My White Ignorance

Consider this post a confession, and a belated apology for my ignorance.

I am a white man, who until yesterday never realized how deeply the programming of "whiteness" had been wired into my thinking, and my speech patterns. I also had no idea how ignorant I am regarding white privilege. So ignorant that when I try to speak out against racism, I am accused of using coded language, because I don't truly understand what I am saying. I have been approaching the issue of racism from the stance of an individual who wants nothing more than to spread compassion and love, but in doing so, I am ignoring the greater whole of society, culture, humanity. I am ignoring my own white privilege.

While this may be who I am now, or how I come across to others, this is not the man that I want to be. I am making it my goal, my priority, to better understand my own "whiteness," and how that impacts others, whether it be intentional or by default. I am hoping that by doing so, I will be better equipped to join the fight against racism. While reading about white privilege I found an article written by Kendall Clark titled My White Problem -- And Ours, and I would like to share parts of it here.

A condition of anti racist 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 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

The more I consider these concepts, I have this sinking realization that I have spent a huge chunk of my life unfocused. I feel really ashamed that it has taken me this long to fully grasp the scale of this, and that I have allowed myself to remain ignorant all these years. I am not going to post the link to the conversation that I was involved in that opened my eyes to this reality, because it is seriously just too damn embarrassing. The more I read about this, the more stupid I feel.

Two Truths Too Many.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday. I was in the third grade, and our teacher Mrs. Leonard wanted to demonstrate for the class how easy it was for a rumor to get started. She had us arrange our chairs so that we sat loosely in a large circle that was open at one end. Approaching one of the children on the end of the crescent, she bent over and whispered something ever so quietly into his ear, and then instructed him to turn to the person on his left and do the same. After each of us had been given our turn to "pass it on," Mrs. Leonard asked the child at the end the circle to please state for the class what the message was. There was an explosion of laughter when the child, with an apprehensive and confused look about her asked rather timidly: 'Weird goats are singing at work?' After the laughter died down, our teacher informed us that the original sentence had actually been 'We are going to see if this works.'

You could certainly choose to attribute this silliness to the fact that we were children in the third grade, and that would be totally logical. Maybe it was our unconscious intention to exaggerate and distort the message as it traveled between us, hoping for a laugh at the end. Then again, the final message bore an uncanny similarity to the original, and aside from the fact that most of the words were completely different, they also sounded very much alike. So maybe we weren't trying to mix it up and make it silly after all, maybe the end result was indicative of what really happens when information is delivered from one person to the next.

Although this tale may seem mildly amusing and simplistic on the surface, it has proven time and again throughout my life to contain much more than a quick laugh. If I were hard pressed to choose a specific event in my childhood, with pin point accuracy as to precisely when I lost my innocence (mom telling me at five that Santa was pretend not withstanding), it would be this moment. Ever since then, there has been a part of me that questions the sincerity and validity of everything that I see, read, or hear. I can't help it. It's not that I am distrustful or have some innate paranoia that people are liars, instead I find myself doubting the human ability to accurately pass along information without it becoming tainted along the way. Whether the disconnect between two people is intentional or not, it does happen.

There are any number of outlets through which we can see this concept being played out. Take for example history books or the evening news: two surprisingly similar mediums. The authors don't just pick and choose which stories to tell, they decide how to tell them. But that is only half of the picture; the intentional half, the spin. What accounts for, or shields us from the unintentional embellishments, the accidental coloring? The longer we contemplate the likelihood of any tale to contain 100% truth, the closer it brings us to realizing that quite possibly nothing is true, save for individual truths. Truths that have not been subjected to the unavoidable filtering that comes of delivering it from me, to you.

For this reason it is critically important that we all at least try to seek our own understandings, arriving at our own truths. If we rely solely on others who reside outside of ourselves to accomplish this for us, we will never understand who we are, or what our unique purpose is in this life. Neither should we allow ourselves to grow subdued under the plethora of stimuli and false priorities available to us in our modern world. Carefully crafted agendas handed over to us on attractive platters labeled "drink me, eat me." OK I'll admit it; conformity is unavoidable, and necessary to an extent. I sit here now conforming my expression, my message to this mode of communication so that you might be able to receive it. But by all means, question it. Tear it apart if need be! This is your gift, your privilege, your responsibility.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

~ Dylan Thomas