All or Nothing
The weight of knowledge, of “consciousness”, is heavy. I can neither look at nor listen to anything without a critical eye anymore, without it being immediately contextualized within my understanding of race, power, politics, and other such heavy subjects.
I was watching the 12th grade students at my internship put on their senior projects – videos that provided a snapshot into their lives – montages of baby pictures, friend testimonials, other things that they felt would put who they were into context for their viewers. And as I watched, there was the little spark of cynicism, the voice that said “must be nice”. Must be nice, to be privileged to a life unburdened by any internal or external discussion about matters such as race or power, any personal struggle notwithstanding. The last part of that statement acknowledges that people of all colors and creeds experience struggle, but white privilege liberates white people from the additional burden of race, and all the meaning that goes along with it.
But as I watched these videos I did not begrudge these children their experiences, their ability to live without certain burdens. And I realized that I do not begrudge white people their privilege, either. Like when I watch any of the countless “neutral” or “normative” movies featuring the conflicts of white protagonists, where race is simply not an issue, I am able to be right there with them through the highs and the lows, the struggles and the victories. But those movies, like the insular world in which white people are able to live, are fiction. At least they do not reflect my reality, or the reality for other people of color in the United States.
I would also say that they do not reflect white people’s own reality, that they choose to ignore. And so it is not privilege itself that I begrudge white people, but the failure to acknowledge privilege as such. It is true that sometimes I experience a bitterness towards white people’s ability to sit within their bubbles and be oblivious to a larger reality. But nothing is more infuriating then when they extend themselves outside of the bubble – but still from within the bubble – to offer their commentary or engage in any sort of activism, including liberal advocacy for people of color on one end of the spectrum and overt demonstrations of racism on the other.
In other words, if they – white people – are going to live within the bubble, then they should tuck in their arms and legs and detach themselves entirely from the greater reality, and not pretend to understand a single thing about the world outside. They should not argue with people of color over their perceptions, they should not deny any grievances. If they are going to stick their fingers in their ears, then they should also stick socks in their mouths. They should respectfully decline any investment in the conversation and retreat to the comfortable confines of the bubble.
The alternative, of course, is to come full-bodied outside the bubble and to embrace, however difficult, the full reality of race and power as it applies to them, and to their relationships with people of color.
This makes me think in a roundabout way of a quote from Anzaldua about white guilt, where she essentially says that guilt is not an emotion, it's an intellectualization of an emotion where the real emotion is fear. That fear, of course, is fear of losing privilege. I try to take this to heart – as a Jew, yeah I have my share of white guilt, but I also try to move away from that in acknowledgment that guilt will ultimately lead to rage against people of color, as I see happen with so many "well meaning white liberals."
There is no easy answer, but – and I think the quote I roughly cited implies the following – I think a crucial step for white people is: Own your own shit FIRST. Think about your whiteness as opposed to "other people's" race, think about the privilege is gets you. It means CONFRONT your own fears and discomforts. And I think there is a way to simultaneously not apologize for the privilege or try to deny it (I'm thinking here of the example of class privilege where white rich kids pretend they have no money in supposed solidarity or out of embarrassment or guilt) but to do the work they can to dismantle that hierarchy. But I think, oddly enough, one kind of attitude that's actually fruitful for white people is an "it is what it is" attitude.
I'm not sure if I'm making sense here. In any case I love a lot about your blog but I *love* love it's format – it's one of the only blogs I read that doesn't do that irritating thing where "read more" means going to a whole different page.
Ha, yeah, I searched high and low for that plugin that allows the rest of the text to just appear. Very smooth.
As to what you said, yeah, that's an understanding that I came to relatively recently. Originally I was in the camp of people like Noel Ignatiev, who is all about abolishing the white race – a point with which I still agree. However, there is a problem in that abolition, if in doing so you deny privilege. I actually need to either re-write or append my "White" essay to include this. I'll probably just make a whole new one to show how my perspective has evolved.
That reminds me. There is this incredible article called "What Should White People Do?" by Linda Alcoff, that really nails the point. Let me just find the URL…
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/alcoffwhi...