On my own whiteness
The following essay is the result of a an almost year-long process of reading and self-reflection that was inspired by the Carthage College Equity and Inclusion Initiative. The good sponsors of this program challenge members of the Carthage community to assess their own cultural awareness, and then to pursue 30-50 hours of personal inquiry and development in the service of fostering deeper levels of inclusion, bias-free communication, self-awareness, and of course equity in our classrooms and workplaces.
I have really enjoyed this process, as it’s given me an opportunity to think critically about my own identity and culture in a way that I haven’t since perhaps college. It’s a challenging thing to admit, but I have never really considered identifying my own culture as “white”, and what that means as a white, middle class woman in America. On the one hand, as an anthropologist, I am well equipped to identify and be critical of race and ethnicity in America’s relationships with the rest of the world, but I rarely look to myself and my own whiteness. I used this time to make deliberate choices to explore non-white media, and to challenge myself to think about how power structures in America have shielded me from thinking critically about race, precisely because of my race.
One consequence of the blindness that accompanies membership in a dominant cultural group is the sense that some white Americans have that we are “cultureless”; or that “cultures” are exotic and other things, the property of other people, to be collected, examined, and consumed. In fact this is the approach that characterized “salvage” anthropology in the early 20th Century, and which the discipline has mostly moved beyond. This attribution of “culture” to others (and implicitly, “civilization” to “us”) is a fallacious misapprehension of what culture actually is and how it pervades our lives—from the gestures in our conversations to the grand political rituals in which we participate. Because of the way that we reduce the concept of culture to “traditional” food, dress and ritual, dominant white culture in America is hard to outline. Our “real” culture is a mishmash of many immigrant traditions, aspirational class values, and invisible, insidious structures of segregation and privilege. As a white middle-class American, I absorbed, but never saw the effects of these structures, believing only that I lacked that “thing” that connected some people with traditions of a particular ethnic heritage.
As 4th-generation Irish-American, what remains of my “Irishness” is a surname and freckles, and a lapsed Catholic faith. There was very little that aligned the patterns and practices of my middle-class New Jersey upbringing with what I later learned of the painful history and cultural experience of the Irish in Ireland. So, while as a young adult I claimed an “Irish” heritage, I actually knew very little about where and what this claim meant, and this artificial identity allowed me to ignore the other formative cultures of my upbringing—white, suburban, mid-Atlantic, middle class. In a way, taking the cultural assessment survey at the beginning of this practice helped me to think of my Irish heritage as a sort of red-herring, a shortcut label that doesn’t really define my experience as an American. While I deeply value what my family does retain of the experience of 19th Century Irish immigrants, and how that has shaped our values as a family today, I realized that in many ways, my real culture is the “unmarked” category of statistics. The thing against which other values are measured, it is never explicitly defined, but it marks every other variable as “divergent.”
So, I began my reflective journey with some critical readings about whiteness. What does it mean to be White in America? I read “White Fragility” by Robin DeAngelo, which revealed the extent of White insulation from the acknowledgement of their place of privilege, or of any other person’s race-based disadvantage, and the epistemological framing of white knowledge, which suggests that while other people’s perspectives may be skewed by their experience of racial disadvantage, white people’s experience is “unracial” and therefore objective, authoritative, real , and individual (as opposed to the shared experience of a “race”). DeAngelo’s text also reveals the extent of White belonging—something which I think is invisible though ubiquitous to white experience. Like Peggy McIntosh’s definition of White Privilege, White Belonging is the ability for a white person to walk into any setting and see someone else of their own skin tone, often in a position of authority, to feel like they belong or are welcome in that setting (regardless of whether they have been there before), and to be reasonably assured that what they do in that setting will be judged on the basis of their merits and not on the basis of their race (for instance, if they do something well, they will not be perceived as a “credit” to their race, or if they do something poorly it will not reflect poorly on their race as a whole). McIntosh reflects how easily forgettable these privileges are, and how we are conditioned to think of them as “natural” and “deserved” effects of basic interpersonal respect and dignity, not things which are afforded to us on the basis of our race. DeAngelo explains how these privileges are also only achievable through ubiquitous, systematic, but again invisible and unacknowledged segregation. The dutiful avoidance (and othering) of black spaces, for instance.
Toni Morrison calls this the “parasitical nature of white freedom!” I loved Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, which situates a uniquely American construction of race, which she calls Africanism, in the literature of early Americans, who were trying to define and navigate the meaning of Freedom in a colonial, slaveholding society. In contrast to European colonizers who could use distance to dismiss Africans as “uncivilized” or “savages”, Settler whites, living cheek by jowl with enslaved Africans, could very well see that they were human, “civilized,” and moral, so they had to define freedom and slavery differently. In novels by authors I have read and enjoyed (Poe, Twain, Hemmingway, James) Black characters—as inventions of white authors—become refractions of American anxieties in the face of their democratic-imperialist experiment. I felt particularly shamed by her take on Mark Twain, whose Huckleberry Finn I had read as a child. Twain, she notes, writes Jim as a moral, fatherly, conscious human being, who provides security and love to Huck in his travels. Then he allows white characters to utterly humiliate him in the denouement, because, as Morrison explains, the “liminal inversion” of Jim’s humanity must be corrected irrespective of the Twain’s otherwise progressive politics.
Newly armed with critical whiteness theory, I revisited materials I have read and used in my classes in the past; Franz Fanon’s “On Violence,” James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” as well articles I have used in my methods courses focusing on Black participants in American schools and universities. Although race is central to these works, I now believe I had always allowed a naive faith in the the universality of the human experience to block my attention to spaces of difference. The point, especially for Fanon and Baldwin is to articulate the ways that race—or rather the structures that make race matter—inflects experiences that would otherwise be mundane.
Over the course of this year I also made a point to consume TV and literature with black casts and creators. I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye; Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain; Americanah by Chimmamanda Ngozi Adichie, Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson, The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The Book of Unknown Americans, by the Hispanic author Christina Henriquez.
Reading these novels was a tremendously enjoyable process for me, getting absorbed in stories that I might not have picked up for myself otherwise. I found myself focusing on stories of young people and how the weight of race and history affects them, even before such a thing is named to them. Woodson’s Red at the Bone tells the story of a teenager approaching her own “coming out” party slowly becoming more aware of the histories that her parents brought to her—her mother’s teen pregnancy, her grandparents’ experience of the Tulsa Oklahoma race riots, (Something I only just learned about through this book and other recent media—not in school!). Henriquez focuses on a love story between two Hispanic young people in Delaware (both from different parts of Latin America), one a migrant whose family came for the sake of America’s better education and health care, and the other a first-generation American, whose parents came for work. Adichie’s novel focuses on a young woman’s transformation in America before returning to her home of Nigeria. She is affected by American race relations, but also by its vast privilege, cultural dominance, and educational elitism, which she brings back home with her. I think I am most affected by the idea that these novels—even such as Morrison’s fantastical Song of Solomon—are grounded in real histories that real people carry with them, and shape their encounter with the world around them.
I also watched a variety of documentaries and mini-series—I watched When They See Us, a fictionalized account of the story of the Central Park Five (Exonerated Five). I also watched the Ken and Sarah Burns documentary on their experience, and the Oprah-hosted talk back about the mini-series. I watched 13th, the documentary on the American prison system and the new Jim Crow, and the The Violence Interrupters, about conflict mediators in urban Chicago ganglands. In the fiction category I watched the movie and mini-series called Dear White People about racial politics and daily microagressions at an unnamed Ivy League school.
These again were informative and entertaining, particularly The Violence Interrupters, which enters into a space of gang violence that is not otherwise accessible to me. It just struck me how so much of the public discourse around race-related violence and poverty reinforces “us and them” mentalities, suggesting that gang violence is somehow intrinsically different because it is perceived as racial, when the problems we are talking about are really just basic human conflicts. 13th highlights this issue doubly with the illustration of how people of color who are arrested for minor offences—the kinds of things that could be simple escalations of interpersonal conflict, or small scale drug charges—wind up in prison settings that disenfranchise them and extract unpaid labor from them. In tandem the two films illustrate the extreme extent of structural violence against people of color in America, and how literally just living can lead to the utter destruction of a human being’s personhood and dignity. This of course was also the theme of When They See Us and The Central Park 5, which tell the story of 5 boys who were falsely convicted of rape, then exonerated YEARS after the true offender came forward. I remember discussing the Five—who had just won a settlement from the City of New York in 2014—in one of the first classes I taught at Carthage, and utterly failing to convey how deeply wronged they had been. What struck me most about When they See Us was how young and baby-faced, the actors were, and how this drove home the cruelty and indifference of the investigators as they calculated who deserved “justice” and who didn’t.
I also brought these observations to recent work for the U.S. Census Bureau. In the context of this ongoing reflective activity, my time canvassing different neighborhoods in Kenosha was also illuminating. I canvassed both poor and wealthy neighborhoods, which were not only (shockingly) different in terms of the space, housing, cars, and landscape, but also in terms of the infrastructure that surrounded them. I was surprised how few sidewalks there were in wealthy developments, while structures in other neighborhoods, such as street-side mailboxes, bus stops, porches, stoops, work to draw people outside into collective spaces. There were different kinds of visibility and privacy in poor and wealthy neighborhoods, and different structures for social interaction. They also reflect different forms of access to transportation, which in turn entails different levels of dependence on the schedules of public buses and services. I reflected on the kind of suburban environment in which I grew up, and the privileges entailed by having access to a car, the relative privacy of a detached home, and the safety and sociality of the street where we lived.
These differences are things that I didn’t really have to consider because my upbringing shielded me from seeing either extreme. I thank the Carthage Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for calling my attention to them, and more broadly to this world of American culture and history that I had been missing. At the beginning of the program, one thing that struck me was the director, Michele Hancock’s, use of the word oppression to describe marginalization. Initially I thought the language was overly strong, but I came around to it by the end of her talk because of course if we agree that discrimination still happens, and disadvantage still occurs on the basis of race and disability, then we have to accept that oppression is the extension, the cause of those experiences. Going away from the first session, I considered that oppression was a real thing that happens in real people’s lives. Having explored the texts and films that I have over the course of this development, I realize that my complicity in that oppression was not knowing and not seeing. It has been a great pleasure to open my eyes.
DeAngelo, Robin. 2011. White Fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3 (3) (2011) pp 54-70.
McIntosh, Peggy. 1988. White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Working Paper 189, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. Wellesley, MA.
Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.