Rather than defend against the charge, Justin Cascio attempts to define and possess his Whiteness.
I was so excited to receive Bill Johnson’s column this week on racial color blindness, that I couldn’t wait to respond. Is Whiteness invisible? It wasn’t to me, and I wrote pages of personal history in which race played a role. Yet, I found I had written an unpublishable mess. I’d walked right into the trap I hoped to avoid, of defending against White identity, taking one popular defensive stance after another: I’m not as White as other people. I’m made aware of my Whiteness at times and it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve wished racism could go away and stop making me feel so bad for things outside my control.
The issue of racism in the world is clearly too much for any one person to tackle, particularly not in one essay, but I found even the racism in myself is too large a subject to take on all at once.
Shedding the racism that is still in my actions and attitudes is a journey that I’m excited to be on. But even while I’m thrilled when I feel like I’m making progress, I can stall again in fear of shame. To connect with White identity feels like complicity in White history. I’ve studied human history through lenses of women’s rights, welfare, media, and environmentalism. I have told my own story at different times from various outsider perspectives, but I have other stories, as an American, and a white person, and a man, who has tried to walk away from the shame of each of these labels. During the Bush years, I considered emigrating to Canada. I spent a few happy years in the Aughties passing as Hispanic in neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey. Years before, feminism both enlightened me to the possibilities for my gender expression, and gave me impetus to try, for a few more years, to find a female identity I could live with.
As a trans man, like many other feminist trans men, I was sure I could bring some kind of pure goodness to manhood: that as an enlightened man I would lead men out of darkness into the feminist light of higher consciousness. Fifteen years later, I know that I landed like the pigs in the final pages of Animal Farm, in the same conspiracy of privilege that every man is born into, and while I was different for my history, it could be invisible, even when I most wanted to make a difference. Strange women continue to cross the street to avoid me, especially at night. They have no idea I’m a man who wants the world to be safe for us both.
If I moved to another country, I would be an expatriate, translating and converting, until I allowed myself to change, to let go of concerns with American politics or the “right” way to measure. In my struggles with faith, gender, and identity, I came to an understanding of myself that includes the facts that I am American and white, and regarded myself this way long before I had the courage to attach the labels to it. In this way I hope to transform what Whiteness means for me.
I have a history as a White person. I wrote half an autobiography about being White in my first attempt to respond, but my history isn’t the point. It’s that I have one, and if you are a White person reading this, so do you, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Just the last 500 years of American history is enough to make me want to disavow everything the patriarchy stands for in my life, from Europe’s Manifest Destiny to fill the American continents (which they had emptied with disease, ignorance, and violence), to my own Manifest Destiny to have a more successful capitalist life than my father’s: a higher paying white collar job, a bigger house, higher achieving wife and kids. It’s easy to get caught up in defenses against Whiteness, and avoid looking at my own experience as a White man. Easier to say that I don’t believe in Whiteness, anymore, while acknowledging that I’m still a White guy. Do I believe anything about what it means to be a White man, to replace the dreams of my fathers?
There is one thing: I believe that it is my responsibility to use the privilege that comes to me, to make the world better for people who struggle under the injustice of the system that makes my life so comparatively easy. Some people think it’s wasteful that I use that power to enlighten White men. Haven’t they got enough? Not enough enlightenment, if any of us are still complicit in the system. I wish to make it possible for men to talk about gender, and white men to talk about race, from their personal experiences. In this way, we can begin to pull our own weight in struggles against injustice and oppression.
Institutionalized racism perpetuates these ideas that white people don’t have a race to investigate, or aren’t interested in the subject. It’s my opinion that White people need to talk more about what it is like to be White instead of accepting the answer that such talk has already been done for them by mainstream society. We should no more accept a produced image of what our identities are than people of color should.
Let’s talk about it. There are people of every race who are yearning to have this dialogue.
Read more On Race.
Image credit: dosbears/Flickr
What a sad, depressing article. There is no way out and no correct response that will not offend some group. We are more divided and more opposed to each other than ever before and the division between the sexes has only made it much worse. We are no longer human beings. We are categories – just objects – the products of a materialist, decadent age that has set us all against each other. All the fancy social science phrases and labels cannot hide it. All the horrors of politically correct speech cannot camouflage it. The only answer is to refuse… Read more »
I don’t see it like that at all. Acknowledging reality is how you begin to change it, and reality is not that we’re all nothing but categories, but rather, that racism still pervades the way we think of ourselves. It’s not a sad story: it’s a story of liberation.
One of the problems with racism is that there is both overt racism and unwitting racism. In general, we’re a less overtly racist society (although Obama’s presidency seems to have prompted many to come out of the closet) but it’s a problem that will probably be with us until we’re all honey-brown colored, at which point we’ll have to judge each other by whether we have stars on our bellies or not.
Some other attribute will have to become important to who is seen as having status. Is it conceivable that in that honey-brown future, we’ll judge one another by our BMI, whether we have neural wifi implants, or appear to be forever 21?
Ah. Ok then. How do you propose we fix it? Generally speaking.
The first step is acknowledging there is still a race problem. The second is listening to each other’s experiences, and hearing what is being said. Unfortunately, in my experience, it takes a white man like Time Wise to say something before people understand it’s still a problem. The third is learning how the justice system has been coöpted to create a system of injustice, how instead of blatantly stoking racial animosity through bigoted language, we now use the language of “law and order” to ensure the undesirables are locked away. As I recommended earlier, Michelle Alexander provides the most cogent… Read more »
Mr. Walker,
I agree with you up until you say, “As a class of people, whites have it easier than coloreds because of the history of systemic injustice, even as there are individuals within each class that go against that trend.”
I’m still missing your point. How do white people have it easier than “coloreds”? Please describe how you have been discriminated against. I gave you my story. Please share your own.
I am not a class, nor are you. There is no translation from “my experience is x” to “the experience of whites is x.” When we talk about class, we are inherently talking about trends, averages, statistics. On average, white people are discriminated against less. On average, white people hold more wealth disproportionate to their representation in the population. In general, no one is refusing to allow white people to rent apartments, or charging them higher rates, because they were white. And yet, there are plenty of white people who have it bad. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.… Read more »
The problem with “Owning Whiteness” is that no matter what you say about being white in today’s society your statements are going to be refuted by arguments that “White isn’t really considered a race” and “All whites are privileged due to 500 years of imperialism and slavery.” I have to admit that I resent all of that. I fall into that category of “white.” I grew up with an alcoholic mother and a father who worked as a welder in a small plumbing supply shop. I attended public schools, ate 19 cent boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for dinner… Read more »
Your story is not uncommon, but your bitterness is misdirected. I’ll remind you of the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr a few years back. Some people see black men like him – successful, educated, gainfully employed, moderately wealthy – and say, “what race problem?” But when it comes to interactions with the police, what really mattered was the color of his skin. He could have been anyone; that he happened to be a distinguished Harvard professor is what shines the occasional light on how the system is tilted against non-whites. And that’s why this isn’t about individual accomplishment or… Read more »
How to get “white men to talk about race”? This is a loaded topic…! My ex used to go on and on about the Bakke case, which was about a white 33 year old man who was denied admission to UC Davis Medical School even though his GPA and scores were excellent… Meanwhile 16 admission spots were reserved for “disadvantaged ethnic/socioeconomic” people… I would just listen to him go on and on about how unfair this was…I never realized that my ex was talking about himself in a way… What I would say to him to him now (if I… Read more »
People ought to be able to transition from one racial identity to another. I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to be transracial people, just like we can be transsexual or transgendered. When it comes to sex and/or gender, one’s identity can be assigned at birth contrary to that person’s reality, contrary to their true self, which they then identify later. So, I don’t see why we can’t do it for race, which is even more amorphous than sexual characteristics. There is some hard biological basis for sexual categories, but no real biological basis for racial categories, so… Read more »
Assuming you’re not just taking the piss here (Poe’s Law and all)… As a “white” person you’re not going to be assigned your own “personal shopping assistant” when you go to the mall. You’re not going to be asked to turn out your pockets when shopping at a jewelry store. You’re much less likely to be stopped and frisked, or to find yourself lying on the concrete with a boot on your back and a glock at the base of your skull. You’re not likely to be offered a worse deal at the car dealership or in the mortgage broker’s… Read more »
Justin — why would you own 500 years of American history? Were your people at Jamestown?
Yes 1493 was rough- but then so were the several earlier immigration waves in the Western Hemisphere ..
I guess I’ve gotten a few gimmes for being white and lost a few for not being white enough.
The thing most people don’t seem to understand is that it’s not a level playing field. It probably never will be. Some white folks think that just because they stopped cheating that the game is now fair. Sure, they own Boardwalk and Park Place and all the railroads, and most of the other properties, all the “Get Out of Jail Free” cards, and have most of the cash… but hey, we’ll move both our pieces to “Go” and play from there, deal? So there’s two pars to the story. First, we need to acknowledge that the playing field is not… Read more »
The problem with deciding to decry your whiteness is that strangers don’t get the memo. If you don’t pass (and I know that word is charged) as something else, it doesn’t matter that you say, well, we’re all from Africa if you go back far enough, because those who trace their ancestry through Europe have had a markedly different experience in the aggregate, and those who appear to have done so (as regarded by the stranger scoping them and making an unconscious racial categorization) continue to have different experiences that constitute a “White experience.” It doesn’t matter whether my ancestors… Read more »
‘ve been a white, male, middle-class protestant for all my life (strangely enough) and I’ve learned that speaking about being one of the “white people” is very problematic, and I’m certain I’m not alone. The is that, quite simply, my opinion doesn’t matter. If I express an opinion that is contrary to social standards — like how man are more likely to commit suicide or how funding for male breast cancer research is basically non-existant — I’m shouted down as “just another angry white male getting mad over losing entitlement”. If, however, I agree and support prevailing progressive viewpoints (like… Read more »
Institutionalized racism perpetuates these ideas that white people don’t have a race to investigate, or aren’t interested in the subject. But in classical racial discourse, it’s true that “white” isn’t really considered a race, particularly when juxtaposed against “colored” which once referred to the negro but has since expanded to encompass all who can’t pass for “white.” When I think of “white” I think of terms like “white power” and “white man’s burden.” We have no language to bring forth imagery of whites being in any role other than “superior.” And while class certainly plays a large part in how… Read more »