News Why It's So Hard To Talk To White People About Racism

[ms spock]

I have just written a 2000 word essay on my Whiteness and the construction of my White identity. I found this great article that I thought I might share with anyone who is interested.

Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism
Posted: 04/30/2015 4:04 pm EDT Updated: 04/30/2015 4:59 pm EDT

Dr. Robin DiAngelo explains why white people implode when talking about race.

I am white. I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race. This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources -- schools, textbooks, media -- don't provide us with the multiple perspectives we need. Yes, we will develop strong emotionally laden opinions, but they will not be informed opinions. Our socialization renders us racially illiterate. When you add a lack of humility to that illiteracy (because we don't know what we don't know), you get the break-down we so often see when trying to engage white people in meaningful conversations about race.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-...k-to-white-people-about-racism_b_7183710.html

 

[Eleanor]

It is a good article! I saw it too. And if you think about what this implies for the development of identity generally...

 

[Kintsugi]

Thanks for this, Spock!

This is such an important conversation to have. I often feel like people think I'm racist because I talk about race a lot, and white privilege, and I can come off as brash and cold on the subject in the way I tend to state the facts of US society.

I am a racist. I am a racist the way all people operating in my society are sometimes racist. It doesn't make me more of a racist to openly talk about racial biases and white privilege.

I despise my friends' inability to understand white privilege. My friend's husband said he wouldn't watch a show (The Boondocks, it's sooo funny) because it was "too racist." I thought he meant that it was racist because it parodies a lot of black culture and uses a stark lens through which to view racial bias in the US. He didn't. He meant it was racist toward white people. He doesn't understand that there is a massive difference between stereotyping white culture and the systemic, ingrained, institutional racism against everyone else in our society.

I PC'd this to Spock, but you all might like it. Act II is about institutional racism. The brief discussion about white space and black space is an excellent summary of the basic issue: http://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/557/birds-bees

 

[Senecia]

I did a couple essays on the death penalty in high school. While researching I was discovering how a black man was significantly more likely to receive capital punishment, than a white man for the same crime. In my American Government class, I was learning about redistricting, but I was thinking about my own city. There really are just those "certain districts" that are concentrated with minorities, and other districts that are concentrated with the majority....whites.
Despite all that I see, and all that I've learned, I still have a hard time understanding white privilege. I mean, really letting it sink in. I think part of it is that I don't know what to do to help. I find myself having biased thoughts, and they do bother me - it's a sign of my conditioning from the culture in which I live.
When I took a course in Sociology, I was learning more about privilege and essentially, what it meant to have the upper hand. Learning how the system essentially perpetuates these issues was really frustrating for me. Because, I am a people pleaser; I do want to help, but I feel completely powerless. What can I do to improve education? Etc. It's like this giant rat's nest of issues and trying to find the root of it all...a needle in a haystack. In my mind, anyway.

 

[Lucycat]

I am white and from a white family. However I had a black big sister. Skin colour did not matter a jot to us children. However I recall my grandmother telling my sister how grateful she should be for having been adopted by my parents. Clearly the insinuation was because she was black and I somehow understood that even then. It was said when my parents were not at home - and I don't know how they would have reacted had they heard.

Yes - wasn't the little black girl very luck to be adopted by a white paedophile.....

 

[Hope4Now]

You might be heartened to check out this terrific program. Lots of people working on this issue but culture changes at a glacial pace. http://www.nationalseedproject.org/. Also this...
Link Removed (Peggy McIntosh is great)

The only way to move forward is to keep talking about these issues...keep them in front of everyone's noses...whether they be issues of race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, or the multitude of additional facets of being human that we human beings use to "other" people.

 

[garden]

@Simply Simon i listened to that radio clip, it was good, thanks for sharing it. My husband is white and I'm not. The kind of thing the comedian experienced outside the cafe while talking to his wife happens to us sometimes on both ends. For example, At a huge family gathering that was catered, he was mistaken for the help. There were hundreds of East Indians there, He was the only white guy there. When we've been out as a family, people assume that we are not together all the time, even though we're literally rubbing shoulders, the look of surprise when they realize we're a couple is always hilarious. When he's alone with our daughter he gets dirty looks from older white women. It's really weird to us, but we laugh it off mostly, although he sometimes gets the urge to rip someone a new one. He grew up in a family that taught racism as a way of life. He was 5 when he got his first lesson. He was playing with another little boy from up the street and they wound up in his room playing with trucks and cars when his mother sent the boy home and told him that he was not allowed to bring black children inside the house. He never bought these ideas, and continued his friendships in secret. His sister is the total opposite and is unapologetically racist. She called me a porch monkey, and he didn't bat an eye lash because he was totally expecting it.

Culture takes a really long time to change, but it is changing.

 

[ms spock]

You might be heartened to check out this terrific program. Lots of people working on this issue but culture changes at a glacial pace. http://www.nationalseedproject.org/. Also this...
Link Removed (Peggy McIntosh is great)

Thanks @Hope4Now!

The only way to move forward is to keep talking about these issues..keep them in front of everyone's noses..whether they be issues of race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, or the multitude of additional facets of being human that we human beings use to "other" people.

I agree. It is most important to keep talking about these issues. Also disabilities as well.

 

[ms spock]

This is such an important conversation to have. I often feel like people think I'm racist because I talk about race a lot, and white privilege, and I can come off as brash and cold on the subject in the way I tend to state the facts of US society.

It makes visible the invisible cloak of Whiteness - the ways in which we White people are conditioned and inculcated in our Whiteness as a racialised identity whereby we racialise others and not ourselves. Anyone who discusses White privilege is a threat to the not knowingness of Whiteness. You become suspect and you are an imminent threat to White denial.

I am a racist. I am a racist the way all people operating in my society are sometimes racist. It doesn't make me more of a racist to openly talk about racial biases and white privilege.

You are not alone. But no one wants to know that they are racist - because "bad people are racist" one of my recent commentaries was titled "Considering issues of Race in Terms of the ‘Other’ is a Manifestation of the Position of ‘White Privilege’ which leaves Dominant Power Positions Unchallenged or Nice People Are Racist Too!" No one responded to my thread but the lecturer, but Ah you get that. I am not popular.

I despise my friends' inability to understand white privilege.

I struggle with this as well.

...doesn't understand that there is a massive difference between stereotyping white culture and the systemic, ingrained, institutional racism against everyone else in our society.

I really struggle with the systemic ingrained institutional racism against everyone else in my society. We live in an unacknowledged Apartheid system in Australia, in terms of the ways in which our Indigenous peoples are treated. I have seen it - after I ran away from home when I was 15 and bravely saved the lives of said family - I saw it up and close and personal - and my White skin privilege meant I got to look and see but I was not brutalised like my fellow Indigenous students and housemates.

Glad to know I am not the only one.

 

[Friday]

Race is a weird thing, to me.

I'm a white chick who grew up mostly in Asia and PacRim Islands. Barely spent any time stateside. Summers mainly. Grew up. As a woman, worked a mans job. Again, overseas, mostly. It's flat out weird to me to be a part of the ethnic majority. I like it. I like blending, disappearing.

When people do start talking race to me, here, and specifically how I don't know what it's like to be a miniority? I generally just look at them over my cigarette. Yah. Sure man. Whatever.

 

[ihateusernames]

Because this from the article: "Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in social and geographic racial segregation." Is, and always has been, so untrue for me I don't know if any of my thoughts on the article itself have much meaning. Obviously my perspective is quite different from the author's. But I do understand what they're getting at and it's probably a good explanation for why so many white Americans will say something like "Only 'those' people are racist." Typically meaning poor, uneducated southerners. What would it matter if a marginalized group holds prejudice toward another marginalized group? Not much in the scheme of things. So obviously there is far more to it. But they don't allow their minds to go any further than that- and I would agree that it's because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient to do so.

 

[joeylittle]

I really love this illustrated explanation of white privilege by Jamie Knapp.

I think the concept of white privilege is really relevant, and also incredibly easy to gloss over into meaning something it does not quite mean. Anyway, thought I'd share.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/white-privilege-explained-in-one-simple-comic/