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.” 
I think these kinds of conversations are complicated by the fact that there are different kinds and degrees of racism. When white people talk about racism, often what we talk about is racial hatred or disgust. When minorities talk about racism, it seems that they’re usually talking not just about those conscious and overt forms of racism, but the more subtle forms of subconscious bias that affect people and intitutions.
Viewed in those terms, both sides are right, in a way. It’s certainly true that there’s a lot less racial hatred in Seattle than in many other American cities (trolls in this comment thread notwithstanding). But there’s no less racial *bias* here, and therein lies the problem. A great deal of the conversation about race conflates these different forms of racism, which makes discussing the problem difficult. Racists of the first kind (Klansmen, bigoted uncles, etc.) have been so thoroughly discredited and demonized that few white people see those views and behaviors as acceptable, and those that disagree tend to keep quiet about it, lest they be ostracized. But the demonization of overt racism has made it very difficult to discuss the subject of racial bias. No one wants to be branded a racist, because racism is seen as synonymous with hatred.
What needs to be recognized is that it’s possible to be racist without being a hateful person, that it is possible to treat people of other races poorly despite bearing them no ill-will.
Racial hatred is terrible, and deserves to be viewed as a mark of shame. Hatred is unnatural and can and should be stamped out. Racial bias, however, is a different animal. Like all forms of bias it is to some degree universal and inescapable. We can certainly reduce it and mitigate its effects, but we’re unlikely to completely eliminate it from others or from ourselves. The sooner we admit our biases, the sooner we can start working on ways to mitigate their effects.
@75: You’re only better educated if you think watching Fox News, masturbating, and collecting newsclippings is an “education”.
Humanity is horrible and murderous, and I acknowledge this.
Where you become an inbred hillbilly is where you somehow think that blacks are exclusively savage.
That attributes intentionality that doesn’t exist. People who have privilege generally don’t “mask” it. At worst, they make an uninformed but perfectly understandable assumption that everyone faces, basically, the same challenges and has the same advantages that they do.
Nobody gives a shit about anyone underneath them on the socio-economic pyramid. African American men do not, as a rule, invest a lot of energy in the socio-economic status of African American women. African American women do not, as a rule, invest a lot of energy in the socio-economic status of undocumented immigrants, or the labor rights of people in the developing nations that make most of the stuff we consume here in the United States. Mexican immigrants to the United States care about opening the U.S. borders, but I doubt any of those people spent much energy advocating for opening Mexico’s southern borders to Nicaraguans or Salvadorians fleeing the bloody civil wars in those countries in the 80s.
Complaining that the ethnic/gender group at the top has a special responsibility to look down is the privilege, so to speak, of people who aren’t on top. But anyone who bothers to hold that up to the light can see it’s pretty weak tea.
Man, white people be PISSED. Privilege is a bitch, ain’t it?
This is a fantastic article, and a great start to a necessary discussion.
A hot-topic think piece that makes you uncomfortable, challenges your assumptions about yourself and your city, wakes you out of smug self-satisfaction like a triple shot of espresso straight into the jugular, and doesn’t give you band-aids? Sounds like The Stranger, roaring back to life! Bravissima, Jen.
The Bell Curve == Creationism
Race-based supremacy != science.
Your conflating shitty soft-science with hard science and evolution is pretty par for the course. Is it any surprise that a Neo-Nazi wants to practice eugenicism?
chuch, jen.
I’m from Atlanta and have visited Ballard and Freemont. I must admit, I was a bit uncomfortable being around so many white people. I am white myself.
I live in the congressional district that elected Cynthia McKinney. I even voted for Miss “Much to Do About a Hair-Do”. This is a very diverse area of middle-class black and white people with a strong influx of Hispanic/Asian immigrants over the past 20-25 years.
Anyone who has traveled through the Atlanta airport has surely noticed the overwhelming majority of airport staff is black. I have had people from places like Wisconsin comment on how the airport makes them unsafe felling or uncomfortable without being able to elaborate why. It’s all the black people, duh. They don’t even realize it. Racism is real and you see it a lot when you are close to it.
A lot of ideas or stereotypes labeled racist, especially concerning black Americans, are sometimes more culturally based than racial. Am I racist for saying something such as “black people love listening to gospel music while driving to work?”
What, no mention of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, or People’s Institute Northwest? CAR-W does great work, but I didn’t think they sprang up as their own entity all by themselves, I thought that both People’s Institute and PINW played some role in the origins of the group.
@Subdued: Studies like this show children of color are impacted more than white children, even when taking in to account local crime rates, income levels, etc:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/0…
“”It’s not that the more violent schools get metal detectors, or even the urban schools get metal detectors—though that’s true,” said co-author Aaron Kupchik, an associate professor in sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. “It’s that schools with more students of color are more likely to get metal detectors, at every level, even elementary levels.”
That suggests that race, rather than class, can play a role, no?
I had to stop after “Honking was an attempt to reassert privilege”.
Really? Those drivers wouldn’t have honked at white people loping down the middle of the road who refused to move for cars?
@92 yeah that was pretty dumb. Laughably dumb.
Anywho, we are all different and we should celebrate our differences.
And yes, class is the real issue, not race.
The thought of these wealthy white people forming clubs so they can clutch their pearls and talk about how hard it is to be a good white person is pretty funny to me.
I guess I just have real things to worry about. But it was an interesting article.
It seemed to me the reason they were honked at was that they were having an experience that all people know well: that you’re not just entitled to walk anywhere you please, that there might be consequences. Holding up traffic was an attempt to reassert privilege.
No, really Jen. The hammer doesn’t swing both ways in some scenarios. I have a feeling that CARW is more an experience of white whining than anything productive.
I second Scary Tyler Moore…classism is legitimate. People hate based on behaviors they see as things poor people do. However, assimilation rarely comes on one’s own terms. To move up in society, you generally have to learn the ways of the next class or perish. Exceptions do exist, but they are far more rare than you’d think.
I think “racist” is a loaded term, because it brings to mind Bull Connor. I deal with no Bull Connor types in Seattle–meaning, there are no people here who wouldn’t let my children go to school or swim in the same swimming pool with theirs. So having white folks say they’re “racist” seems silly to me.
There is, of course, white privilege, straight privilege, male privilege and Christian privilege. And those privileges are: default. Any institution predominantly white, straight, male and Christian is presumed to be neutral. Does anyone consider Safeway to be white? Does anyone consider Uwajimaya to be neutral? The point is (and this is what creeps out Republicans/Libertarians/denialists): there is no neutral in this country, and there never has been, because the state has actively discriminated against blacks, women, gays and non-Christians.
Well, I’m not a navel-gazer, so as lovely (or misguided) as this article might be, my recommendation would be:
This is America. We believe in putting our money where our mouth is. If you’re interested in promoting racial equality, then vote with your dollars.
Get a directory of minority businesses and spend your money there (we used to call it Black Dollar Days).
Make a lesbian your primary care doctor (even if you’re a man–yes, it’s ok!).
Shop at Uwajimaya instead of Safeway (yes, it might cost a dollar or two more–think of Dr. King in jail–is a dollar or two more worth it?).
Find a nice Japanese or Vietnamese mechanic. (They may not speak great English. Well, it’s not all that necessary to speak English to change your oil and notice that your brake pads need changing.)
The point is, don’t just wallow in your guilt. Do something. (Eating at your local veganj Thai place or going to Brazil fest at Seattle Center, while nice, don’t really count.)
Volunteer for a nonprofit where you will meet your fellow residents of a different ethnicity. Tutor immigrant children at a south-end school. I’m sure you can come up with many more useful ideas.
Seriously, Jen. Is the white people who got in a fight with the Critical Masstards because he couldn’t move his car a racist? What about all the people who honked at the same group of idiots when they blocked 99? What about getting pissed off at the retardos who make right turns from the left turn lane and cut you off?
Or, what if you get mad at an incompetent receptionist for failing to do her job? Is it racist if the worker is a black woman who speaks in street dialect with an accent that comes from the hood? What if it is a trailer-trash speaking white guy? An English-challenged person of any race? A script-reading Indian named “Hank”? A spoiled rich person who only has the job to make money but has no interest in helping you accomplish your task?
When does justified anger and frustration turn into actual racism? Is it ANY anger at a person of a different color? Is it any anger at somebody on THEIR turf?
Jen Graves continues to struggle with when and how to wield the word “racist”:
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…
Well, all verbal arguments ultimately collapse under the weight of semantics, but I’m still with Henry Louis Gates on this one: “race” is a dangerous trope.
“Honk if you want to reassert your priviledge” would make a great bumpersticker.
Because it is completely absurd.
WOW—-!! What an eye-opening article! This really made me stop, take a look at myself, and ask some difficult questions about how I grew up in the era of “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons”.
It will indeed be interesting to see what happens over the next two, five, ten years—-not just in Seattle, but worldwide as the Earth continues to shrink.
Thank you, Jen Graves, for writing an excellent and very much needed article!
@96: Interesting points, too. There doesn’t seem to be any easy answer.
@92 & @93: Points well taken, too.
Inequality seems to be everywhere.
So I throw it out there: “Raise your hand if you’re a racist […] You’ve never had a negative thought based on racial bias?” I ask.
I enjoyed this piece and while I understand what you are driving at when you pose this question, I have a hard time equating something as simple as a thought with the label of racism. Sure, the blood of our country runs red with racism, racism is embedded in our institutions and society, and no one among us has never had a negative thought based on race. Still it seems to me that if everyone can be labelled a racist, then the label loses some of its usefulness.
I might have the occasional homoerotic thought, but I don’t think anyone would label me a homosexual because of it. Alternately, I have let slip the occasional homophobic slur (e.g. “that’s so gay”), but I can assure you that I’m no homophobe.
It is important to realize that many of our thoughts and impulses are conditioned. If I feel suspicious or hostile towards a person (e.g. the urge to lock your car door when passing certain folks) and can find no honest justification for it besides race, then I will freely acknowledge that “I just had a racist thought”, but I am not about to label myself a racist if I do not act on that impulse or even go out of my way to counter that impulse.
Besides, some of my favorite relatives are black and/or gay. 😉
I’m gay, and I’d never call a hetero a homophobe just because they had a thought biased on homophobia. So long as they’re all for legal equality and equal opportunities, straight privilege a homophobe does not make!
Your classroom approach might make a few people wake up to privilege in a university setting, but elsewhere you run the risks of building barriers. Try telling a laid-off white family in the Rust Belt, who will never be middle-class again, how very privileged they are and you’ll sound ridiculous. You may be right, they will never face racial discrimination, but in a climate of diminishing opportunities
for all but the very wealthy, your words won’t resonate.
Stress good opportunities for everyone. Push for equal opportunities at every turn. Let people know that it isn’t a fixed pie, and helping group A won’t harm group B. If one group matters most to you,
get involved in a charity that helps them. Don’t waste your time trying to win over overt racists, as those bigots are dying off anyhow.
But please, please don’t call well-intentioned white people racists. If I called everyone who ever said “fag” or “that’s so gay” a homophobe, especially if they’re progressive, I’d lose influence and shut down opportunities for dialoge. A lot of people want to right the wrongs of this world and combat the different “-isms” but don’t know where to start. Calling them racists won’t get them started any sooner.
At first I was excited to read this; Jen is right, race relationships does not get talked about enough in a meaningful way. But then it turned out to be “Hey whitey, you’re racist! Don’t think you’re racist, well you are!” It’s too bad because there is a really good piece waiting to be writing about the 300 years of systematic racism in the United States and the effects it has caused (Note if you do not believe there isn’t a history of systematic racism in the United States, go and read some history books).
People here are right that a lot of the issues are class issues, but the systematic racism has caused a large amount of black people to be in the lower class. So you can’t just shrug this off as class issues, it’s both class issues and race issues. And it’s getting worse as the current political climate is to shrug off issues of the poor class as issues as of the lazy class. Why can’t you just pull yourself up by your boot straps, that is the American way after all. If you can’t make your way in this country, you just aren’t trying hard enough. This way of thinking completely ignores the issues facing the poor class and does nothing to help them escape poverty. So it’s easy to see how the middle class and upper class have an upper hand with the laissez faire environment in the usa today.
Many black people are living in poor conditions due to the systematic racism that has been a part of America since it was created. They see a country founded on slavery and whose hero’s were slave owners. They see a country that has treated them like second class citizens up until the 1960s, and in some ways continue to. They see the programs that could help them be slashed in the name of tax cuts, and they see the American dream fail them, if they ever even saw it as a dream in the first place.
Yes, white people in this country do not have to deal with this. It’s something we can ignore because it doesn’t affect us in our day to day life. Instead we worry about the things that do affect us, paying our bills, getting food on our tables. This isn’t racism, its human nature.
And this is where your piece falls flat Jen. Instead of examining what affects this systematic racism has on the black community, or what can be done to elevate the black community out of the poverty that it has created, it just focus on the fact that most white people don’t think much about it. Yeah most white people don’t, but now that you’re drawn their attention to it do more than just nag, show what can be done to help. And no, going to a class on the weekend to take about your white guilt doesn’t help, but voting for politicians who have policies to lift the poor out of poverty do. But that’s a much harder article to write, much harder to write then an article that turns out to be little more than “you think you’re racist, but you are” in a condescending tone.
@13 NO. YOU don’t get to decide how a group chooses to self-identify. THEY do. Your white privilege is showing, and it doesn’t look becoming.
In as much as a person of color wouldn’t enjoy having their racial identity co-opted to describe some undesirable trait, so white people may justly feel insulted by the use of the term “whiteness” in this context. Similarly so, in as much as a person of color (or, for that matter, a poor person) would see injustice in having their motives for, say, being on the sidewalk after dark questioned, so too can a white person see injustice (different, mind you, from simply being made to feel “uncomfortable”) in being called a racist. Real progress will come when we can talk about (and more importantly DO THINGS TO SOLVE) these issues without needing to resort to co-opting *anyone’s* identity as a pejorative. Insulting the minds you hope to change is a losing strategy.
You’d do more to help disadvantaged black people volunteering at a homeless shelter than you would attending one of those white shame meetings.
1. Race is meaningless in terms of inherited characteristics. The pseudoscience of race we inherited from the nineteenth century is bogus beyond any doubt.
2. Race as currently understood is a social construction directly inherited from nineteenth-century understandings. They’ve been modified and added to and the splintery edges rubbed off, but the broad categories of white, Asian, black, indian, and spanish-speaking are now hard-wired into how this nation thinks. Just look at the census…
3. So, race has reality, but it is reality as enforced by broad human-created social structures. It has as much reality as the state of Washington or the United States of America: God and DNA did not create the 49th parallel. We did.
4. We want to take more responsibility for our social creations than we deserve. Social constructs like these can’t be deconstructed simply through awareness, any more than psychic problems can be solved by realizing “Hey, I have an id!” It’s not that awareness is bad, but reprogramming is not just a matter of consciousness.
5. If I as an individual want to help break down the walls I did not build, I need to play a funny game of tag with myself and the world around me. I will never probably feel super-comfortable with the kids in my neighborhood who have been beating people up for money and were out slashing the neighbors’ tires the other day. What I can do is follow my love of singing to a gospel choir. I can slowly, by following opportunities I love, when they come up, erase Race from my personal life.
I think the way homophobia has been slowly erased from some of our lives is instructional. We didn’t get there because of marches in the street, or sessions of the anti-homophobia committee. We got there because we have friends who are G, L, B, and/or T. We didn’t seek them out because of their letter, we sought them out because we likes them. And then we learn of the crap they still have to deal with, and because we are their friends, we can stand with them clearly and honestly.
In a way, it’s a trap to become aware of white privilege before you’ve begun your slow, meandering march. It makes you aware that you are doing things to fight racism/white privilege, and this sucks some of the joy out of what you are doing. On the other hand, maybe it can be like how I end up treating exercise in my life: I hate practice, whether it’s physical or musical or anything. So I never “exercise.” But I know I need to, so I find things I like to do, which involve exercise. But I enjoy them because they’re dance or walking to work, or I do them because they’re necessary like walking the dog or mowing the lawn. I then only then have to CHOOSE exercise when I figure out a habitual or scheduled pattern.
Can we do the same thing for racism? Fool ourselves into working past it? I think in the long run, it’s the only way we’re going to get to a truly post-racial society–a society that recognizes that your ancestors were African slaves, and yours emigrated from Somalia, and yours were Maya, and yours were Chinese peasants, and yours were Irish potato farmers, and yours were English Pilgrims… but where this identity is a matter for an annual parade and peculiar family foodways and customs, and for the great-uncle who’s decided to really get into his heritage and goes to folk-dance camp and wears kind of funny ethnic clothing. And that’s it. I long for that day.
1. Race is meaningless in terms of inherited characteristics. The pseudoscience of race we inherited from the nineteenth century is bogus beyond any doubt.
2. Race as currently understood is a social construction directly inherited from nineteenth-century understandings. They’ve been modified and added to and the splintery edges rubbed off, but the broad categories of white, Asian, black, indian, and spanish-speaking are now hard-wired into how this nation thinks. Just look at the census…
3. So, race has reality, but it is reality as enforced by broad human-created social structures. It has as much reality as the state of Washington or the United States of America: God and DNA did not create the 49th parallel. We did.
4. We want to take more responsibility for our social creations than we deserve. Social constructs like these can’t be deconstructed simply through awareness, any more than psychic problems can be solved by realizing “Hey, I have an id!” It’s not that awareness is bad, but reprogramming is not just a matter of consciousness.
5. If I as an individual want to help break down the walls I did not build, I need to play a funny game of tag with myself and the world around me. I will never probably feel super-comfortable with the kids in my neighborhood who have been beating people up for money and were out slashing the neighbors’ tires the other day. What I can do is follow my love of singing to a gospel choir. I can slowly, by following opportunities I love, when they come up, erase Race from my personal life.
I think the way homophobia has been slowly erased from some of our lives is instructional. We didn’t get there because of marches in the street, or sessions of the anti-homophobia committee. We got there because we have friends who are G, L, B, and/or T. We didn’t seek them out because of their letter, we sought them out because we likes them. And then we learn of the crap they still have to deal with, and because we are their friends, we can stand with them clearly and honestly.
In a way, it’s a trap to become aware of white privilege before you’ve begun your slow, meandering march. It makes you aware that you are doing things to fight racism/white privilege, and this sucks some of the joy out of what you are doing. On the other hand, maybe it can be like how I end up treating exercise in my life: I hate practice, whether it’s physical or musical or anything. So I never “exercise.” But I know I need to, so I find things I like to do, which involve exercise. But I enjoy them because they’re dance or walking to work, or I do them because they’re necessary like walking the dog or mowing the lawn. I then only then have to CHOOSE exercise when I figure out a habitual or scheduled pattern.
Can we do the same thing for racism? Fool ourselves into working past it? I think in the long run, it’s the only way we’re going to get to a truly post-racial society–a society that recognizes that your ancestors were African slaves, and yours emigrated from Somalia, and yours were Maya, and yours were Chinese peasants, and yours were Irish potato farmers, and yours were English Pilgrims… but where this identity is a matter for an annual parade and peculiar family foodways and customs, and for the great-uncle who’s decided to really get into his heritage and goes to folk-dance camp and wears kind of funny ethnic clothing. And that’s it. I long for that day.
The comparisons between homophobia and racism are off in that it much more difficult to hide the color of one’s skin in most social settings. I realize there are a variety of treatments to alter your skin color if you’re really motivated, but that’s not what I’m talking about. When I walk down the street most people are going to react to my sexual orientation much less than they are going to react to my skin color.
@111 So, you’re saying that gays should not hold hands n public , and otherwise avoid acting gay in public, in order to take full advantage of their privilege. But, blacks can not, or at least should not be asked to, avoid acting like ghetto stereotypes.
I called it. Callllled it: I KNEW that Charles Mudede could never write a headline as funny as this one.
@111: You are correct in asserting that you can’t hide your skin color the way you could conceal your sexual orientation. But, if you are referring to my comment @102 and the following comment @103; I am not trying to draw parallels between racism and homophobia. I am trying to point out that a thought does not equate to a crime. Having a racist thought, particularly an unconscious thought fueled by years of conditioning, does not necessarily make you a racist anymore than having daydreams about murdering your boss makes you a murderer, or having rape fantasies makes you a rapist.
I am so excited that Jen wrote this article and The Stranger published it. It takes some guts for white people to talk about racism and admit our roles. But we don’t need to be paralyzed by it.
If you are interested, CARW is holding its fourth annual Organizing Institute for white folks who want to learn more about racism as a system, and gain tools for talking about racism and organizing against racism (including in multi-racial settings).
Click here to learn more about our ORGANIZING INSTITUTE: http://carw.org
@28:
Mutts? Excuse the fuck out of me for not being terribly pleased with being equated to mongrels and that being the primary attraction someone would have towards me.
How the fuck did you manage to be racist at EVERYBODY all at once? Seriously, did you have to think real hard about the equal-opportunity asshattery you have going there?
Thank you Jen for writing this article, and The Stranger for publishing it. It takes some guts for white people to talk about racism and the roles we play in it. But that role does not have to be paralysis.
The fourth annual CARW Organizing Institute begins in October. Its a chance to gain some understanding of racism and white privilege, some skills for talking about racism and organizing against it. Click here for more details: http://carw.org
For those who do not see that the African American community does not have a problem with crime, just watch the TV Show “the first 48”.
It strongly debunks by simple everyday experience the idea that more African Americans are in Jail because of racism. With affirmative action not called that but very popular in Canada, if you are a white man of middle age , your job prospects are almost Nil as you are at the very bottom of the waiting line.That is institutionalized racism.
Interesting article, but not a lot of it makes any sense to me. The examples you provide, like honking at people in the road who HAPPEN to also be black, are evicence of racism? How exactly? Sounds like they just need to get out of the road, because its a ROAD! I would entertain this as an example if a white person walked out in the road and the car stopped and waved them through and, just after, a black person walked into the road and the driver starts honking. However, I doubt this is the case. You can discuss gentrification and white people moving to places they “just dont belong”, but these are really arguments of socio-economic status and the inequality there. This, of course, is certainly tied to race and race cannot be ignored, but if you are simply talking about honking at someone in the middle of the road, give me a break.
It seems to me this is a kind of over-analysis that, ironically, is afforded by the extra time we white people have (a result of the extra money/privilege afforded to us) to sit around on a Saturday and pick apart all the possible ways our actions COULD be interpreted as racist. Notice I didnt say SHOULD. This, in my opinion, is almost as insulting to the whole issue of racism as actually being racist. It seems to me a whole lot more could be done if the attitude was “yep, there is still racism, what are you going to DO about it” rather than sitting around, over-analyzing the fuck out of it all and accomplishing nothing outside your group of privileged white friends. Its not about you feeling better about your racism, its about doing something to change it in the place you live. Just being aware isnt good enough anymore.
“Who here is a Racist?”
When I first read that I knew I would have raised my white-Irish hand; is it because I sometimes curse using the n-word, or is it that I grew up with the privileges of whiteness?
According to your article Jen, it is the direct benefits of my whiteness that make me a racist, and like a previous commenter wrote: “it’s a message that makes me want to throw up my hands in despair.” However; I am not one to give in so easily.
I’m willing to confront this question, and I applaud your article in bringing up this discussion which was well below my radar.
Where am I racist in my daily life? I live on the southern coast of Oregon (Seattle transplant) and if you think Seattle is white, try rural Oregon. When I see a person of color on the streets here I am immediately aware of their minority status; when I meet people other than white, I am immediately awkward and aware of their non-white identity; what do I say? How do I act around them? I ask myself.
I am open to your suggestion that whites need to follow the lead of non-whites when it comes to racial equality and justice; as long as we are committed to progress and honesty; one caveat is that I am not interested in disempowering my self with racial guilt. I’m willing to take responsibility for the privileges of my white status, and willing to also work to extend those same privileges to all citizens; but how to do it while remaining secure and proud of my own Irish/Catholic heritage and upbringing?
An interesting note is that I work for one of the local Indian Tribes here in Oregon, and I have sat in on councils surrounded by Native Americans, here too I have felt my whiteness as an awkward cloak, with no hook to hang it on; it is what it is and we all should know how that feels; but, what to do with that? I think your article offers a great first discussion on how to bring this out into the opening, how to talk, listen and discuss it so that awkwardness can be cleaned away and justice be served.
Art seems a perfect and unique vehicle to conjoin people to this discussion.
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.
If I drove down the street and a white person was “loping,” I’d eventually honk. But I doubt I’d honk at the black person. Why? I’d be afraid of getting my window knocked out, or worse.
White people in Seattle are also more likely to live in white neighborhoods while sporting “Celebrate Diversity” bumper stickers on their cars. Hypocrites. Go live in White Center or SeaTac if you believe that shit.
Then, after living there for a few years, tell me if you want your Police Department to concentrate on “social justice,” whatever that is, or on protecting your sorry ass from getting shot.
You haven’t established causality, Jen. You haven’t proven any cause and effect relationship between quality of life data for minorities you quote, and racism. So, fail.
Stick to teaching art. Keep your repulsive convulsions of white guilt to yourself.
Wow. The comments here are…interesting. I’m just going to say a few things: Jen, this article is fucking amazing. All my friends on Facebook are talking about it and applauding you. I appreciate your bravery and willingness to tackle the hard issues that are, clearly, not quite acceptable in the mainstream yet.
Secondly, as an active member of CARW, I can assure all of you that the meetings are not about “handwringing”. We do self-education around the history of racism in Seattle, Secure Communities and their effects on immigrants, how to discuss race with coworkers, etc. The second part of the meeting is where we meet in 5 separate groups which are called “ally groups”–we are allied with people of color-led organizations. We provide them support through organizing, doing childcare at their meetings, moderating email lists, etc. We raised $10,000 for the Duwamish Tribe’s legal fund in 2010….I wouldn’t call that “handwringing”, would you?
Thirdly, @108: you honestly think that helping out homeless folks of color does more good than ending the systems that made them homeless in the first place? right.
What is “white privilege”? It is the privilege of allowing tens of millions of non whites to flood your homeland and allow them to whine and complain endlessly.
It is the privilege to have large portions of your tax money go towards providing free primary schooling, free college, free healthcare, free housing,free food and even free money for foreigners and other non whites.
It is the privilege of often being targeted by these other groups for rape and other violent crimes. It is the privilege of having your own children brainwashed by the schools funded by your tax dollars, and told your people are evil, and they should be ashamed of themselves and their ancestors. It is the privilege to be systematically pushed down by marxist affirmative action laws, in an attempt to level the playing field.
It is the privilege of becoming a minority in the lands founded and bult by your ancestors. It is the privilege of being told how you must remain silent and watch your own genocide, because to do otherwise would mean you are a racist, and society has told us a racist is the worst kind of person, worse than even a rapist or thief.
I’ve got no doubt that Jen is now busy congratulation herself on having “stimulated a discussion of race issues.” Why, maybe she’ll even mention this in her next grant application.
However, turning her class into a personal encounter and reeducation camp is exactly the sort of thing that whoever came up with the phrase, “more heat than light” had in mind.
If she really wanted her students to understand Baldwin and Ligon, a straightforward explanation of their art and how it reflected their life and their times would have been much more productive and, dare I say it, educational.
But education is really not what Jen is about. Teaching is pretty boring, ain’t it hon?
Wow. The comments here are…interesting. I’m just going to say a few things: Jen, this article is fucking amazing. All my friends on Facebook are talking about it and applauding you.
Facebook loves it! What more could we ask for?
Both my husband and I were blessed with an extraordinary mental capacity and an embarrassingly high I.Q. After much debate and vehement protests from our extended families we have decided to make an effort to stymie the inevitable white priviledge of our two beautiful children. Through trial and error we have sought to encourage the gradual development of various superficial learning disabilities with moderate success. Observe our progress, join the conversation and celebrate our brave contribution to a more just and equal society at our blog: blakeandpaige@blogspot.com
Interesting Article.
In general I agree with you that there is work needed to be done to allow all people the
equal benefits of living in a free country regardless of their racial background.
You have taken the left fork in the path to knowledge and understanding. I believe that
leads you to your great errors that you have honestly presented in your article.
1. Any one who touches social justice content should study its history and it’s
realtionship to Marxism and dialectical materialism. The only difference is that class has
been replaced by race. A knowledgable person should be honest with themselves and examine what type of process they are accepting with social justice. If they are a teacher this should be part of their discussion. Transparency.
2. Social justice absent the marxism is a fine goal. Merit, Mentorship, Jobs, and Family
should be the cornerstones of a healthy social justice effort. Not the biased failed effort
that has been documented in the Seattle School system or the City of Seattle.
3. Any person may partipate in a mosque, church, or synagogue and they will find the
converstation lifted up way past the concepts of white and black. A person severely limits
themselves in life if the critical component of their thinking is white vs black. Drugs the
destroyer of black families will have less impact. Job connections will be stonger.
4. I moved to Seattle because it was a racially tolerant city 30 years ago. It still is
today excepting the personalities that force themselves to make it into a problem. I can
walk around most any part of the city in an interracial relationship and feel comfortable
except some of the poorer areas. Poverty of spirit or income not race holds onto and
develops ignorance which breeds hate. Seattle stands above most any city in the world as a tolerant city. If a few warts color your whole thinking process, then the warts aren’t the
problem.
5. The problem of youth is that once they realize they are at fault they feel the extreme
need to revolutionize everyone else but themselves. An immature ego. That is where the
guilt should lie in both black and white.
6. The legal system does overly enforce against victimless crimes in poor areas versus rich areas. The mayor should recognize that or he is not listening to social justice. The legal system does over felonize and over fine poor people on a regular basis. The wallets of the mayor and councilmen are fattened on the backs of the poor. They just see a rule, a fine, and not a circumstance that needs to be managed. The punishment money is more important to them.
7. The deep problem on the left is their need to get into a polarity about guilt and
victims. They need victims. That is how they survive. The less black people talk to a lefty
they healthier they will be. Note how the left has had to redefince and broaden the
definitions of racism as a form of victim creep.
@13 NO. YOU don’t get to decide how a group chooses to self-identify. THEY do. Your white privilege is showing, and it doesn’t look becoming.
Okay, but YOU don’t get to tell someone else what to think, you dictatorial piece of shit.
CARW is a waste of time for people. Wrong approach. You can do more with a smile than CARW can do with $1,000,000
The blackest people are at the equator, the whitest at the north pole. Vitamin D processing.
White people living in Seattle are getting blacker day by day and black people living in Seattle are getting whiter day by day.
Husksters want to make money out of the process.
Great article, Jen. I appreciate the diversity of voices you included.
One correction–WEACT (the Work of European Americans as Cultural Teachers) is a group of White educators who meet monthly to learn together and discuss our cross-cultural interactions in educational settings from pre-k through college. Although some of us do presentations for schools, most of us are involved in the practice of teaching for social justice in our own classrooms. Thanks for coming to our meeting and sharing your perspectives.