Pre-racial

How can we be "post-racial" if we've never seen ourselves as racial beings?

I began this post wanting to write about the term Post-racial. It’s bandied about in the media and I’ve never been comfortable with it. But that’s no surprise: I’m usually uncomfortable with just about anything I see-read-or-hear in commercial media when it comes to race. So much of the US hasn’t ever taken a focused look at what race IS let alone the impact of race on daily life in the US. Most of us White folks don’t even realize that WE are racial beings (in as much as anyone is a racial being – race being a social construct- or as I like to call it, the most meaningful and important nonexistent thing in the US). When we Whites talk about race, we almost without fail talk about other people and not ourselves. With so little thought given to ourselves as racial beings, it’s no wonder we’re a bit simple in our outlook on race.

A web search of the term post-racial brought varied responses. Much of them had to do with Obama’s election and the notion that he transcends race as a politician (we White folks never seem to have to transcend race). Some talked about how his election ushered in a new post-racial era in which race is no longer (or at least less) relevant in the US. One self identified traditionally valued conservative web site near the top of the response list talked about the fallacy of post racialism and how Whites will continue to be blamed for Black peoples’ failings (such as the achievement gap) in the Obama era. I think that anyone who has read any of this blog will know what deluded, barely concealed bigotry against Black folks I consider that to be.

The fact is that I still find it easy to get fired up in exactly the way that the US commercial media wants me to get fired up when it uses such terms that lack any nuance. It’s easy for me to confuse the revenue-driven chatter of the airwaves (which the US government gave away for free a generation before I was born) with actual interaction and discussion on the matter, including the questions of how race is lived in the US today.

So this post is in a way a refutation of the term Post-racial. But is also hopefully a refutation of the process by which I collude with commercial media to short-circuit the important discussions of our day. That doesn’t mean that I will ignore the notion of post-raciallity. What happens in the media affects us all in different ways and post-raciallity is an idea that millions have taken into their consciousnesses. But I will acknowledge that without some kind of mutual interpersonal interaction with others, and without action on my part, my blogging is only one tiny photon bouncing between two vast mirrors: the commercial media and the US people.

When I think about race in the US, I don’t think immediately about People of Color. I think about White people. I do this because that’s where my experience has led me. As a White man, when I first began the process of my own awakening to multicultural values I started by focusing on everyone but myself. I wanted to reach out and help people of other races, ethnicities, genders, disparate abilities, etc… to be more successful, to have a better chance at their share of the American Dream.

As time passed I began to see and believe that much of the struggle of race in the US is one that must take place in the hearts and minds of White people. It is we who don’t see ourselves as racial beings. It is we who don’t understand the impact of race in the US. It is we who live in a system that reflects the values that we are socialized to have and in its complex way grants us greater access to resources because of our physical phenotype and so much of the identity that comes with it. And so few of us Whites spend much if any time thinking about Whiteness. I’ve found only two general groups that do, luckily only one with which I’ve come into actual contact.

The first group is White Supremacists. This is the group with which I haven’t had real contact. From what I’ve seen and read, they have created various mythologies of Whiteness designed to highlight their belief in the superiority of the White race as they understand it, mythology that underpins their assertion that White people should possess the power in society. They hold European, especially northern European, forms to somehow be the optimal forms of humanity, but from what I’ve seen, they take the forms they like and leave the rest. They often will say that they are under siege and only fighting for the existence of their race, but those arguments seem to me to be arguments for racial dominance, not racial survival they never question the meaning of the word race or its vagueness as a construct. They never discuss the fact that what they call the superiority of the White race is nothing more than their own preference for the things that are familiar to them. They never question their own authority to deem one thing inherently superior to another. They want to continue the dominance of White people and any threat to that dominance feels like a threat to survival. This is not my notion but comes straight from Paulo Friere and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed – the oppressor feels oppressed when he loses his ability to oppress others. I won’t spend any more time talking about this brand of White Supremacy because the majority of Whites in the US are repulsed by its blatant racism and violence. The fact that most people equate the word racism with this kind of behavior is the reason why I don’t use the word racism even to describe what many would call modern, aversive, or unconscious racism. This is a notion that was made very clear to me by a Black woman who works in, among other areas, the field of diversity. The term racism shuts too much of the conversation down. These days I lean towards the term racial partiality.

The other group of Whites who are doing a lot of thinking about Whiteness is the White antiracist movement (WAM), folks with whom I’ve spent a good deal of time. As a group they have done a great deal of powerful thinking about Whiteness as a system of oppression in the United States. I’ve learned a lot from my time spent in Undoing Racism workshops with The Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond and reading various White antiracist authors. But the thinking about Whiteness I’ve found in the movement stops short of thinking through the cultural realities of Whiteness. They define Whiteness only in terms of the role it plays in oppression. Whiteness has no actual cultural content in this viewpoint.

This is an ironic continuation of the classic notion in the White US that “we don’t have a culture, we’re just White.” In discussions with people in the WAM, when I talk about my cultural identity, I’m often told that I need to seek out my Italian heritage and reclaim it because it was taken away from me in the bleaching process that turned my grandparents White in the early 20^th century. To them, the fact that Italian identity was never something that was truly available to me and as such was never taken from me is only proof of my denial of who I am: The fact that I feel no desire to find a deeper affinity with that heritage is proof that I’m still a prisoner of Whiteness. What is lost on them is that I’m actually defending my identity as a culturally White person. They don’t see any irony in the fact that they are responding to the history of Whiteness’s obliterating others’ identities by attempting to obliterate White identity. Some will simply defend the obliteration of Whiteness as the only way to end racism and see me as clinging to my White identity in an attempt to avoid my own development and perpetuate racism. I return to Friere here and his notion that the oppressed can perpetuate the oppressor mind when they strive to become oppressors themselves. Turning Whiteness on its head and making it, instead of the be all and end all, an empty structure that does only ill, is trading White Supremacy for White Abasement. Not only is that a tough sell to a lot of White folks, but it perpetuates the cycle of oppression.

Without a frank look at the lived experience of Whiteness we Whites will remain Pre-racial: we will be people who have not yet begun to experience and express ourselves as racial beings and to understand the lived experience of others.

Stay tuned to M2F for some thoughts on the middle way to a White identity that respects the White cultural experience and relinquishes racial dominance.

My Maine Man?

A recent New York Times article began:

Gov. Paul LePage of Maine directed a graphic insult at the state’s N.A.A.C.P. leaders on Friday after they questioned his decision to pass on attending Martin Luther King Birthday events in Bangor and Portland.

The article is very brief and worth skimming before you read on here (by clicking the hyperlink above).

I won’t dwell on the fact that the NAACP only said that it seemed that the Governor wasn’t concerned with their interests. It’s not a huge leap in logic for LePage to infer some kind of racial meaning to this statement since the NAACP exists to advocate for People of Color. But, from what I am given to understand in the article, it is, ironically, the Governor who “plays the race card” by bringing his Black son into the argument.

We can infer from the fact that the Governor has taken a Person of Color into his home and heart that he knows that racial differences are superficial, that the color of one’s skin is no indication whatsoever of the potential that a person has at birth. But is also seems clear, from the Governor’s response to the NAACP, that his understanding of the lived experience of race in the United States is superficial.

Governor Mr. LePage is doing what a lot of White people do. He is living in the belief that because he loves one Black person, or a small number of Black people, that his understanding of what it means to be Black in the United States is complete. Let me say this unequivocally: having a close relationship with a Black person, or a few Black people, does not mean you have rid yourself of your responsibility to work for racial equity as a White person. It certainly doesn’t mean that you do not continue to benefit from the system of inequity that favors White people. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t have any unconscious prejudices towards Black people in general (though in this instance, I will not explore another person’s unconscious after reading one brief article about him in the newspaper). Think about the number of incredibly sexist men who have wives and daughters, wives and daughters, I’ll add, whom they love and who love them. These relationships do not stop these men from pursuing sexist goals at work and leisure. We White men often have people who are members of other identity groups in our lives for whom we genuinely care, who genuinely care for us, but who constantly have to make allowances for our ignorance and insecurity, even though it is they who pay the very price for our shortcomings. The generosity of some of the people in our lives is truly staggering if we think about it.

The concerns of Black people and other People of Color in the United States have to do with the many inequities to which they are subjected. Maine’s NAACP and Black community are actually losing out because the Governor has a Black son. Because he loves his son he seems to feel that he can ignore the concerns of the Black community. He seems to think that not only has his own personal racial awareness development progressed enough, but that is own development is sufficient: that if he can somehow prove that he is not motivated by basic bigotry then he can be excused from taking direct action to address racial inequity in Maine in his role as its Governor. The fact that he may have inherited a state that perpetuates institutional inequity doesn’t seem to concern him and that leads me to fear that his understanding of the impact of race in how life is lived in the US is limited. And since the Governor has brought his son onto the fray, I’ll ask: “What can you do, as Governor of Maine right now, that can make the system more fair for your son and his own children in the future?”

One last non-racial point that just sticks in my craw: the spokesman for the Governor made a statement along the lines of “the Governor has always been combative and his response in this situation is what people have come to expect.” To me, this sounds a lot like, “The Governor has always been a jerk so it’s ok for him to be a jerk now.” Wrong answer.

Update 1.17.10: LePage ultimately changed his mind and the tenor of his speech and did attend an MLK Day event. Keep up the self-reflection, Gov, and listen, listen, listen to your constituents of color!

Mutually Inclusive

This post is the fourth and final in a series on Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and organizational equity.

Shared Vision and Team Learning are the final two of the five disciplines that Peter Senge espouses to be the facilitators of The Learning Organization.

Shared Vision is logical to follow the previous discipline of Shared Mental Models since the both disciplines involve shared meaning making. Shared Vision is, in a way, a Shared Mental Model of what we are trying to create. Our vision will flow from our mental models. Yet, as with any attempt to move a group of people from one way of doing things to another, it is key that the group has an explicit goal or destination in mind. Senge states that people who share a vision are “bound together by an aspiration.”

To quote Senge further: “At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, ‘What do we want to create?’” An explicit Shared Vision is essential when we gather together to create racial equity. People have such disparate ideas about what race really is, how it impacts our lives, and what should be done about it that without a Shared Vision, we could spend a lot of time and energy working at cross purposes. We could also have members of our group who have visions for our future that are based in assumptions that do not include the perspectives of non-dominant groups and unwittingly perpetuate the dominant discourse. It’s very important that we Whites internalize other groups’ perspectives to avoid this, and work in active and honest communication with them to be sure we’re inclusive. (I guess what I’m saying here is that to be inclusive we had better be inclusive. An inclusive future starts with an inclusive present!) In fact, it is often advisable to have non-Whites leading the drive to create more equity in organizations, but we must be sure to guard against two habits that White led organizations often have: 1) to “outsource” diversity to members of non-dominant groups in such way that Whites are not responsible or accountable for building equity, and 2) having members of non-dominant groups lead in the diversity drives but nowhere else in the organization.

The final of the five disciplines is Team Learning. Team Learning is a way of creating alignment among members of a team so that their individual visions become extensions of the team’s Shared Vision. Team Learning calls for all members of the team to be skilled in dialogue and discussion. These two words have very specific and different meanings in this context. In dialogue, the goal is to build understanding. People in dialogue suspend their own opinions or beliefs while they deeply listen to others’. By practicing this, people are able to internalize others’ perspectives and build communication within the team. In discussion, different views are presented, defended, and the preferred view is chosen. These two types of communication practices can be highly complimentary. They allow the best ideas to surface and synthesis to occur in a way that a final decision is truly made by the team rather than some subset of people who may have the most power, or who may be the most verbally dominant. In groups where racial equity is the subject of their focus, Whites often have a hard time stepping back and allowing Non-Whites to express their experiences , views, and aspirations. Practice in dialogue as it is defined here could help minimize this dynamic in groups. On the other end of the spectrum, discussing race can be such a heated and frightening experience for some Whites that a team with good discussion skills might be a place where they can express their views and get the kinds of developmental feedback or support that can facilitate their own racial awareness development.

When people come together to make meaning, there are often members of the group who have unconscious needs that they seek to gratify. We Whites who do racial work can be so ambivalent about what we’re doing. We are raised in a society that teaches us to act according to the dominant discourse and these habits of mind are often slow to leave us despite our best efforts and intentions. We can be so determined to avoid our own racism that we become the “racism police,” projecting our own unconscious racism onto others, seeing them as the bearers of racist thinking that, if we were to be completely honest, we still harbor in a dark corner of our own minds. We can create a sort of “hegemony of the oppressed” by rejecting all things White as bad. Seeking to share a vision can become cover for squashing dissent and disallowing a certain kind of open diversity. Dialogue and Discussion can act to keep the group form doing this as well.

One of the reasons I chose to use The Fifth Discipline as a framework for creating racial and ethnic equity in organizations is because of its pragmatic transcendence of the usual individualistic approach of US organizations. In our attempts to be objective in how we approach organizational life, the emotional, intuitive, and interconnected quality of human performance is often ignored or deemed too personal to discuss at work. Senge’s work makes room for the emotional and intuitive in the organizational setting. How often do we try to acknowledge and address our lived experiences of work? Some people don’t want to be bothered, thinking it’s all a waste of time. Some don’t trust their organizations to respect their more personal experiences, often with very good reason, having suffered in one way or another for any kind of personal disclosure. Add working on racial equity to the mix and the emotional stakes get even higher. Most people believe that their own approach to racial issues is the best way to create fairness for everyone. When one of my fellow White males says that the best way to deal with racial differences is to pretend those differences don’t exist, he truly believes, at least in his conscious mind, that he is advocating for equality for all. How can one intervene to move another person from a belief which is destructive to others but that he believes is truly generous and liberating? Is it even possible? Can we afford to believe that is isn’t?