“Everything you said in there was so insulting to me.”
The words came harsh and unexpected. I had just given a speech on racism and white privilege at an upstate New York college and was nearing the end of an after-event reception, when the young woman, who had been seething with anger, waiting to confront me, finally stepped forward.
“You don’t know me,” she continued.
Uh-oh, I thought to myself. Nothing good ever follows those words.
“How dare you say I have privilege just because I’m white,” she continued. “My family had nothing. We lived in neighborhoods where we were the only white people around, and I got called a white bitch by black girls every day and got beat up by black kids on my block. How is that privilege?”
It’s never easy to know the right words at a moment such as this. On the one hand, I knew that the young woman had misinterpreted my talk that night, and my book, White Like Me, which she and her first-year classmates had been asked to read the previous fall. On the other hand, you can’t tell someone who is obviously in pain that they missed the point. To do so would be cruel. Instead, I tried a different approach.
First, I told her how sorry I was that those things had happened to her. There is no excuse for anyone to treat another person that way. Those who had abused her and called her names were assholes, and nothing they had experienced in life could justify their lashing out at her.
Then I tried to explain, as best I could, that my comments hadn’t really been directed at her.
“My book is a memoir,” I noted. “So, by definition, it’s about my experience. I just want people to reflect on those experiences and to see how many of them hold true in their own lives. Some will, others won’t, and that’s fine.”
She still wasn’t buying it. “Yes, but you said that all whites have privilege, not just you.”
“In some ways, yes,” I noted. “Being white means having advantages in employment, education, the justice system, and housing, for example — all of which I documented in the talk — but I never said that all whites have easy lives. It’s just that as a general rule, to be white pays certain dividends, just like being rich, or male, or straight, or able-bodied does, relative to those who are poor, women, LGBTQ, or disabled.”
“Well, okay,’ she replied. ‘It’s just that you spent all your time talking about ‘whites this’ and ‘whites that,’ and I feel you should have talked about the other side of it. What about people like me, who have been attacked for being white? Why don’t you spend the same amount of time talking about that?”
It was a fair enough question, which I’ve gotten many times before. Indeed, the whole idea of “reverse racism” is one about which I’ve written often.
Related: “Cracker Please: Reflections on Reverse Racism and Other Unicorns”
In reply, I noted that as a white person it just made sense to me that I have to deal with my piece of the problem — my two nickels in the quarter so to speak — since it is white racism and privilege over which I, as a white person, have the most direct control.
“I can’t control what black folks think of me, or how they treat me,” I explained. “But a system that gives me unfair advantages and opportunities is something over which I can take some ownership and responsibility.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I get that, but it just seems you should be more balanced.”
“Well, think of it this way,” I responded. “If data indicates (and it does, surprisingly) that every year there are maybe a few dozen attacks of heterosexuals by LGBTQ folks, which are apparently motivated by bias against straight and cisgender people, does that make anti-straight bias or cis-phobia the functional equivalent of homophobia, transphobia, and gay-bashing? And should people who speak about the latter subjects feel compelled to give equal time to ‘straight-bashing’ and ‘heterophobia’?”
“No,” she answered, admitting with a snicker how preposterous such a thing would be.
“Okay then,” I replied. “So even if we acknowledge that sometimes members of the less powerful group in society do something bad to those from a more powerful group, and even if sometimes members of the more powerful group suffer injustices, the larger institutional patterns can remain in place, right?”
Though she seemed to understand what I was getting at, her anger was far from spent. The tension continued to mount, ultimately tapering off into an exchange that probably was less productive than either of us would have preferred.
Because I feel a responsibility to explain the concepts I talk about in a way that is clear and convincing to others, I struggled for the next few days, wondering what I could have done better in our conversation.
What could I have said that would have allowed the young woman to fully hear me?
What could I have said that might have allowed us to connect, share perspectives, and reach some synthesis?
Though I hadn’t thought of it that evening, a few days later, I came to realize perhaps the most important thing about her experiences as a child, growing up white in an almost-all-black neighborhood. Namely, that experience itself was a symptom of institutional racism — the kind that creates racially-isolating environments to begin with. In other words, the abuse she had suffered didn’t disprove my position. Instead, it confirmed it, most viscerally.
The young woman’s abuse was made more likely by her racial isolation. After all, people feel more empowered to abuse others when they have numbers to back them up. And her isolation was the result of social forces that have allowed neighborhoods to become so racially separated in the first place: forces such as institutional racism and white privilege.
Were it not for the history of racism, which has kept black folks disproportionately concentrated in lower-income and mostly black spaces — and allowed whites to move from them — there would be few neighborhoods like the one in which that young woman grew up, in which a massive racial imbalance gave her tormentors the sense that they could get away with treating her in such a fashion.
Ironically, she had reaped the consequences of a system that had been set up for the benefit of persons like herself and her family — to make it easier for them to “escape” such spaces — but which occasionally leaves even some white folks out in the cold.
This is not to let the perpetrators of her abuse off the hook. Those who physically assault others should be held accountable. But if the goal is to prevent such abuse, the answer is a greater focus on reducing racial inequity and diminishing white privilege. After all, both create the conditions under which such abuse manifests: whether the mistreatment of people of color by whites or the opposite.
If we wish for race-based mistreatment and abuse to happen less often, we should seek to break down the de facto segregation that so often prevails throughout the country. This means more enforcement of fair housing laws, crackdowns on predatory lending, and policies to encourage equitable integration (as opposed to often rapid and inequitable gentrification).
This latter piece is crucial. Integration alone will not suffice. The influx of affluent whites back into urban spaces, which their parents fled, can spur understandable resentment on the part of longtime residents who see themselves priced out of booming markets, their cultures marginalized to make way for newcomers. Cities must be willing to invest in such communities before white folks move back and to protect longtime residents of color from the kinds of property tax and rent hikes that follow the influx of more affluent families.
But whatever path we follow to encourage a more just and sustainable integration, one thing we cannot afford to do is to allow the effects of institutional racism to torpedo the push for racial equity. We cannot allow our occasional injury as whites to distract us from the real culprit in that experience: not merely the individuals who took advantage or abused us, but also the systemic forces that made the abuse more likely.
It is white supremacy and privilege that set us against one another, to begin with.
It is white supremacy and privilege that continues to skew opportunities hundreds of years after they were set in place as systemic norms.
It is only the eradication of white supremacy and privilege that can put an end to it — all of it, once and for all.
. . .
I’m an antiracism educator/author. I Facebook & tweet @timjacobwise, podcast at Speak Out With Tim Wise & post bonus content at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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