Monday, January 21, 2013

My Own Private Birmingham


I have been to the supermarket, and I've seen the other isle.


     With the 28th Martin Luther King Jr. day upon us I’m going to take a moment to point out exactly what I mean by my assertions in this blog that, “Racial Identity is a White Issue,” and, “We’ve Come Far but Not Become Fair.”
     I’m not going to make a complex argument about whose responsibility it is to end racism. Those arguments are out there if you seek them.  I’m simply going to say that racism is a problem in the racist just like theft is a problem in the thief. If the thief doesn’t steal there is no theft.  If the racist stops his racism there is no racism.
     I’m not going to quote statistics about racial inequity, though if you go seek them you will see that Whites in the US hold power and wealth disproportionately compared to People of Color. 
     If you believe that all races are equal in natural ability then systematic, often-unconscious White oppression is the logical explanation for the racial disparities in the US.  After all, 99 years after slavery was made illegal in the US we needed to pass the Civil Rights Act to enforce equality among the races, and 49 years after that there are still disparities among the races in achievement, power, and legitimacy in our culture.
     And of course, if you believe that racial disparities stem from one race being superior to other races then you are, by definition, racist.
     But this is already more than I wanted to say today. Here’s what I really want to say: Last year on MLK day I went to the supermarket and there I saw the color line starkly. On this national holiday celebrating this Black man who was a civil rights leader, every single person buying food was White and every single person working behind checkout was a Person of Color.  MLK day seemed to be a great opportunity for us White folks to catch up on our shopping while for People of Color, at least in my little corner of the world, it wasn’t a day off.  Yes, they may have been getting holiday pay, yes they may have been glad to make some extra money, but no White folks seemed to be in the same boat. For us it was a day off. 
     At the time I wanted to say something to the person who checked me out, to at least acknowledge that I saw it, but what could I say that wouldn’t be some attempt to be viewed as a “good” White person instead of one of those other, bad, unaware White people? “Boy, that racism sure is persistent! Oh, I brought my own bag…” 
     All this happened, mind you, while the first Person of Color to be President of the United States is in office, a thing that until it happened many people thought was unimaginable, even in 2008. 
     And so my little experience reflects the philosophy of this blog. With Obama in the White house we have “come far” in terms of what race means in the US.  With such disparities among the races still in place, we’ve “not become fair.”  It is my responsibility to continue to do what I can about it because it’s doubly unfair to ask the targets of inequity to take the responsibility for eradicating it: “racial inequity is a White issue.”     

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Race Abating


“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― C.G. Jung

Racial microaggressions are an important part of modern racism. Racial microaggressions are the small insults and inequities that are often directed at People of Color by Whites.  They can build up in one’s experience and become a destructive force in the person’s life.  The fact that microaggressions are subtler than overt racism contributes to the difficulty in dealing with them.  People who are the targets of them aren’t always sure they actually have happened or often have a difficult time eliciting support form others because of the lack of clarity involved.
As few as the resources are for People of Color to deal with microaggressions, there are even fewer resources available for Whites who want to deal with their own microaggressions.  Many of us are simply not conscious of our biases and we often have intense emotional and psychological pressures to keep our biases out of our awareness, to keep them unconscious. It makes sense. The unconscious is the place to which we banish thoughts, feelings, and impulses that we cannot consciously bear. And in our society, one of the worst things a person can be is bigoted. In our society, being a racist is so bad that even committed White supremacists deny being racist.  They will say that they are defending their race against threats by other races, but they will often refuse to be considered racist themselves.  How much more difficult, then, can it be for one of us White liberals or those of us Whites who consider ourselves part of the antiracist movement to admit to unconscious bias? Whites who are able and willing to see their own unconscious bias are few and far between. And those of us who know in principle that we have them have a difficult time seeing them in action when we do act out on them.  Just as People of Color can be heard to say, “Did he really just say what I think he said?” a White person in pursuit of his own racial awareness development may ask himself, “Am I being racist?”  And if we believe we are, what then?  Where do we go with this knowledge? How do we build skill to overcome it?
Many people have experienced the psychotherapeutic model as a tool of oppression. I agree that it has been used that way.  It is a Eurocentric technique.  It has been used in an overall context of White privilege to further the goals of the oppressor. It has often been used by people who do not examine its assumptions critically. It has often been used by the privileged to dictate what is “normal,” and that “normal” almost always has a Eurocentric set of values.
I take a multicultural perspective. One of the values of multiculturalism is striving to respect all people and their cultural identities to the furthest extent that we are able.  This perspective includes respecting White culture, and as a White person it is important to me to create a cultural identity that nurtures my well-being. Just as it is sometimes the task of members of non-dominant groups to learn to love and respect their own cultures after having had them denigrated by White society, it is my task as a White person to learn what is lovable and respectable in my own culture once I have come to see Whiteness’s role in racial genocide.
It is in this spirit that I advocate for a psychotherapeutic approach to dealing with unconscious racial bias in Whites as a culturally appropriate approach.  None of us was born with our biases.  We were socialized to them.  They are not our fault but they are our responsibility. A White person could work with a coach-like person acting in the role of non-judgmental listener.  And this coach should also be a White person who is well trained and supervised at least in part by People of Color.  The hurdle of speaking openly about one’s racial biases to a Person of Color is too great for most people.  Admitting to bias is hard enough without worrying about attacking the racial identity of the listener. Just as talk therapy can help a person become aware of her or his unconscious motivations in life, this kind of “race therapy” can allow White people to become aware of their biases, make them conscious, and begin to learn to manage or even relinquish them.  Holding impulses in the unconscious takes up a great deal of our emotional energy and tearing down the dam that holds them back can release that energy and allow it to be used constructively. It will allow us to confront our biases when we act on them, and hopefully eventually, before we do.
In an ironic way, the psychotherapeutic model also addresses one of the critiques of White culture. White culture is highly individualistic and often nurtures no sense of personal history for its members.  Many other cultures have a good deal of focus on the past and one’s ancestors.  With its focus on the childhood, the psychotherapeutic model is a way that Whites can focus on their ancestors in a way that makes their impact on the present explicit. It is our version of evoking our ancestors.  Why would we want to deny us Whites that tool?