January 06, 2005
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-01/06wise.cfm
Race to Our Credit
By Tim Wise
Sometimes it can be difficult, having a conversation with those whose
political views are so diametrically opposed to one's own.
But even more challenging, is having a discussion with someone who
simply refuses to accept even the most basic elements of your worldview.
At that point, disagreement is less about the specifics of one or
another policy option, and more about the nature of social reality
itself.
This is what it can be like sometimes, when trying to discuss the issue
of white privilege with white people. Despite being an obvious
institutionalized phenomenon to people of color and even some of us
white folks, white privilege is typically denied, and strongly, by most
of us.
Usually, this denial plays out in one of two ways: either we seek to
shift the focus of discussion to our status as members of some other
group that isn't socially dominant (so, for example, whites who are poor
or working class will insist that because of their economic
marginalization, they effectively enjoy no racial privilege at all), or
we retreat to the tired but popular notion that all have an equal
opportunity in this, our colorblind meritocracy.
Denying ones privileges is of course nothing if not logical. To admit
that one receives such things is to acknowledge that one is implicated
in the process by which others are oppressed or discriminated against.
It makes fairly moot the oft-heard defense that "I wasn't around back
then, and I never owned slaves, or killed any Indians," or whatever.
If one has reaped the benefits of those past injustices (to say nothing
of ongoing discrimination in the present) by being elevated,
politically, economically and socially above persons of color, for
example--which whites as a group surely have been thanks to enslavement,
Indian genocide and Jim Crow--then whether or not one did the deed
becomes largely a matter of irrelevance.
Of course, what is ultimately overlooked is that denial of one's
privilege itself manifests a form of privilege: namely, the privilege of
being able to deny another person's reality (a reality to which they
speak regularly) and suffer no social consequence as a result.
Whites pay no price, in other words, for dismissing the claims of racism
so regularly launched by persons of color, seeing as how the latter have
no power to punish such disbelievers at the polls, or in the office
suites, or in the schools in most cases.
On the other hand, people of color who refuse to buy into white
reality--the "reality" of the U.S. as a "shining city on a hill," or the
"reality" of never-ending progress, or the "reality" of advancement by
merit--often pay a heavy toll: they are marginalized, called
"professional victims," or accused of playing the race card.
Consider the common charge of conspiratorial paranoia hurled at any
person of color, for example, who dared to point out the
racially-disparate voter purging that took place in Florida in 2000, or
in various places in 2004. White reality is privileged at every turn, so
that if whites say something is a problem, it is, and if whites insist
it isn't, then it isn't.
Those of us who are white remain thought of as sober-minded, and never
as given to underestimating the extent of racism, making a molehill out
of what is, in fact, often a mountain, or playing our own race card, the
denial card, which far and away trumps whatever pallid alternative
people of color may occasionally find in their own decks.
In other words, privilege is not merely about money and wealth. It is
not merely something that attaches when one is born with the proverbial
silver spoon in one's mouth. Rather it is the daily psychological
advantage of knowing that one's perceptions of the world are the ones
that stick, that define the norm for everyone else, and that are taken
seriously in the mainstream.
Whiteness is so privileged in everyday dialogue that one need look no
further than our nation's post-election discourse to see how it
operates.
So, for example, one after another commentator in the wake of election
night pontificated, without hesitation, that the outcome had been a
referendum on "moral values," and the result of high turnout amongst
evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly voted for President Bush.
Yet what this analysis ignored is that it was only some evangelicals who
overwhelmingly chose to re-elect the President, while others voted to do
exactly the opposite. Indeed, black evangelicals voted eight to one
against Bush, meaning that the mainstream talking heads, as usual were
privileging the white perspective, and universalizing the particular
behavior of white folks, as if it were the standard for everyone.
So too with the so-called "red state, blue state" divide. Fact is, the
divide is less one of geography than race: a majority of whites in the
blue states (including California and New York) voted for Bush on
election day, while the vast majority of blacks and the majority of
other persons of color in the red states voted against him.
But part of white privilege is never having to examine the peculiarity
of white behavior (or even acknowledge that there is such a thing as
white group behavior at all), and so naturally, this racial aspect of
electoral division remains unexamined, and the more comforting
perspective (for whites at least) that there is merely a split based on
residence remains largely unchallenged.
But it's more than that. Even more important as an example of white
privilege--the kind that adheres to all whites, not just the rich--is
the ability to avoid being stigmatized by the actions of others who just
so happen to fall within the same racial group as you.
While people of color bear the burden of disproving negative stereotypes
regularly--when interviewing for a job, taking a standardized test, or
merely driving in the "wrong" neighborhood, where they are presumed not
to belong--whites rarely if ever have to worry that the actions of
others like us, no matter how horrible, will stick to us or force us to
prove that we are somehow different.
For example, whites can screw up on the job, run entire corporations
into the ground, rip off the Savings and Loans to the tune of hundreds
of billions of dollars, cut corners on occupational safety and health in
the workplace, or scam millions from employee pension funds, without the
rest of us having to worry that such incompetence or outright dishonesty
will result in whites being viewed suspiciously every time we seek to
climb to the top of the corporate ladder.
White men in Lexuses (or is it Lexi?) will not need to fear being pulled
over by police on suspicion of transporting documents confirming their
latest fiscal shenanigans.
When Martha Stewart conspires to cover up a stock dumping scam, white
women across America do not cower in fear that somehow they will be
viewed as dishonest and predatory as a result. Nor white men thanks to
Ken Lay.
If the President of the United States mispronounces every fifth word out
of his mouth, none of us white folks have to worry that someone will
ascribe his verbal incompetence to some general white illiteracy. But
honestly, do we think that if this President were black, or Latino or
Asian Pacific American, or indigenous, and mangled the English language
with the regularity of the actual President, that no one would make the
leap from individual to group defect?
Why is it that when the white President of the University of Tennessee
overspends his expense account by millions, using public funds for
expensive rugs, home furnishings and lavish chartered plane trips, no
one suggests that perhaps it's time for the school to pick a black or
brown chief executive, but when the black President of historically
black Tennessee State University is seen as mismanaging that school's
resources, voices all across my hometown of Nashville began to whisper
(or even say quite loudly) that perhaps it was time for TSU to get a
white President?
For those reading this who are white, ask yourselves, when was the last
time you felt the need to stand up and apologize for a crime committed
by another white person? Better yet, when was the last time you felt the
need to do this for fear that if you didn't, your community would come
to be viewed as inherently violent and dangerous, and perhaps be
attacked as a result? And when was the last time someone suggested that
our failure to openly condemn white criminals implicated us in their
wrongdoing?
Yet what of the recent murders in Wisconsin by a Hmong immigrant, who
killed six white hunters when they confronted him in a private deer
stand? Not only did bumper stickers crop up within days reading, "Save a
deer, shoot a Hmong," implying that the shooter was somehow
representative of a larger group evil, but more to the point, the Hmong
and larger Southeast Asian communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota (where
the shooter was from) rushed to distance themselves from him.
This distancing was, of course, only made necessary because to not do so
would put others like them at risk, in a way no white person has ever
been put at risk because some of our number occasionally kills folks.
Likewise, nearly a decade ago, when a Hmong woman in the Twin Cities
murdered her six children, her status as a racial and ethnic minority
was front and center in discussion of the crime--anger on talk radio was
pointed at the Hmong as a group, or Asians more broadly, for
example--but a few years back, when Andrea Yates killed her five kids in
Texas, or when Susan Smith drowned her two boys in a South Carolina
lake, no one attacked her as an example of what's wrong with white folks
these days.
Even when some white teenager commits a racially-motivated hate crime,
as happened recently in Simi Valley, California where four white youths
beat two black kids to a pulp, the white response is one that seeks to
demonstrate that their town is not racist (as if geography alone ever
commits an aggravated assault), rather than hoping to prove that all
whites aren't that way. The latter possibility would never enter their
minds, and why?
It's why in the aftermath of 9/11, you could hear one after another
white person demanding to know, and being treated as reasonable for
asking it, "where are the moderate voices in the Arab Muslim community
prepared to condemn terrorism," all because nineteen out of 1.5 billion
Muslims on Planet Earth flew planes into buildings. Yet one cannot
fathom anyone being taken seriously if they were to ask, "where are the
moderate white Christians," in the aftermath of Oklahoma City or any of
a number of abortion clinic bombings.
It's why whenever this issue is raised, white folks rush to insist that
we're "just individuals," and want to be thought of as such, rather than
as whites. Indeed, we often believe that to even point out our racial
identity is racist, as it groups us unfairly and diminishes our
"humanness," or "Americanness."
Of course, the irony in such a position is that it is only members of
the dominant group in a society who could ever have the luxury of
viewing ourselves, or expecting to be viewed by others as "individuals."
That's the point: no one else has ever been able to assume they would be
viewed that way, because at no point have they been, nor do they get to
be so viewed today, as the aforementioned examples demonstrate all too
clearly.
To even say that our group status is irrelevant or should be is to
suggest that one has enjoyed the privilege of experiencing the world
that way (or rather, believing that one was). In other words, it is the
result of a particular social arrangement, whereby some and not others
have been seen as individuals no matter the actions of others within
their group. There is, of course a phrase for this arrangement.
White privilege.
And until it is eradicated, dug up and discarded root and branch, there
can be no legitimate discussion of "colorblindness" or simple
individualism. Nor can we be taken seriously as a nation when we hold
ourselves up as an example to other nations of what freedom and
democracy are supposed to look like.

Tim Wise is an essayist, activist and father. He can be reached at
[log in to unmask], and his website is located at www.timwise.org. Hate
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