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Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity
The authors of the narrative chapters represented in this volume have in common that they are dedicated to the realization of a critical, multicultural, democratic society. Individually, they are female and male, from diverse ethnicities, socio-economic class backgrounds, first language groups, religious and spiritual affiliations, and sexual orientations. They are professors of education, psychology, sociology, and communication as well as community activists. The stories that they share reveal the history of racism in this country over a fifty year period beginning in the late 1930s and continuing into the early 1980s. The stories are most diverse, and share what it was like growing up White during and after Jim Crow segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and busing and integration. Thus, there is a history here of our country's racism yesterday and today. Inviting students to experience this history may encourage them to further explore its ongoing manifestations.
304 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 1999
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November 11, 2012
This book had a huge impact on my awareness and motivation as a white person who seeks to oppose racism. Here's what I wrote part-way into the book:
I am thrilled to find kindred spirits in this book! Just unpacked from Amazon yesterday, and already found a powerful framework in Chapter 3 by Beverly Daniel Tatum: Lighting Candles in the Dark. She outlines six possible ways a white person can respond to the racial situation in our environment, based on the theory of Janet Helms.
For me it reads like an outline of how my white racial identity has developed over time, and includes the complexities of how I respond differently at different times - while I have generally been on a road to awakening, it is not a linear process.
Her six statuses are, in my own language:
1. Unconscious privilege - seeing whiteness and white privilege as "normal"
2. Oh my God - I have just discovered racism - the new convert, road to Damascus stuff
3. Resentment of the victims
4. "I don't want to be white"
5. Searching for white antiracist role models
6. Antiracist ally - with ongoing self examination
Can't wait to read more! She ends the chapter with this encouragement:
"Whether we are white or of colour, we need to know the stories of change agents. They are a renewable source of energy and courage for the long haul of interrupting oppression. In them we find the turning points, the critical incidents, the ordinary moments that have an extraordinary impact."
24 March 2012 - OK I have read more - continuing to love this book, even though some individual chapters have made little positive impact on me. One I loved today is
Chapter 4 - Subverting Racism from within: linking white identity to activism, by Becky Thompson.
Compassionately, she explores "what taboos [white people] must face down to chronicle a history that does not valorize, romanticise or inflate white activism, but that allows ourselves to take stock of the work that has been and still needs to be done?"
She also gives historical political context to the bind that white antiracists can get stuck in: the position that grew particularly in feminist circles in the late 70s and early 80s around the struggle to get better hearing for the marginalised voices of women, lesbians and gay people, people of colour and others who are oppressed by the mainstream. She describes how this positive purpose sometimes had the consequence of creating a "jockeying for authority based on one's belonging to a subordinated group."
Where this took me is into my own experience as a white man, where my group membership and the privilege I carry with me wherever I go, often triggers painful experiences for oppressed people whom I meet - which in turn reminds me of the unearned nature of my privilege and often takes me into my shame. Where I easily go then is towards Tatum and Helms (above) stage 4 - trying to be an "honorary black" or "honorary woman." Needless to say, that doesn't work for me or anybody around me.
She also tackles very directly the question of white identity, white centrality and "what to do with whiteness" - work towards a positive white identity or "destroy whiteness"? She examines efforts to "develop a white identity that is not based on subjugating others" in contrast to the call be a "race traitor" in completely overturning and destroying white racial identity.
This is important to me because I see how much my racial shame and guilt has contributed to me denying my power and attempting to shuck off my privilege - which I now see is so built into me. My education is one simple ineradicable example of my privilege. My emerging identity includes me using my power and privilege for the good of all, inlcuding to combat racism.
Thompson also contributes towards a debate I often hear in South Africa between "non-racialism" and "anti-racism." She sees how the position in favour of "abolishing whiteness" can link up with (a) conflating race and racism and (b) feeding what she calls "the debilitating ideology of colour blindness."
I am with Thompson in seeking a world that recognises and embraces difference, including but not limited to differences that are linked to race and ethnicity. She says "As [one] way of organising the world, race is not inherently oppressive. The problem is the ranking of racial categories as a means to uphold inequality."
She makes a powerful call for white antiracist activists to organise together, which requires us to find "terms that accurately describe what it means to be a white person who both acknowledges whiteness and rejects the ideology of supremacy it sustains." Yay for that!
If you're not standing in this line, you're standing in the wrong line Chapter 11, by G Pritchy Smith
This chapter is a beautifully frank and honest account of a white man's awakening awareness, driven in large part by his close relationships with black people. He describes so sensitively his experience of the "ebb and flow... that often involved, first my working towards a less racist society and, second, coping with reactions against my efforts by pulling back."
I so relate to this - it reminds me of the time I stood in a lift in the Harare business district with half a dozen white businessmen, heard them speaking of kaffirs and challenged them - only to get the fright of my life from the menace they threw at me - all before the 10th floor. I got scared and pulled back, there and then, in my efforts to speak truth to white power. Smith illuminates these experiences with a piece about how activists need to develop the ego strength to cope with these setbacks: "the boundaries of ego strength seem to stretch and enlarge slightly with each effort."
The most powerful part of his account for me, is where he acknowledges the extent to which white antiracists "have achieved a reasonably high level of antiracist activism without ever coming to terms with the worst aspects of their cultural heritage." For me as a white South African I have long held myself different from this - after all, I have known since my teens that my people did bad, very bad, for over 300 years in South Africa. Yet what hits home to me now, is how much I have hidden from personal onwership of that ugly history by defining myself as antiracist. Yet I still carry with me all the unearned privilege of my whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality.
What occurred to me in reading this, is a possible explanation for why I and so many of my white compatriots get so bent out of shape when we see black leaders behaving badly. Firstly, of course, an atrocity is an atrocity whether it is committed by apartheid troops or Mugabe's troops. But also, isn't it true for us as antracist whites, that black atrocities remind us of the white atrocities committed by our recent ancestors, that we may not have fully owned and processed?
The hope I take from Smith's chapter is emobodied in the following: "[in trying to] forget the past ... we robbed ourselves of the rich opportunities for growth that could have resulted from coming to terms with the distaseful aspects of our cultural roots."
I am thrilled to find kindred spirits in this book! Just unpacked from Amazon yesterday, and already found a powerful framework in Chapter 3 by Beverly Daniel Tatum: Lighting Candles in the Dark. She outlines six possible ways a white person can respond to the racial situation in our environment, based on the theory of Janet Helms.
For me it reads like an outline of how my white racial identity has developed over time, and includes the complexities of how I respond differently at different times - while I have generally been on a road to awakening, it is not a linear process.
Her six statuses are, in my own language:
1. Unconscious privilege - seeing whiteness and white privilege as "normal"
2. Oh my God - I have just discovered racism - the new convert, road to Damascus stuff
3. Resentment of the victims
4. "I don't want to be white"
5. Searching for white antiracist role models
6. Antiracist ally - with ongoing self examination
Can't wait to read more! She ends the chapter with this encouragement:
"Whether we are white or of colour, we need to know the stories of change agents. They are a renewable source of energy and courage for the long haul of interrupting oppression. In them we find the turning points, the critical incidents, the ordinary moments that have an extraordinary impact."
24 March 2012 - OK I have read more - continuing to love this book, even though some individual chapters have made little positive impact on me. One I loved today is
Chapter 4 - Subverting Racism from within: linking white identity to activism, by Becky Thompson.
Compassionately, she explores "what taboos [white people] must face down to chronicle a history that does not valorize, romanticise or inflate white activism, but that allows ourselves to take stock of the work that has been and still needs to be done?"
She also gives historical political context to the bind that white antiracists can get stuck in: the position that grew particularly in feminist circles in the late 70s and early 80s around the struggle to get better hearing for the marginalised voices of women, lesbians and gay people, people of colour and others who are oppressed by the mainstream. She describes how this positive purpose sometimes had the consequence of creating a "jockeying for authority based on one's belonging to a subordinated group."
Where this took me is into my own experience as a white man, where my group membership and the privilege I carry with me wherever I go, often triggers painful experiences for oppressed people whom I meet - which in turn reminds me of the unearned nature of my privilege and often takes me into my shame. Where I easily go then is towards Tatum and Helms (above) stage 4 - trying to be an "honorary black" or "honorary woman." Needless to say, that doesn't work for me or anybody around me.
She also tackles very directly the question of white identity, white centrality and "what to do with whiteness" - work towards a positive white identity or "destroy whiteness"? She examines efforts to "develop a white identity that is not based on subjugating others" in contrast to the call be a "race traitor" in completely overturning and destroying white racial identity.
This is important to me because I see how much my racial shame and guilt has contributed to me denying my power and attempting to shuck off my privilege - which I now see is so built into me. My education is one simple ineradicable example of my privilege. My emerging identity includes me using my power and privilege for the good of all, inlcuding to combat racism.
Thompson also contributes towards a debate I often hear in South Africa between "non-racialism" and "anti-racism." She sees how the position in favour of "abolishing whiteness" can link up with (a) conflating race and racism and (b) feeding what she calls "the debilitating ideology of colour blindness."
I am with Thompson in seeking a world that recognises and embraces difference, including but not limited to differences that are linked to race and ethnicity. She says "As [one] way of organising the world, race is not inherently oppressive. The problem is the ranking of racial categories as a means to uphold inequality."
She makes a powerful call for white antiracist activists to organise together, which requires us to find "terms that accurately describe what it means to be a white person who both acknowledges whiteness and rejects the ideology of supremacy it sustains." Yay for that!
If you're not standing in this line, you're standing in the wrong line Chapter 11, by G Pritchy Smith
This chapter is a beautifully frank and honest account of a white man's awakening awareness, driven in large part by his close relationships with black people. He describes so sensitively his experience of the "ebb and flow... that often involved, first my working towards a less racist society and, second, coping with reactions against my efforts by pulling back."
I so relate to this - it reminds me of the time I stood in a lift in the Harare business district with half a dozen white businessmen, heard them speaking of kaffirs and challenged them - only to get the fright of my life from the menace they threw at me - all before the 10th floor. I got scared and pulled back, there and then, in my efforts to speak truth to white power. Smith illuminates these experiences with a piece about how activists need to develop the ego strength to cope with these setbacks: "the boundaries of ego strength seem to stretch and enlarge slightly with each effort."
The most powerful part of his account for me, is where he acknowledges the extent to which white antiracists "have achieved a reasonably high level of antiracist activism without ever coming to terms with the worst aspects of their cultural heritage." For me as a white South African I have long held myself different from this - after all, I have known since my teens that my people did bad, very bad, for over 300 years in South Africa. Yet what hits home to me now, is how much I have hidden from personal onwership of that ugly history by defining myself as antiracist. Yet I still carry with me all the unearned privilege of my whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality.
What occurred to me in reading this, is a possible explanation for why I and so many of my white compatriots get so bent out of shape when we see black leaders behaving badly. Firstly, of course, an atrocity is an atrocity whether it is committed by apartheid troops or Mugabe's troops. But also, isn't it true for us as antracist whites, that black atrocities remind us of the white atrocities committed by our recent ancestors, that we may not have fully owned and processed?
The hope I take from Smith's chapter is emobodied in the following: "[in trying to] forget the past ... we robbed ourselves of the rich opportunities for growth that could have resulted from coming to terms with the distaseful aspects of our cultural roots."
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