Thinking about Emancipation: White Privilege

There's a very interesting dialogue about race here, at the Anti-Essentialist Conundrum, and here, at the Anarchist Black Cross Network.On ABC, Peggy McIntosh writes:

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks....After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us".

I find much of this valuable, especially coming from a white (American) feminist. It's part of what I talk about when I refer to hegemony -- the idea that what is "normal" is actually what is white -- and, from the perspective of The Bahamas, what is white and other (what is white and Bahamian is actually a rather African-flavoured form of whiteness; more on that later). White Bahamians are not white Americans or white Europeans; their Bahamianness -- from the national cuisine to, these days, the national accent -- already rendering them different from the norm.Now McIntosh is, as I say, a white feminist. Sylvia, author of the Anti-Essentialist Conundrum, a pretty cool blog that considers issues of race and equality, written by a black (American) woman, while agreeing broadly with her principles, also critiques them. As she says:

There are three main problems with the essay and its framework. The first is its voice: the author is a privileged, white, intellectual, feminist, American woman with some level of financial self-sufficiency and physical ability, and her mode of explanation proceeds from these characteristics in its word choice and description. To say that each characteristic needs its own privilege study would be too obvious; to say that one characteristic should monopolize the discussions of privilege for everyone — too divisive. The second problem is its method of identifying white privilege: its language leaves the gate wide open for white people engaged in denial to invoke defenses leaning towards white pride or white guilt. The third problem is the list of characteristics surrounding white privilege would function easier if separated into categories of the types/classes of privilege instead of specific situations.

This last critique is impotant, for, as Sylvia observes, people can be both privileged and oppressed at the same time. See what she says herself:

The third problem cycles back to the first: McIntosh invoked the list of items that existed in her perspective of the knapsack. Ongoing discussions of privilege in a variety of disciplines point to intersectionality — the ability for people to live within different frameworks of oppression and privilege simultaneously. It is disheartening, but not unsurprising, to see a black man boggle at a black woman’s accusation that he shares in male privilege. His understanding only reaches to both of them suffering under privileged whites. These debates enclose incidences where a white lesbian suffering under heterosexist privilege and male privilege engages in racist behavior, or where an affluent Vietnamese-American male’s class privilege and assimilation into white supremacist xenophobia turns on the ambiguous category of lowerclass, undocumented “Hispanic” American workers. While privilege manifests differently in each concentric circle of oppression, it never alters its M.O. As a result, we as human beings cannot cry hypocrite when a victim in one cycle switches sides in another cycle — especially with our knowledge that all privileges sprout from a fundamental hierarchy equally lacking in exposure what it gains in power.

In this year when we observe the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, it's important that we understand that emancipation is not a simple thing. Oppression and privilege are not simple, after all. Victimology is an insidious process, and imperfect understandings of history, of self, of location, of hierarchy permit all kinds of oppressions that go unrecognized. In our society, where most of us, well coached by the American mass media to view "white" as one thing and "black" as another, undifferentiated, thing, tend to imagine ourselves universally oppressed, we ignore the very real oppression we visit on one another: outrageous racism against Haitians, unexamined violence against women and children, and actions founded in self-hate.I encourage people to check out these sites. Yes, they're radical. But they're worth a good hard look.

Just so we know we're not special

In terms of racism and racist rhetoric, I mean, here's a tale about racism from Russia. A Russian Newsweek reporter and blogger, who is ethnically Kazakh, was attacked in Moscow by four young men.Here's an excerpt.

Most likely, it was an accidental attack by the neo-Nazis. Today, it may well be considered a routine crime ), or maybe not. Funny that on this very day I finished a piece on the [United Russia party] members who now have to love the “Russia for the Russians” slogan. A piece with some interesting bits on [the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, the DPNI].

What's most interesting to me are the comments. They sound so very similar to what I hear regularly about Haitians. Most interesting is the go-back-home theme that keeps recurring.

... in your Motherland, an ethnic Russian journalist exposing local nationalists wouldn’t have survived even a couple of publications. And you go on living and exposing. So everything is fair and logical. And then, if you are such a fighter against Nazism, why don’t you do this in your homeland? And we’ll deal with nationalism here ourselves ...No one is keeping you here. You can move and live somewhere in Turkmenistan. Because it doesn’t make any difference whether there are Russians around or not. But to many people it does matter, and the Russian people mainly want to live in a country where there are 80-90 percent Russians, and not 10 percent. […] So 20 million Kyrgyz come to Russia, and 50 million Chinese, and 10 million Azeris. And they multiply. And as a result, only 10 percent of Russians will remain in the country. And this won’t be Russia anymore. All our history will have to be crossed out - what for have we been building the country for? […] The thing is, in a normal state, the state itself would’ve been involved in immigration policies.

Whenever the topic of Haitians in The Bahamas is raised, the rhetoric becomes predictable. It's predictable because it's the very same rhetoric that is used by all racists to justify their perspectives on people they believe don't belong among them. The following comments are usual:

  • "They" should go home to their own country

  • "They" shouldn't complain about what happens to them here because "they" are immigrants (usually the word illegal is added here)

  • "They" are using up all the resources "we" pay for

  • "They" multiply faster and more than "we" do and "they" will soon outnumber "us"

I'm not debating the truth or lack of it about any of these statements. But I am pointing out that they are not unique to us. They are not special to Haitians. They are remarkably identical to the kinds of statements made anywhere in the world by people whose environments are changing rapidly and whose reaction to that change is to blame the Other, rather than to adapt and move forward. The language, and the rhetoric, is fundamentally racist, and that is true of whether the person who is making the statement is white, black, orange, yellow, or pink.

How did I miss this?

Marlon James on How To Make A Jamaican Music Video.It's hilarious.  Here's a taste.

Come to think of it, forget, the ghetto; you must shoot in the uberghetto. Remember that poor Jamaica is the real Jamaica. Forget high-rise buildings, Taino tribal grounds, the second oldest railroad track in the world, and the most fascinating network of underground caves in the Caribbean. You need bad roads, shit running down the side walks, zinc fences, tenements and gunmen, because this is the real Jamaica. Please have the locals stack 12 speakers together, 3 in a row and have the natives come out to wind their waists and slam dominoes on the table or your viewers will think that it’s Haiti. You must shoot in district of Waterhouse. This will be in your contract for Waterhouse is the music video ghetto of choice, probably because the quick to be violent blackies aren’t so violent there. But be sure to buy the men in mesh merinos a hot Guinness or you might not make it out of there alive. Remind yourself that if Alicia Keys can shoot there, you can too.Should you meet a gunman make sure to genuflect in the usual fashion. But feel free to pass off an offensive comment so that the Jamaican crew can never shoot in that place again. The nature of that comment is up to you but forgo the racial for Jamaican Negroes are not black. Make sure you have extra film left for the midnight dance so you can remark how bestial and sexual the natives can be while dancing. Listen as the Jamaican producer remarks that this is in keeping with our African culture, even though he or she will not do such things until after the wrap when they take you to Quad Nightclub where uptown people grind each other. Try a dance yourself but restrict it to hands, you don’t need to remind us that white people cannot dance for us to remember that we’re still safe. Because once you take our dances we’ll have nothing left! Don’t forget the smiling children.

If you read French

You'll find this blog entry as amusing as I did.(Not to worry, I'll translate to the best of my ability by the end of the day.)What it does is illustrate the attitude of many people on this side of the Atlantic — beyond the coasts of Africa, in fact — about "Africa" and its "problems". I include it because it's important to make a point. Just as Bahamians take offence when people confuse us with Barbadians or Bermudians or, God forbid, Jamaicans, citizens of the various countries in Africa take offence — even when it's reported as absurdity — people from the African continent do the same. And to be honest, there are more differences between various African cultures and nations than there are between any Caribbean or American country.Google-translated version here, courtesy, I do believe, of Rick Lowe.I can use the weekend to do a less stilted translation than the computer.

The Political Brain

Michael Schermer over at Scientific American has written an article that describes what happens to the brains of politicians when they talk. Here's an excerpt:

During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men--half self-described as "strong" Republicans and half as "strong" Democrats--were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

This is nice to know, and it makes me wonder what my friend, neuroscientist Dan Glaser, would have to say about it. The thing is, it isn't news; nor is it limited to politicians. It's basic human behaviour. Indeed, the article begins with a quotation from Sir Francis Bacon, the father of modern scientific reasoning, who said what the neuroscientists have observed almost 400 years ago. So I'm not sure what the point of the observation is, except to show that physical scientists have finally been able to see (and hence prove?) what students of humans (writers, theologians, philosophers, social scientists, parents, teachers, and servants) have known forever. Well, good for them.The study simply confirms, in living colour I imagine, that people don't reason when they don't have to. When they have made up their minds about things they then leave their minds open only to that information that fits their theories about the world. Scientists have been doing it for centuries. They call it the scientific method, and they throw out all received wisdom when they go about finding out about stuff. This isn't a bad thing, by the way; it allows scientists to explain how all sorts of things happen, and helps us do a number of interesting things to make our lives easier as a result; but it doesn't do very much to explain why. We know for sure, and can prove with diagrams and computers and other instruments how people conceive babies and what happens in the brain when people have strokes and how cholesterol clogs blood vessels and what they put in cigarettes, but we don't know a thing more about why. But that's another story.So what the neuroscientists have done is to show what parts of the brain become engaged when politicians talk. They can prove in living colour what Bacon and Shakespeare and Sophocles and Euripides and the writers of the Bible (and other holy writ for that matter) knew long before they died and turned to dust: that people like to shore up their opinions by noticing only the stuff that supports them. It's something you learn for sure when you go and teach College English courses at COB, by the way; students have to be taught to reason, taught to look for the information that's out there that says that their opinions are wrong.So. Scientists can say which parts of the brain light up when these guys and these guys pick only those bits of information that fit their theories about, when these guys and these women write their articles, and when I post new stuff on this page.All I can say is it's nice to have pictures.(Thanks, Books, Inq., for leading me to this article!)