One day in front of a class of art history students at Cornish College of the Arts, I say, “Raise your hand if you’re a racist.” I hadn’t planned on this.
That class period I was focusing on James Baldwin and Glenn Ligon, both gay men, both African American, and it hit me that because there wasn’t a black person in the room, things were getting abstract. This art is valuable and has to be taught—there really is no arguing against Baldwin, and Ligon’s painting Black Like Me #2 was one of the first President Obama brought to the White House—but how do you teach someone to have a relationship to it?
So I throw it out there: Raise your hand if you’re a racist.
As my students do that thing where they sort of just look at you, perplexed, I raise my own hand. I am deeply embarrassed, but I feel I have to be honest if I am asking them to be.
“You’ve never had a negative thought based on racial bias?” I ask.
Very slowly, arms begin to rise. I understand their confusion. Theirs is a generation in which we have elected a mixed-race president, but affirmative action has been struck down for being racist.
It was white Seattle parents (and a few from Kentucky, too) who fought all the way to the United States Supreme Court in 2007 so that race would be eliminated from consideration as a tiebreaker in competitions for placements in public schools. Despite the fact that racial inequities remain steady year after “post–civil rights” year—across indexes of health, wealth, and education—racial balancing, according to the 2007 ruling, is no longer a “compelling state interest.”
The racial tiebreaker in Seattle was originally instituted to end de facto educational racial segregation. But now segregation across Seattle schools is worse than it was in the 1980s. A few years ago, the Seattle Times published mind-blowing maps of the data; this same backslide has happened around the country.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” declared US Supreme Court chief justice John G. Roberts Jr., in 2007, siding with the Seattle parents whose kids didn’t get into Ballard High because they were white. This is legal color blindness. It has dubious precedent: In 1883, 18 years after the abolition of slavery, US Supreme Court justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote a majority opinion that ended reconciliation laws because former slaves must “cease to be the special favorite of the law.”
Today the same argument is made under the precious neologism that laws intended to redress racial inequity are themselves racist. “Racist is the new nigger,” says Riz Rollins, the writer, DJ, and KEXP personality. “For white people, the only word that begins to approximate the emotional violence a person of color experiences being called a nigger from a white person is ‘racist.’ It’s a trigger for white people that immediately conjures pain, anger, defensiveness—even for white people who are clearly racist. ‘Racist’ is now a conversation stopper almost like that device where you can skew a conversation by comparing someone to Hitler. It’s an automatic slur. And only the sickest racists will own up to the description.”
White people in Seattle are more likely to own rather than rent. White people are more likely to have health insurance and a job. White people are more likely to live longer. White people are less likely to be homeless. White people are less likely to hit the poverty level. White people are less likely to be in jail. White kids are nine times less likely than African Americans to be suspended from elementary school (in high school, it’s four times higher; in middle school, it’s five times, according to the district’s data). Nonwhite high-school graduation rates in Seattle are significantly below white graduation rates—even if you’re Asian, regardless of income level.
And then there’s the white Seattle police officer beating “the Mexican piss” out of a guy. The white Seattle police officer punching a 17-year-old African American girl in the face. The Seattle Police Guild newspaper editorial that called race-and-social-justice training classes “the enemy,” “socialist,” and anti-American.
Not that racial experience is monolithic. It’s not black and white. But it’s real. And across all measurable strata, white people in Seattle have it better.
Yet nobody is racist.
The 2010 US Census data led to reports of Seattle being the fifth whitest city in the country—reinforcing the perception of this place as a white place. But if you look at the actual numbers, 66 percent of people in Seattle identify as white, which means that one in three people are not white. That’s not a white city. It only seems like a white city when you’re in, say, Ballard or Wallingford or Fremont. If you walk the street expecting every third person you see not to be white, well, then you’ll see how weird it is to be in Ballard or Wallingford or Fremont, where almost everyone is white. If you walk the street in Rainier Valley, the opposite is true.
“In Seattle, there’s really a small amount that you have to do to be labeled a hero of diversity,” says Eddie Moore Jr., the Bush School’s outgoing director of diversity, who describes Seattle as “a segregated pattern of existence.”
He adds, “It’s just that there’s really no real challenge to how the structure in Seattle continues to assist whiteness and white male dominance in particular. When you say ‘white supremacy’ or ‘white privilege’ in Seattle, people still think you’re talking about the Klan. There’s really no skills being developed to shift the conversation. How can we be acknowledged to be so progressive, yet be identified to be so white? I wish that’s the question more Seattleites were asking themselves.”
Back at Cornish, a week after that awkward classroom moment, the vice provost has called me into her office. My classroom was in the basement; this office is on the top floor, beyond a waiting room that doubles as a gallery of finely framed alumni art and behind a wing of administrative assistants typing quietly in cubicles. I’ve never been here before, I’ve been teaching only two years, and I am scared. I’m invited into a closed office where the blinds are partially drawn to block out bright sun, to sit at a table across from the vice provost’s desk. A third white person in the room, the director of student affairs, pushes a piece of paper across the desk to me.
A student from my class—white, male—has asked for my head. His charge is that by admitting to racism, even though I described it as a problem that had to be named in order to be solved, like any other problem, I could only have been trying to recruit white supremacists. In his letter, he compares me to Hitler. I spend the next hour rehashing, in detail, the tone and content of my lecture. I am trying to be honest and I am trying to wrap my head around the accusation. I am trying to admit to being a racist while at the same time defend my ability to teach about black art history. It is, to say the least, a tortured conversation.
The charges are dismissed; the other students didn’t share his theory.
But it suddenly hits me how alien it has become just to try to define racism, and admit to it.
Every conversation about race is tortured—palpably awkward, loaded with triggers, marked by the blind spots of perception and presumption—but that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong or should stop doing it, says Scott Winn. That means you have to keep on.
“Once I realized I was racist, it was, well, what am I going to do about it?” says Winn, a mild-mannered white guy in his 30s. “That shifts the defensiveness.”
Ten years ago, Winn cofounded CARW (you say “Car W”), or the Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites. For him, getting involved in antiracism “ultimately was not a moral shift but a strategic one.” He already knew the world was racially fucked. He just had to figure out what to do next, and he began by examining whiteness as the invisible structure that defines everything—that needs to be explored and then exploded.
“Whiteness is the center that goes unnamed and unstudied, which is one way that keeps us as white folks centered, normal, that which everything else is compared to—like the way we name race only when we’re talking about a person of color,” Winn says. “We can name how some acts hurt people of color, but it’s harder to talk about how they privilege white folks.”
CARW holds an open meeting every month at the downtown Y, one of those early-20th-century brick buildings whose architecture is especially, absurdly on this occasion, Anglo. More than 20 people show up usually, sometimes up to 50. They’re young and old, male and female, straight and gay. The only thing that would tip you off from the outside that this isn’t, like, a giant poker tournament is that participants ask each other to share which gender pronoun they prefer during introductions. There’s plenty of overlap between antiracist and LGBT activists in Seattle—Others know from Othering—and the message of these intros is simply that people are not necessarily what you think they are, whatever that is.
The radical thing about CARW is that its purpose is to force awkwardness into the open. It could just as well be called Deeply Embarrassed White People Talk Awkwardly About Privilege. The first half of every meeting is devoted to group discussion of a theme. The second half is spent in committees, each attached to a separate racial-justice organization run by people of color. CARW is fueled by the philosophy that white people need to follow the lead of people of color on matters of race. (It sounds simple; what’s surprising is how seldom it occurs.) One concrete result of that idea is that CARW members volunteer as support staff—waiters, babysitters, whatever—for the activities and events of groups in the Duwamish, African American, Latino, and Filipino communities.
How have I lived in Seattle for more than five years and never heard of CARW until a year ago?
After the first meeting I go to, I describe to CARW member Esther Handy my sense that this is a conversion experience, that everything around me has begun in recent years to look different, with a totality that feels spiritual—waking up to white privilege. (For me, embarrassingly, the real awakening began late, with a 2008 story about transracial adoptees that I wrote in The Stranger, and it continues, propelled selfishly by the fact that I am marrying into a family of color. I come late, and I mean to come humbly.) Gently bringing me down to earth and shifting the focus away from me, Handy says, “Our coming around to figuring out that we should be thinking about and talking about and doing work around racial justice is great and it can be spiritual, as you mentioned. But it is in service and in honor to the awesome organizations and leaders of people of color who have been doing this work for decades… The truth is that communities of color are thinking about racial justice all the time. They’re living it and breathing it, and there’s a group of white folks supporting that work, but it’s only a small fraction of the white community at this point.”
I ask her how to talk about racism with people who don’t want to see it. I’m not talking about Tea Partyers; I’m talking about people like some of my friends and family, lefties who care, people who are on my team. Attempts to bring up race in editorial meetings at The Stranger have been as klutzy as anywhere. Even for perfectly decent, well-meaning, progressive people, it can be hard to see the connection between unintended acts of racism and actual racial injustice.
“I start with the facts,” Handy says. “It’s clear these injustices exist. I say I’m trying to understand the systems that create these inequities, and what’s my role in working to change things. Reaching out and sharing these concepts with families and friends is absolutely part of the work, it’s just not all of the work. Getting our racist uncle to stop saying bigoted things is not going to change the system. But we’re not going to change the system without talking to our friends and family about it. While it benefits us not to talk about race, let’s look at these disparities that just don’t seem right.”
I ask how often she encounters resistance to conversations about race among white people in Seattle who consider themselves progressive.
“I’d say every day,” she says. “We’re confused about it and we’ve been taught to be defensive about it. I don’t think we should be too surprised about that.”
Winn says, “Exposure is often the key thing that trips people into awareness.” The old “black friend” routine. Yes, it helps to seek out friends who are racial minorities if you want to understand racial injustice. Yes, this is weird. But so is the history of judging people based on something as arbitrary as skin color; we have to work with what we’ve got.
“After that, I think many white people are integrationists in that ‘beloved community’ way, but integration usually means assimilation,” Winn says. “As in, you’ve gotta act like us for this to work. So exposure on the terms of people of color is important. At CARW, we create a space that’s not a PC space. If you say something that’s not cool, we say here’s why language matters. That talking about it is a skill.”
At the two CARW meetings I attend, nobody tells anybody that anything’s not cool. But people vary in how much experience they have in talking and thinking about race. A very experienced turquoise-eyed lady who lives on Beacon Hill tells a story from her neighborhood: She’d been looking forward to meeting her nonwhite neighbors at a block party, but only the white neighbors showed up, talking about how they wished a Trader Joe’s would move in. “Not a Trader Joe’s!” she gasped as she told the story, laughing. “That is the definition of gentrification in Stuff White People Like.”
There’s a quiet, older woman at the meeting who comes across as a little more awkward, endearingly so. She mentions a cousin who went on a medical tourism trip to Costa Rica and returned with some choice racist remarks written in a family e-mail. She’s struggling to find a way to talk to him about it, and this isn’t the first time. “I tend to start out a little soft,” she says, gently, “and it never goes anywhere. I just need some opening lines.” Other CARW members help her figure out how to begin.
“The test of how racist you are is not how many people of color you can count as friends,” I recall someone telling me—I can’t remember who now. “It’s how many white people you’re willing to talk to about racism.”
Through CARW, I find out about WEACT, or Work of European Americans as Cultural Teachers, a group of educators who give presentations on white antiracism in Seattle schools. The reception to these presentations varies widely depending on the school. Like, at Ballard High School, the reception tends to be disbelief and defensiveness (i.e., “What are you talking about?”), whereas at Franklin High School, students go, “Yeah, duh.”
The antiracist white movement in Seattle is growing.
If you’re white and you tell a white friend you’re going to a community meeting about zoning or bike lanes or homelessness, that seems normal—like you might even make a difference in your little way. But try saying you’re going to a meeting of white antiracists.
“Jen, people won’t get it,” said a white friend, an art scholar and lifelong radical whose first serious boyfriend in the 1970s was an organizer for the African Liberation Support Committee and the Black Action Society. Her father didn’t know that; he already wouldn’t let the guy in the house just because he was black. (My father would have done the same; my dad’s attitude to the black men I’ve dated over the years has changed from “I forbid you” in college to “Why?” to, finally, “He’s going to make a great son-in-law.”) Years later, when my friend and her white partner were living in Seward Park, a white man came to their door canvassing for the NAACP.
“On some level, I felt funny that a white person was doing it,” she said. “Not funny, but surprised. Or suspicious. I don’t know, but I was suspicious. I guess I wondered, do you really care, or are you just paid to canvas?”
She wishes she’d asked him directly.
White people saving trees: check. Ending poverty: check. Improving racial equity: What’s the catch? If you’re white and talking about race, or working for the NAACP, people will ask you to explain yourself.
Doing it isn’t pretty. I’ve made a fool of myself. I’ve been accused of being a race traitor. A comment on a recent Slog post I wrote reads, “You’ve got some issues of your own, there, sweety, and it’s not the first time you’ve used ‘white’ as a pejorative. Let go of just a tiny bit of your guilt complex, and you just might find that white people can be wonderful, too.”
But how would the conversation be different if Seattle were as progressive on race as it is on the environment? This city isn’t as green as it should be, but at least we’d like it to be—nobody proposes color blindness when the color in question is green. And opportunities find us on a daily basis should we want to help make Seattle greener.
At my first CARW meeting, I shared a story from when I lived in the Central District. Driving the narrow streets, I’d notice that young black men would sometimes walk in the middle of the street and refuse to move for cars. They’d downright lope, slow like the South, where African American families coming to work at Boeing in the 1950s hailed from when they moved to this neighborhood—the only area of the city where they were allowed to live until the middle 1960s. To me, this loping was a form of historical communication, intentional or not: This is our street.
But the reason this communication was happening was the opposite: Clearly, this was no longer their street, as the neighborhood steadily homogenized, growing whiter as well as wealthier by the year. I would drive slowly behind them, as in a funeral dirge. We were getting nowhere. But I noticed that often, white drivers would honk at the men to move aside. It seemed to me the reason they honked was that they were irritated at having an experience that people of color know well: that you’re not just entitled to live anywhere you please, that there might be consequences. Honking was an attempt to reassert privilege.
The United States was started by white people, for white people. That’s the premise of the White Privilege Conference, founded in 1999 by Eddie Moore Jr., the former Bush School diversity director quoted earlier. Today, the conference is held in a different city each year, and where it used to bring maybe a couple hundred people, now more than 1,500 attend.
“It is not a conference designed to attack, degrade, or beat up on white folks,” its website reads.
“There’s some pancakes I’m not gonna be able to flip over,” Moore says. “But what I say up front is that what whiteness does, as a structure, is to limit your ability to listen to people of color, to hear people of color, to believe people of color. I would encourage people to embrace that as true, and then start to work through it—and to use me as a resource. I’m not trying to villainize anybody.”
So one answer to the question What can I do? is simple: Listen. Believe.
“I had to stop talking to white people about race, because I kept getting retraumatized,” an African American friend told me about her days as a diversity trainer. “They just wanted to talk about why they weren’t racist.”
As Moore argues, segregation—whether enforced or voluntary—teaches us to disbelieve racism. I grew up in a middle-class white suburban neighborhood. Although we never had a black family over for dinner, every house on our street hosted black men doing perp walks through our living rooms on the news. I didn’t realize the contradiction until much later—that our seemingly all-white existence was predicated on keeping other people other.
“It’s really important to recognize that race affects everything you do—and that to act otherwise is just naive,” says Julie Nelson, the director of the Seattle Office for Civil Rights (she’s white; her predecessor was an African American woman).
Every city has one of these Offices for Civil Rights, to deal with legal antidiscrimination claims, but Seattle has an additional arm of government (only two and a half full-time positions, but supported by a small army of volunteers) devoted to racial justice, called the Race and Social Justice Initiative (RSJI). It began in 2006—it was the first of its kind in the nation—in response to an anti–affirmative action initiative sponsored by Tim Eyman. (Thank you, Tim Eyman.)
At least in Seattle, racial balancing is a compelling goddamn state interest. The RSJI is officially anti-color-blind. Not finding a racially equal world, it does not pretend at one. The city worked around the fact that Eyman’s initiative specifically disallowed “quotas” or “set asides”—rather, the city strengthened the conditions of eligibility for getting city contracts by using the terms that are allowed in order to do the same thing: “good faith efforts” and “aspirational goals.” The result has been a rise in contracts to minority-owned firms. Based on statistics that show that racial minorities in Seattle are still less likely than whites to hold diplomas and college degrees, the RSJI worked to remove unnecessary degree requirements from city jobs, which earned the RSJI a mocking on the local Fox News (a sign you’re doing a good job). The RSJI reaches into every department. It influenced Seattle City Light to change its streetlights policy, which used to be replaced on a call-and-complain basis—a system that works fine in affluent, native-English-speaking communities where people know to look on a light pole, call the provided number, and trust that the city will come out to fix the problem. Now streetlights are changed on a fixed rotation that begins in the South End.
None of this is perfect—and more people of color still work in lower-paying jobs in the city’s own 10,000-strong workforce, Nelson says—but at least the City of Seattle acts like it recognizes the existence of racism.
Nelson’s office high up in the municipal building is full—really, full—of paintings by the African American street artist Darryl, who for years has been sitting on corners throughout the city, selling his scrawled paintings on cardboard. They say things like “What in the hell WRONG with my ass.” (My fiancé bought one that sits in our living room and reads, “100 YEARS OF BLUE MOONS.”) I didn’t imagine I’d see the phrase “What in the hell WRONG with my ass” scrawled across anyone’s office in this tower high above the city, but the sound of Darryl’s voice way up here emphasizes the distance down to the street.
What Nelson says is this: If you’re white, you have to own it. None of this I’m-not-
white, I’m-beyond-it-and-I’m-Norwegian stuff.
White people have to see race according to the terms they actually benefit from. Not that whiteness is a monolith, any more than nonwhiteness is. As Mab Segrest writes: “Women are less white than men, gay people are less white than straight people, poor people less white than rich people, Jews than Christians, and so forth.” But what might matter, what should matter, is that whiteness is a real force that you’ve personally benefited from in one way or another if you’re white.
The work of art that illustrates this story you’re reading, by Seattle sculptor Sean Johnson, is two halves of two couches, one painted white and one painted black (the couch started out brown), sawed from their wholes and set next to each other. They don’t balance right, so you can’t sit on them, and there’s a gaping hole between them. The title is False Identity. Johnson is half black, half white, and originally from Columbus, Ohio. He says Seattle’s racism is unlike the racism anywhere else, because Seattleites act like they’re above it.
“I’ve had a conversation [about privilege with someone] like once a week for a while now,” Johnson says. “It’s a denial that’s almost more offensive than somebody just coming out and saying a racist word to us. I’ve been arguing about this in a bar and been thrown against the coals like I don’t know what I’m talking about—that there’s no way Seattle’s racist, there’s no way Seattle’s segregated—yet I’m the only black person in the room. Yeah, it is.”
He goes on, “I have this friend from Mississippi, and we were both saying that we’ve never encountered anything like it before. There’s a collective thought that it’s a progressive place, so that everything has been done to make things equal, and any form of ‘No, it’s not enough’ is either greeted with passive-aggressiveness or ‘No, you don’t know what you’re talking about.'”
“Remember: Seattle doesn’t have a race issue,” Tali Hairston says, laughing, during a pause in a heated public conversation about race at Taproot Theatre in June. Hairston, a Rainier Valley native who directs Seattle Pacific University’s John Perkins Center for Reconciliation, Leadership Training, and Community Development, is descended from white plantation owners and black slaves. His family was the subject of the 2000 book The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White.
The production at Taproot, Brownie Points, concerned an African American woman, a Jewish woman, and a white woman who go on a camping trip and end up debating race, religion, and motherhood. The director of the play had organized this public talk about race because the same audience that had flocked to an anti-Nazi play before this one now was telling her race issues seemed passé (and not buying tickets).
Backstage during rehearsals for Brownie Points, Hairston had asked each cast member how important race had been for them growing up. Their rankings, on a scale of 1 to 10, ranged from 2 (a white actress) to 10 (an African American actress).
“Your life story produces a racial filter,” he explains in a conversation after the panel. “It might be a lens so thick that everything gets drawn into looking like it’s about race, or so thin that when someone says something is racial, you go, oh hell no, it’s not. As a white person, you have to own the development of your own racial lens. Because whether you’re aware of it or not, you have one.”
It reminds me of something said by the white man sitting on the other end of the panel, Ron Ruthruff, a close friend and neighbor of Hairston’s.
“The number 7 bus tells me things about myself,” Ruthruff had said.
“Seattle people, we are really nice on the outside,” he said. “The problem, I would argue, is that many of the things we struggle with regarding race in Seattle are covert. What do I see? I’ll be really honest. I see two school districts in Seattle, one in the north end, one in the south end. You know what kids in the community call Garfield? They call it the slave ship, because the white kids are on the top two floors and the black kids are on the bottom two floors. I see my son walk into a classroom with his [African American] best friend [Hairston’s son], one receiving the benefit of the doubt, the other being questioned—same thing in a movie theater.”
Ruthruff pointed over to Hairston, wearing a suit; Ruthruff wore jeans. “He can’t wear jeans and get taken seriously,” Ruthruff said. “Tali can’t carry no plastic bag on an airplane. In our neighborhood, I’m affirmed for living in the Rainier Valley. Meanwhile, people look at Tali and say, ‘You’re still in the Rainier Valley? We thought you were moving on up.'”
(Ruthruff’s mention of Hairston’s formal dress reminded me of the time recently when NPR’s Michele Norris, an African American woman, tried to explain to Steve Scher, KUOW’s white morning-talk-show host, that her parents felt they always had to make sure their kids were dressed better than the white kids in the mostly white neighborhood where they grew up. Scher—perhaps the archetype of the unaccountable Seattle white liberal—asked Norris if she saw that as an opportunity.)
On the number 7 bus, which runs from Rainier Beach to downtown, a woman once scolded Ruthruff for calling a young African American kid a boy. He was a boy, and Ruthruff almost ignored the woman because she was drunk. But he was feeling open, and instead he asked her to tell him more. She explained that masters used the term “boy” to belittle slaves; it’s still a charged word for black males of all ages. That was 25 years ago, and Ruthruff is still riding that bus in the same spirit. “I think for many of us, we have to just keep listening,” he said. “Could we as white people be willing to be wrong? Could that just be okay?”
After talking to Hairston, I approach a young African American man I’m overhearing. “I’d love to interview you; you’re so eloquent,” I tell him, immediately hearing myself sound like one of those people who said candidate Obama was so well-behaved (well-groomed, polite, pick your nice adjective) for a black man.
“I can’t believe I just called you eloquent,” I say. He gives me a knowing look, we both laugh, and start talking.
“Three hundred years of affirmative action for white people,” is how author and activist Sharon Martinas sums up American history.
The original “whites”—well-bred, high-class people, not those dirty Irish or Italians—were based on someone’s dim memory of the beauty of women from Georgia, on the Black Sea, historian Nell Irvin Painter writes in her new book, The History of White People. (The word “Caucasian” might have been “Georgian,” except that the German man who coined it knew there was an area called “Georgia” in the nascent United States, and didn’t want to confuse people!) Layers of ridiculousness piled up, like a lie compounding. Science was pushed and pulled. Tomes full of charts and graphs demonstrate that the race scientist’s most sophisticated tool for centuries was—wait for it—measuring human heads with a ruler. True.
African American scholar Cornel West suggested in 2008 that the somewhat more wounded, struggling Americans of the 2000s rather than the Americans of, say, the 1950s, are well-positioned to feel race. After 9/11, “for the first time in the whole nation, my fellow citizens had the blues across the board: they felt unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, hated for who they are. It’s a new experience for a lot of Americans.”
He continued, “It’s a very American thing, in many ways, to be sentimental, to create your little world of make-believe, live in your bubble. And then sooner or later—like Wall Street—boom! Here comes reality. Boom, here comes history. Boom, here comes mortality.”
Right around September 11 was when a handful of white people began the current movement of white antiracism in Seattle—and not too soon. I can’t help but think that in many ways, the natural white allies for the needed next generation of racial justice work—progressives who still may not have heard of CARW or antiracism—are instead unwittingly playing into the hands of race-baiting right-wingers simply by remaining silent.
“Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us,” Rich Benjamin writes in his 2009 book Searching for Whitopia, in which he spent a year in the growing, increasingly white neighborhoods that are creepily cropping up all over the country. A 2008 study from the Pew Research Center showed that racial segregation in this country is worse than income-level segregation.
Is Seattle in danger of becoming a whitopia? The largest swaths of racial minorities are now living far north and far south, keeping racial separations alive, for various reasons, economic and otherwise. In some ways, we don’t seem to want to live in racially mixed neighborhoods. Instead, we consume polarizing simplifications. In May, a study by Harvard and Tufts researchers made headlines around the world. The study was called “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” and came to the stunning conclusion that white people believe they are the real victims of contemporary racism (reverse racism). But look closer at the study—it surveyed 417 people total. You can fit more people than that on some buses. The sample was not even close to statistically significant. Yet like the idea of Seattle as a “white city,” word about it spread fast.
“Our racial thinking needs a truly twenty-first-century upgrade,” Benjamin writes. “Identity politics is letting America down, on the one hand. Race and structural racism still matter, on the other.”
“Rather than thoughtfully discussing race,” he writes, “Americans love to reduce racial politics to feelings and etiquette. It’s the personal and dramatic aspects of race that obsess us, not the deeply rooted and currently active political inequalities. That’s our predicament: Racial debate, in public and private, is trapped in the sinkhole of therapeutics.”
There’s a riddle at the heart of our racial lives, he writes: “It’s common to have racism without racists.” He means the redneck, Deliverance-style kind—easy to identify, easy to marginalize.
How else to explain a generation of people who voted for Obama, and who cried tears of happiness at what his election meant, but are doing nothing to eliminate racial inequality where we live?
“Awash in its racial conundrum, America has delightful people who are perfectly comfortable with widening segregation and yawning socioeconomic inequality that often breaks along racial lines,” Benjamin writes. “Let’s call that a problem.” 
^”no dignity”
Damn me for my errors, it’s okay.
#339
…we are all human and bleed the same. Why is that so threatening to those who have the privileges and the power? Because it reminds them they might LOSE their power.
Exactly. Very well put.
A societal shift does not happen in one generation alone. The shift cannot happen in silence, denial, or a refusal to call things what they are.
Also well put. 🙂
Excellent post. I have done similar things in my classes in cultural anthropology.
Will have me students read this, this semester.
@313: “Nice trying to justify black people being racist.” I was not and never will try to justify black people being hateful (or “racist” as you put it). Prejudice, bigotry, hate, and your definition of racism are disgusting and deplorable no matter who exercises it. My point was that black people do not have the power to be truly racist in that they cannot use their prejudices to define and confine people within our society.
@317: Have you ever heard of poverty or the working poor? Not everyone can afford to “assume the responsibility of home ownership.” Regardless of race that statement comes from a place of privilege
@319: I do read the dictionary and I know what the definition of racism is. I have also learned how to deconstruct words, because often a lot more is lying beneath the surface of a simple dictionary definition. Who invented the idea of race? Who has ever truly been able to act upon those assumptions? Racism’s presence may not be as overt now (especially if you happen to be white) but media, culture, and politics still assert that being white is the same as being “normal” or “superior,” with everything else being a deviation from that normality. It isn’t men running around in pointed hats, but it’s most definitely racism in one of its most destructive and prevalent forms today. No other minorities have that same amount of power to accompany any prejudices (which are necessary elements of racism) they have. This isn’t “redefinition,” it’s getting to what the word actually signifies instead of repeating what’s been memorized.
Also to Lyllyth and Mink: THANK YOU
Thank you for writing this article–this type of commentary and astute observation is desperately needed! Good work! The best thing to do is to keep talking about race and to get everyone, regardless of race, to start talking about it too.
I have not yet finished reading this post. I had to stop after: “So I throw it out there: Raise your hand if you’re a racist…I raise my own hand.”
That sounds more like prejudice and stereotyping. If you were racist against African-Americans, you would not believe that two works, both by African-American artists, ” [were] art is valuable and has to be taught.”
I studied Sociology in college with an interest in race relations and inequality, and understand why ‘racist’ or ‘racism’ could easily be inappropriately defined by an art professor. An art professor could teach me a lot about terms used in art.
Ok-that was cathartic. Now back to reading.
ok, my previous comment was kinda dumb. This was actually informative but EXTREMELY difficult to read to completion. A lot of weird premises, or something going on hear. Only one commenter mentioned Tim Wise. I suggest the author and everyone that has ever discussed racism visit http://www.timwise.org/ . Check out the reading list as well.
We can work out the issues of racism and white privilege but need the tools to create an effective context.
“Anti racism”, making self hating white people feel legitimate since 1965, that should have been the title for this article and this site at large.
How does it feel to be so stupid that you believe in ‘white privilege’ when “Affirmative Action” is non white privilege by its very definition and there is no white equivalent to that?
How does it feel to be so unintelligent that you believe whites have any power when we have lost the demographic advantage EVERYWHERE and yet still have no specific claim to any institutions of our own while non whites have entire countries they call their exclusive property?
It is time for “anti racist” groups to be destroyed, is is actually way past time. It is time to combat ASIAN privilege and yes BLACK privilege etc, the ONLY racial privileges that exist in the western world are for non white groups, and of course the only privileges in the non western world are for NON WHITES as well.
“Anti racism”, making self hating white people feel legitimate since 1965, that should have been the title for this article and this site at large.
How does it feel to be so stupid that you believe in ‘white privilege’ when “Affirmative Action” is non white privilege by its very definition and there is no white equivalent to that?
How does it feel to be so unintelligent that you believe whites have any power when we have lost the demographic advantage EVERYWHERE and yet still have no specific claim to any institutions of our own while non whites have entire countries they call their exclusive property?
It is time for “anti racist” groups to be destroyed, is is actually way past time. It is time to combat ASIAN privilege and yes BLACK privilege etc, the ONLY racial privileges that exist in the western world are for non white groups, and of course the only privileges in the non western world are for NON WHITES as well.
I am SOOOOOOO relieved to hear others say the samething. i had no idea what a priveledged and racist life i lived as a white, country girl. I went to the city and 6 years later married an african american man – we now have a beautiful little girl. Learning all that hubby went through, experiencing all the things we have together and watching my little girl deal with her identity – wanting to be white. Broke our hearts. As we started dealing with this, and of course all the Obama drama with most white people, we have encountered SO MUCH opposition as we try to explain to both sides the reality of what is really going one. white ppl ALWAYS deny that they are racist or that racist things are happening and always point the finger the other direction “well, black ppl need to make a move too!” usually the african american IS ready to work thing out. the whites just want to cover it up and move on. some actually think we much have taught our daughter racism in order for her to have seen this already. it’s been shocking to discover. THANK YOU for writing this!
(how is it that the “5th whitest city in the US” is only 66% white?)
It is too bad people continue to pretend that the US is still the same as the 1950s and in turn are causing LOADS of innocent Liberal drone kids to die from the IMMENSE racism projected at them from the actual privileged racists, the non whites.
The “progressives” on this blog will most likely meet the same fate.
Will the anti white left calls groups like the Tea Party ‘racist’ because they DARE to be mostly white, actual racist minority organizations like the “The Black Coffee Party” are being formed to do further harm to ANY white people who get in their way.
It seems that if you are white you are racist, at least to the rest of the American world. I am really tired of the double standard of certain words like “Nigger” is taboo for a white person to use however any African American can use it as he or she sees fit including in music and entertainment. That is crap at its lowest level if African Americans are really interested in fixing racism then practice what you preach! I am a middle age white male that came from a family that immigrated from Germany in the late 1890’s and never owned or participated in Slavery however I am lumped into the “white American” so I must be racist and owe the African Americans something. I didn’t have anything given to me in my life and my parents we hard working folks that took care of their children over everything else, we didn’t have anything but the basics growing up. My parents didn’t care what the fad were if you had clean clothes on you were good to go and if you wanted a pair of Nike’s rather than some no name gym shoe we had to work in the farm fields all summer to get your money to buy them. That gave me and my siblings a real education in what it is like to earn your own way. We all put ourselves through college or trade schools on our own dime and taking a lot longer.
I think that this country has done a greater disservice to the African American community by the way the welfare system works, rewarding women (not a shot at women) but reality having more children and to make more money. Plenty of White people have gone down this track as well but statiscly African Americans dominate in this area. This is truly a lack of education and taking advantage of that as well on the part of the system.
I don’t hold myself up as someone to fix this but who is? Change has to start from within, if you are raised to believe that everyone owes you everything then things won’t change but if the next generation just gets an opportunity to see that with hard work and an open mind that things can change but it took what a couple hundred years to get to this point let’s hope that change can come quicker.
Lastly everyone in this lovely country is racist to some level so making white people you escape goat isn’t going to further your agenda. There are several groups trying to open dialog about racism but many are scared to open their mouths fearing being labeled a “racist” especially if you are white. A lifelong friend of mine finally got me to go to a local NAACP meeting last year downtown and I was a minority in that meeting but my friend who is as he prefers to be called “Black” and is very proud of that wanted to me to see why we are such a stalemate. I was there for more than 2 hours and the only thing that was said over and over again was how much they wanted to make Whites pay and that nothing will change until reparations are paid. So it is more about money than working the problem and I understand this a some level being the son of a Holocaust survivor. Which can’t even be considered as the same thing, although many try. I am very proud of my Black friends and their accomplishments which were all done on their own with no help from hiring quotas or “equal opportunity” options. They like me never checked the “race” box on job applications unless required through the years. I applaud this article and did read it and I still don’t see myself as racist although most probably would base on what I write and that is your loss.
It seems that if you are white you are racist, at least to the rest of the American world. I am really tired of the double standard of certain words like “Nigger” is taboo for a white person to use however any African American can use it as he or she sees fit including in music and entertainment. That is crap at its lowest level if African Americans are really interested in fixing racism then practice what you preach! I am a middle age white male that came from a family that immigrated from Germany in the late 1890’s and never owned or participated in Slavery however I am lumped into the “white American” so I must be racist and owe the African Americans something. I didn’t have anything given to me in my life and my parents we hard working folks that took care of their children over everything else, we didn’t have anything but the basics growing up. My parents didn’t care what the fad were if you had clean clothes on you were good to go and if you wanted a pair of Nike’s rather than some no name gym shoe we had to work in the farm fields all summer to get your money to buy them. That gave me and my siblings a real education in what it is like to earn your own way. We all put ourselves through college or trade schools on our own dime and taking a lot longer.
I think that this country has done a greater disservice to the African American community by the way the welfare system works, rewarding women (not a shot at women) but reality having more children and to make more money. Plenty of White people have gone down this track as well but statiscly African Americans dominate in this area. This is truly a lack of education and taking advantage of that as well on the part of the system.
I don’t hold myself up as someone to fix this but who is? Change has to start from within, if you are raised to believe that everyone owes you everything then things won’t change but if the next generation just gets an opportunity to see that with hard work and an open mind that things can change but it took what a couple hundred years to get to this point let’s hope that change can come quicker.
Lastly everyone in this lovely country is racist to some level so making white people you escape goat isn’t going to further your agenda. There are several groups trying to open dialog about racism but many are scared to open their mouths fearing being labeled a “racist” especially if you are white. A lifelong friend of mine finally got me to go to a local NAACP meeting last year downtown and I was a minority in that meeting but my friend who is as he prefers to be called “Black” and is very proud of that wanted to me to see why we are such a stalemate. I was there for more than 2 hours and the only thing that was said over and over again was how much they wanted to make Whites pay and that nothing will change until reparations are paid. So it is more about money than working the problem and I understand this a some level being the son of a Holocaust survivor. Which can’t even be considered as the same thing, although many try. I am very proud of my Black friends and their accomplishments which were all done on their own with no help from hiring quotas or “equal opportunity” options. They like me never checked the “race” box on job applications unless required through the years. I applaud this article and did read it and I still don’t see myself as racist although most probably would base on what I write and that is your loss.
I grew up in Seattle and for 30 years always thought of it as progressive and diverse. I grew up in an area that was white and lower income so there was a different kind of opression – the opression of poverty. For the longest time I had little empathy for people who suffered from racial injustices because I felt like economic inequalities were the primary obstacles to be attacked.
Today I realize that things are more complex than my youthful oversimplifications.
It wasn’t until I left Seattle for about 12 years that I saw and lived in more integratied cities. New York and London are extemely diverse, more integrated, more racist, yet more open in their dialog. Seattle seems to care more yet do less in terms of openly acknowledging and trying to address segregation in the city. I’ve been driving around the last two months reaquainting myself with Seattle and it’s segregated. Fact. Weirdly, after living in Hackney in London and Jackson Heights Queens, two of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in either city, I find myself here, feeling uncomfortable in traditionally non-white neighborhoods.
Why? I’m trying to figure this out. Why is it that in Seattle, with its progressive idealism and liberal values, I don’t feel like I’d be welcome in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a white majority? Why is it when I mention looking at houses outside of a certain area the realtor rolls her eyes and says, “you have to think about the property values in THAT neighborhood? Why do I worry that if I bought a house where I could afford I might be looked at as part of the next wave of “gentrifiers” and am suddenly burdened with guilt.
I know the Seattle you write about that thinks that racism doesn’t exist here because I was that person. Racism completely exists here and in this place where everyone is polite, non-confrontational, and guardedly friendly, I can imagine that most people find it more convenient to ignore.
Thank you for writing this article.
*Meh*
Somebody tell the author that the waiter forgot her boyfriend’s entree after working a double shift…it wasn’t an intentionally racist act. Her next meal is free!
Also, as much as I admire MLK, why did King County coopt his image for the County Seal? It’s dishonest. King County was named after William Rufus King, a man who served briefly as Vice President and who was prolly racist, but who was prolly also gay with Pres. Buchanan at some point. Now get back to your Blue Scholars and smugness to which you’re entitled as an instructor at a tiny, expensive arts college in Seattle.
Somebody tell the author that the server forgot her boyfriend’s entree because she worked a double shift, it wasn’t a racist act.
The next meal is free!
Also, why did King County rebrand their seal using MLK’s image. It’s dishonest, and occured at the tail end of the housing bubble/condo gentrification. King County was named after William Rufus King, who served briefly as Vice Prez. He was prolly racist, but also prolly secretly gay with James Buchanan. Now get back to your regularly scheduled smugness that comes with being an instructor at Cornish!
Somebody tell the author that the server forgot her boyfriend’s entree because she worked a double shift, it wasn’t racially motivated!
But Seriously…
Why did King County rebrand itself using MLK’s image during the housing bubble/condo gentrification? It’s dishonest. King County was named after William Rufus King, who served briefly as Vice Prez. William King was prolly racist, but also prolly secretly gay with James Buchanan. Does that cancel out?
In any case please get back to your white guilt, preachy Cornish smugness. I was worried that nobody was flying the flag this week up!
Nicely written article. I really enjoyed reading it.
It’s also good that comments are on – the commenters are proving most of your points. 😉
Nicely written article. I really enjoyed reading it.
It’s also good that comments are on – the commenters are proving most of your points. 😉
How very interesting that Graves bends the truth in order to make her story seem credible. She’s a true Stranger reporter. I was the student that filed the complaint about her..two years ago! And contrary to her claims, I did not compare her to Hitler nor suggest she was recruiting for White Supremacy. What I did include was that she asked the “are you a racist” question in class and when she didn’t get the desired result she coaxed more people into raising their hand. She wouldn’t explain why she asked the question until she was pressed into an explanation. Furthermore she made racist comments not associated with the topic. For instance, in her words, she’s afraid when she sees black men on her street corner at night, and figures they are dealing drugs, which according to her “they probably are”. She then told the class that she desired to adopt a black baby to “piss off” her father.
Of course, the Cornish community silenced and dismissed my complaints because Cornish itself has a problem with race issues, and in a private meeting, the Provost herself admitted to being racist!
So Jen, it seems that if you are writing about this two years out it still haunts you. Good
@228 Hello Kitty, welcome to the Class Warfare Zone!
sorry but I was too busy WORKING to read any of this drivel for some time, but your ‘response’ is full of used kitty litter…in fact, Bullshit to your entire screed-I was fighting for my damn country while you were a burden on society and wallowing in self-pity with those shitbag junkies. I have seen men better than your entire benefactors’ board of directors come back as amputees,then have to fight faceless corporate bureacracies for treatment, while you were sitting on your ass in free subsidized housing.
Now pull your head out of the sand and wake up to the fact that America has a major Oligarch Problem, and it has already damn near wrecked the country- even Warren Buffett himself has publicly acknowledged this. So why do so many impoverished Americans sound like such dupes on this subject? No ma’am, I am no communist nor some ‘Richie Rich’ hater as you assume, and FYI I probably made and contributed more in the past 5 years than you have in your entire life.
So why am I advocating changes to the system that mean i will eventually pay more in taxes? Because I actually give a damn about my country and still believe in upholding and defending its Constitution ,including all those hard-won amendments and Bill of Rights. And I am frankly disgusted at the current degenerating state of affairs, in which I see a shocking number of my friends and family still struggling and unemployed, among them combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact the only current growth industry with stable employment seems to be doing the overseas dirty work of the empire. At some point one realizes, as a great USMC general and Medal of Honor recipient once observed, that he is really just a “high class muscle man for Wall Street and big business interests” enforcing our laws of market economics on unwilling overseas societies, with all the overt brutality and implied racism that entails.
So then, are you telling us you are a “koder” as in trying to work in the software industry, yet
“I love the rich, and I’m a happy content poor person, very poor, below poverty level even”
…no doubt you are aware that not so long ago, any software job was a golden ticket well out of poverty in this town
(before the billionaires running the industry decided to export jobs by the ton and import cheap immigrant labor, by spending millions lobbying the U.S. Congress for massive increases in H1B visas, special interest legislation and massive tax breaks)
so one can assume you are now either unemployed,or barely getting enough work to survive…and who exactly do you think trashed the economic system to the point you can’t get work, and are now reduced to barely surviving in special subsidized low-income housing?
Well i’ll give you a hint- it wasn’t the guys like me who do the real work and pay most of the taxes: it wasn’t the firefighters,or the soldiers,or the truckers…
that’s right-your local, national, and global economic system was trashed by your favorite oligarchs, and yet when some plutocrat-types throw you a stale bone you fairly slobber their praises. Do you really think Tully’s , or Vulcan, or the benefactor of your choice really do any do-goody-good BS out of the goodness of their downsizing, bottom line cost-cutting hearts? Have you ever seen a corporate budget spreadsheet, and what it reveals about how much more the same corporations budget for PR firms, lobbyists, lawyers and marketing? A few pennies on the PR dollar occasionally tossed toward the poor is some of the best public relations marketing corporate America can buy.
@361: Oligarchy is the main reason I have zero faith in mega-corporations. “Trickle down economics”, since the Reagan years, have proven ineffective. Yet they still push it, like drug dealers.
And they’re the ones cutting education, laying off the teachers and college professors so that none of us in the general 99% catches on.
Thank you so much for writing this. And thank you so much to CARW. Here’s to hoping more chapters open up around the country, because we sorely need it. As a PoC, I feel saddened that it’s necessary to have white people on my side to make other white people understand their privilege, but I’m glad that there are people willing to do it and to understand where they fit in. This was eye opening for me and my own racial prejudices, too.
This was a great article, but why are race issues always about black and white? Contrary to popular belief Asian people do deal with racism in the area also. By leaving us out of this conversation, you just perpetuate the idea that asians are not effected by white privilege.
Excellent article. And for all of you uncomfortable with being labeled racist, consider a quote by author Tim Tyson, “we are all recovering white supremacists”. Tyson wrote the book “Blood Done Sign My Name” about a racially motivated murder in Oxford, NC in the 70’s. We all need self-examination about our beliefs, fears, and prejudices, but be honest about the power white privilege gives you. Just because you don’t acknowledge it, doesn’t mean you don’t have it.
I think this is a very good piece, as somebody who has just begun a journey into white antiracism (and definitely I relate to that “conversion” sentiment).
But I read the comments and just think over and over and over again that it is extremely hard for people (e.g. Tricky in comment 6 and 8) to unlatch from the very weak, simplistic definition of racism that we’re usually taught as children. If racism is nothing but personal prejudice and bigotry based on race, then we can become non-racist by having parents who campaigned for civil rights, as suggested by the well-meaning and defensive comment 233. It takes a lot of work to start to understand how racism is institutionalized and built into the power structures that make life easier for white people, REGARDLESS of whether we want it, like it, or even know it.
It also takes a lot of personal work to get past the blame game, and realize that we can benefit from some evil shit that we didn’t intentionally establish, and we still should be accountable for it.
As a simple example, if my grandfather made a lot of money as a mobster, and then passed it onto my parents, paid for an excellent education for me, and gave us an inheritance of real estate and business connections, then that means I’m sitting on a lot of ill-gotten wealth. It’s not my fault, and I can’t undo it. But that doesn’t make it okay for me to just sit on it, say it’s mine now, and I wasn’t in the mob, so leave me alone and stop calling me a mobster.
The way we benefit as white people from the long years of institutional racism is harder to pin down than the mobster example, because it’s in the air we breathe. We don’t notice it, because it just is the environment in which we live. But if we benefit from it, we are responsible for it. That doesn’t mean we’re bad people or are deserving of blame. It just means our inheritance is complicated and messy, not clean and pure. And we’re still responsible for it.
@319
The dictionary definition of racism doesn’t mean shit to people who are actually affected by it. What else should we call it if people of color are systemically excluded and held back for no other reason then race, an invented cultural construct with no basis in biology, whether the white people are aware of it or not?
I agree that anti-racist work is more difficult because anti-racists ask us to consider a different definition of racism than the standard dictionary one that we’re raised with. So if it will make it easier for you to understand, copy and paste the text of the article into Word or Google Docs or whatever you’ve got handy. Do a find & replace, changing “racism” to “the oppression of people who are not white through a variety of legal, institution, systematic, personal, sometimes violent, often non-violent means.” The re-read.
As a working class stiff type white guy, I get to work with “people of color” (they would all burst out laughing if I called them that)every day. We talk about, acknowledge, and joke about race and cultural differences all the time.
I thank God daily that I was born white. In many ways, what little I have has been handed to me in great part because of my race. As lazy and no account as I am, were I any other race, I’d be screwed.
And, by the way, there is still plenty of “genuine” racism out there – you just have to know where to look and what code speak to begin the conversation. Being white, I have the keys to this club, and can join in at any time.
an excellent article. I have not waded through all of the comments, but add my own. As an exhibiting artist at 619 Western, i came to notice that hardly any African Americans attend art events. There is next to no art produced or shown by them. The entire art scene is irrelevant to ‘people of color’. I had a painting in which an African American was depicted in a necessary but subsidiary role. Early in the evening a well-dressed white lady gave me a stern evaluation -why and how dare I? And then later in the evening the only African American attendee, chewed me a fresh one for what I thought a neutral depiction. No one objects to whatever distortions or vulgarities I may subject the ‘white folks’
I don’t care about if it hurts people’s feelings if they are called racist, or really any of this minor stuff. I’m in NYC and I see a city where depending on race and class people live in vastly different worlds: some worlds those of blacks, latinos, Asians, Native Americans, gay people, trans-gendered people, the disabled and others are filled with more PAIN and SUFFERING and that makes me angry! Why is it unfair? Is all of this talk about equality and freedom just a buch of feel-good make-believe talk? It seems like it is.
I tried reading the comments here and it was hard so many of them are so self-absorbed. Who cares if you personally have been identified as racist? Why is it so important to say that it’s “really class” that causes the problems? It isn’t just “class” –just because class can insulate a tiny fraction of minorities from prejudice (but not completely) dosen’t mean that race isn’t one of the primary factors that prevents people from moving up economically and socially. Don’t you give a damn aout the way that the construct of race and the privilege that goes with it is hurting people? Saying it’s just class shuts down a critical conversation.
I’m a young black woman, I’m straight, I have more education than average and I was pretty lucky growing up. I have so many childhood friends who are smarter than than most the white people who are all around me with the best jobs and the most opportunity. But these minds are trapped in poverty or caught-up in dead-ends. Some of them are in regular physical pain. Some of them live with the inadequacy of wasted potential and dreams and the suffering that goes along with that. It sucks. It sucks for all of us because if these brilliant people were where they are supposed to be we’d have a better nation. I’m certain there are other scattered in Latino communities, and elsewhere too. Racism cripples the potential of our nation.
I escaped that fate, but not because I’m the very best, Mostly because my grandfather owned his own farm and we had the privilege that came with land ownership that, and some hard work, and some luck.
But, people work harder than I ever have, harder than many of the people people reading this article ever have, they have good minds and good hearts, they are the people our nation is missing in clinics and board rooms in classrooms and government and we never know about them and they still end up suffering– since the sorting mechanism in our nation for who will suffer sorts the black and browns ones in to the suffering pile more often than not.
The mechanism is white privilege and racism.
I don’t care about if it hurts people’s feelings if they are called racist, or really any of this minor stuff. I’m in NYC and I see a city where depending on race and class people live in vastly different worlds: some worlds those of blacks, latinos, Asians, Native Americans, gay people, trans-gendered people, the disabled and others are filled with more PAIN and SUFFERING and that makes me angry! Why is it unfair? Is all of this talk about equality and freedom just a buch of feel-good make-believe talk? It seems like it is.
I tried reading the comments here and it was hard so many of them are so self-absorbed. Who cares if you personally have been identified as racist? Why is it so important to say that it’s “really class” that causes the problems? It isn’t just “class” –just because class can insulate a tiny fraction of minorities from prejudice (but not completely) dosen’t mean that race isn’t one of the primary factors that prevents people from moving up economically and socially. Don’t you give a damn aout the way that the construct of race and the privilege that goes with it is hurting people? Saying it’s just class shuts down a critical conversation.
I’m a young black woman, I’m straight, I have more education than average and I was pretty lucky growing up. I have so many childhood friends who are smarter than than most the white people who are all around me with the best jobs and the most opportunity. But these minds are trapped in poverty or caught-up in dead-ends. Some of them are in regular physical pain. Some of them live with the inadequacy of wasted potential and dreams and the suffering that goes along with that. It sucks. It sucks for all of us because if these brilliant people were where they are supposed to be we’d have a better nation. I’m certain there are other scattered in Latino communities, and elsewhere too. Racism cripples the potential of our nation.
I escaped that fate, but not because I’m the very best, Mostly because my grandfather owned his own farm and we had the privilege that came with land ownership that, and some hard work, and some luck.
But, people work harder than I ever have, harder than many of the people people reading this article ever have, they have good minds and good hearts, they are the people our nation is missing in clinics and board rooms in classrooms and government and we never know about them and they still end up suffering– since the sorting mechanism in our nation for who will suffer sorts the black and browns ones in to the suffering pile more often than not.
The mechanism is white privilege and racism.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon typing quotes from Harvard University’s Professor Western’s “Punishment and Inequality in America” into Google Docs. If anyone doubts that irrefutable racism exists they should pause to read the following facts:
• Among black male high school dropouts aged twenty to thirty-five, we estimate that 36 percent were in prison or jail in 1996….
• We also found that black men in their early thirties at the end of the 1990s were more likely to have been to prison than to have graduated from college with a four-year degree….
• Between 1970 and 2003, state and federal prisons grew sevenfold to house 1.4 million convicted felons serving at least one year behind bars, and typically much longer. Offenders held in county jails, awaiting trial or serving short sentences, added another seven hundred thousand by 2003. In addition to the incarcerated populations, another 4.7 million people were under probation and parole supervision. The entire correctional population of the United States totaled nearly seven million in 2003, around 6 percent of the adult male population.
• The basic brute fact of incarceration in the new era of mass imprisonment is that African Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than whites….
• The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2004, over 12 percent of black men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine were behind bars, in prison or jail. Among black men born in the late 1960s who received no more than a high school education, 30 percent had served time in prison by their mid-thirties; 60 percent of high school drop outs had prison records.
• By 2000, over a million black children – 9 percent of those under eighteen – had a father in prison or jail. In around half of all cases, these fathers were living with their children at the time they were incarcerated….
• So marginal have these men become, that the most disadvantaged among them are hidden from statistics on wages and employment. The economic situation of young black men – measured by wage and employment rates – appeared to improve through the economic expansion of the 1990s, but this appearance was wholly an artifact of rising incarceration rates….
• Perhaps more than adding to inequality between blacks and whites, the prison boom has driven a wedge into the black community, where those without college education are now traveling a path of unique disadvantage that increasingly separates then from college-educated blacks….
• In the federal system, three out of five prisoners by 1997 were drug offenders….
• In 2001, Britain still recorded the highest incarceration rate in western Europe, but the American imprisonment rate was more than five times greater…. Indeed, to find close competitors to the American penal system we must look beyond the longstanding democracies of western Europe, to Russia (628 per hundred thousand) and South Africa (400).
• High incarceration rates among less educated, less skilled, financially disadvantaged, and minority men are unmistakable. The 1997 survey of state and federal prisoners shows that state inmates average fewer than eleven years of schooling. A third were not working at the time of their incarceration, and the average wage of the remainder is much lower than that of other men with the same level of education…. Black men are six to eight times more likely to be in prison than whites….
This is an important article. Thanks to Jen Graves for taking the time to write it.
Ari Kohn
Seattle, WA 98145-0007
@Comment #363
“I feel saddened that it’s necessary to have white people on my side to make other white people understand their privilege”
To the saddened white people who are troubled by “white privilege” I wonder how much of history have you actually read. I put “white privilege” in quotes because in historical context white privilege disappears into the abyss.
Savagery, ruthlessness and hatred has been demonstrated in all the peoples of the world. And that is truly sad. But.why single out whites?
White people – Stop apologizing!
patrick
@Comment #363
“I feel saddened that it’s necessary to have white people on my side to make other white people understand their privilege”
To the saddened white people who are troubled by “white privilege” I wonder how much of history have you actually read. I put “white privilege” in quotes because in historical context white privilege disappears into the abyss. It’s a pale cloud in the sky.
Savagery, ruthlessness and hatred has been demonstrated by all the peoples of the world. And that is truly sad. But what is the serious argument for singling out whites?
White people – Stop apologizing!
I live in Portland, and I am appalled each time I note the racial demographics of the passengers on the #6 bus as it heads down MLK Boulevard to North Portland. During rush hour, there are almost never more than 1-3 white people in a bus with so many people that there is no standing room. The Alberta neighborhood and others are growing more and more gentrified, yet when I told a family friend that I lived in North Portland, his eyes grew wide and he asked me if there are a lot of black people in that area of town. I was shocked. Portland has an ugly history of racism and segregation, as does all of America.
Thank you for the amazing article! I especially appreciated your comment about green being a less controversial color to talk about. This is also very true in Portland. I wish that there was more of a conversation about race in Portland. And while in Portland and Seattle we see many subtle expressions of racism, there are also many Neo-Nazi groups in the Pacific Northwest. Visit the beautiful Olympic Peninsula to find trucks and houses proudly sporting Dixie’s flag.
I think it’s important to create a less harsh word than ‘racist’ to describe the blindness to racism that is so prevalent in this decade. Racism is a form of ignorance. But shocking people into listening by calling them racist might not be an effective way to get their attention. Offended people rarely listen, and therein lies the problem. Citizens of all races, classes, and creeds need to listen to one another. Yes, it takes more time than making a snap judgment based on complexion, accent, or labels, but this is what is needed to get rid of the erosive damage that passive aggressive PC culture inevitably leads to. (Case in point, re-segregation of American schools while no one was noticing).
“And across all measurable strata, white people in Seattle have it better.”
And unspoken is the reasoning – white people have it better because of their subtle racism.
It couldnt possibly be that white people have what it takes to make it better and that non-whites dont.
Why do national patterns of migration tell only one story non-whites trying to live amongst whites.
Why are white countries better places to live than non-white countries?
so what if I am half white…half non-white….
but raised in a single home by the non-white half
but I look white as snow….
not everyone is racist…everyone is a bigot to a point but the bigotry may have nothing to do with ones culture or race..but ones lifestyle choice..
so many people that feel guilty for doing nothing wrong…
I thought back to this essay after reading the NYT today
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinio…
I loved this article… however, your blatant prejudice of any so called “right winger” hurts your credibility and my respect for you as a progressive and anti-racist because you yourself, a pioneer of racial equality are judging people based on their political affiliations? Not cool.