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What if over tea, what if on our walks, what if in the long yawn of the fog, what if in the long middle of the wait, what if in the passage, in the what if that carries us each day into seasons, what if in the renewed resilience, what if in the endlessness,
what if in a lifetime of conversations, what if in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?
What if you’re the destruction coursing beneath your language of savior? Is that, too, not fucked up? You say, if other white people had not … or if it seemed like not enough … I would have …
What is it we want to keep conscious, to stay known, even as we say, each in our own way, I so love I know I shrink I’m asked I’m also I react I smell I feel I think I’ve been told I remember I see I didn’t I thought I felt I failed I suspect I was doing I’m sure I read I needed I wouldn’t I was I should’ve I felt I could’ve I never I’m sure I ask …
justice and the openings for just us.
The phrase “white privilege” was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define “invisible systems conferring racial dominance on my group.”4 McIntosh came to understand that she benefited from hierarchical assumptions and policies simply because she was white. I would have preferred if instead of “white privilege” she had used the term “white living,” because “privilege” suggested white dominance was tied to economics.
“They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their own narratives and coming up short,” he said. “I include myself in that,” he added after a moment. “We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male archetype. The individual actor on the grand stage always had the support of a genocidal government, but this is not the narrative we grew up with. It’s a challenge to adjust.”
Full comprehension would include the understanding that white privilege comes with expectations of protection and preferences no matter where he lives in the country, what job he has, or how much money he makes.
It’s hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence. Frank Wilderson III, chair of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, borrows from Orlando Patterson the sociological term “social death” to explain my there-but-not-there status in a historically antiblack society. The outrage—and if we are generous, the embarrassment that occasioned the white passenger’s comment—was a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of the understood privileges of whiteness.
These phrases—white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation—have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation. At
Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white male dominance is the privilege. There’s no outrunning the kingdom, the power, and the glory.
The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have.
Because decisions get made that reinstate white hierarchies every day, it would be good if the culture of whiteness were marked and made visible to those who can’t see it by those not invested in keeping it primary. Awareness has to happen in rooms where everyone’s white, since those rooms are already in place.1
“James Baldwin Discusses the Problem of Being White in America”: “Whites sought to civilize black people before civilizing themselves.”
But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and yet, on the other hand, it seems all too likely.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route: “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.”
I wonder if white people don’t develop friendships with people of color, especially blacks, because they don’t want to be implicated in or confronted by white violence against black people.
He will not know himself as the favored even as he destroys others in order not to know. Even as person after person lives dependent on him, waiting for him, looking to him to know what he cannot—or is it will not?—know.
Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes. In “Sexism—a Problem with a Name,” Sara Ahmed writes that “if you name the problem you become the problem.”7 To create discomfort by pointing out facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I want to shout at everyone, including myself.
But situations (claims, blogposts, diversity workshop activities, whatever) manufactured specifically to elicit white shame, penance, etc., make me uneasy—I feel like unholy transactions are in the offing, like white moral masochism is getting a thrill.
I suspect some of my frustration, exhaustion, and sadness is that the calls get made, over and over and over, brilliantly and urgently, and so many white people shrug, or thrill to them emotionally but then do nothing.
Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of women of Color, I do not only mean Black women…. The woman of Color who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us.
I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.
How far away can I get from confrontation by using the language of inquiry? Where are you going with this analogy?
Normally, I would never say a particular white man stands in for white men, because I know better. I have watched white people reduce black people not to a single black person but to a single imagined black person, imagined animal, imagined thing, imagined ignoramus, imagined depravity, imagined criminality, imagined aggressor, superpredator, imagined whore, imagined poverty queen, imagined baby maker, imagined inferior being in need of everything belonging to white people including air and water while stealing everything belonging to white people including air and water and on and on toward
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How to understand all our looking away?
Have so many become so vulnerable to white dominance that the pathways to imagined change are wiped out of our brains and our default consciousnesses are in their lowest levels of activity, meaning we can no longer envision a new type of future or even really see what’s happening in our present?
The “toomuchness” of our present reality sometimes gives rise to humor but could occasion disassociation, detachment from engagement, a refusal to engage in our democratic practices given how structural and invasive white supremacy remains.
E pluribus unum might have been the first national mistake.
“The analysis of our murderer, and of our murder, is so we can see we are not murdered. We survive. And then, as we catch a sudden glimpse of ourselves, we shudder, for we are shattered. Nothing survives. The nothingness we share is all that’s real. That’s what we come out to show. That showing is, or ought to be, our constant study.” Appropriate that.
What I know is that an inchoate desire for a future other than the one that seems to be forming our days brings me to a seat around any table to lean forward, to hear, to respond, to await response from any other. Tell me something, one thing, the thing, tell me that thing.9
For some of us, and I include myself here, remaining in the quotidian of disturbance is our way of staying honest until another strategy offers a new pathway, an as-yet-unimagined pathway that allows existing structures to stop replicating. Until then, to forfeit the ability to attempt again, to converse again, to speak with, to question, and to listen to, is to be complicit with the violence of an unchanging structure contending with the aliveness and constant movement of all of us.
The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
