What's Wrong With Anti-Racism

[le_bebna_kamni]

I grew up in an environment that might fall under the category "passively racist". We certainly didn't tell "people of color" to stay out of restaurants or churches, or send hate letters to the couple of black families and the one Muslim family who lived in town. We didn't even make "Black jokes" (although Polish jokes were okay).

But we were the ones who would pointedly seek out minority person and befriend them in a patronizing way to show everyone else how not-racist we were. We complained about "the blacks" (referring to urban poor people, not our "friends", of course) -- slavery was over; they've got the right to vote; so what's their problem? We thought that Southern American English was an acceptable dialect and didn't complain about the people who said "warsh", but constantly complained about this thing called 'Ebonics' that we'd heard about on the news.

And most of all, we prided ourselves on the fact that we *obviously* weren't racist, because we didn't do all those horrible things the KKK does...and of course that's all that racism is or can be....

But since moving out of my hick town, I've learned a lot. Perhaps a bit too much, because I've started to feel the embarrassment and guilt that many white people start to feel when they recognize the passive assumptions that contribute to problems with racism. It's more than a simple guilt over past behaviors; rather, it's a feeling of shame simply because of being white and not being oppressed in the same way that other people are. In more recent years, this feeling of guilt has been something intentionally cultivated by anti-racist movements.

Unfortunately, as I've experienced myself, the guilt tends to provoke a feeling of helplessness instead of any concrete action that might be taken to make the situation better. The reasons for this are fairly straightforward:

1) First the white person is told that they're racist and will always continue to be racist even if they've changed their previously racist assumptions.

2) All whites participate -- even unwillingly -- in a system that perpetuates the problem.

3) And whites aren't allowed to make any changes to the system themselves, because that would be patronizing. Only oppressed people are allowed to change the system

While there is a mild kernel of truth behind the last one¹, it's completely counterproductive to set people up in an "I'm a bad person, the world is bad, but I'm incapable of doing anything" position -- which is what anti-racism does. Even worse, it demands that white people *desire* to take on the role of the victim, to stop exercising any personal power and abdicate positions of authority, but then prohibits them from then feeling powerless or claiming the role of victim.

So I wanted to post this article that, while a little dated (from 1999), still has a lot of relevance:

What's Wrong with Anti-Racism, by Thankdeka

Of particular note is this line, which I think is a good analogy for why the concept of "white privilege" -- or at least how it's used, even if it's a valid term -- is antithetical to meaningful progress:

Imagine that business and government leaders decreed that all left-handed people must have their left hand amputated. Special police forces and armies are established to find such persons and oversee the procedure. University professors and theologians begin to write tracts to justify this new policy. Soon right-handed persons begin to think of themselves as having right-hand privilege. The actual content of this privilege, of course, is negative: it's the privilege of not having one's left hand cut off. The privilege, in short, is the avoidance of being tortured by the ruling elite. To speak of such a privilege -- if we must call it that -- is not to speak of power but rather of powerlessness in the midst of a pervasive system of abuse -- and to admit that the best we can do in the face of injustice is duck and thus avoid being a target.

My point is this. Talk of white skin privilege is talk about the way in which some of the citizens of this country are able to avoid being mutilated - or less metaphorically, to avoid having their basic human rights violated.

This explanation, in its own fashion, is permission for white people to stop punishing themselves simply for being white. It puts the ability to do something, to look for reasonable forms of action instead of inaction, back in the hands of willing allies.

-------------------------------------------------------------
¹ For example, when the NAACP first started, it was often necessary for most of its leaders to be white in order to take the kinds of legal actions necessary to make progress. However, in this day and age when black people are no longer banned from going into a courthouse or legislative building, it would be patronizing to have an entire board of white people on the NAACP deciding what the best policies for black people are. Not that white people should never help, or never take positions of leadership in an organization like the NAACP. Like most things, there's a balance.

Comments

[mothwentbad.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. What have you done? I haven't really done much more than try to figure out some bad habits and avoid them.