Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America

by George Yancy

What if I told you that I’m sexist? Well, I am. Yes. I said it and I mean just that. I have watched my male students squirm in their seats when I’ve asked them to identify and talk about their sexism. There are few men, I suspect, who would say that they are sexists, and even fewer would admit that their sexism actually oppresses women. Certainly not publicly as I have just done. No taking it back now.

Yet, I refuse to remain a prisoner to the lie that we men like to tell ourselves—that we are beyond the messiness of sexism and male patriarchy, that we don’t oppress women. Let me clarify. This doesn’t mean that I intentionally hate women or that I desire to oppress them. It means that despite my best intentions, I perpetuate sexism every day of my life. Please don’t take this as a confession for which I’m seeking forgiveness. Confessions can be easy, especially when we know that forgiveness is immediately forthcoming. As a sexist, I have failed women. I have failed to speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage critically and extensively their pain and suffering in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity of gender roles in my own life. I have failed to challenge those poisonous assumptions that women are “inferior” to men or to speak out loudly in the company of male philosophers who believe that feminist philosophy is just a non-philosophical fad. I have been complicit with, and have allowed myself to be seduced by, a country that makes billions of dollars from sexually objectifying women, from pornography, commercials, video games, to Hollywood movies. I am not innocent. I have been fed on a poisonous diet of images that fragment women into mere body parts. I have also been complicit with a dominant male narrative that says that women enjoy being treated like sexual toys. In our collective male imagination, women are “things” to be used for our vi...

You see, the complicity, the responsibility, the pain that I cause runs deep. And, get this. I refuse to seek shelter; I refuse to live a lie. So, every day of my life I fight against the dominant male narrative, choosing to see women as subjects, not objects. But even as I fight, there are moments of failure. Just because I fight against sexism does not give me clean hands, as it were, at the end of the day; I continue to falter, and I continue to oppress. And even though the ways in which I oppress women are unintentional, this does not free me from being responsible.

This letter is not asking you to feel bad about yourself, to wallow in guilt. That is too easy. I’m asking for you to tarry, to linger, with the ways in which you perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which you are racist. I’m now daring you to face a racist history which, paraphrasing Baldwin, has placed you where you are and that has formed your own racism. Again, in the spirit of Baldwin, I am asking you to enter into battle with your white self. I’m asking that you open yourself up; to speak to, to admit to, the racist poison that is inside of you. Again, take a deep breath. Don’t tell me about how many Black friends you have. Don’t tell me that you are married to someone of color. Don’t tell me that you voted for Obama. Don’t tell me that I’m the racist. Don’t tell me that you don’t see color. Don’t tell me that I’m blaming whites for everything. To do so is to hide yet again. You may have never used the N-word in your life, you may hate the KKK, but that does not mean that you don’t harbor racism and benefit from racism. After all, you are part of a system that allows you to walk into stores where you are not followed, where you get to go for a bank loan and your skin does not count against you, where you don’t need to engage in “the talk” that Black people and people of color must tell their children when they are confronted by white police officers. As you reap comfort from being white, we suffer for being Black and people of color. But your comfort is linked to...

I’m with Baldwin on this one. The question that white America must face is why did you, white people, need the nigger in the first place? Baldwin says that white people simply need to face that question. My reconciliation with this country, the reconciliation of Black bodies with this country, this “Sweet land of liberty,” will remain hollow until white America, white people are able to face that question. For this “sweet land” will remain bitter and “liberty” a mere farce without white people first facing that question, without white people coming to risk themselves, to give themselves over to the truth that they, you, are the nigger, not me. Like Baldwin, I have no use for the term nigger, but you do. I know that I’m not a nigger. Nigger is not my name. Baldwin’s words are as painfully relevant and prophetic as they were when he said them in 1963 to African American psychologist Kenneth Clark. Thus, I end this chapter with Baldwin’s powerful insight and inimitable wisdom: What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger. I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it. The question you’ve got to ask yourself—the white population of this country has got to ask itself. . . . If I’m not a nigger here and you invented him—you, the white people, invented him—then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it’s abl...

Yet as white, there are goodies to be reaped, and your hands are not totally clean. Speaking of contemporary white supremacist organizations, Jessie Daniels writes: In many ways, the presence of white supremacist organizations and their discourse functions to confirm the social order for whites in much the same fashion that, in another historical context, lynching—violence directed primarily at Black men—functioned. Even those not implicated, those who may have been appalled by such “vulgar” displays, still reaped the rewards of living in a system in which being born white was a social condition vastly privileged over being born Black. That white supremacists periodically act on these beliefs only confirms what many people of color already know about life in a white supremacist context—their lives are in danger.9

As men, we have collectively failed women; we have failed ourselves by not interrogating a conception and a system of masculinity and power that violates the integrity of women’s lives, their desires, their self-understanding. Because I’m able to point this out, however, doesn’t provide me with clean hands. I don’t want to be coaxed into accepting a critical feminist approach to patriarchy by being told that I’m one of the “good ones.” My objective is not to propitiate women, but to take ownership of my sexism and my male privilege, even as it is complicated by race, and to make a difference in terms of how I treat women and trouble the systemic structure of patriarchy. The reader is

In this view, “All whites are responsible for white dominance since their ‘very being depends on it.’”42 In short, as white, you are constituted relationally and preconfigured in the lives of Black people and people of color, especially in ways that perpetuate white racism and that have implications for their oppression. I understand that you didn’t create the system of white supremacy, but this does not free you from perpetuating white racism, it does not free you from the ways in which you are responsible for the maintenance of white racism. Part of the problem, as Barbara Applebaum brilliantly argues,43 is that white people presume a thin causal nexus within which racist responsibility must be directly and causally traced back to their actions for that action to qualify as racist. My point, though, is that white people fail to understand the ways in which a thick conception of the embedded white racist self, a self that is also linked to perpetuating structural injustice, highlights their being part of a larger white racist social network of “belonging together with [white] others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which [whites] seek benefits and aim to realize projects.”44 This is what I had in mind in chapter 2 where I briefly mentioned being white and being positioned systemically or structurally within a white supremacist world. So, by simply walking into a store to shop, it is as if you’ve signed an invisible contract wi...

White people who responded angrily to my letter appear to have assumed that when it came to their racism, the racism that they rejected, they were able to ascertain whether or not they were racist through a sincere act of introspection. As one reader wrote, “Yancy doesn’t know my heart.”50 Given the moral investment that white people place in the rhetoric of a “color-blind” United States, despite their embeddedness within systemic white racist practices, and the social stigma that they feel when labeled racist, I would argue, with Ann Berlak, that “introspection as ordinarily understood is more often an imaginative construction than a retrieval process.”51 That is, it is not an effective method for ascertaining the “truth” about the internal depth of one’s white racism.

My conception of the opaque white racist self and the embedded white racist self are two important concepts that point to complex ways in which, as a white person, you never clearly come to a place of “arrival”—where such a place suggests a static noun—as a “nonracist white.” For me, just as I am an antisexist sexist, as white, you are an antiracist racist,