Radical educator Paulo Freire argued that the purpose of education was humanization. By this he meant that any form of education must begin from the experience and knowledge of the oppressed, and that the oppressed and oppressors must enter into a community of learning.
It strikes me that the current white privilege discussion breaks almost all the rules of humanization. Privilege fundamentally erases the experiences and knowledge of the oppressors and dictates to them a knowledge that they must adopt in order to be considered members of the social justice community.
We must find ways to humanize both oppressors and the oppressed because both the oppressors and the oppressed are, in fact, human.
Before I get to my arguments about a way to call oppressors to a higher consciousness, I want to first credit the folks that I got this idea from, lest I be accused of appropriation. I am in conversation with a number of black nationalists/radicals. One of those who has had the most influence on me is Zone the Divine Mind, a spoken word artist and community organizer from Birmingham.
In contrast to many white "allies," Zone is about calling folks, mostly black, to a higher plane of consciousness and knowledge of self, meaning an understanding of black history and culture and of the way that government, culture, and economics place black folks within the societal hierarchy. He is fundamentally positive in the belief that this form of consciousness is liberating and empowering.
What occurs to me is that WHITE PEOPLE NEED THIS TOO and that knowledge of self is the goal of the white privilege discussion, but in a dehumanizing way.
Thus, as opposed to privilege, educators need to talk to the oppressors in a way that calls them to consciousness and knowledge of self.
Instead of essentially telling sinners to repent (privilege), knowledge of self opens a conversation about who oppressors are as a people and how we're placed in society.
In contrast to the visceral anger elicited by the privilege discussion, the oppressors respond with curiosity and puzzlement, which is much more amenable to learning than anger.
The discussion can start something like this:
Person lacking knowledge of self: I am not racist; I treat everyone as a human being.
Educator: Only a white person with no knowledge of self would ever claim that they are not racist.
The accusatory tone is now gone and the person lacking knowledge of self is simply puzzled. They ask, implicitly, "why would being racist constitute knowledge of self?"
The next steps may be more difficult, but the educator must demonstrate that global white supremacy exists and that everyone is subject to it, though they may experience it in different and novel ways.
One way to do this is to provide an example. (This is predicated on dealing with people that actually care about racism; we shouldn't be even trying to educate those that do not.)
Person lacking knowledge of self: Global white supremacy may exist, but I don't support or participate in it.
Educator: How can you not participate? Your tax dollars support the criminal justice system.
This shifts the terrain from individual racism to how global white supremacy constructs the white racial subject.
In essence, whites, though that may want to be non-racist, are forced through government to participate in global white supremacy through paying taxes, which demonstrates that every white is, in fact subject to, though not oppressed by, white supremacy.
This is the beginning of knowledge of self because it shows that whites are racist vis-a-vis their position in the system instead of their individual feelings or beliefs.
It seems that it is time for positivity in the conversation about white racism and this seems to be a better way to get at who white people are and why as opposed to just telling folks, "you're privileged."
Showing posts with label white privilege. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white privilege. Show all posts
Friday, March 6, 2015
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
I am a White Male
I believe that it is time that I say a little about myself, who I am, and why I do what I do. First and foremost, I am a radical scholar-activist. I am currently in school at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing my PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. I am also a Southern white male, which places me in a very particular position to comment on social phenomena in the South from an insider's perspective. As a Southern white male, my first education was that of a white supremacist.
A point of order; while this is my personal story, I am not saying anything that people of color haven't been saying for centuries. 100 years ago, W.E.B. Dubois talked about the "psychological wage" of whiteness, which is essentially white privilege.
I learned early in life about white privilege, the structural characteristic of whiteness that causes whites to have an entitled approach to living and interacting with others. An example of white privilege is that whites believe that if one works hard and follows the rules, the system will provide benefits, a life, and a living to them. Of course, people who aren't white men recognize instantly that all manners of glass ceilings exist that impede this upward mobility, but this belief in upward mobility is a hallmark characteristic of whiteness and white privilege.
Back to my life. My earliest memories were from Fairfield, Alabama, an older industrial suburb of Birmingham. At 5, this area was transitioning from a white neighborhood to a black neighborhood, owing to white flight. My family was poor by any measure of income, but my parents put me in an all white private school because the black public schools were "bad." While the purported quality of schools may or may not have been true, what is undoubtedly true is that being put in private school was the first inculcation of my white privilege. Other instances from my life, further conditioned me to accept white privilege as both natural and the normal mode of living.
I began to defend that privilege vigorously at about 10 or 12 when I started to listen to conservative talk radio. I held Rush and Hannity to be among the most important prophets of the time, and even won caller of the day on Hannity's talk show when it was in Huntsville. The specific reason that I won caller of the day was because I railed agains the Black Coaches Association for defending athletic scholarships. I made some ridiculous comment that basically amounted to "whites are smarter than blacks," though it was highly coded, showing how at a young age I understood how to use racially coded language.
My racist racial theory began to fall apart when I entered the blue collar world, where for the first time I was really exposed to black people. Most of this transformation was non-conscious as I started to assimilate new information. I entered the blue collar world because I refused to go to college, much to my parents dismay. There I saw blacks in much the same position as myself, struggling to survive on meager incomes. The work was long, brutal, and oppressive.
My new anti-racist perspective arose out of my engagement with anthropology after abandoning my blue collar career for an opportunity in higher education. Through anthropology I learned the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that one's culture must be judged by its own criteria. I began to try to understand others around me from their own perspective and even looked back to my experiences as an auto mechanic and warehouse worker with new-found clarity. The anti-racist perspective began to crystallize in graduate school when I was introduced to different aspects of critical race theory.
My rudimentary understanding of the anti-racist perspective basically entailed the mainstream liberal solution to racial animosity - that everything can be solved by constructing a diverse community. While this is a start, it still entails one of the hallmarks of whiteness - universalism. When whites talk about community, they do so from a perspective that entails adoption of their colorblind values. However, colorblindness is in itself a racist ideology in that it denies the real differences in history and experiences between whites and people of color. As I learned to recognize those differences, I saw that constructing a community isn't enough, it must be the construction of a community underpinned by anti-racism, the belief that our society, and even global society, is organized unequally on the basis of race, and to actively work in one's everyday life against that inequality. This entails as much fighting our own individual racist demons as it does reaching out to try to change the world around you. The two are mutually determined.
I've learned that I still have white privilege in spite of my desire for that to disappear. I've learned that I'm still a racist in spite of the fact I don't want to be. And I've learned that this is all a result of white supremacy, the name of this organizing system. To change this system, we must first fight white supremacy within ourselves and then reach out to the world to share that fight with others. This is how change happens.
A point of order; while this is my personal story, I am not saying anything that people of color haven't been saying for centuries. 100 years ago, W.E.B. Dubois talked about the "psychological wage" of whiteness, which is essentially white privilege.
I learned early in life about white privilege, the structural characteristic of whiteness that causes whites to have an entitled approach to living and interacting with others. An example of white privilege is that whites believe that if one works hard and follows the rules, the system will provide benefits, a life, and a living to them. Of course, people who aren't white men recognize instantly that all manners of glass ceilings exist that impede this upward mobility, but this belief in upward mobility is a hallmark characteristic of whiteness and white privilege.
Back to my life. My earliest memories were from Fairfield, Alabama, an older industrial suburb of Birmingham. At 5, this area was transitioning from a white neighborhood to a black neighborhood, owing to white flight. My family was poor by any measure of income, but my parents put me in an all white private school because the black public schools were "bad." While the purported quality of schools may or may not have been true, what is undoubtedly true is that being put in private school was the first inculcation of my white privilege. Other instances from my life, further conditioned me to accept white privilege as both natural and the normal mode of living.
I began to defend that privilege vigorously at about 10 or 12 when I started to listen to conservative talk radio. I held Rush and Hannity to be among the most important prophets of the time, and even won caller of the day on Hannity's talk show when it was in Huntsville. The specific reason that I won caller of the day was because I railed agains the Black Coaches Association for defending athletic scholarships. I made some ridiculous comment that basically amounted to "whites are smarter than blacks," though it was highly coded, showing how at a young age I understood how to use racially coded language.
My racist racial theory began to fall apart when I entered the blue collar world, where for the first time I was really exposed to black people. Most of this transformation was non-conscious as I started to assimilate new information. I entered the blue collar world because I refused to go to college, much to my parents dismay. There I saw blacks in much the same position as myself, struggling to survive on meager incomes. The work was long, brutal, and oppressive.
My new anti-racist perspective arose out of my engagement with anthropology after abandoning my blue collar career for an opportunity in higher education. Through anthropology I learned the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that one's culture must be judged by its own criteria. I began to try to understand others around me from their own perspective and even looked back to my experiences as an auto mechanic and warehouse worker with new-found clarity. The anti-racist perspective began to crystallize in graduate school when I was introduced to different aspects of critical race theory.
My rudimentary understanding of the anti-racist perspective basically entailed the mainstream liberal solution to racial animosity - that everything can be solved by constructing a diverse community. While this is a start, it still entails one of the hallmarks of whiteness - universalism. When whites talk about community, they do so from a perspective that entails adoption of their colorblind values. However, colorblindness is in itself a racist ideology in that it denies the real differences in history and experiences between whites and people of color. As I learned to recognize those differences, I saw that constructing a community isn't enough, it must be the construction of a community underpinned by anti-racism, the belief that our society, and even global society, is organized unequally on the basis of race, and to actively work in one's everyday life against that inequality. This entails as much fighting our own individual racist demons as it does reaching out to try to change the world around you. The two are mutually determined.
I've learned that I still have white privilege in spite of my desire for that to disappear. I've learned that I'm still a racist in spite of the fact I don't want to be. And I've learned that this is all a result of white supremacy, the name of this organizing system. To change this system, we must first fight white supremacy within ourselves and then reach out to the world to share that fight with others. This is how change happens.
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