We Whites doing racial justice work need to understand our own cultural identities. That's not as simple as we may think.
The group is always of
mixed race and ethnicity. The times I’ve done this exercise the two largest
participant groups tend to be Black people and White people, followed by
Latina/o people, Asian people, and South Asian people. Participants are asked
to decide for the purposes of the exercise which racial or ethnic group they
identify with. The question is: “What do you like about being a member of your
group.” The facilitators pick a group and ask individual members of that group
to respond. They always start with the group of people who identify as White. Whites almost universally report that
the things they like about being White are things like access to resources,
safety and security, not being automatically criminalized by law enforcement
officials, and having their values reflected in the media and often in the
broader culture.
Then the facilitators ask
the next group to tell us what they like about being a member of their group.
The answers from this group and all the other groups are dramatically different.
People talk about specific values: family, community, and spirituality. They
talk about art, style, and expression. They talk about cuisine. They talk about,
their skins, their hair, their bodies and their beauty. They talk about their
strength and resilience in the face of oppression.
The facilitators then ask
how the responses differ among the groups and it’s usually obvious to most
participants: the White people think about the benefits of privilege when they
think about being White. The
members of other groups describe the lived cultural experience of being members
of their groups.
I, like many other Whites
who have done this exercise, was taken aback the first time I did it. My thought was that I was missing out
on something important and valuable, a source of strength and pleasure, by not
seeing myself as a cultural being and understanding what it meant to me to be a
member of my racial group. I spoke to one of the facilitators of the group, a
woman whom I knew, who had played the role of mentor in many ways for me in my
quest to end racism. She told me that the next step of my journey was to
reconnect with the Italian culture that I had lost when my family came to the
US. The process of becoming White
had stripped my Italian-ness, my cultural birthright, from me and reclaiming it
would be a source of strength. I listened. I thought.
I had been studying
multiculturalism for a few years and had joined some activist groups to try to
develop my awareness. Often when we start a gathering that is focused on racial
justice activism, if the group is small enough, we take a moment to introduce ourselves.
We go around the circle and say a few words about who we are, why we’re there,
and what’s important to us. For me, especially early on in my racial awareness
development journey, I used this time to list a brief resume of my actions and
beliefs in support of racial justice as a way to prove my credibility, to show
the other members that I have the right to sit in a group that hopes to do
something about inequity. I can also admit to no small measure of
competitiveness in these moments, flexing my “cred” muscles and hoping that no
one else has more than I do. After all I AM a straight White male, taught
competition from the outset. And while I can’t read minds, I usually get the
sense that I’m not the only one who’s in that mode, whether we’re aware of it
or not. I know for me, this habit comes from a combination of insecurity,
guilt, and the desire to protect myself from challenges to my sense of myself as
highly developed. What can I say? I’m a work in progress.
One thing I do always say
during intro time is, “I’m White. I’m not trying to be something other than
that.” I have seen too many White people co-opt things from other people’s
cultures while trying to do racial work and I don’t want to myself. When I
enter the cultural space of another group I do so as an observer and
participate at the level of an outsider. I try to be aware of what is
considered polite within the cultural spaces of others but when, for example,
I’m in Japan, even though I may have an impulse to, I don’t strive to act like
a perfect Japanese person should. I understand I cannot. When I go to an Indian
cultural event like a powwow or other gathering, I don’t want to “become a member
of the tribe” like some kind of 21st century Man Called Horse. When
I’m in a group of Black people I don’t use slang that might be considered
“Black.” Of course, I use slang that was contributed to the English language by
Black people through the co-optation process, like the word “cool,” to mean
“stylish, good or excellent;” or the word “hang” used to mean “spend time
with.” I used words like those for years before I understood, in some small
degree at least, the immense contribution of Black people to White culture, and
in fact, the entire socioeconomic fabric of our nation and world. What I don’t
try to do is to sound “Black” or like I’m “down.” I am not “down” as much as I
wish I wanted to be. I. am. White.
I enter racial justice spaces White.
When my mentor told me
that I needed to explore my Italian heritage I had already specifically and
intentionally done so as part of my journey of becoming a multicultural person.
I had read a number of books, such as Blood of My Blood, by Richard
Gambino and Growing Up and Growing Old in Italian-American Families, by Colleen
Leahy Johnson, which gave me a great deal of insight into the Post-Italian
immigrant experience in the US but also spoke more to my parents’ generation
than my own. I had conducted research into third generation Italian Americans, my
generation, formed more impressions in that experience, and saw the
generational thread from my parents’ to my own. In my family, though we
considered ourselves White, we were aware of our Italian-ness and held ourselves
apart from mainstream White/WASP society. My parents would call people who were
more mainstream White, or not from Italian descent, “Meddigon,” an Italian
language bastardization of the word American. It was not a compliment. I had spent a good deal of my life
aware of the salience of my family’s Italian-ness to me. I had spent a good
deal of time coming to terms with the fact that I personally was post-Italian.
I was born in the United States to parents born in the United States. I speak only the simplest pidgin Italian
(though I speak French and a small amount of some other languages). I hold affection and some affinity for
people and things Italian, a bit more so for people and things that might be
called Italian-American, but most of my cultural being is expressed in White
society. My grandparents, and to some degree my parents, had to discard or hide
an Italian cultural identity to assimilate into US society and they did this to
varying degrees. I, on the other hand, had not. This is not to say that my
being post-Italian has no impact on me whatsoever. I have many shared qualities
or habits with other post-Italians. I see my Italian-ness in my communication
style. I often attribute my emotional intensity to being raised in a
post-Italian home. I speak with my hands in a very “Italian” way. I am drawn to
Italian foods and Italian films. I love
these things but I am not of these
things.
My White identity is much
more salient to the way I move through the world. Here is one important example
of the way my Whiteness expresses itself and exerts itself in the face of my
cultural post-Italian-ness: Italian culture is collective. The unit of analysis
is the family but in a very specific sense. The family is a large, extended
entity of relationships that spans far beyond the parent/children “nuclear”
family of (mainly) White USAmericans.
It approaches the notion of “clan.” There are good reasons for this.
Italy, especially southern Italy, where the vast majority of immigrants to the
US originated, was a generationally poor region that was dominated by outside
powers for centuries. The only people one could trust were ones with which one
had strong interrelatedness. The only institution that could be trusted was the
family. Italians, as all people of all cultures do, created ways to function
within their societies and in context of their cultures. If the only people you
could trust were your family, and you wanted to accomplish anything that took
more than the number of people you could give birth to, you had to create a meaning
of family that included more people. In so doing they created and engaged in a
collective cultural norm. A person who has a collective worldview uses the
collective, in this case the family, as the unit of identification. The collective’s
identity within society is a powerful force in the collectivism psyche and the
individual’s identity is constructed based on her or his perceived relationship
to the collective.
I, on the other hand, have
an individualism worldview, which is the dominant worldview of mainstream White
US culture. The individual is the unit of identification for me. It is my own
actions that are most powerful in the construction of my understanding of
myself. It is my own thoughts and actions that define me. To be clear, there
are a lot of things about individualism that can perpetuate racial inequity. Perhaps
the most important of these is that if we only see people in the context of
individualism, we might underestimate or altogether fail to see the impact that
systems have on individuals. And if the system is unjust, our blindness to it
acts as a way to perpetuate it. But individualism can also be the source of
great joy and power. The most ironic example in my own life is that my
decisions to try to become a more racially aware person stem from my
individualism, my sense of being lied to by the system, duped into believing
that meritocracy is the rule when millions did not have access to it, and my
refusal to let this soul-crushing system define me.
Beyond the pleasurable but
diluted connection I feel to my Italian roots, there is another important
aspect to my post-European immigrant identity. I share the post-immigrant
experience with a great many others. In any ethnic culture, shared history
plays an important role. I see racial culture as having a great many of the
aspects of ethnic culture; as racial groups we have shared experiences and are
pulled by shared assumptions from within and without those groups. As a White person in the US, there is a
history I share with the vast majority of other Whites. Part of that history is
the process of becoming White. The vast number of people who come from immigrant
roots in the US share the family history of becoming White, of turning away
from the forms and norms of their previous homelands and taking up the forms
and norms of Whiteness. While of course this was a loss to them, it was not a
loss that I personally experienced. And while I do not seek to eradicate
history nor ignore its importance in the present, I also, as a culturally White
person, do not derive a great deal of personal strength or meaning in my family
history. When I do, it’s with a very White understanding of my family history’s
impact on me in the present, through the framework of psychoanalysis and its
views on how generations impact each other.
I see it as a continuation
of denial of our Whiteness for us post-Europeans to use our ancestral roots as
the core of our cultural identities. Whites often say, “I’m not White, I’m
[place European ethnicity here].” We often use our European ancestors’ immigrant
hardships in the United States as examples of the American dream: the
generations who came before us struggled so hard to help us to get where we are
today. While acknowledging the past is a healthy thing, we often use our family
histories to avoid feelings of responsibility for racial inequality in the
United States. We often use this as evidence that the system is fair and that
People of Color should somehow be further along, implying cultural or
individual inferiority on their part. What we’re really doing is only
acknowledging half of history, only seeing our “Whitennable” families’
histories as representative of all family histories, even those families who
have been denied access to Whiteness. We leave thinking about White culture to White
supremacist who have rewritten history and have confused the loss of cultural
dominance with the loss of freedom.
Whites have always co-opted
other cultures. We co-opted hip-hop and rap culture. We take on modes of dress and
cuisines from countries that would be considered “Third World” countries
without acknowledging the impact of colonialism on them. We ignore
colonialism’s impact on the US economy, which benefits us Whites disproportionately
to members of other races. The notion that I can enter Italian-ness and take it
on as my cultural identity strikes me as co-opting a culture that is not mine.
It may be morally different than co-opting another culture, but I owe a great
deal of thought and consideration to Italian people and their culture if I am
going to presume to take it on and own it as my own. My grandparents left Italy. Of course it was for material
reasons. But the nation of Italy is populated with the descendants of people
who did not leave. I see it as within their rights to claim ownership of that
culture in a way that I cannot and to demand a great deal of care and
consideration if I presume to call myself Italian. That was one of the
trade-offs that came with my grandparents’ decision to come to the United
States. Being culturally Italian is not my birthright. After all, a culture is
more than the art, history, cuisine, and other quantifiable artifacts of a
people. Lived culture is a mindset. It is a worldview. It’s how we think how we
love, how we work. It is in the air we breathe. Human beings don’t just select
a worldview and subscribe to it. It’s something that we’re socialized to. It’s
how we navigate the world. Most of us Whites haven’t even considered the
realities of what our worldview is. We might be able to choose a worldview and
make it our own but even if we can, the only way to do that is to deeply
understand the worldview that we already have. And judging from the “What We
Like About Being a Member of Our Group” exercise, while some of us Whites might
understand the workings of privilege in our lives, fewer of us understand the
culture that is the context from which our worldviews stem.
The belief that I must
return to the pre-immigration ethnic identity of my forbearers has ending
racism as its goal. I see this as having an ironic and unintended consequence.
Without deeply understanding our cultural identity as Whites we cannot truly
understand ourselves as cultural beings. Even if our goal is to change our
cultural identity and worldview, we have to know what our starting point is, if
only to make a beginning. We have to know our cultural beliefs explicitly and
consciously, for if they remain unconscious they will always subtly (at least
to us if not to others) dominate our actions.
None of this is to say
that others who have a different relationship than I do to their ancestral
history are not having a valid experience nor have no right to that connection.
I will venture to say, however, that anyone who has not explored the underlying
dynamic of her or his cultural identity might very well benefit from doing so.
Many Whites have no
conception of the relationship that the construction of Whiteness has with
racism. Often when we learn Whiteness’s role in oppression we seek to end Whiteness.
But we cannot end our own Whiteness. There are many historical threads that are
woven into the tapestry of White culture, but one of the most salient is this
one: White culture has its roots in history, in the process begun by the
English invaders and eventual dominators of North America trying to do two
things: 1) separate themselves, many of them bonded servants, from the African
bonded servants who had been brought here against their will, and 2) create a
cultural identity for themselves in relationship to England, their place of
origin. As time went on, 1) what
started as the short-term bonded servitude of post-Africans became codified into
life-long bonded servitude, one of the few bodies of racial laws ever to exist
in the world, and systemic oppression, and 2) cultural behavioral norms and
shared assumptions among Whites unrelated to their relationship to post
Africans came into being. New immigrant groups found themselves in a land where
they had to assimilate into an existing post-English context to be successful,
a context that post-African slaves had no hope of entering. Those slaves’
descendents and the people that are members of that racial group still live
within a system that is on many levels the continuation of that situation. Whiteness
both negated and absorbed aspects of large immigrant groups in a process that
continues. While both slavery and the assimilation process are acts of physical,
moral, economic and cultural violence, that violence is not the only thing that
happened.
A culture also came into
being, one that is not only that
violence. We wouldn’t be able to live in the US at all if that were so. I know
many People of Color who have a cleared-eyed view of the United States’
inequity but still love it as a nation and seek its continued success. The
great thinker and constant critic of the United States James Baldwin said, “I
love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this
reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” We don’t love
things that should be discarded. White culture has contributed vastly to the
United States. Denying either its positive aspects or, more importantly, its
existence, will only perpetuate its worst aspects by keeping us Whites unaware
of the cultural assumptions we make, making us people steeped in privilege and
draped in the garb and ritual of others. After all, isn’t the belief that you
can reinvent yourself at will a particularly White one?
