Monkeyfist.com: My White Problem -- And Ours

A condition of antiracist work is a kind of attunement, an ear tuned to the pitch of racism, modulated to register even the low, subtle tones of racial oppression. But sensitivity has its costs. The end of antiracist work is the end of racial oppression, an end that's worth any good faith mishearing. Better to be overly sensitive to race than a dullard.

White Americans, and particularly men, who would do antiracist work must acquire such attunement through moral education, through tutelage. Only rarely -- because of our socialization, itself a product and reinforcement of White privilege -- do we possess the ear we need, and then only by overcoming not only our lack of it, but our native, hostile clumsiness to it. Most of us have to earn it, through careful and attentive listening, chiefly to people of color, to women, to those for whom such an attunement is a skill of survival, imbibed with mother's milk. To gain the attunement we need, White men must destroy old attachments and form new ones. Only by our genuine love for the oppressed other may we dissolve our native attachments (to our privilege, to our arrogation, to our power) and form new attachments of justice and care and concern.

One must be attuned before one may acquire the quality of opposition that comes from being antiracist rather than just acting that way at times. Like all social fitnesses attunement to racism is a matter of degree: sharpened by use, dulled by quiescence. One of my projects is antiracist work. I need a finely pitched ear.

And so, during a recent car trip from Dallas to Atlanta and back, on interstates 10 and 20, to the capital of the New South through the heart of the Old, I witnessed the following scenes.

In Lafayette, LA, just off the 10, at Mulate's, a classic Arcadian restaurant, a group of about 25 White men and women were drinking beer around the bar, watching a football game on tv, LSU and Georgia Tech. At one point, a lull in the ambient noise, I heard a male voice use the n-word to describe one of the players.

During the long drive across Alabama, where there are few radio stations other than C&W (or fundamentalist Christian), I heard two songs repeatedly: Hank Williams Jr.'s "If the South Woulda Won" and Alabama's "When It All Goes South." Each is little more than a tribute to neoconfederates -- and their supporters, among whom, in the Congress alone, are Phil Gramm (R-TX), Trent Lott (R-MS), Thad Cochran (R-MS), Jesse Helms (R-NC), Strom Thurmond (R-SC), Dick Armey (R-TX), Lindsey Graham (R-SC); and George W. Bush's Attorney General nominee, John Ashcroft -- who propagandize the antebellum South and advocate a return to (at least) the legal segregation of the Jim Crow era.

(Ashcroft, among his other confused and debased views, claims that secession and civil war in service of slavery's perpetuation are honorable, not perverse ends:

Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern Patriots like Lee, Jackson, and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda ( Southern Partisan; emphasis added).

Extolling the virtues of the Confederacy, with or without criticism of slavery or Jim Crow segregation, is a remarkable enactment of White privilege, especially from a Senator and future US Attorney General. I wonder if Ashcroft's pledge to "do more" to defend "Southern Patriots like Lee, Jackson, and Davis" will include doing less to uphold the law, including civil rights. The scornful neglect of labor laws by the Reagan administration during the 1980s offers a chilling precedent.)

In Atlanta (a city about which W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, in The Souls of Black Folks in 1903, that it "must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success" -- save for MLK, it seems to have done little since), in an IHOP, within earshot of several black folk, a White male, a Protestant minister, loudly asked, "is there anything more ridiculous than a black nativity scene?" The clearly absurd implication being that White nativity scenes are less ridiculous (because, one presumes, less historically anachronistic -- a complete falsehood) than black ones.

In Atlanta, at a holiday party in a private home, a White man, an on-call, out-of-uniform Georgia police officer remarked -- about the same football game playing at Mulate's a few days before -- that "they" must have played so poorly because "they'd eaten a lot of fried chicken before the game and had greasy fingers." A remark accepted without comment (or nervous laughter or dissent or dispute) by the White men to whom it was passed.

In Atlanta, in a private home, during a vigorous conversation about drugs and decriminalization, a White man characterized the American drug problem as largely a matter of black crack users. He did so overtly and by using coded language about an Atlanta public housing project. He later denied that anything he said or thought about drugs had anything to do with race.

In Mississippi, along state highway 49 between Jackson and Biloxi, I stopped at a souvenir stand to buy a few Southern delicacies: chow chow, blackeyed pea relish, boiled peanuts. In the back I saw a shelf of racist statuary: dozens of (18" to 24" high) Aunt Jemima, Stepin' Fetchit, and jazz musician figures with features horribly distorted to match White supremacist representations of black folk -- in effect, I'd stumbled unwittingly into a roadside gift shop of the Ku Klux Klan.

One tactic of oppression is the implicit denial of oppression by making its infrastructure as invisible as possible. The longer race or gender oppression can be plausibly denied or shielded or masked, the better for the oppressers. Not only is it beneficial to deny the facts of oppression, it's beneficial to deny their intended results, the privileges such oppression confers, and the mechanisms by which such oppression is created, maintained, extended. The denial of White privilege, like the denial of racism itself, serves the interests of those who enjoy it.

It should not be surprising, then, that so many White people are so confused about what racism is; such confusion reinforces the status quo and sets the bar of justice and social change far too low. White people want to and do claim that racism is (only the) overt expression of racial bigotry or prejudice, and that such overt expression is socially impermissible. And so it is in situations and contexts, normally, where black people are really present because they have some social or institutional power -- but these are rare in the South, as I rediscovered.

This patterned White response -- so remarkably uniform as to merit analysis -- obfuscates in two ways: first, by trying to make racist social structures and institutions invisible by directing critical attention away from them and onto the failings of individuals; second, by falsely claiming that bigotry and prejudice are unuttered and unutterable

A common thread running through these Southern vignettes is the maintenance, construction, and enjoyment of White company. In each vignette the context or institutional setting is White-dominated or controlled. Most White people would not be so brazen in the real presence of black folks -- a fact that makes the corporate pollution of public airwaves by corporate-backed neoconfederate propagandists all the more dismaying -- but what can be done? Given history and White privilege and power as it's presently constituted (both in the South and elsewhere), one cannot fault black folks for staying away when possible. Every all-White assemblage or gathering isn't racist per se, of course; but they all seem vulnerable to expressions of racial bigotry, expressions which are both enactments and reinforcements of White privilege. And White company seems more likely to be the scene of displays and enactments of White privilege than mixed company; but this, too, can be taken too far since one of the purposes of social displays of White privilege is intimidation and silencing of blacks. What can antiracist Whites do? Perhaps especially for White men -- who're often less physically vulnerable than women to racist White men -- who would do the work of antiracism, we must publicly oppose, in clear and strong terms, racial bigotry, prejudice, and displays of White privilege, even when subtle or dim. As I found in the not so new New South, to my dismay and deflation, one doesn't have to look hard or long to find opportunities.

What of presumptions and burdens of proof? The task of validating a claim belongs prima facie to the one who makes it. And so it is with marking the words or actions of others -- to say nothing of social structures and forces and institutions -- as racist. The coarse, vulgar pattern of opposition to marking racism is to deny its value in all but the most obvious or extreme cases; in, that is, those cases where it least needs to be marked. Charges of racism, so the habituated response goes, are so stigmatizing that making them effectively forecloses all possibility of rational discourse. The risk, opponents claim implicitly, of mismarking racism far outweighs the gains of marking it properly. That's exactly backwards. The costs of racism's perpetuation far outweigh the prices of mismarking it. The implied claim, that most markings of racism are either mistaken or insincere, is a claim which must itself be validated, if it can be, by those who make it. I happily accept the burden to validate my claims to mark racism. I do not accept as valid the implied claim that most markings of racism are false or made in bad faith, especially since those who habitually make this claim rarely attempt to validate it at all.

Attunement is a condition of antiracist work. One of its substantive tasks, at least for White people, is public opposition to White expressions of racial bigotry and prejudice, which are ultimately signs and enactments of White privilege. Recognizing those signs and enactments without going on to oppose them is nothing more than an empty, private gesture.