Just Us: An American Conversation

by Claudia Rankine

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. Nonetheless, the phrase has stuck.

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.

What was it that Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing? “I got into Yale Law School. That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.” He apparently believed this despite the fact that his grandfather went to Yale.

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. From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared.

If white people keep forgetting to remember that black lives matter, as they clearly do given their acceptance of everything from racist comments by friends and colleagues to the lack of sentencing of most police officers who kill unarmed blacks, to more structural racist practices, then they will always be surprised when those memories take hold.

We are a sad lot churning inside the repetitions and insistences of the “afterlife of slavery.” Notes and Sources 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.

How does one combat the racism of a culture? It’s difficult to be hopeful when even the “eye gaze patterns” of teachers in preschool tend to target black children, especially boys, at the sign of any disturbance in the classroom.4 One wonders how this could not become a social cue for all the children.

Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: “Consequently, if we whites want to interrupt this system, we have to get racially uncomfortable and to be willing to examine the effects of our racial engagement. This includes not indulging in whatever reactions we have—anger, defensiveness, self-pity, and so forth—in a given cross-racial encounter without first reflecting on what is driving our reactions and how they will affect other people. Tears that are driven by white guilt are self-indulgent. When we are mired in guilt, we are narcissistic and ineffective; guilt functions as an excuse for inaction. Further, because we so seldom have authentic and sustained cross-racial relationships, our tears do not feel like solidarity to people of color we have not previously supported. Instead, our tears function as impotent reflexes that don’t lead to constructive action. We need to reflect on when we cry and when we don’t, and why.”

Even without luck or chance of birth the scaffolding has rungs and legacy and the myth of meritocracy fixed in white. That’s how white holds itself together as the days hold so many white would not— White is living within brick-and-mortar, walling off all others’ loss, exhaustion, aggrieved exposure, dispossessed despair— in daylight white hardens its features.

What does it mean to want a thing to change but then feel bullied by that change? Is understanding change? I am not sure. The playwright and poet Samuel Beckett once said that writing Waiting for Godot was a way of finding “a form that accommodates the mess.” Are conversations accommodations? Perhaps words are like rooms; they have to make room for people. Dude, I am here. We are here.

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 an imagined no one.2 All this wouldn’t matter if this same category of white people weren’t strategizing tests, writing exams, grading exams, funding schools, granting bank loans, selling property, making laws, suppressing voters, determining sentences, evaluating pain, teaching classes, creating and perpetuating master narratives, hiring, firing, demoting, killing imagined me.3 Institutional whiteness has stereotyped blackness and used this particular image to murder by. Given that process, if systemic change is what is wanted, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as the poet Audre Lorde took the time to tell us.

I ask if women are less tolerant of abusive behavior by men in our current political climate. She says many women at the protest were wearing “WOMEN FOR KAVANAUGH” T-shirts. Sometimes they had signs calling for “Due Process” and “Protect Our Sons.” She tells me that in televised interview after interview women and mothers are saying, “Boys will be boys.” How their sons have morphed into Kavanaugh defies a certain logic but, whatever. Don’t they have daughters? I ask. Don’t they matter? I ask these questions even as I know that what matters is the wealth, power, and access that proximity affords, whether actual or aspirational, in the office or at the altar. Not to mention—whose boys get to be boys?4 I begin to think isn’t this too simple even as I know on a certain level the apparent simplicity of it is what keeps the power dynamics in place, and whiteness in power.

Is blondness the heel, the nose job, the skin bleaching, or none of these? This culture made us, and as wrong or as right as we can be, we know someone is always looking. Amen to that, I didn’t say, as four men arrived with trays of cake, vanilla ice cream already melting into the dark chocolate. Though life is not always so sweet.

As I look around, I wonder if, for bleached blonds who are white, the added blondness is whitening their whiteness, erasing their ethnicity? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white Anglo-Saxons in the United States persecuted Italians and the Irish, ostensibly for their religion, before they could claim whiteness. Their passports associated them with blackness, and for some, perhaps, their dark hair confirmed their nonwhite status. I suppose if all I had to do was bleach my hair blond to stop white supremacists from wanting to burn crosses in my yard, I might consider blondness myself.

“Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt…. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”