I want to explore this latter aspect, around "keeping my cool". Aside from resistance, I want to explore an anthropological approach to Whiteness, not just in terms of locating (for the purposes of problematising, undermining and disrupting) White privilege, but also in terms of "objective" (i.e. dispassionate) explorations of Whiteness and its many variations... The way that "White discourses" and "White cultures" function, not just, by definition, because of the dispossession/marginalisation of people of colour, but also because of the nuances of White people doing Whiteness (whether overtly or covertly racist, "doing good" in anti-racist spaces, or in critical awareness of privilege). What sorts of Whiteness are produced and reproduced?
Lastly, as a tentative inquiry, I want to explore the ethical stance of "innocence", which is a narrative uniquely generated within cultures of Whiteness (and particularly projected upon constructions of childhood). I particularly want to see if there is any "wisdom" behind an innocence that is sometimes (or ordinarily) deployed defensively and in reaction to accusations of racism, and what it is we may learn from such normatively White formulations (about presumed racial innocence).
Some considerations of "Good White People"
1. Hippies, Quakers, Jews, Europeans,
and so on...
are not the same.
2. For example, hippies in the USA emerge as an ethnically mixed, middle-class White culture, partially as a reactionary response to their inherited colonial, neo-colonial and settler mentalities (counter-(dominant )culturalism).
3. Quakers emerged as a dissenting group of English people in 17th century England, breaking away from the Church of England. They were consistently anti-war, anti-colonial and anti-slavery, and thus driven out of England as migrants seeking religious freedom, significantly transforming their consciousness as a religious diaspora on the American continent.
4. Jewish folks within White settler societies such as US/Canada largely exist also in response to anti-Semitic persecution within Europe, migrating out of Europe in significant numbers to seek a better lives for themselves... Ironically moving increasingly into spaces of White, economic, and cultural privilege through their visibility in (post)modern American popular culture.
5. "Indigeneity", in Europe, is necessarily inclusive of Whiteness, and other Euro-White colonial projects on indigenously European peoples.
Additional Thoughts:
a. Discrimination on the basis of race (and perceived racialised characteristics) is something that occurs among (that is, perpetrated by and against) people of any and all cultures and races.
(Lia writes wonderfully about this in her piece "Against analogy":
"Modern liberal thinking offers discrimination as a metonym for all oppression, with prejudice as its cause and individualisation as the solution. But while prejudice is arguably problematic in its own right, discrimination is only one aspect of oppression. (As a start, others might include erasure, marginalisation, fetishisation, tokenism, appropriation, exploitation, segregation, assimilation …)"
... Her piece is worth reading in its entirety
b. Discrimination alone, then, in this context, is not sufficient to constitute what I mean by Racism. I must necessarily factor in issues of class, and of course, race privilege (of which White privilege is, at this historical moment, hegemonic in my Australian national context, and in many other global contexts).
By way of example, a Black person calling a White person "cracker" does not have the same material weight (or history) of a White person calling a Black person "nigger".
While both are discriminatory, (only) the latter is indisputably racist.
c. To differentiate between White people is not to excuse White people of their White privilege, but rather, to contextualise and differentiate nuances of accountability for ongoing race privilege and racial oppression. How did different people (disproportionately, though perhaps not exclusively, of European heritage) start to "become White" in certain national contexts? How does their Whiteness differ from space to space / country to country? What sorts of racial accountabilities can/should one expect, for example, of a newly arrived Swedish migrant to the USA, compared to a British migrant to Australia, compared to a Croatian migrant to New Zealand, compared to an Anglo-Australian woman who has grown up in Shanghai, compared to a 5th generation Irish-Canadian woman in Quebec, compared to a fair-skinned Honduran Latino man living in Singapore, compared to a 2nd-generation Greek Australian in Melbourne, compared to a Dutch person within and indigenous to Holland?
How do differing patterns of migration, into countries with different legacies of racism, affect the production of White cultures? Are there patterns we can notice? And are White (national) cultures therefore always to be regarded as criminally suspect?
(I immediately draw a distinction between White-dominated settler societies, such as Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand, and "indigenously White" societies where many of the people who may have political power are also indigenous to the land (many European countries).)
In a more contemporary sense:
In the USA, I suspect largely because of the cultural power of cities like New York City, many Jews, Italians, and Greeks have similarly "become White" in American consciousness (that is, are perceived as racially White, and thus, adequately "Subjectivised" in the national imagination as citizens). This is different in Australia, where it is specifically people of Anglo-Celtic heritages who are still culturally and phenotypically dominant in constructions and portrayals of Whiteness and citizenship.
I am witnessing a slow, generational change in the inclusion of more Greek and Italian faces... but for the most part, Greeks, Italians, and many other people of Southeastern European descent (e.g. Croation, Serbian) as well as Middle Eastern / Arabic descent (e.g. Lebanese, Iraqi) are racialised as "Wogs".
Sort of "off-White".
Problematising White Privilege
I am less and less convinced by the utility of narratives which iterate White privilege as the globally hegemonic form of race privilege, true as this may be in this historical moment. The reason I am less and less convinced by the utility of this narrative, even though it may be true, is because:
1. It is an expedient discourse but pretends universality in Anglophonic spaces (and is thus wedded, perhaps unwittingly, to American hegemony in racial discourse).
--> the irony of meeting many Queer People of Colour here in Melbourne who romanticise cities in the USA as bastions of cultural power for QPOCs, because of its hegemonic creative potential around "radical" discourse...
2. There are variations on who receives race privilege in different cultural spaces... To speak of White privilege as globally hegemonic itself privileges a certain vision of the reaches of globalisation.
3. The emotional content of discourses on White privilege and the oppression of people of colour sometimes unabashedly morph into strictly (and reductionistically) materialistic and dualistic frameworks
(e.g. White people = Oppressors // People of Colour = Oppressed...
therefore Whiteness = In need of rehabilitation // People of Colour = not responsible for White people's rehabilitation process).
4. This dualism precludes intimacy (both a product and a perpetuation of Racism).
5. We forget or ignore the culpability of colonialism within people-of-colour socities as, at least in part, highly racialised narratives in themselves, many of which set the precedent for the continued dispossession of our own people today (a dispossession that today globally disproportionately privileges White people... but these historical referents have varied...)
6. There is also the ever-increasing cultural and economic power of people who are racialised and/or acculturated as Chinese / East Asian, particularly in countries in Southeast Asia.
That last point needs to be taken seriously, in any attempt to universalising accounts of racial justice, even if these accounts acknowledge their limitations (in this case, I am writing in the English language for an English-reading audience).
If the most spoken language in the world is Mandarin, then we can postulate this much: That the cultures and worldviews expressed in Mandarin are the ones that are globally hegemonic for the most numbers of people, or at least are likely to become much more so.
It could be helpful to preemptively consider Chinese constructions of race and ethnicity, in shaping the near future of race and racism globally, even in national contexts such as the USA and Australia, where Whiteness and European-ness are still hegemonic.
This is especially important given the increasing obsolescence of the rational Nation-State as being the final arbiter of our meaning-making as "citizens"... Global citizenship (for those of us who have the race/class/gender etc. privilege to conceive of such a thing) requires an active engagement with racial and linguistic concerns beyond Whiteness.
Innocence
My interest here is not to indict people of colour and to defend White innocence.
(indeed, part of an anthropology of Whiteness would be to precisely include analysis of White cultures or White-dominator discourses which hold people of colour disproportionately responsible for our own oppression and suffering while simultaneously absolving themselves of any culpability... or who use colourblind approaches and narratives around racial justice).
I of course acknowledge that White people need to intentionally increase their awareness of and take responsibility for their White privilege. I intend to historicise how this has come to be, and where this may go, and I acknowledge that Whiteness and English are still hegemonic as the face and language of global capitalism.
So no, I am not here to indict people of colour and to defend White innocence.
Rather, I am claiming:
All of us need to claim our innocence.
In anti-racist discourse, I often encounter the narrative of complicity...
"All of us are raised in a racist society, therefore there is no such thing as someone who isn't racist... We need to ALL take responsibility for our racism..."
etc.
But I think there is a unique "wisdom" in innocence. And I am suggesting:
White people should not have a monopoly over this innocence.
We are all innocent, because discriminating on the basis of perceived racial difference is something that happens to all of us, developmentally, as we move through the world.
I am not saying:
"White people are (uniquely) innocent".
I am saying:
"All people are (generally) innocent".
I am also saying:
That as we discriminate on the basis of race, while the material differences on aggregate are stark (if you are White, compared to if you are a person of colour), the spiritual consequences are similar. Racial discrimination necessarily involves a disavowal of a part of our own selfhood and personhood.
The part of the White person who is, for example, also "primitive", "ugly", "poor", or "cultural"...
or "sexist" or "homophobic"...
characteristics sometimes projected onto people of colour...
and the part of the person of colour who is also "dominant", "colonial", "normal", "ignorant", "oppressive"...
characteristics sometimes projected onto White people...
...Also: "innocent"
"Innocent", because all of us, in whatever we do, are bonded in our shared struggle, to deal with our suffering, our fears of old age, sickness, and death.
When we are angry, when we use our ignorance to hurt others, maliciously or ignorantly, when we become perpetrators, when we are hurt by others' ignorances and, victimised, become victims... When we are held back from courage to speak out because of our fear, when we fall-back on being do-nothing bystanders, when we jump the gun on social justice, when we make harsh and punitive or eternally and prematurely forgiving judgements, all this, I suggest:
Are all expressions of our own common innocence as human beings, fumbling our way to make sense of how we can, should, or must relate or not relate to one another better. To survive, to thrive.
A wisdom that may come from race privilege, perhaps (or at least enough privilege and space to breathe through the pain of racial oppression), but a wisdom that I'd like to see available to all of us, is the engagement with this very "innocence" that belongs not to White people nor to people of colour, but is a common developmental stage of our all-too-humanness.
Our propensity to discriminate is not inherently pathological. It is "innocent" of the systems which render it either benign or devastatingly tumorous.
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