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 20th 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.
