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.” 
This article clued me into the next racism trend, owning your “whiteness” and somehow using that to punish black people.
Also those crazy orgs mentioned in the article are interesting!
All in all a wonderful piece.
@275: Actually, I’m more of a flutist.
@Louisep
Oops — your corrected version is what I intended to say. But I was also trying to say that the black party somehow would be aware of this unspoken presupposition on the part of the white party.
@Heidirh
I see. Yes, you’re right, the black person would be aware of what the white person was assuming.
I like the term white privilege. Reading comments I think of money privilege, political privilege, location(or geographical)privilege, scholastic privilege,religious privilege, etc.
This is a compensating effort to give us status when we really feel like nothing, superiority when we really feel inferior, comfort when we really feel discomfort etc.
So, I think that privilege exists across all elements of society since we are all human and have the same basic traits.
Looks to me that it would be helpful to be honest, open, and real on an emotional deep level. However this can be painful, vulnerable, and embarassing and we need to support each other for this process to happen.
Having this awareness makes it possible to reevaluate our image of ouselves so we may be more natural and confident about who we really are and respect ouselves as well as others. Hopefully this can lead to being more fully human and have less real need to be artificially privileged.
This takes a lot of risky work and most of us are don’t know how, are impatient and want a quick fix or band-aid. However, this is the only real worth while approach that is deeply satisfying.
Thanks for a great article. Please keep writing more like this!
What #284, Color and Composition, said. Ditto. Thank you for this piece!
What #296 said.
@Tricky (and a lot of other commentrs), you should probably not go see “Avenue, Q”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDo…
Thank you for this article! It articulated some things that have been rolling around in my brain for awhile. As mixed (white/Chinese) Asian American who grew up in the Seattle area, I was encouraged to be “white” not only by my Chinese mother, but by the broader society I was living in.
It wasn’t until I left Seattle for Chicago that I was really able to understand race and racism in a constructive and, for me, transformative way. It was in seminary that I learned all of this! As I turn my eye back to Seattle, I’m astonished at its strange culture – one that prides itself on being socially progressive and yet uncritical, almost willfully ignorant about race, one of the primary social issues in this country.
Seriously though, racism and racist are words that are over- and imprecisely used far too much, as in this article. The word she should have used is “Prejudiced.” Racism implies a direct power imbalance and the ability or intent to cause pain, suffering, embarrassment, violence, economic difficulty, social ostracism, or the like through conscious actions.
On a person-to-person, day-to-day level, having a negative internal reaction to someone and/or drawing negative conclusions about a person or group based on no evidence beyond the basis of their race (or gender, disability, perceived or known sexual orientation, attractiveness is prejudice.
For the record, progressing from that internal prejudiced feeling to provocative confrontation with or a negative action toward someone “different” is called bigotry.
To wit:
The lady that clutches her purse to her breast when a black man in a business suit, with the Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm sits down next to her on the subway is prejudiced.
The man who screams the “N” word or the “F” word out the window of his car when passing by a black person or gay person, respectively, is a bigot.
The state that tries to re-impose poll-testing in a conscious effort to undermine the ability of poor black citizens to vote is racist, as is each legislator who supports such a notion.
Here endeth today’s lesson in the nomenclature of negative racial feelings.
Thanks for this article. It is the by far the best explanation of racism (white privilege) that I have read. The reaction of white to antiracism that you describe is being mirrored in the comments.
Most whites are outraged at being confronted with their racism but at the same time benefit from white privilege while also denying it exists. Part of the problem is that racism has been redefined to be open, blatant descrimination of the southern Jim Crow flavor, rather than the insidious two-faced kind of the rest of the country.
If you start to pay attention, racism is everywhere you look. These insights are fundamental to blacks, but no one listens to them for even a second. Denial, denial …
Thanks for this article. It is the by far the best explanation of racism (white privilege) that I have read. The reaction of white to anti-racism that you describe is being mirrored in the comments. The reaction is ‘what did I do to enable white privilege?’ when really the question should be ‘what did you do acknowledge and fight white privilege’?
Most whites are outraged at being confronted with their racism but at the same time benefit from white privilege while infuriatingly also denying it exists. Part of the problem is that racism has been redefined to be open, blatant discrimination of the southern Jim Crow flavor, rather than the insidious two-faced kind of the rest of the country.
If you start to pay attention, racism is everywhere you look. These insights are so fundamental to blacks, but no one listens to them for even a second. I wonder (facetiously) why that is?
@300: Amen!
Few things:
-I really enjoyed this article… serious props to white people trying to examine their privilege, and who acknowledge racism. This is a cruel world so I know that white people have their own sh** to worry about, and I would never want a (white) person “wringing their hands” and feeling bad about themselves or their privilege, but I think its important for everyone to examine their privilege. I’m a woman of color… but I recognize my privilege as an American, as a native English speaker with a “standard” PNW accent, and as someone with access to education and opportunities… and I struggle with all of that but I don’t beat myself up about it, and no one is asking whites to beat themselves up either.
-I honestly am so offended by white people who will say racism doesn’t exist anymore, or who will dismiss and interrogate a person of color when they talk about a racist experience they’ve had. The invalidation; the disbelief is more racist and more offensive to me than calling me a nigger. I honestly don’t care about a word. But Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck/etc and their army of followers perpetuate a SYSTEM that questions OUR experiences and invalidates our voices. And THAT is more powerful, more racist, and does more damage to us then silly name calling.
-That was so true about the worst word you could call a white person is a racist, even if they ARE a blatant racist… I never got that. I think that’s evident even in the comments that seem to have a running theme about whether its appropriate to use the term “racist” to talk about white privilege, etc etc. Nowadays, it seems like you would be hard-pressed to find a white person who will call ANYTHING racist.
As a Blind mixed raced Homosexual male I find the whole subject very confusing. I swear I can’t tell a white punk from a black gangster. You all look the same to me. I don’t like people who mutter or mumble and I hate people who smell bad I mean how hard is it to wash relay even shelters have showers. I know i’ve lived in some. Do people treat me different because of my color or my blindness? How the F*** would I know! to me an A**H*** is just an A**H*** I am not going to worry why she is one. I would like to thank my husband Jose for typing what I Dicktated
As a non-White person who has done diversity trainings and multicultural workshops over the years it is interesting to see the paradigm established. People of color are helping white folks deal with the issue their culture created; racism. White people need to address the issue as it is so entrenched in their culture and operates on it’s own (systemic/institutional racism) without anyone doing anyhting overtly mad-dog racist. So CARW is to commended for at least trying to ask the right question.
And Jen, could you do me a small favor? Could you do an expose of the whiteness of the art world here in Seattle and while you’re at it do a breakdown by race of who receives your Genius Awards and who makes those decisions?
I know that every now and then you recognize a rapper for hipster credential validation, but it seems seriously lacking in diversity, in a city known for it’s cultural richness. Or used to be anyway.
For all of those people that said Jan is a bad writer you are wrong simply because you posted something. Writers are supposed to make you think and formulate you own opinions. And that is exactly what she has done. She started a conversation between complete strangers whether you agree with her thoughts or not is up to you. I think that Jan did a great job and those who are knocking her writing need to think about what she wrote this for. She is trying to make you think, not give you an answer for an unsolvable problem.
@307: I agree that Jen’s a great writer. I’m just saying that JAWIWA and others have some good points, too.
Peace.
I read this whole article and wish i had time to read every comment. I read many of them and noticed how much weight people are placing on “being racist”. I know i am super late but f it.
I have been educating those around me, mainly whites, about their privilege for years now and dealing with discussing discrimination at my place of work with my employers and co workers. Empirically and through my years of studying and meeting with the college community; we have learned the best way to carry out this shift in awareness is to address the facts(which is also mentioned in the article by some activist). Educate people about the systemic hierarchies as opposed to telling them that their racist. Thanks for writing and publishing this. word.
cloudy october
publisher-producer-songwriter
black male
“I have been educating those around me, mainly whites, about their privilege for years now and dealing with discussing discrimination at my place of work with my employers and co workers.”
My symapathies to your employers and co workers.
I can’t count how many times I’ve had black co-workers who thought it the whole workplace didn’t center around them they were being discrimnated against. They were usually entry level employees and demanded not only their co workers be subordinate to them, but upper management. Get over yourself, what you are facing is not discrimnation, but the reality that it’s not all about you. Whites have to live with this reality too.
“But black people are racist too!”
Newsflash: Racism ≠ Prejudice
The difference between racism and prejudice/bigotry is power. Are there black (or Asian, Latino, Native America, or any other “POC”) people who are hateful, prejudiced, violent, etc. towards white people? Yes. Does that make them racist? No, and here’s why:
Racism = Prejudice + Power, and just because we have a black president doesn’t mean that African-Americans are now holding the reins. While “minority” people may perform heinous acts of violence or bigotry against whites (just like whites did for hundreds of years before they even had the chance to think of doing anything against “massa”), that doesn’t mean their prejudice has as pervasive of a systemic effect on society. Power with regard to racism is bigger than just being able to deny someone a job. It’s things like gentrification, where a black owned business that has been serving its community for decades is pushed out to accommodate the influx of yuppies who would rather be within walking distance of Trader Joe’s, or forcing lower income people in that black neighborhood to move because they can no longer afford the rising property values that come along with your neighborhood becoming the it place for white hipsters in their mid-to-late twenties looking to buy their first home.
Everyone is prejudice to some degree (class, education, sexuality, etc. in addition to race), but only whites (as a race not always a specific person)* can be racist. Don’t believe me? Then you may have forgotten about the fact that IT’S THE REASON EVERY SINGLE BLACK PERSON IS IN THE U.S. RIGHT NOW**.
*I realize there will be the “race is a social construct” people who will detest the term white. It’s all about culture isn’t it? Well as someone who believes race is a social construct and people should be able to define themselves, I’ll tell you this: race is about how other people treat you. As an African American I am treated like a “black woman” whose actions are assumed to be common among “black people” and all the baggage that goes along with that. I may see myself as just a “woman” whose actions are only a small aspect of the human experience, but the rest of the world doesn’t. Race is a social construct intended to privilege white people and we live within the society that created it.
**I also realize there will be the smart ass who says “what about African immigrants?” Really? I’m obviously not talking about them (their ancestors felt the sting and bullet of white racism and colonialism too anyway).
“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.”
Oh give me a break. Honking is not an attempt to reassert privilege, it’s an attempt to get people out of the middle of a public road. Really, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
@311 …. nice trying to justify black people being racist.
You want to opt out of white guilt?
Move to DC.
Or Detroit.
You will soon discover that white privilege is anything but in these majority-black cities.
Racism isn’t intrinsically a white thing.
I’ve seen racist whites and racist blacks. Of the two, I’d say the more deeply seeded hatred is from the racist blacks.
Of course I may feel that way because it was aimed more directly at me.
As for white privilege generally, I’m the offspring of very poor white parents. We literally scrounged for our next meal.
A middle class black family in the same community, or most certainly in a black-centric power structure like DC or Detroit, most certainly had more ‘privilege’ than I.
“Racism = Prejudice + Power, and just because we have a black president doesn’t mean that African-Americans are now holding the reins. “
Apparently you’ve never spent much time in DC.
Blacks ‘hold the reins’ here. Black mayor. Black city government. Black school system.
Most of the local institutions are black run.
And I see a lot of black racism.
There’s a reason white business owners here hire black ‘facilitators’ to get them building permits or otherwise make visits to various city government offices.
I also see a lot of very decent blacks that don’t discriminate.
But the suggestion that you have to have power to be racist is absurd. A racist without power is still a racist, albeit theoretically a castrated one.
But I suspect you don’t include all forms of power.
The power to influence others through hate is likely just a big a power as the immediate power to, say, deny someone a job.
And I routinely see blacks in DC passing on their hate to a new generation.
Just like I saw whites in rural Tennessee doing the same thing.
“I have been educating those around me, mainly whites, about their privilege for years now and dealing with discussing discrimination at my place of work with my employers and co workers.”
You must be fun at parties.
“If you start to pay attention, racism is everywhere you look.”
If you start by looking for it, then you can imagine it everywhere.
But also if you look hard enough you will see a lot of people of all races that are decent, hard-working people. And they don’t discriminate. And they aren’t racist.
But if you are determined to see only racism that’s what you will see.
“It’s things like gentrification, where a black owned business that has been serving its community for decades is pushed out to accommodate the influx of yuppies who would rather be within walking distance of Trader Joe’s, or forcing lower income people in that black neighborhood to move because they can no longer afford the rising property values that come along with your neighborhood becoming the it place for white hipsters in their mid-to-late twenties looking to buy their first home.”
First, a lot of those incoming yuppies are black.
How do you figure that’s racism?
Second, being ‘forced out’? The only real way that happens is if your rent rises (most towns have property tax deferrment programs that ensure the poor won’t lose their homes because of rising real estate taxes). And if you lived in a neighborhood for more than ten years ‘back in the day’ and you never bought your apt when you had the chance (as most nearly everyone in my town of DC did) then honestly it’s hard to have that much empathy for you.
With the ease and convenience of being a renter comes the possibility that your neighborhood will change and you can no longer afford it.
I will admit that given today’s stunning real estate prices my pat answer is no longer really valid.
But it certainly was in many cities for the last wave of gentrification.
Don’t want to be displaced? Assume the responsibility of home ownership.
Is it possible to introduce a white person to your story without proving their antiracism street cred by documenting how many black guys they’ve slept with, how many African-American artists’ work they have on their walls, how their white parents just don’t “get it”? It is rather tedious hearing someone eschew how having “black friends” doesn’t mean anything but then justifying themselves by letting us know they have black boyfriends.
I grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in NY, went to predominantly black elementary and high schools, and yet the ratio of black graduation at my high school paled in comparison to the ratio of black attendance. I don’t believe this is due to inherent differences in race, but in systemic problems in culture and community. I didn’t need to be bused into my high school- it was the closest to my house anyway- but my presence there did not uplift any persons of color. If other students were spending time focused on racial awareness, their time would have been better spent trying to alleviate societal injustices by cracking open a book or two and studying.
Rather than worrying as much about reallocating school children in the hope of finding that magic ratio that cures racial injustice, I’d much rather see a discussion on reallocating resources so that traditionally affluent districts share more in the interest of future generations. Rather than rehashing old racial grievances done to or by our ancestors, can we talk about actually alleviating the problems that allow the resultant imbalances to fester in our society?
Removing unnecessary academic qualifications to jobs is fine, but why not also help people achieve those qualifications? I’m not interested in having the government become a surrogate family that provides for children of color all the things that white (and asian! and Jewish! and many black and latino!) parents can offer their children privately; but I am interested in collectively finding ways to inculcate those structural advantages to end the cycles of disproportionate poverty and crime. If you want to call that assimilation, then so be it. While you dream about rebuilding the foundations of our society, another generation of predominantly non-white children grow up with a lack of skills and resources to escape their impoverished communities here in the real world. Poor blacks can slow the honking cars passing through “their” streets, but those cars will eventually still pass them and reach their destinations, while another generation of socio-economic wraiths walks the streets in impotent rage.
Volunteering to fill servile positions in predominantly black groups is not a conversation on race and doesn’t provide any real awakening; any more than spending a night on the street for charity makes one understand homelessness, or fulfilling rape fantasies garners understanding for centuries of the subjugation of Africans. Low-skilled black workers in the service industry are there because they’re hired to be there and need the money (just like low-skilled white workers in the service industry); that’s fundamentally different from someone who is volunteering to feed their white guilt. A volunteer knows they can go back to their real life when the event is over (just as a faux homeless student can return to his or her dorm), but a real worker doesn’t have that luxury. So forgive me if I’m unimpressed by CARW’s antics. Instead, why don’t they just participate in the groups as peers?
I acknowledge the amount of luck in my station in life. I am more than willing to contribute toward expanding those advantages and opportunities to the less fortunate. Artificially subjugating myself does not make other people better off, it just makes them feel better about their condition. This is the logic of the worst of our reality television. Not feeling complacent enough about your lot in life? Look at those douches on Jersey Shore!
I’m interested in rectifying imbalances in opportunity, whatever their historical origin (not that historical origins are irrelevant in doing so); but I have no interest in flagellating myself for the sins of my ancestral European cousins or my unrelated contemporaries.
In conclusion, I don’t have a problem talking about racism or white privilege (two things which, while related, are not the same and ought not be conflated). But my refusal to accept most of your premises, definitions, and conclusions does not constitute a lack of willingness to communicate.
Also, I don’t know where you guys come up with your definitions, but if you looked in a dictionary, you would see that “racism” means a belief that people possess inherent qualities and attributes incumbent to their race. It has nothing to do with power dynamics or state action (although it may permeate these). Prejudice and bigotry are broader words that don’t necessarily have anything to do with race.
Redefinition of established word meanings is of cults and ideologies. I hope that’s not what you want studies of racial dynamics to become (although in many quarters, it seems to already be there).
“If you start by looking for it, then you can imagine it everywhere.”
Ummm… if you can “not look for it” and make it go away for you then that only means that you don’t have to live with the effects of racism in your own life.
There’s lots of things I can “not look for” and never see. Starvation, sexual abuse, child rape, slavery… racism.
That’s because I don’t have to deal with these things in the day to day course of my life.
But pretending they don’t exist because I have the luxury of “not looking” well, that’s just being a blind ignorant fool!
Wow, for an author who seems to be advocating understanding and empathy, she certainly litters her work with a lot of judgemental, hateful stereotypes: “race-baiting right-wingers” “Fox News (a sign you’re doing a good job)”, “Tea Party” digs.. This author has a long way to go to comprehend her own race .. for her to deign to understand my race (yes, I am an African American, pro-freedom, “Tea-Partier”) is simply laughable.
Deeply embarassesd? My actions today is what I am, not the actions of my forefathers. The only racism I see today is the racism directed at me. Dr. Martin Luther King would be embarrassed by some and proud of others.
I do not apologize for being white. White is just a color, not a person.
You know, the more I think I about this, and I re-read the article… the more I must raise my hand and admit that while I am not a racist, I am a culturist. I seek those that have values and beliefs that I can tolerate. And that is saying a lot as I can tolerate much! LOL. Like minded people have always congregated. There is nothing wrong with that. It is called harmony. I would proudly have had Martin Luther King, and many of my black friends as my neighbors. Because our ideas are similar.
For example from the article: “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 in your anaylsis he says we are trying to reassert priviledge….. really? Get a clue, it is rude behavior, but something I see in often within that culture of attitude. You say: “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.” Damn skippy, I call it about feelings and etiquette. We are supposed to be color blind and basing our perception and reactions on others reactions. If you can’t respect me enough to obey the law, by not jaywalking, I can honk my horn. The only reason from my perspective is not about political inequalities, but about plain disrespect. Martin Luther King was listened to, because he was respected. If you notice, not many whites got behind Malcom X.
But I did like this part of it: “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). ” Unnecessary being the operative word. At first read, I thought, oh great they dumbed down the requirements just to promote someone of a specific race, then I re-read and saw the word unnecessary. This helps individuals of socio-economic status, not race. Race is not the issue, people without diplomas and college degrees are. But they choose to try and “show” they are doing something for the blacks… grrr, it is like the politicians that come in every 2, 4 or 8 years and change regulations on something that is working, just to prove they are “doing something”. I call it “resume building”. Here it is a good thing, but someone decided to call it in the name of recognizing racism, that is not good.
But I do not close my mind, I listen when someone says something is racist. But I can’t be responsible for how someone else’s perception is other than to state my side. So I raise my hand to being a culturist. But I do not apologize for it. Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are. Proverbs 13:20 He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.
Madcap:
You write with style and grace. Which is a rare and unexpected surprise when reading blog comments.
“But pretending they don’t exist because I have the luxury of “not looking” well, that’s just being a blind ignorant fool! “
Please show me where I said racism doesn’t exist.
Great post, but how are White women less White than White men?
Patricia raises an interesting point.
I assume its because the author started with the premise that the ultimate evil person is a white male. Regardless of the actual individual involved.
Patricia raises an interesting point.
I assume its because the author started with the premise that the ultimate evil person is a white male. Regardless of the actual individual involved.
Sortof the reverse of Martin Luther King’s ‘judge a person by the content of their character, not the color of their skin(or what’s in their pants).’
This article is written by a white person for white people and I think it’s an insightful and invaluable article for white folks in Seattle who think that they are somehow “immune” or “above” race or racism. I think we need more conversations like this across communities, but especially among people who benefit from white privilege. Here are some examples of white privilege listed by Peggy Macintosh: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcint…
This is an article written by a white person for a white audience. People of color have been facing these issues most of their lives but I believe this is an insightful and informative article for white folks in Seattle who might think they are “immune” to or “above” race or racism. In this country, white people have certain privileges and for some examples of those privileges, you should look at Peggy Macintosh’s article on White Privilege: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcint…
I have to disagree with this:
‘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.’
A typical male-dominance perspective: for women “c**t” will do it every time. White men have no idea the emotional violence this word elicits when a woman has this shouted at her. Or maybe they do, which is why they like to use it.
@325: Bravo, Patricia!! You nailed it!!!!
@325: Bravo, Patricia!! Spot on!!!
Sorry for the double post.
Is that why white people are called “honkies?”
This article highlights what is wrong with so called “progressives” and why they’re largely a non-factor politically. Increasingly, I’m beginning to believe that they advocate certain viewpoints not out of a desire to effect change, but because they feel that it improves their own karma in some way. “Hey, don’t be mad at me, various oppressed groups, I’m one of the good guys.”
But let’s assume that white people adopt the perspective outlined in this article and become super introspective about their “white privilege” and fully and openly admit that it has made things easier for them. Okay…then what? Black people suddenly achieve equality? Cops stop randomly frisking black teens? It’s a very Underpants Gnome way of looking at things. It’s also a very feminized way of dealing with real issues of inequality. “If we just validate the grievances of black people, then…” What? What happens next? That’s the part that is missing from this article: how does this actually translate into equality? And by equality, I mean genuine, tangible equality of economic opportunity and justice, not the faux-equality of being included in some big kumabya-circle of validation and empathy.
What is the point in defining (redefining, actually) ‘racist’ to mean a lesser flaw of acting on bias/prejudice, which every human being does? If I refer to someone as ‘tall’, I mean they are in the top 10-20% of height, not that they are tall because they are not the absolute shortest person on the planet. Defining tall in a way that applies equally to everyone is pointless– why even have a word like that? If the word racist is going to retain a useful meaning, surely it must only apply to those who are more extreme in their bias/prejudice.
As for the guys walking down the middle of the street… it’s wrong to think a minority group can do no right, but also that they can do no wrong. Why make excuses for bad behavior? Jackasses and morons come in all colors. The white driver who honks the horn is not trying to ‘reassert privilege’, just trying to get to work on time.
Actually, I don’t believe there is anything ‘missing’ from this article.
I applaud the author for writing it.
“What comes next”, is ANOTHER article, which can begin to unearth answers and acts to answer YOUR question. (MikeJake)
We’d never get to that next article without exploring this one. So, in that respect, this article has achieved its purpose.
What utter nonsense. Particularly your idiotic comment about white drivers honking their horns at pedestrians walking down the center of the roadway and refusing to move out of the way of traffic: “Honking was an attempt to reassert privilege”
Uh, sorry, but that is nonsense. The drivers in question honked because the idiot pedestrians were blocking the road!!! I guarantee that if the pedestrians in question were white, the drivers would have done the exact same thing.
But you raise a good point: WHAT IS MORE DAMAGING TO SOCIETY? Actual racism, or idiots like this author who makes a genuinely serious problem into a joke of political correctness? I vote for the latter.
Okay, so I’m posting this comment admitting that I have not read any of the preceding 338 comments, but I have to say:
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU FOR WRITING THIS ARTICLE!!!
Seattle, and WA in general, is THE WHITEST PLACE I HAVE EVER LIVED AND IT FREAKS ME OUT DAILY!
I moved up from SoCal, since it was where my parents were from, not me, it was not my home. I think of the land here as Home. Forever.
But there is something NOT RIGHT about NE King County, starting with NE Seattle. It’s surreal.
Maybe because I am of Italian descent, and occasionally get mistaken for Hispanic, or maybe just because I AM Mediterranean, I’m not white enough for the white folks here.
I know that I live in South King County because that’s where all the good ethnic markets are. That’s where people will at least talk to each other on the street.
I have tried to broach the subject with some of my friends on my theory that all white people are still at least a little bit racist. It has certainly become more subtle and possibly subconscious and definitely NOT P-C; but it’s there, it still affects everyone. I am openly scoffed at when I say that I know that I am at least a little bit racist, even as I try really hard not to be. “But, who understands those rap guys, anyway?” I used to blame it on being a different subculture, but it isn’t. It’s a non-acceptance of a cultural value I have partially consciously, partially unconsciously assigned to a certain set of skin colors other than my own.
I have to say, even with racism being a problem, I still think classism is a bigger problem in the world right now. I used to eke out an upper-lower class existence, beating my head against walls to break into the middle class…but I never made it. I fell down two years ago.
I am every statistic a “good white girl” shouldn’t be: teen parent, welfare-to-work-mom, temp worker, single mama with deadbeat daddies who don’t pay child support (they were 10 years apart, I apparently STILL didn’t learn enough about men in that time), fired unfairly from a job when my new boss started committing wage theft and I called her on that and her lack of providing training for our team, slapped back into an unemployment/DSHS bottomless pit of misery, and eventually HOMELESS and sleeping in my car with my kids and dog. We’re in a shelter now, but it took 5 months in an RV (once the UE got processed, of course too late to pay back rent by about 2 months) to get high enough on the waitlist to get into a shelter.
The hardest part of all those statistics is maintaining your dignity in the face of everyone who says, “Oh well, you MADE THOSE CHOICES, you’re the fuck-up, you loser, you drag on society!”
And I can only imagine _how it would be_ if I were not white and somewhat literate, and more curious and persistent than the average bear.
It’s really been a VERY dehumanizing and eye-opening experience. Yet if I put on my work clothes and talk to you over coffee, you would not know that I live in abject poverty and am still shell-shocked a year later.
Humans must still have their dignity. I think this article touches a nerve for that very reason. When you strip away all of the socio-economic facade, we are all human and bleed the same. Why is that so threatening to those who have the privileges and the power? Because it reminds them they might LOSE their power. If you feel powerless, you are that much closer to having know dignity.
I feel like my train of thought has wandered, I am not clear, but in the end I agree:
We have to STOP PRETENDING that the 1960s and 1970s made everything okay and equal and groovy for everyone. Just because our parents taught us verbally that Everyone Is Equal Now, and then taught us in word and action otherwise. A societal shift does not happen in one generation alone. The shift cannot happen in silence, denial, or a refusal to call things what they are.
I am so grateful that others are saying, enough bullshit, WE NEED TO TALK. “Keepin’ it real” is a cute little catchphrase, isn’t it? A casual greeting or farewell, right?
Shouldn’t it be a way of life?