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.” 
Instead of white people meetings (CARW), why not go out of your way to befriend a people of color. Get to know other cultures. You may feel awkward, but everyone will have to feel uncomfortable for a while to truly see change.
All this worry and guilt covers up the fear that maybe people of color are just as smart and capable as white people.
Don’t expect other cultures to act like you.
Instead of white guilt meetings (CARW) if you’re so concerned, make friends with people of color and people in other cultures.
White worry and guilt hide the fear that people of color are just as smart and capable as caucasians. Enabling p.o.c. to depend on the system is a vile form of racism.
Make quality education free and available, and this becomes a non-issue.
…also, don’t expect other cultures to act like your own. There are plenty of white cultures I don’t want to be around (loud bike people, drunk homeless white men, hipsters), and I don’t judge them because they don’t think as I do. I just don’t befriend them, and that’s ok.
@182: Racism is about social privilege, not bigotry on an individual level. That’s the whole point of the article: “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.” You’ve experienced anti-White bigotry, not racism.
Actually, the definition of “racism” stipulates a belief in the inherent superiority of some races over others or abusive behavior based on such a belief. It can be a person (of any color), a government or an institution that’s racist. To suggest, as this teacher did, that having a single racist thought makes you “racist” is like saying that having a single homosexual fantasy makes you “gay”: this attitude trivializes and oversimplifies a deeper orientation to the world. The class of educated, liberal, middle-class white suburbanites the author so snidely dismisses are, as a group, the least racist people you’ll meet. They have probably observed and interrogated their own racial attitudes and, if they attended a typical liberal arts school, endured their fair share of derisive swipes about the shortcomings of their own middle-class white American culture. If they’re naïve about the latest trend in white culpability, it’s probably because they’re unconflicted about race and, therefore, less likely to seek discourse about it. They’re also easy targets for academics and activists with a philosophical axe to grind because, unlike the racist Latinos, racist Asians, racist blacks and racist Native Americans in Seattle, the white kids’ culture doesn’t come shielded by a narrative of oppression that deflects criticism from outsiders. Speaking from personal experience, the most corrosive racist comments I regularly hear come from Asian immigrants, and the only people I have heard use the so-called “N word” in the past 20 years have been Cubans. So, racism is a much more complicated problem than just the attitudes of whites. I think it’s perfectly natural to notice racial differences and the impact of race on culture and class and, considering our national heritage of discrimination, it’s also natural to entertain ideas of racial superiority or inferiority: whether or not you’re a “racist”, however, depends on whether you stay stuck in those ideas.
So. Only white people can be racist? Is that the theme here?
Or we going to have an actual honest discussion about race? Because that’s what the article said it was about. But it’s apparently not about honest discussion. Not if most of the comments in this thread are any indication.
Because, while I really liked the article over all, if we’re going just stop at the purely academic definition of Racism — which is now a simplistic “WHITEY IS EVIL” kind of cartoonish view of racism — nothing is going to change. Outside of these echo chambers constantly resorting to overused ill-defined reactionary buzz words like “privilege” won’t do shit.
Racism is deeper than that. And so far most of what I see here is same old shit that hasn’t accomplished a fucking thing in making peoples lives on the ground better.
Wow! You’re very articulate!
(Great piece. Essential threads for further discussion if Seattle is to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.)
@#188:
In answer to your first question: No. I don’t think that’s what the author is expressing. Furthermore, I have begun to recognize this question as a bit of a counterproductive mechanism–when one answers the question and says, “Of course not–people of other ethnicities can be racially-prejudiced, too,” certain people take that answer and go, “So everybody’s racist, no further discussion, the end.” And cosmic order is restored.
To speak more colorfully (but to stay on topic), that question has become an invasive “loop” of sorts, a weird mini-vortex endlessly collapsing and folding into itself while preventing the progression of the conversation. Some people intentionally use this as a mechanism in debate (I forget the actual term), if only in the interest of obtaining some sort of self-satisfying “victory” without having to go further down the road. Down the road, there lies the danger of having to put one’s true self in the picture–that danger simply cannot be afforded, so…throw in a quick logic-loop to shut the whole thing down.
Anyway, I would guess that you enjoy a substantial amount of exposure to current events. With that in mind, and with such a large degree of access to information at your disposal, I find it difficult to grasp that you would–with a clear mind and conscience, I assume–present to rational and informed human beings the idea that Americans of non-European cultural origin (read: black, Asian, Latino, whatever) are astonishingly incapable of accepting the possibility that they, themselves, are capable of racial prejudice. This implies that they are incapable of thinking for themselves. That is a scientifically-incorrect; furthermore, it creates that same logic-loop that prevents conversations from progressing into more remarkable areas.
What I’m saying is that you’re walking into a twenty-first century conversation with twentieth-century ideas. Move OUT of that, into a more potent and effective level of discourse about the topic.
Good piece. I think that Jen’s artical goes a long way towards promoting racial integration because it made me realize that I’d rather be stuck in a room full of black people than to be stuck in a room full of guilt-ridden, self-loathing white people. But lest ye think I discriminate, I would rather be stuck in a room full of rednecks than to be stuck in a room full of guilt-ridden, self-loathing white people.
Hopefully, this wont be taken as trolling but I am tired of this type of talk. It’s pure ignorance. I find it so strange that the biggest enemy to white equality are whites themselves. Whites are the biggest victims of hate crimes, over the past 30 years, the average cost to every white family to affirmation is in the thousands, now it’s into the tens of thousands. It’s a race tax.
People talk of this white priviledge but does your heart weep for the thousands of whites who are discriminated against in Africa? The peace workers gangraped anually or the whites being genocided. Do you ask Africans or East Asians about their so called priviledge? No you don’t. You openly complain about ”whiteness” and want to ostracize it without talking about the negaitves of this diversity.
You understand races self segregate. This isn’t social, this is biological, it’s genetic. It’s self determination. 90% of black voters voted for Obama. Black areas vote for black politicians. You claim it as harmful, it isn’t. It’s self determination.
I don’t believe either races are superior but we are different. It is people like you who assume superiority by claiming that races have to play along to OUR level. We are different genetically, biologically. It doesn’t mean people don’t have constitutional rights or citizenship or even the act they are American. But in reality, the US, Europe and Australia are lands made for and by white people. It should remain that way. But it isn’t and because of people like you, we are now openly discrimianted against by law and socially. We are told our culture, race are naturally bad and need to be stamped out.
I do hope that when this great divesication happens that your egalitarian dream comes true but it wont. South Africa, Haiti, Zimbabwe and everyother multi cultural/ multi racial community ends up with one side annhilating the other or the natons break apart.
It never works, it never will work and the only time, THE ONLY time it ever works is under totalitarian governments.
I prefer Liberty and TRUE equality.
Hopefully, this wont be taken as trolling but I am tired of this type of talk. It’s pure ignorance. I find it so strange that the biggest enemy to white equality are whites themselves. Whites are the biggest victims of hate crimes, over the past 30 years, the average cost to every white family to affirmation is in the thousands, now it’s into the tens of thousands. It’s a race tax. Whites commit less crime per capita. Why don’t you check the crime statistics of California for example. Is this so called discrimination an excuse for monumental rape crime %? How can 5% of the population commit 40% of the rape crime then say that it is THEY who are discriminated against?
People talk of this white priviledge but does your heart weep for the thousands of whites who are discriminated against in Africa? The peace workers gangraped anually or the whites being genocided. Do you ask Africans or East Asians about their so called priviledge? No you don’t. You openly complain about ”whiteness” and want to ostracize it without talking about the negaitves of this diversity. Where is this priviledge? Are added taxes based upon race and entitlements really a priviledge? Sounds more like punishment.
You understand races self segregate. This isn’t social, this is biological, it’s genetic. It’s self determination. 90% of black voters voted for Obama. Black areas vote for black politicians. You claim it as harmful, it isn’t. It’s self determination.
I don’t believe either races are superior but we are different. It is people like you who assume superiority by claiming that races have to act like us. We are different genetically, biologically. It doesn’t mean people don’t have constitutional rights or citizenship or that they aren’t American but in reality, the US, Europe and Australia are lands made for and by white people. It should remain that way. Noone should claim that they aren’t. You don’t go to Africa and say it isn’t for Africans. It is because of people like you, we are now openly discrimianted against by law and socially. We are told our culture, race are naturally bad and need to be stamped out.
I do hope that when this great divesification happens that your egalitarian dream comes true but it wont. South Africa, Haiti, Zimbabwe and every other multi cultural/ multi racial community ends up with one side annhilating the other or the nations break apart.
It never works, it never will work and the only time, THE ONLY time it ever works is under totalitarian governments.
I prefer Liberty and TRUE equality.
This is coming from a Londoner who sees first hand the changes and dangers in this egalitarian dream. I see the crime rates sky rocket among immigrant populations, mainly african populations but of course, whites say it is discrimination. But I ask, where is the crime rate by Europeans in Africa? Why don’t Europeans commit such radical crime in such heavy discriminatory enviroements and can anyone truly dare claim that Britain was ever discriminating? We gave chances they never had, laws, rights, housing, welfare, affirmation, boundless and endless leaps of faith. Where has it got us? When was the last time a group of white males kidnapped and gangraped an african girl for hours then poured bleach inside her to destroy the evidence? Never, the opposite on the other hand happens more often that people dare talk about.
Now we even have zones being claimed by Jihaddists placing their ”Sharia Controlled Stickers” wherever they can daring to enforce their foriegn laws on sovereign soil. A land that invited them without the permission of its people yet still accomodated and taken care of.
Look at London. That is your Egalitarian dream. Look at Detroit, was that discrimination too? Like you say, only whites are racist because of our ”priviledge.” Egalitarianism is cultural and racial suicide.
I see a lot of posts about it being “class” not “race” that’s the real issue. It’s not either/or. The two go hand in hand. I’ll be anyone claiming it’s ONLY the former, is probably white. Hence the term white privilege!
#193: You seem disturbingly obsessed with crimes of rape.
yeah- let’s tap this powder keg hard enough to hear the hollow part…
Seattle is about the most hand-wringingly half-assed racist city I’ve ever been in. The most dishonestly ‘pro-diversity’ town too. At least down south in Miami or up north in Boston, people are more honest about not much liking your white/black/brown ass around here (i.e. in ‘their’ neighborhood).
One thing you will learn traveling, whether civilian or military, is that almost every major city in the world has areas where people will try to kill you because of what you look like(and whatever the locals, rightly or wrongly, perceive that represents). It makes no difference in combat whether you are being attacked for your ‘ethnicity’ or not. The more unevenly distributed the wealth,the more dangerous the city, except in outright police states like China and parts of the U.S. and A. for example.
If you want greater safety and peaceful coexistence in your city-state-nation, either distribute the wealth more evenly, or pay the price of Police statehood. Unfortunately, America has chosen the latter. This includes the American subcultures who worship Wall Street tycoons,as well as those that promote the virtues of bling, gun-toting and Thug Life.
@182: And I see your points, too.
While this article was indeed, an eye-opener for me, and yes, like others have already mentioned, a bit long, I don’t and won’t feel ashamed about being white, just as nobody else should be made to feel about their origins, either.
This sure opens up a panel for discussion, though, doesn’t it?
yay jen! this piece is excellent and really valuable. I’ve shared elsewhere. thanks for writing it! <3
I hate that “white” is the operative term here. I hate that the relevant adjectives continue to be about skin color and not culture, and that it continues to be presented as a simple problem of personal attitudes rather than a complicated issue of cultural inertia. I hate that the descriptors used are so simplistic and that that leads to assholes like “TikofTok” sounding like they’re just sane dickheads, not utterly cracked, when they launch into “white rights” screeds.
I hate that the condition of this whole cultural dialogue has led to this piece leaving a bad taste in my mouth, instead of just letting me appreciate a good editorial.
meh.
There is a lot in this article that smacks of self-congratulatory philanthropy among noblesse oblige-ridden whitey guilt groups. A great deal more would be accomplished by a few simple changes to the tax code to reverse the grotesque hoarding of wealth by those who now purchase Picassos and commission Chihulys. Then we could proceed to abolition of the overseas slave trade promoted by many of the same hyper-privileged individuals, and their insistence on the forced deporting of American jobs without regard to the societal consequences. This is what has affected racial tensions among Americans of all colors, more than any other factors you can name.
Spend enough time out of the comfort of your coffee-talk salons,and you will realize that all the humans out there are racist to varying individual degrees. Except the liars of course- they are “Not Racist”. The various tribal subgroups are all judging each other, all the time, every day. Racism is a universal and omnidirectional phenomenon, rendering terms like ‘reverse-racism’ redundant and misleading.
As Nelson Mandela observes in an on-air PSA “No one was born hating another person for the color of their skin, religion, or background. Hatred has to be learned…”
But all humans are born with a brain that has evolved into a wonderful pattern recognition engine,that excels at categorizing and assigning causality to a lifetime of inputs, experiences, observations. Social conflicts and all sorts of toxic thought processes seem to arise when the higher-order pattern recognition engine becomes enslaved to the lower-level primitive ‘reptilian brain’ that deals with the instincts, impulses and snap judgments so vital to survival and earlier evolution.
thank you, this article is heartening. not surprisingly, so many of the comments confirm or illustrate the very points made by the author. so much defensiveness. so much refusal to see.
One thing I cannot stand is this distrubute the wealth screeds. A person ought to have a right to do with his money as he wished, and not have to “do good”. Some of you really imagine the rich, twirling the moustaches, cackling “No how can we maintain control”
@205 I share the same observation all the time, people need to stop demonizing everyone, the “white”, the “rich”, the corporations, etc. in order to see progress, otherwise their minds will inherently find them as an aggressor even when they are trying to help.
On MLK Jr Day last year KUOW had a program where black folks were encouraged to call in and talk about their experiences with racism in Seattle. Ironically enough not ONE of them who claimed Seattle was soooo racist had anything close to the abuse from whites that I’ve had from blacks. Blacks are encouraged to vent about whites, whites are called racist if they do the same. How many blacks have ever been physically threatened or verbally abused in Seattle by whites while walking down the street minding their own business? Not many. Most white folks I know have.
“so many of the comments confirm or illustrate the very points made by the author. so much defensiveness”
If I don’t agree with the author it proves I’m racist, or perhaps I think my life experience is as valid as those disagree with me? I would get defensive and offended if someone suggested I was a child molester, that doesn’t mean I am one? The only “non-racist” whites are the ones who admit they are racist?
Speaking of ignorance and refusal to see, no amount of soft-headed pollyanna wishful thinking will change the verifiable, objective facts that contribute to the poverty and violence all around you. Educate yourself- you can start by Doing The Math. Ask yourself: do you actually have any clue how the current maldistribution of wealth in this country looks compared to other industrial societies,and the connection to our current high unemployment rate (which has reached 1930s Depression-era levels for several industries and demographic groups.) Your job may be next.
As our modern-day robber barons twirling their mustaches, Steve B**mer and his fellow billionaires cackle with satisfaction at the obedient wage-slaves, dutifully parroting standard-issue press release responses(“don’t demonize us”-“it’s their Money” hear hear good show). The corporate PR hacks on Fox news are proud of you all.
Oh and by the way, we are giving your coder job to a new H1B visa hire next month. Please show your team spirit in training our newest employee, then clear out your desk and Security will escort you off the premises. Good night and good luck.
@count no’count
It might suppose you that I’m not some right wing, fox news listener, nor am I an “obident wage slave”. Niether are most people who don’t agree with socalism.
Are there evil rich people, yes, same way there are evil poor people. Do some people have more money that I ever will, yes, the same way some people have talents I’ll never have.
It’s simplistic to demonize though, all rich people, all buinesses, and all capatlism beliefs. You probably think people who don’t agree with you are brain washed, and that we are all “parroting standard issue…responses”, but if I had a nickel, being from the east coast, every time I’ve heard something similar to your post above, well maybe then I too could hire my own PR staff.
This seems relevant : http://rattravails.blogspot.com/2011/09/…
To be ‘brutally honest’,
“It might suppose” me ? No, that merely amuses me.
When you simplistically label my argument “demonizing all rich people and all businesses” you are demonstrating the typical intellectually lazy American knee-jerk reaction that is such a piss-poor excuse for rational thought. Another lazy, canned response is labeling any position that doesn’t follow some Grover Norquist-approved Tea-bagger Party line as “Socialism”. You show a fundamental misunderstanding of what socialism is,and probably of other ideologies, such as fascism for example.
It might surprise you to learn that Benito ‘il Duce’ Mussolini endorsed some of the views you expressed here. Yet I do not accuse you of being a Fascist, just of being yet another lazy,ill-informed, poorly-educated American who blatantly mischaracterizes the positions of his fellow citizens.
The prevalence of such non-thinking in this country has led us to what Gore Vidal called a One-party system(to paraphrase): in America there is only one party, the Property Party, and it has two right wings, the Republicans and the Democrats…
Thank you for this. So very, very well-written. I’m white (+), female (-), older (-), disabled (-). That one + trumps the three minuses. When I became homeless, after becoming disabled, that whiteness, that middle-class upbringing, got me back out of homelessness, into SSDI, into Section 8, much faster than others I saw who were not white. Very strange, to be disabled, to have well below poverty-level income, to be in low-income housing, and still feel so very grateful, because I know how privileged I am, in comparison with so many others.
Is Trader Joe’s too white? Sheeeeiiiiittt! I don’t know. Is Popeye’s Chicken and Bicuts too black?
The Downtown Y is absurdely Anglo? What’s so absurd about Anglo architecture. Myself, I like gothic, epecially the gargoyles on the ledges.
Loping? To me loping says: I will go out of my way to make your day a little bit shittier. I live in Renton. If I loped in the middle of Ranier Ave, white motorists would be honking and cussing me out, but so would blacks, asians, mexicans and just about everyone else. And they would be justified. I think that anyone caught in a traffic jam, which is all of us, could agree that loping is an asshole move, regardless of one’s skin color.
One last thing, one of the things that I respect about both blacks and rednecks is that they are a proud people, and I like proud people. I wish that some of these white “anti-racists” could learn to take pride in their culture, heritage and themselves.
I hate this headline. WHY should white people be “deeply embarrassed”? Why should I be embarrassed by the color of my skin, or the origin of my ancestors?
Your headline was so offensive that I almost didn’t read the article. Why should white people be “deeply embarrassed”? There is nothing embarrassing about the color of my skin, or my ethnic heritage from Northern Europe. I don’t have to fucking apologize for it, and neither should anyone else. I also am too busy trying to keep my head above water and keep my life together in this economy to give a shit whether people choose to self-segregate or not. it’s true – most people feel most comfortable interacting with other people with whom they identify. People identify with other people on MANY different levels, only one of which is race. Take a look at some wealthy zip codes on the Eastside – only 60% of the residents are white. I think your view of how the world works is pretty outdated.
Racism will continue to exist as long as it is over simplified as a black/white issue- as per the photo of the black/white chairs and most of the article.
Why can’t we just be people without all the labels: black, white, gay,lesbian, Muslim, etc.? Why can’t we just be whoever we are – just people!? It starts with the forms when my kids started school – picking a race every year was a real challenge for them since they are half Asian half white. (I think the forms have changed by now to mixed – or hopefully it has) This was the beginning of being labeled and also the start of a lifelong identity problems.
The one and only time in my life that I felt accepted for who I was in the sixties when I was a UW student – the hippie era. I marched on the Administration building with the Black Student Union (and consequently lost my job- working in the Ad. building!) I marched in Olympia for the Indian Fishing Rights and of course the anti-war marches..No one cared then what race you were. (there were no Asian causes then or I’d be part of that too!) I dated many blacks and others- my parents didn’t care.
Terrible Asian stereotypes that still exist – I hated watching the old Buck Rogers show where the evil woman was the Asian Dragon Lady or whoever she was.
Watching an episode of Friends (a show I never liked but watched a couple times when there was nothing else on) there was a line by one of the main characters “She looks like an Asian hooker!” It seemed-all Asians were the bad guys. I wrote in protest of the Life cereal commercial showing Mikey (even he likes the cereal) and a bunch of other kids loving the cereal including a little black kid) BUT when it goes to the Asian little girl = she turns up her nose and makes a face at eating the cereal and the ad says All kids like Life cereal,unless they are weird!” My kids were little at the time and although most wouldn’t see the harm in the ad and may even think it cute, I found it offensive and wrote and it went off the air – although doubtful it was due my letter alone. This shows how insidious racism is –
Recently took 5 trips to the DOL for my adult daughter to get an enhanced ID card since she didn’t have a utility bill (she lives with me) I think they thought she might be an illegal Alien because she doesn’t look like me and could be mistaken for Mexican. I doubt if this would happen if she were all white.
My son was kicked and beaten & arrested by police when he was in high school because he was Asian while the white boy with him was not touched, even though he was the boy who was accused of throwing apples at cars from the pedestrian bridge in the Arboretum. (they were onlookers – the boys who were the culprits all ran away – my son and the other kid didn’t run because they hadn’t done anything- but were assumed guilty. The other kid was wearing red shorts which the woman who called in the incident had identified one of the boys as wearing red shorts. My son spent the night in jail with his hands handcuffed behind his back. The other boy slept overnight in Juvenile center in a bed. Anyone who knew my son in high school knew he was the gentlest of kids. He did not resist the arrest. This was a racist act on the part of the police. I filed a complaint & they did an “internal investigation” (what is with that anyway!!??) and they “didn’t do any wrong” of course. The police are racist. (yet another story!) Actually the police are bullies which is an even bigger problem I believe than being racist. There are many other times where race made a difference with the police and or where they were the bullies.
I lived through a very bad racist era – post WWII – coming out of Manzanar internment camp where we were forced to live for 4 – losing our homes,businesses,etc. Then after the horrendous train ride from Calif. to Seattle,where my mother grew up (attacked by whites on the train) and then after returning to Seattle and then rented a house near Woodland Park where the neighbors all petitioned to get us out of their precious all white neighborhood. They thew rocks through our front window with messages “Get out or else” written on them. My mother refused to move – (she was feisty- born in Seattle she never considered herself Japanese) so we stayed for 14 years during which time the neighbors never once spoke to us! The unfortunate part was that 2 of the 3 kids in my family had to suffer through tremendous racism in what was then all white schools: West Woodland,Hamilton & Lincoln. I was beaten up on the grade school playground for being ‘a Jap”. No one would dance with me in the social dance class in high school.(except for the new kid who just arrived from England and didn’t know it was not acceptable to dance with the “weird Asian girl” – that is a whole different story!) I was called names galore… ALL by white kids by the way. (no blacks were at any of the schools I attended back then and there were only 2 other Asians in junior high and high school and NONE in grade school) I could not transfer to Garfield because back then you HAD to attend schools in your exact zone and I lived across the street from the dividing line to go to Ballard where my classmates from West Woodland went. That was unfortunate as I was in the same class group from lst through 6th grade and we all got along very well (it was the other kids in the school who picked on me) I was so lucky to be in that great group of kids and one is still my best friend. There was no racism in my class in part because we were together from age 6 until junior high when we separated and because I just happened to be in a wonderful group.
My oldest sister went to Garfield because she was a live-in nanny to a OB doc with 6 or 7 young kids in exclusive Broadmoor. She had a great HS experience- was in the Fun Fest (annual music production) with Quincy Jones (says he was quite ladies man even then) and she marveled at the diversity – the rich kids from Broadmoor and Montlake and the rest -the Asians and Blacks – and they all got along she recalls. It was the same for the kids I met at the UW in the sixties who went to Garfield. (their classmate was Jimmy Hendrix. My famous classmate was Rick Kaminski,the Mariner’s peanut guy)
Of course it all changed at Garield after the forced bussing and also when the APP program turned the school into the 2 schools in one that still exists today. The sister 5 years younger had the opposite experience than her older sibling at all white Lincoln HS. She so hated school that she never went to a single reunion until her death.
Growing up was the line I hated “Why don’t you go back where you came from?! Of course it was assumed I CAME from Japan even though I was a 3rd generation American! There were times I really wanted to go back to Manzanar,Calif.- but it no longer existed – it was just some rubble and tumbleweed in the middle nowhere in the Mohave Desert I found out when I did go back.
The real problem with racism is it is visual. I would not be targeted as the enemy growing up if I were German and if my parents were Nazis – because European immigrants couldn’t be visually separated. Chinese-Americans had to wear buttons that said “I am Chinese” during the war years. I have worked for years in Seattle Schools and I found racism still exists. Interestingly one of my most recent racist experiences involved a Japanese-American district administrator.(another lengthy story)
My final story is not so much racism as preferencial treatment. When I try to cross a busy street after getting off the bus after work – at a corner without a light – if it is just me, or me and another older woman (of any race) no one stops for me/us, but if a tall young blond girl walks up to the corner – the cars ALWAYS come to an immediate screeching halt!
And yes,I believe we all are at least a little racist – My mother was anti-Japanese and refused to visit Japan when my father wanted to visit his family. She was born in Seattle. (the lst and only time he returned after arriving here in 1920 -was after my mother died) It makes me so mad when people want to keep America for the whites (what ever happened to David Duke anyway? )because the only REAL Americans are the Native Americans and everyone else is a foreigner. (and there is another story…)
PS this may be a repeat story because my lst attempt at a reply somehow disappeared midway and I don’t know where it went!
I was with you until here:
“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.”
Are you seriously trying to defend assholes swaggering nonchalantly down the middle of the street, blocking traffic? That’s dickish behavior, no matter what race you are. It has less to do with racial tension and more to do with people having places to go and being blocked. If you’re going to transpose your white guilt onto every situation where white people react unpleasantly to a black person (even when they fucking deserve it), you’re damning your own cause and tainting an otherwise worthwhile, urgent message.
We all make presumptions based on appearance, mannerism, etc, mostly viewed from afar. Race is a huge component of this. So is dress, speech, what you carry, where you buy your food, etc. In this moment in history, race often drives a kind of “look” on average. But I judge people based on skinny jeans, flip flops, and whether i see them reading on the bus or eating a bag of funions.
Sure, I’m racist. And jeanist and funionist, bookist, starbucksist, and every other kind of judgment based on appearance. If the only bar I have to meet is “you’ve made a judgment based on x,” then I’m the most whateverist motherfucker in history. And that has taught me nothing.
But honestly, I liked this a lot the good parts were better than the bad parts and it took balls to write in this passive aggressive town filled with weak ass pansies when it comes to talking about race.
I was with you until I read this:
“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.”
Are you seriously trying to defend assholes swaggering nonchalantly down the middle of the street, blocking traffic? That’s dickish behavior, no matter what race you are. It has less to do with racial tension and more to do with people having places to go and being blocked. If you’re going to transpose your delicate white guilt onto every situation where white people react unpleasantly to a black person (even when they fucking deserve it), you’re damning your own cause and tainting an otherwise worthwhile, urgent message.
Black people are allowed to be evil, or irresponsible, or ignorant too. Because they’re fucking people.
it is not just white privilege. there is pretty privilege, skinny privilege, girl priv, etc…
also there are a fair share of vocal people from any race that expounds their own virtues to the point of racial superiority and exceptionalism.
#218
Amen to all that. When a Chinese friend of mine moved with her parents and brothers to West Seattle in 1973, they had to get an unlisted phone number because they got so many hostile calls from white people who didn’t want a Chinese family in the neighborhood.
#195: You seem disturbingly ignorant of such crimes.
So becuase I actually care about crime rates and the racial hatred that erupts everyday agianst white populations, I’m supposed to shut up and blame this bull crap priviledge?
Why do they commit such incredible amounts of rape? Why do the Black 5% population of California commit 40% of the rape crime?
How is socio economics an excuse for that? All I hear are the same excuses. It’s da white mans fault, look at this liberal diversity author spouting the same rhetoric we have heard for decades. It’s rubbish and it has always been rubbish. Noone here dares refute my points because they are the truth. They will keep blaming racism, discrimination and the old excuse… SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM.
Like no other civilization ever conquered or enslaved. Like the africans didn’t sell their slaves to the Americans. Spain was subjugated for 700 YEARS as was Eastern Europe. What did Spain do? They took back their land and became conquerers themselves.
Wheres the North African reparations for Spain? Wheres the apologies for what the mongols and muslims did to Europe?
I dont want an apology or excuses. I want Liberty and I am sick and tired of authors like this spouting the same anti white crap over and over. They hate their race, they hate their culture and they hate themselves. They push this agenda to feel good. They have been brainwashed by white liberal guilt for things they never did or ever do.
But of course, they will ignore the crime statistics. Statistics which are mimiced EVERYWHERE even in countries like Britian which has no history of discrimination. We invite these people in, take them fromw are torn areas. Areas that WE for once didn’t invade for some ridiculous reason illegally. We give them things they never had, so many possibilities and they squander it. They rape, murder and steal more than the natives and continue to do so. Now they out breed us and within a few decades we will be the minorities in our own countries. And when that happens, we truly will be in danger. We have fallen so far… we have let corrupt politicans both left and right use us, we continue this unsustainable fiat currency and this social welfare which exceeds our own income. We could be in space, mining gas giants, digging deep into asteroids with conceptual dieas we have had for 4 decades but no, we have to be the worlds lifeboat and commit national suicide for some agenda that has never made any sense.
And you wonder why I worry about this.
@224: Holy SHIT, Batman!!! That is morbid!
Okay, while there is some truth to your long rant about the history of world hatred, take some deep breaths…..breathe deeply……let it all slowly back out…and repeat….for the next 30 years.
Peace.
@187 – That’s one of the most cogent things I think I’ve ever heard anyone say on the topic.
What a compelling reflection on whiteness and racism. I wish that I had time to read all of the comments l, which appear to be equally compelling. I appreciate very much Jen your honesty and your research. Thanks for opening this box and tackling the tip of a very large iceberg. Your point in class was well taken here and if students were offended and confused, I say, “Bravo!” Then they are feeling, thinking, and beginning to learn. Apparently, no one has yet challenged them and I applaud your authenticity and courage. As a Latina and a professional, I have encountered so much ignorance and hubris among many of my fellow healthcare professionals, civilian & military, regarding the care of ‘non-white’ people. For example, they see all Spanish-speakers as one monolithic group and there is such ignorance regarding the struggles of Latinos native & non-native to this country and how that colors their experience and perceptions. The erroneous and damaging conclusions derived by non-racist healthcare professionals, researchers, and policy makers would fill infinite volumes, not to mention the fallout left in the wake. Keep on doing whatever you’re doing! You can count on me to support your struggle for awakening! Your original Tacoma fan, Ana
@Count No’Count …. I love the rich, and I’m a happy content poor person, very poor, below poverty level even. I love rich people because two of the richest in Western Washington paid to have the building I can afford to live in remodeled so many of us poverty level or lower people have a place to live. These giant corporations all started out as mom and pops, just like Starbucks is … oh yeah, they’re a huge corporation now to, okay, Tully’s …. erm …. big corporation now. You see, you know rich people are not evil, you just don’t like people being wealthier than you, you thrive on finding someone to hate, and you choose the one demonized the most so you can do it guilt free. Want to know what I hate? I hate junkies, yep, a few friends from when I lived in the shelters are junkies, and I hate them for it, but I do know that some of them are okay folks. How do I hate without guilt? Simple, I give them a chance to prove me wrong in my assumptions before I decide to write them off. That’s the difference between protective hatred and truly evil hatred. You will not give them a chance, yet the ultra wealthy in this state have done more for the homeless and poverty level people than ANYONE else, a LOT more than you have ever done and will ever do because you are spending all your time hating instead of doing something.
Thank you, Mrs Graves; great article.
Many of us in the black community are doing really well, and we’ll take the credit for that, thank you. And we’d also like to take responsibility for our shortcomings.
Well there’s the kicker, isn’t it? The shortcomings part. Blacks are far, far more likely than other races to engage in self-destructive behavior.
The point is to ask yourself what you’re going to do after you’ve gotten angry over a discussion such as this one. It’s the anger of being singled out and put on the spot; the way I, born an American of African descent, feel angry at being singled out by conservative politicians for taking advantage of public resources, since the American dream has eluded me for all of my life because I HAVEN’T enjoyed privilege. The truth is: only former slaves and their descendants can know that the struggle to overcome this lack of privilege continues through the generations, or how hopeless that reality can feel. When you’re behind coming out of the starting blocks, you usually don’t catch up to the other runners, and get further behind rounding the curve. And yet, in order to finish, to survive, you have to push and keep running anyway. Therefore, I have to own my tiny part of the track and keep going, although it might seem futile to do so, to improve my position. @THECHAZ, I hear you on that.
Ms. Graves, I appreciate the article. But let me tell you something. There are actually non-racist white people out there. I don’t know about your generation, but some of us had parents in the civil rights movement, and instead of getting latent racism from them as you may have from yours, we got a foundation in tolerance and respect. Are we perfect? Of course not, but do we have any problem at all with Blacks/Latinos/Asians/Indians/whatever in our neighborhood, being our bosses, dating our daughters? No. Do we think they simply want to be white people? No. Do we think racism is a huge problem and every Black person gets an unacceptable amount of it? Yes. We are still shocked at the amount of racism in our society, in police profiling, sentencing inequalities, discrimination in home and farm loans, job applicants, you name it, but just because it hasn’t gone away already does not mean every white person is part of the problem.
Some people get mad at being called a racist because they ARE racist, and nobody likes to be thought of as a bad guy, but some people get furious at being called a racist because they’ve gone through hell not to be and someone like you just, without knowing them, says it’s not enough, or they’ve missed the point somehow.
You can’t go around with this Zen koan type of paradox that if you think you’re not racist, you’re racist, or that everyone is whether they try to be or not. It doesn’t open peoples’ minds, it makes them angry and defensive, and I know from personal experience it may actually create racism.
If someone asked me if I was racist I would ask them if they thought any of the follow were “anti racist” activists: Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP. If they said yes to any of these I would then let them know that I talk about black folks the way they talk about Jews. (I included the NAACP because they have given a platform to Louis Farrakhan on numerous occasions). Then I would ask them if they consider me a racist, which no doubt the answer would be yes. Sick of the hypocrsy
In case you are an embarassed white person, just thought I would list some white achievements that people can be proud of, just as there is a long list of black achievements, and other races’ achievements that people can be proud of.
1. When everybody else decided to stay home, white people explored and charted the four corners of this world. That took courage, tenacity and intelligence – all things to be proud of.
Other white accomplishments to be proud of: movable type printing presses, 1st to create realistic looking paintings, numerous advances in architecture, calculus, physics, 1st to chart periodic table of elements, numerous medical advances, nymerous agriculture advances, invented the steam engine, internal combustion engine, deduces the laws of electricity, first to create advanced musical harmony, the symphony-orchestra and most of its instruments, first to build a flying machine, automobile, rockets, first man on the moon and on an on.
If some of you are embarassed to be white, speak for yourselves because I’m not. I would just like to encourage people to be proud of theirselves no matter what race they are.
If you are a white person in America, then you benefit from the racist systems that give you privilege.
So unless you are actively undoing racism, you are a racist.
You might not be a bigot, but you are a racist.
This is a critical shift for all white people to make.
All white people are racists.
In the face of this, you can reclaim your humanity, by actively working for racial justice.
That means working actively with people of color to undo the institutional racism in our community. And doing the hard work to understand and undo internalized racial superiority.
Or you can be complacent.
But your non-action is what defines you…not your professed liberal values, or the number of friends that you have that are people of color.
@236
Emmet Till’s murder and the subsequent injustice is called a travesty.
Yankel Rosenbaum’s murder and the subsequent
injustice is called a dispute between communities based on legimiate grievences.
Recently a group of black artists in NYC commemerated the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom by holding an exhibit that was more sympathetic to the black perpetrators then the Jews who were lynched, assaulted, and mugged.
I don’t want to minimalize how upset blacks were over the child who died in the car accident- they committed 2 murders, over 50 assaults, and most importantly, over 250 muggings.
When black folks stop calling the hate crimes they committ “disputes between communties” and use it for a shake down then I will start paying attention to their gripes.
As long as Rosenbaum’s lynching is spoken about as a “clash” between blacks and Jews while Emmet Till’s is called a barbaric hate crime- I will have no sympathy for those who whine about “white priveledge”. Only blacks can get away with openly sympathizing with those who lynch innocent people. RIP Yankel Rosenbaum and Emmet Till. Hopeful America will one day see you both as equal. Until then, our civil rights movement remains in ashes, because there is only one group of people who can act like the KKK and still be openly defended without outrage- people of African decent.
#227
Hear hear!