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

by George Yancy

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...