Unsourced screencap making the rounds on Facebook.
yeah, pretty much this. there is no such thing as ‘white culture’.
the one ethnic pride fest i wish existed that doesn’t is “dude i have no idea what all is up in there” pride. both for the many white americans who have no idea where their ancestors came from (not all families were literate, some folks are adopted, etc), and for people like me who have an ancestry from “sort of all around that general vicinity over there.” i mean, i go to the czech heritage festival and that’s pretty great, but there’s no kazakh or mongolian or “idk some uyghur guys in northern china we think probably” festival. anyway, we could call it Mutt Fest and it could be a lot of fun. we could have fusion food and dance to afro-celts. 😀
When I was 14 or so, I asked my grandmother why we didn’t have a “white club” at school. I don’t recall her response, but I do remember feeling particularly smug and vaguely angry that there was a “Latino” club and a “Chinese” club but not a “white” club.
Oh the unfairness! Oh the disparity! Why do we celebrate their heritage but not ours?
And I didn’t think about race again, at least not much, until I dated an African American man in college and a stranger whispered “nigger lover” in my ear one night as he walked by us in a grocery store. Disgusting.
I figured he was a strange exception of horrible racist creature. He was, after all, approximately 97 years old. (Well, 70, but he appeared 97 to my fresh young eyes.)
And then, a few months later, when my boyfriend’s roommate took me aside and asked why I have to “take a good black man who was in college,” when so many black men were incarcerated. I concluded she was crazy. And mean.
She hurt my feelings. Poor Janelle.
Beyond these few moments, and a couple others, I didn’t really think about race. Well, I thought about how people made arguments “about race” when clearly they were not. I mean why do they make race an issue? It’s obviously not.
Oh yeah, I had America all figured out: If ya work hard, you get ahead. And if you don’t get ahead, it’s because you made bad decisions. And if you get arrested it’s because you’re breaking the law, and people who break the law are more likely to be black. Obviously. That’s why they’re always getting arrested. (How’s that for some cyclic logic?)
I knew this to be true because:
America was awful to black people but that was fixed during the Civil Rights movement;
Therefore, we are all on equal footing now and if you don’t succeed it’s because you aren’t trying.
I learned it in school. It was fact. School teaches the truth.
And then, graduate school, and Professor Lee.
Oh, shit.
“Not all white people are white supremacists, but all white people benefit from white supremacy.”
WHAT THE WHAT?
She made us repeat it like a mantra. At least 3 times. I read Tim Wise’s White Like Me (I have mixed feelings about him now, but I digress) and bell hooks and David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness and learned how our economic systems benefit from racism and we read about thehistory of American immigration laws (have you ever read them?) and colonialism in the Philippines and elsewhere (yes, America has colonies but we call them “territories”), and we read about redlining and white flight (ever wonder how black people ended up in urban centers?), and we read some DuBois and Omi & Winant and literature by people of color and all of the sudden I realized I had been fucking lied to.
I understood America through white eyes. I understood the world through the mainstream, polished glasses of a nice clean history of “we used to be bad now we’re not the end.”
Go team.
I discovered I was white.
“Not all white people are white supremacists, but all white people benefit from white supremacy.”
She wanted us to see that as individuals, not all white people are bigoted. But she also wanted us to see that every white person – whether they are bigoted or not – benefits from the racially structured hierarchies in America. They benefit from racism.
Yes. Even me. Even though I am not “racist.”
How? And she explained whiteness. She explained that “white” is the standard. White is the background against which difference is measured.
In other words, it’s “white” until further notice. It’s “white” until proven otherwise. It’s “white” or it’s the “other,” and it has nothing to do with actual numbers, percentages of “minority” population. It has to do with power. It has to do with the culture of power. What do I mean? If a comedy film features a white family, it’s a comedy. If it features a black family, it’s a blackcomedy.
Think about it.
White is the standard. And I’m white. Therefore, I am standard, and that benefits me.
When I walk into a room, I don’t fear that I’m representing my whole race. I have never acted badly then thought to myself “Oh shit, I sure hope they don’t hate all white people now.”
Or, in other words, even though pretty much every Columbine-type-school-kid-murderer is white, I’ve never developed a distrust for white, socially awkward high school kids.
A few do not represent the whole.
“Privilege is passed on through history.”
Whatever. I grew up POOR!
But then I thought about how, in the late 1940s, my grandmother was the first woman editor of the University of Washington’s newspaper. After she graduated, she and my grandpa bought and ran small newspapers in northern California. The family business they built employed my family members for 40+ years.
In the late 1940s, black people were not allowed to sit in the front of the bus.
How can I deny that my grandparents’ access to education and economic success did not materially affect me in a positive way, directly, through my father? I thought about the loans my parents were able to take with financial backing from my grandparents, and how that benefitted me. My life. My quality of life. The neighborhoods we lived in. The schools we attended. My cultural knowledge.
“Why don’t we have ‘White History Month?’”
Because White History Month is every month other than February, asshole.
Oh, shit indeed.
“The culture of power determines which version of history is told and retold.”
Prior to the Women’s Rights Movement, women were stuck in the home while men went to work and supported them. But then women were liberated and able to get jobs working outside the home.
Right?
WRONG. White, middle to upper class women were “stuck in the home.” Women of color have ALWAYS “worked out of the home.” In fact, the women of color were probably working in the homes of the white women about which our history is written.
So one of the most oft-repeated, trusted narratives about American history erases the history of women of color. It is dead fucking wrong. It isn’t even kind of right. They are erased. Non-existent. Unseen.
They are Chapter 10. They are a chapter that ends with “but then Martin Luther King, Jr., and all is well.”
They are Chapter 10. I am chapters 1 through forever, and every day I cash in on that fact, whether or not I support the systems making that happen for me.
I realized the reason I had never thought about race was because I was of the privileged one, because I didn’t have to, NOT BECAUSE RACIAL DISPARITY DIDN’T EXIST. I didn’t have to think about race because I was having a fundamentally different life experience than people of color. But I could ignore them, because of my privilege.
I was able to hang out in meltin-pot, “post-racial” land was because the structures of that society allowed (and encouraged) me to “not see race” while continually feeding me narratives about “equality,” “multiculturalism,” “color-blindness” and “ghetto urban lifestyles.”
I spent a lot of time in graduate school in the library, writing at a computer. Like, hours. Whole days. When I had to pee, I would ask the person sitting next to me to watch my stuff so I didn’t have to pack it all up and carry it down the hall to the bathroom. I did it a 100 times.
Once I looked over at the person next to me and my first thought was “Oh you can’t ask him. He’ll steal your stuff.
He was a young black man wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt.
I was sickened at myself. I was horrified at my response. There was absolutely nothing different about him than the 100 other people I didn’t hesitate to ask, except he was black.
I realized that not only do I benefit historically and presently, every day, from the color of skin, I have also internalized cultural narratives regarding blacks and whites that manifest whether or not I support them.
“Hey, would you mind watching my stuff for a minute?”
But what now?
Does it mean my grandmother’s accomplishments are less badass? Nope. Does it mean I do not “deserve” success? Nope. Does it mean that I am a bad person? Nope.
It means that we live in a highly racialized society rooted in a history of discrimination and that we have a long way to go. It means that I have had an advantage over people of color. Yes, always. Yes, no matter what. Because even if you’re poor and white you can join the culture of power by learning the walk and talk. But you can’t change your skin color.
From the day I was first introduced to this “other story,” I couldn’t get enough. Not because I’m some sort of saint or conspiracy theorist, but because I was curious. I was interested out of a sense of shared humanity. And I was fucking angry that I had been swindled. I wanted the truth. Or, I wanted a fuller picture. I wanted more sides.
That, my friends, is pathetic in its privilege.
I learned in graduate school what every person of color knows through life experience. I learned in graduate school that we weren’t “fixed” during the Civil Rights movement.
But when this information was presented to me I felt a sense of relief, because I think deep down I always knew something was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I don’t understand the white rage I keep reading on the internet.
Just another dead thug.
He got what he deserved.
Run over the protestors. They’re making me late for work.
STOP PLAYING THE “RACE CARD.”
I don’t understand it. What’s at stake, people? What’s at stake in accepting that racism exists? Or even entertaining the thought? Are people really so stupid they can’t fathom that other people might be having a different experience than they are? Is it really that hard to comprehend that something can exist EVEN THOUGH YOU DON’T PERSONALLY SEE IT?
(Although you’ll see your privilege if you’re willing to examine your life honestly.)
Why the hell are people so unwilling to listen?
Let’s think about this for a moment. A whole community of people are saying this exists. Data shows racial disparities in economic, education, justice, and healthcare systems. Basically, ALL OVER THE PLACE. Unarmed black boys and men are killed without recourse. Repeatedly. The comment sections of these crimes are riddled with assholes shouting “Good. One less loser.”
But people still claim “Racism doesn’t exist.” But here’s the thing: The only way you can discount the words, lives, efforts and voices of hundreds of thousands of people is THROUGH THE RACISM YOU CLAIM DOESN’T EXIST.
You can only ignore them if they’re aren’t worth hearing.
You can only ignore them if they’re liars. If they’re just looking for a handout.
If they’re not human like you.
You can only ignore them by using the very narratives you claim aren’t happening.
And let’s be honest, we can only ignore them because it’s easy, because we’ll never have to walk a day in their shoes, and it’s just so much more pleasant to turn away, look away, focus back on our lives.
But the sand is getting skimpy and our heads are showing. At this point, if we’re not part of the solution we’re part of the problem.
I’m using my voice to talk to you. I’m using my voice to talk to my kids. But it isn’t enough. We’re looking for places to volunteer. I’m looking for actions I can take.
We’re at a crossroads. This cannot go on. We’re crushed under the weight of hatred, history, silence, violence, bullshit media and the insidious defense of systematic unequal distribution of resources, and at some point, none of us will be able to breathe.
It feels small and pathetic to be one person in this mess. I feel stupid and vulnerable and slightly insane to be writing this here, now. But fuck my feelings. Fuck feeling uncomfortable. Fuck the nonsense that keeps us quiet and content and cozy in our little post-racial dreamland.
They can’t breathe, and I’m breathing just fine.
And that is precisely the problem.
FUCKING SPREAD THIS TRUTH AND GIVE THAT PERSON A MEDAL DAMMIT
Share!!!!
WHY DOESNT THIS HAVE MORE NOTES?????
Wow….can this please make it over to white tumblr
READ IT ALL
AMAZING essay.
Wonderful content, but that quote isn’t by Dubois, it’s actually a tweet by Van Newkirk and I hate being that person, but every time I see it improperly credited I die a little and have to say something.
i think a lot of the rage reactions you see are covering a terror of guilt. people who have no idea how to handle the truth, so they react against it like a cornered, wounded animal. i have sympathy for that, honestly. but just like you can’t let a wounded animal live in your garage and bite you whenever you come near it, we can’t let the Angry White Boy Lashout be treated as okay and normal. we need to respond with patience, empathy, and firmness; like animal control officers, not debating partners.
as for ignorant kids like the OP describes being – white privilege is not being aware of these things, but that’s not the fault of the children. growing up without fear isn’t a crime. ignorance is completely curable. so i’d like to add a reminder that as adults aware of the issues, our job with regard to kids who don’t understand oppression isn’t to be outraged at the ignorant things they say, but to encourage them to find out the truth, and become helpers.
please teach children that having privilege doesn’t mean they’re a walking poison, it means they have leverage to help others.
Wanting to stop bad representation is all well and good. It’s noble! But just as fetishization can turn “I love this culture” into a negative because you actually love your idea of the culture, wanting to save the world from bad representation can also turn very negative.
Why? Because you want to play saviour to PoC.
We don’t need a saviour. Chances are, we’ve already written about the issue you want to write about. In your valiant effort to give accurate representation, tripping over yourself to ask what’s okay, what to avoid, how you can properly write this situation, how you can be a Good Ally and get cookies and generally stop being a White Person that’s discussed whenever PoC talk about racism… you add to the burden of emotional labour instead of detract from it.
You’re putting your own desire for immediate knowledge above everything else.
Instead of turning to Google and educating yourself, instead of going through our guides over and over again, instead of educating yourself across an extended period of time, instead of searching for authors of colour you can lift up, you want answers to your questions right now so you can stop being a White Person and just be a white person.
You won’t stop being a White Person overnight. You will not go from 0 to Passable Representation thanks to one question and one conversation. Even if we were to give you a list of what to avoid (which, honestly, our blog is a very large list of exactly that), it would still take you years of noticing your own behaviour to change.
Take for example our most recent correction: using a Chinese example when the ask was about Tibet. Despite a fair chunk of education and several posts about how much China has taken over lands that do not want to be taken over by China, that mistake was still made.
And that’s with education. That’s with knowing, intellectually, the context of China/Tibet relations. If you’re jumping in from scratch having only taken in enough racism education— enough to know you should be representing diverse cultures, not enough to know where to start— you’re going to make even worse mistakes.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t start learning! But recognize it is a process, and that wanting to save the world isn’t a sustainable reason to educate yourself and write good representation. You probably shouldn’t jump straight into the deepest depths of representation right away.
So What Can I Do?
Write stories you think are worth telling because they’re interesting stories, not because you want to “prove” how good/interesting they are. Write stories you are curious about, instead of picking the most under-represented group you can think of. Make sure your drive is from curiosity, not white saviour. You shouldn’t be trying to prove to everyone these stories are worthwhile; you’re very likely to fall into model minority because you don’t want to show anything “bad.”
Signal boost stories PoC have already written. You are not the first person to write about an issue, and chances are authors of colour have done it better. You can use your white privilege to lift up PoC narratives, bringing them to a new audience. Look through #OwnVoices or #WeNeedDiverseBooks as a starting place. Give value to authors of colour writing about their own culture, their own world, instead of thinking the value comes from your outsider take on it.
Realize you’re going to have to start small: background characters, adding diversity to friend groups, having more than one of any ethnicity to avoid tokenism. If you do fantasy writing, start by learning about trade routes such as the Silk Road and add in references to other countries’ trade links, while also realizing “exotic trader” is a very toxic trope.
Also, realize you’re going to be in this for the long haul. If you are interested in a fully immersive story set in another culture, you’re going to be spending years, perhaps a decade, learning enough about it to do it justice.
You don’t need to ask us to get the basics (food/clothing/religion/trade relations) of a culture. We can tell when you haven’t researched it.
Writers are renowned for our research ability. How long will you spend looking up the weather in 1600s England, the process of learning how to be a swordsman, the average medical knowledge of a farmhand? The same applies to learning about PoC settings. You might be starting from scratch, but simple searches like “clothing in 1500s China”, “goods that traveled on the Silk Road”, and “Native American cities pre-contact” are starting places. It might be a little more basic because of unfamiliarity, but remember that you didn’t know stuff about Europe once upon a time.
Learn the definitions of appropriation, fetishization, and white saviour. Realize they all come from the same roots: a person’s ideas about a culture over the actual reality of the culture. Instead of assuming you know what there is to know, research to find out if you “know” a fake thing. You might “know” how horses work, but do you know the Disney version or the horseback rider version?
The research we are asking you do is the same research. It’s the same steps of searching for a particular fact and building your story based on the details you uncover. It’s not some murky waters of hard to find information— especially as the internet is ever-expanding, and sometimes a few years or even a few months down the line you discover the information has been made available (“weather in India” wasn’t a wikipedia article 12 years ago, for example).
Learn you and your ideas are secondary. The facts are first. It will take time to learn that you are secondary, because whiteness by nature puts itself first. It is not an instant process because you don’t realize how deep it runs. You will mess up. You will get corrections.
Apologize (genuinely— no “I’m sorry if I offended you”; say “I’m sorry I made this error”), admit you were wrong, and do better. Research more, take more time, maybe even edit the previous work with your new knowledge so it really sticks. This is, after all, a process!
You just have to do the work. You can’t come to us and say “how do I represent this group”, because we can’t tell you in a reply to one ask. You have to dive into the history, current situation, and culture of the people you want to represent.
You have to fill your own cup of knowledge, and willingly drink all parts of culture: sweet and bitter alike. Drink from cups we have offered you already instead of trying to build your own. You can’t just take the sweet (finding it a fantasy world) or the bitter (the trauma of racism) and think you have enough.
When white leftists make spurious notions about needing to unite under “class struggle” and not racism, it’s clear they don’t care about People of Color.
Just look at the way welfare and the minimum wage have been gutted and maligned. It’s ahistorical. There’s innumerable examples like these.
the idea that “privileged people should speak out on behalf of oppressed people” and the idea that “it’s not the oppressed person’s job to educate” are both good ideas in their contexts.
if you take them out of context and try to scale them up outside of a single conversation into precepts of larger-scale discourse, they IMMEDIATELY become tools of white supremacy and get misused to justify privileged people talking over oppressed people.
I want to expand on this a little more, too – left it short and sweet because I’m too prone to walls of text, but I feel like this deserves a second pass:
Basically, establishing the idea that it is *only ever* the responsibility of people who are privileged in a specific discourse to speak out about oppression leads to the following situation. I have seen it primarily in racism discourse and now in antisemitism discourse, but it’s really all over the bloody place.
1) Someone not in an oppressed group circulates a thing that they made up, or nicked out of context from an off-the-cuff rant by some person in that oppressed group, without checking any kind of group consensus, because that thing is punchy and angery and gets attention. And it’s about ~protecting the weak~ so arguing looks bad.
2) Nobody bothers to run it past the group being spoken of (because that would be “expecting someone to educate you”) or check it against even the cheat sheet versions of decades of existing critical theory by that group (because that would be “work”).
3) Several thousand reblogs later, the echo chamber of privilege has generated a Fact! Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up to analysis. If there are like two or three approving reblogs from people in the group you’re talking about, and a few dozen disputing it? Well, clearly the dozens of folks are just internalizing prejudice, because of course the person who started it knows better than them, poor dears, and they can Prove It, now that they’ve got an endorsement from the handful of affected people who agree with them.
… And then folks start getting policed and yelled at by activists from out of their lane, for practicing their own cultural traditions or talking about their own life experiences or making their own stories and analyses.
The dominant narrative is a steamroller. People in a position of dominance, who decide to blithely attach shit to it without fact checking, have basically just discovered a new, exciting and socially approved way to steamroll minorities.
The system rewards punching down; it rewards talking over people that we’ve been trained to think are lesser. Unpicking this is *hard work*; flowing with the current is not.
Don’t be that person, is what I’m saying. Don’t confuse what’s satisfying with what’s right.
The whole Captain-America-is-a-Nazi-now thing reminded me of something, about all the straight white goys who think being a Nazi must have been cool.
The whole thing about the racial community, the Volk, was pretty much bullshit. Nazi leadership orchestrated the brutal mass murder of those they considered outsiders, but that does not mean they actually cared about the well-being or even the survival of insiders. Hitler himself considered the majority of Aryan Germans subhuman, gullible idiots. (His term is Hühnervolk, chicken people.) The average German may have been told he was an Übermensch war hero, but he was still used as cannon fodder, a worthless, disposable human tool. I’ve read mood reports from the last years of the war: the consensus amongst German civilians seems to be that there must be some secret weapon or secret plan that will turn the tide of war, because without one, Germany is losing so obviously that even an idiot could tell there’s no hope for victory. So if the leadership is still not giving up, and still sending men to the front to die, and still telling civilians to sit out the bombing, there must be something, or else we’re all dying for no reason. Nazism pretty much betrayed the people it was supposed to be for.
So the thing I want to tell young people attracted to Nazi ideology isn’t ‘you’re empowering yourself at the cost of the murder of others’, it’s ‘you’re gunning for someone who has no qualms sending you out to die a miserable death for no reason.’ What I want to say is, ‘you should know that just because you’re not amongst the first to be put into the meat grinder doesn’t mean you won’t end up there within the decade.’
hell, we don’t even need to look at germany: you see this over and over again in american history. the 30′s, 50′s, 80′s, this last election. constantly. the white poor are whipped into a racist frenzy over seeing nonwhites doing their best to survive, they’re told other races are enemy combatants come to steal all their shit instead of fellow citizens and natural allies against the upper class, then the poor whites all vote for politicians who promise to keep necessary resources away from the undeserving subhumans. the politicians make good on their word by funneling those resources up to themselves and their friends. the poor, white and black, all fucking suffer for it— but at least the white poor get to feel real fucking special while their kids sicken and die.
Don’t characterize a Black character as sassy or thuggish, especially when the character in question is can be described in literally ten thousand other ways..
Don’t describe Black characters as chocolate, coffee, or any sort of food item.
Don’t highlight the race of Black characters (ie, “the dark man” or “the brown woman”) if you don’t highlight the race of white characters.
Think very carefully about that antebellum slavery or Jim Crow AU fic as a backdrop for your romance.
If you’re not fluent with AAVE, don’t use it to try to look cool or edgy. You look corny as hell.
Don’t use Black characters as a prop for the non-Black characters you’re actually interested in.
Keep “unpopular opinions” about racism, Black Lives Matter, and other issues pertinent to Black folks out the mouths of Black characters. We know what the fuck you’re doing with that and need to stop.
Don’t assume a Black character likes or hates a certain food, music, or piece of pop culture.
Be extremely careful about insinuating that one or more of a Black character’s physical features are dirty, unclean, or ugly.
Feel free to add more.
Adding more…
Be wary of making Black characters seem animalistic, uncivilized, or subhuman in comparison to white characters. Watch out for: comparing us to monkeys, gorillas, chimpanzees, apes, and other animals.
Words like Negroid, colored/colured, Negro, and the n-word do not belong in the mouths of contemporary characters you want to portray as sympathetic.
Not all Black people are African American.
Africa is not a country but the second-largest continent on earth with some 54 different countries with thousands of ethnic groups and 1,500 to 3,000 languages and dialects.
Resist the urge to make a Black character seem uneducated and ignorant compared to white characters.
Capitalizing Black shows that you recognize that the word unifying people of African descent, particularly the diaspora, should be described using a proper noun.
Please, say “Black people,” not “blacks.”
Give Black characters the same psychological and moral complexity as white men are given by default.
Make sure that you don’t write a Black character as happily subservient to a white character.
Understand and show that you understand that Black characters don’t exist to be the caretakers of white characters.
And more…
Do your own homework instead of expecting, asking, or demanding Black fans to do it.
Before approaching that Black person you admire so much for being so articulate about race issues (this is sarcasm) to beta read your work: 1) make sure it’s something they’ve expressed interest in doing, and 2) you offer something in return for their time and expertise.
Be prepared for fans to have issues with what you came up with and open to suggestions.
Having only one Black character in a story that takes place in a huge city, country, or galaxy looks weird. Really, really weird. Scary weird.
Don’t use a Black character’s death to motivate a white character.
Portray Black characters with complex and multifaceted identities. We are more than just Black. We are also women, LGBT, Jewish, disabled, neurodivergent, immigrants, etc.
There is a huge chasm between hypersexual and desexualized.
Remember: what’s progressive for a white character is not necessarily progressive for a Black one.
Every once in awhile something makes me take a beat and just think about what it’s like to be a Black woman.
You’re a woman living in a world where men make more money, undermine your authority, feel entitled to your time, and take ownership of your body.
You’re a Black person living in a world set up to cater to whiteness, where law enforcement is a threat, job opportunities are unequal, and assumptions of character are made before you even say hello.
On top of all that, you’re a Black woman, both hypersexualized and desexualized (sometimes within the same conversation), expected to live up to European standards of beauty for not just men as a whole but also to Black men who lavish praise the closer you are to whiteness.
We gotta do better than this. Of course colorism has its roots in white supremacy, but why is it that some of the same people in our community who are quick to call out racial injustice and are quick to dismiss white opinions borne of archaic assumptions about race still adopt the white man’s standard of beauty and apply it to our own women?
One, women are not a status symbol and they’re not property. You aren’t a better man because you found a White Man’s Trophy to accept a ring on her finger, and the same goes for the light-skinned Black woman with long hair.
Two, White America doesn’t respect you more because your wife is closer to Europe than Sub-Saharan Africa, and you shouldn’t even care anyway. That’s where a lot of the colorism from Black men to Black women comes from. We’ve been programmed since birth that white is beautiful and good, and Black men want some of that to rub off on them by having a lite-brite or white woman on their arm. It’s not just the programming of falling prey to Eurocentric beauty standards – it’s also an attempt to increase self-worth by proxy.
Let it go. White America won’t give you a pat on the head for dogging brownskingirls. The most powerful man in the world – a biracial man at that – got to the White House with a brownskinwoman by his side who is descended from slaves, probably field slaves. No Black woman should have to feel like a D-Girl because your insecurities as a Black man in America got you chasing after the Sisterhood of the Traveling Vanessa Williamses.
HOW IS BEYONCE A “B” GIRL ??????????????????????????
just moving along like everyone else 