy who disapproves of the vaguely racist water-cooler joke, or the overtly racist David Duke types. These are good things.

But he does not see race in terms of the invisible systems McIntosh sees. While accepting that institutional racism yet exists, Joe exhorts Earl (and, presumably, other "black partisans") to get of whatever high horses they're on:

If you're oppressed, end the oppression and move on, but for fuck's sake, don't consider yourself different than whoever oppresses you because you have a different skin color. And even if you are different, due to, say, sexual orientation, or social class, then don't think for a moment that being a minority or just plain oppressed makes you somehow better. When your oppressor does that to you, you rightly accuse him of bigotry; and yet you applaud such behavior when you do it.

Aside from thinking that black partisanship or black pride means thinking you're as good as, rather than better than, anyone else (except maybe the bigots), there's a flaw there, which is that Joe does not ask the obvious question, the way Mcintosh does: "Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. [. . . O]ne who writes about having white privilege must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?" And in a paragraph that, eerily, almost word-for-word rebut's Joe's assertions, she adds that

Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

In other words, addressing and redressing racism is not the responsibility of the victim, but the burden of the privileged. And it is in this way that Joe's whiteness is absolutely relevant to the debate. (PS--go read all of McIntosh's essay. There is a reason it is a classic.)

Joe is like the poor student from this Robert Jensen piece:

Here's what white privilege sounds like: I'm sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege--unearned white privilege--how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I asked. He paused for a moment and said, "That really doesn't matter." That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: The privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to ignore what it means. [emphasis mine]

Jensen goes on to note something Joe should pay attention to: "In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves." Or, back to McIntosh: "I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks." Even Frankenberg says "We are frequently complicit with racism even when we are absolutely confident that we are not."Ampersand (who is white), the source of the initial quote that set Joe off, chimes in with similar feelings in the comments to Joe's original essay.

Joe can't even take the first step, though, and admit that he's white: "Ask me what race I am," he says, "and I'll tell you that unfortunately, I'm human."

Perhaps part of the reason Joe saw my use of "white privilege" as an ad nauseum fallacy is because he didn't seem to see any of this. (I should give full credit to Tomato Observer for being first on the scene with that argument, though.) Joe's reluctance to see is not unexpected. Apart from the fact that obliviousness is an advantage to white privilege, Joe probably, like many good, liberal whites, likes to think of himself as race-neutral, or colorblind. Frankenberg addresses that: "Another component of my whiteness is, in fact, my seeming neutrality, my seeming unmarkedness." McIntosh add, "whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow 'them' to be more like 'us.'" But we are not neutral, we are not unmarked. We only seem that way in comparison to the Other.

Back to Frankenberg:

What is whiteness? It is, in part, I would success, a mere mirroring of a mirroring, a "not" of a "not." Whiteness comes to self-name, invents itself, by means of its declaration that it is not that which is projects as Other. And there is a level at which whieness has its own inbuilt complacency, a self-naming that functions simply through a triumphant "I am not that."

Defining yourself as "not that" is not necessarily racist. Joe would have us believe so. The difference is whether or not you know you're doing it. Baldwin knows; in fact, I would hazard a guess that most people of color, women, and gays and lesbians know.

The whole point of black identity, for example, is that you begin to define yourself in your own terms, rather than as the Other.

Dar Williams has this great line--they're all great lines!--I'm reminded of here: "I will go outside to join the others/ I am the others/ And that's not easy/ I don't know what you saw/ I want somebody who sees me." And that's part of overcoming white privilege: See the Other not as the Other, but as another, separate, individual self. "Racialization is relational," Frankenberg says. And no, this does not make Joe's point. Joe would have us believe that Earl's, or Baldwin's, attempts to come to terms with being a member of the subordinate class by finding things within that group to celebrate, they are being racist--engaging in that racialization.

I need to sidetrack here: One of the other disturbing tactics taken by Joe, in the comments to his original post, at least, is a denial of the importance of history in these discussions of race. Yes, Joe Taylor may be the only liberal who thinks that history has no place in a discussion of racial identity in this country. Literally. He said, in the comments, "The issue is not so much historical as it is philosophical; the issue, let me remind you, is racial identity, which can be brought down without any historical debate."

Frankenberg begins her essay by citing Audre Lorde's oft-repeated saw about bringing down the master's house. I thin that we cannot, absolutely cannot go any further without recognizing, once and for all, that in this country there has been, and continues to be, both literal and metaphorical masters' houses. She goes on:

Racial positioning and self-naming are contextual and thus their transformation must always entail collective processes, ones that take place, so to speak, within history, rather than as individual journeys.

Let me paraphrase it: If you are at all going to come to terms with who you are, you must have some sense of where you're from.

I figured out one reason why, I think, Joe might be confused about the place of history in these discussions; he wrote, "I don't consider anything as 'my heritage' unless I wrote it. [. . .] So you're proud of things you had no involvement with? Unbelievable. Or, rather, it is believable, regrettably, because you are in the majority in this country, considering that people are somehow proud of being born in the USA, again something they weren't involved with."

I think Joe is confusing "heritage" with "legacy," for starters. But beyond that, Joe is missing what he really needs to have if he plans to be a writer, and that's a recognition that every writer must place him or herself in a tradition, either to buck it or to embrace it. I won't go all Santayana on him, but Joe had better come to grips with history, especially as it relates to his whiteness, and the privilege it entails.

With a previous post about this, all my comments to Joe's essay, and this massive missive, I have written well over five thousand words from Joe's lone few-hundred word post. It is something I take seriously, and, I suppose, in the end, that's one of the things that frustrated me most about Joe's responses. He treated all of us who wanted to talk not in cold, logical terms with utter disregard and contempt. Anyone who said anything about anything that did not "logically" contradict his assertion that racial identity, black pride, or the like, was attacking him or making non-sequitur arguments. And yet, racial identity--identity, period--is not cold and logical. It is fluid, it is explosive, it is the essence of what it means to be human. Joe's callous disregard for these facts led to a real sense that this was not argument, not a give and take, but merely beating our heads against a wall.

I hope that somewhere, buried in this, is something that will crack the wall just a little.