Dillan DiGiovanni asks: “What does our country stand to gain from perpetuating this deeply-rooted myth that black people are more violent than white men or people of any other race?”
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I remember the first time I sat in on a workshop about white privilege. I spent so much time concerned about my own oppressed identities, it took a while to sink in. But sink in, it did.
And years later, when I read Allan Johnson’s Privilege, Power and Difference, it resonated with me in a way that deep and startling truths do. It resonated in the way we just know things, or understand them before we are told about them. Things like love, fairness and joy.
I wasn’t raised to eradicate racism, I was raised to perpetuate it, namely by not talking about it all.
That’s how privilege works. It maintains things as they are for the people who have the most to gain. When we talk about oppression as an institutional reality, this is what we mean. We don’t mean interpersonal interactions, jokes or slurs. That stuff is too easy to dismiss or discount or ignore. At the institutional level, we are are talking about how a country, a system, functions to perpetuate stereotypes and systematically keep one group of people in a holding pattern based on a negative stigma about some aspect of their identity.
So it makes sense to me why so few people are talking about this really big issue in America right now: the issue of who is actually the biggest threat to American safety. It makes sense why so few people are having the conversation about the extreme violence we are experiencing from white men on the other end of the barrel of a gun.
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Even though many of us have been force-fed for some time to think black gang members in the ‘hood are our biggest threat and that we should avoid “bad areas” at night, black people–specifically young black men–don’t seem to be the ones causing the biggest threat to our collective safety. It is white men, specifically young, middle-class white men who are committing both random and calculated acts of extreme violence. White men are behind almost every one of the recent acts of profound violence in America in the past 32 years.
And very few people want to talk about it. We aren’t seeing this conversation being held on the major new outlets, the resource with the most influence on the average American citizen. The pundits aren’t hashing it out as they do with similar issues. The question is, why? Or why not?
What does our country stand to gain from perpetuating this deeply-rooted myth that black people are more violent than white men or people of any other race? What would it mean if we had to face the truth that we aren’t living in a post-racial society at all, but rather that racism and stereotypes are still alive and well? One could argue they are, in fact, more insidious perhaps because the silence about this issue is as damaging, if not moreso, than blatant blame and outright racism.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “in the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
I wonder, as a white person, what it’s like for people of color to see these acts of extreme violence by white men occurring one after another and watching the news justify their behavior time after time while never mentioning their Caucasian identity. I cringe when I see the pundits hashing out justifications and theories and going deep into family histories for hours but never once making a bold statement about the reality of the shared identities of the perpetrators: young, white, middle-class males.
These men match the very traits that meet Audre Lorde’s mythical norm of societal perfection, in fact, as referenced in her paper titled, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.”
Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising.
Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amerst College, April 1980
Reproduced in: Sister Outsider Crossing Press, California 1984
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I get shivers just reading her words of wisdom from 1980, which seem about as prophetic as could be.
These men are wreaking havoc on our nation and what is being done about it at a larger scale? Why are they so untouchable to the point of not even being discussed?
I wonder the impact on the psyches of other young white men, if there is one at all. I wonder what it’s like for young black men watching television screens, seeing the scenes play out while experiencing daily systematic oppression based solely on the color of their skin. It seems unjust, unfair and downright wrong.
Do white boys experience the same systematic internalized anguish because they share the identity of these perpetrators in the same way young black men experience daily oppression based on the socialized beliefs about what it means to be young and black and male in America?
These are the questions I have, which comes back to the initial and perhaps most important question: why isn’t America talking about this more? Why are we justifying the behavior and dismissing these men as random, mentally ill individuals? Why are we not discussing the pattern that is clearly evident and not drawing the same associations with these men that so many do with and about young black men?
Why is white identity still so sacred as to avoid this examination of privilege, power and such a fierce double-standard?
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Photo: L.C. Nottaasen / flickr
Thank you for this article. I am going to buy the book you mentioned. I’m a black man with three black sons. I often speak with the older ones about how to live in a country where the majority portrays them as the villains. I often speak of such matters on my program as this topic is one of my passions. I teach my boys and daughter to “button up” when they’re in public because any questionable action will be perceived with extreme prejudice. It’s not enough that we must teach our black boys how to be men in this… Read more »
Thank you for this piece, Dillan. Short and sharp and probably not easy for a lot of people to think about. As a male who’s been black for a pretty long time, I can tell you what I think when I see who the mainstream decides is a threat: I think Saul Bellow was right: “we do not want to know what we do.” I started being black back when you were expected to have some equanimity toward this sort of thing. It also taught you that this was not really your country. It still isn’t. (It isn’t for a… Read more »
Thanks for weighing in so honestly, Mike. Much-appreciated. It’s great to have your opinion and perspective here. I agree with you that this country doesn’t feel like “home” in the same way for each person, depending on their identities. Your last thought is terrifying and perhaps true.
You’ve got that right.
Myth ? lol No Predicting adult involvement in crime: Personality measures are significant, socio-economic measures are not http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914002360
Huh. I read the quote by Audre Lorde, and was also blown away by how brilliant and insightful it was. But then I see your interpretation of it is that we need to blame those who fit this mythical norm. But when I read it, the last sentence says to me that she recognizes that it is the ones who set themselves outside of the mythical norm who need to look in the mirror for some of the blame for their own oppression. I think she is warning of being too quick to point out the enemy, when individuals who… Read more »
Huh. I read the quote by Audre Lorde, and was also blown away by how brilliant and insightful it was. But then I see your interpretation of it is that we need to blame those who fit this mythical norm. But when I read it, the last sentence says to me that she recognizes that it is the ones who set themselves outside of the mythical norm who need to look in the mirror for some of the blame for their own oppression. I think she is warning of being too quick to point out the enemy, when individuals who… Read more »
Hi Anonymous/Paul, you seem to be the same person or one of you is copying the other. I will reply once. Not too sure what you mean or what you are saying at the end, there. And yes, I tried to insert my disclaimers about the topic not being discussed enough, I certainly didn’t mean nor do I think it isn’t being discussed at all. It is, by folks of all different identities–feminists, people of color and white men, too. It’s so easy to get into “not all white men do this”–and that’s evident. Not all members of any one… Read more »