[DEBATE] : CCS Seminar: Robert Jensen on racism, whiteness - 21 May, 12:30-2pm

[Patrick Bond]

Join us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society for
a seminar, 'Racism and Whiteness'

Speaker: Robert Jensen, University of Texas/Austin
Date: Thursday, 21 May
Time: 12:30-2pm
Venue: CCS/SDS seminar room, Memorial Tower Building Room F208

University of KwaZulu-Natal Howard College Campus

Queries: poonenh at ukzn.ac.za or 031-260-3195

Radical activist, public intellectual and journalist, Robert Jensen is 
an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of 
Texas at Austin. Jensen is a powerful and inspiring speaker and dissects 
the multifaceted nature of US power. Jensen's latest book, All My Bones 
Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, is published 
by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: 
Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); 
Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 
2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the 
Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2001); and co-author with Gail Dines and Ann 
Russo of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality 
(Routledge, 1998). He was co-editor with David S. Allen of Freeing the 
First Amendment: Critical Perspectives on Freedom of Expression (New 
York University Press, 1995).

***

White people's burden
Robert Jensen
School of Journalism
University of Texas

This essay is excerpted from The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, 
Racism and White Privilege, City Lights, September 2005.

posted on Alternet, August 31, 2005.

by Robert Jensen

The United States is a white country. By that I don't just mean that the 
majority of its citizens are white, though they are (for now but not 
forever). What makes the United States white is not the fact that most 
Americans are white but the assumption -- especially by people with 
power -- that American equals white. Those people don't say it outright. 
It comes out in subtle ways. Or, sometimes, in ways not so subtle.

Here's an example: I'm in line at a store, unavoidably eavesdropping on 
two white men in front of me, as one tells the other about a 
construction job he was on. He says: "There was this guy and three 
Mexicans standing next to the truck." From other things he said, it was 
clear that "this guy" was Anglo, white, American. It also was clear from 
the conversation that this man had not spoken to the "three Mexicans" 
and had no way of knowing whether they were Mexicans or U.S. citizens of 
Mexican heritage.

It didn't matter. The "guy" was the default setting for American: Anglo, 
white. The "three Mexicans" were not Anglo, not white, and therefore not 
American. It wasn't "four guys standing by a truck." It was "a guy and 
three Mexicans." The race and/or ethnicity of the four men were 
irrelevant to the story he was telling. But the storyteller had to mark 
it. It was important that "the guy" not be confused with "the three 
Mexicans."

Here's another example, from the Rose Garden. At a 2004 news conference 
outside the White House, President George W. Bush explained that he 
believed democracy would come to Iraq over time:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people 
whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and 
self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that 
people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that 
people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than 
white can self-govern."

It appears the president intended the phrase "people whose skin color 
may not be the same as ours" to mean people who are not from the United 
States. That skin color he refers to that is "ours," he makes it clear, 
is white. Those people not from the United States are "a different color 
than white." So, white is the skin color of the United States. That 
means those whose skin is not white but are citizens of the United 
States are ...? What are they? Are they members in good standing in the 
nation, even if "their skin color may not be the same as ours"?

This is not simply making fun of a president who sometimes mangles the 
English language. This time he didn't misspeak, and there's nothing 
funny about it. He did seem to get confused when he moved from talking 
about skin color to religion (does he think there are no white 
Muslims?), but it seems clear that he intended to say that brown people 
-- Iraqis, Arabs, Muslims, people from the Middle East, whatever the 
category in his mind -- can govern themselves, even though they don't 
look like us. And "us" is clearly white. In making this magnanimous 
proclamation of faith in the capacities of people in other parts of the 
world, in proclaiming his belief in their ability to govern themselves, 
he made one thing clear: The United States is white. Or, more 
specifically, being a real "American" is being white. So, what do we do 
with citizens of the United States who aren't white?

That's the question for which this country has never quite found an 
answer: What do white "Americans" do with those who share the country 
but aren't white? What do we do with peoples we once tried to 
exterminate? People we once enslaved? People we imported for labor and 
used like animals to build railroads? People we still systematically 
exploit as low-wage labor? All those people -- indigenous, African, 
Asian, Latino -- can obtain the legal rights of citizenship. That's a 
significant political achievement in some respects, and that popular 
movements that forced the powerful to give people those rights give us 
the most inspiring stories in U.S. history.

The degree to which many white people in one generation dramatically 
shifted their worldview to see people they once considered to be 
subhuman as political equals is not trivial, no matter how deep the 
problems of white supremacy we still live with.In many comparable 
societies, problems of racism are as ugly, if not uglier, than in the 
United States. If you doubt that, ask a Turk what it is like to live in 
Germany, an Algerian what it's like to live in France, a black person 
what it's like to live in Japan. We can acknowledge the gains made in 
the United States -- always understanding those gains came because 
non-white people, with some white allies, forced society to change -- 
while still acknowledging the severity of the problem that remains. <>

But it doesn't answer the question: What do white "Americans" do with 
those who share the country but aren't white? <>

We can pretend that we have reached "the end of racism" and continue to 
ignore the question. But that's just plain stupid. We can acknowledge 
that racism still exists and celebrate diversity, but avoid the 
political, economic, and social consequences of white supremacy. But, 
frankly, that's just as stupid. The fact is that most of the white 
population of the United States has never really known what to do with 
those who aren't white. Let me suggest a different approach. <>

Let's go back to the question that W.E.B. Du Bois said he knew was on 
the minds of white people. In the opening of his 1903 classic, The Souls 
of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote that the real question whites wanted to ask 
him, but were afraid to, was: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Du 
Bois was identifying a burden that blacks carried -- being seen by the 
dominant society not as people but as a problem people, as a people who 
posed a problem for the rest of society. Du Bois was right to identify 
"the color line" as the problem of the 20th century. Now, in the 21st 
century, it is time for whites to self-consciously reverse the direction 
of that question at heart of color. It's time for white people to fully 
acknowledge that in the racial arena, we are the problem. We have to ask 
ourselves: How does it feel to be the problem? <>

The simple answer: Not very good.

That is the new White People's Burden, to understand that we are the 
problem, come to terms with what that really means, and act based on 
that understanding. Our burden is to do something that doesn't seem to 
come natural to people in positions of unearned power and privilege: 
Look in the mirror honestly and concede that we live in an unjust 
society and have no right to some of what we have. We should not affirm 
ourselves. We should negate our whiteness. Strip ourselves of the 
illusion that we are special because we are white. Steel ourselves so 
that we can walk in the world fully conscious and try to see what is 
usually invisible to us white people. We should learn to ask ourselves, 
"How does it feel to be the problem?"

***

Why White People Are Afraid

By Robert Jensen, AlterNet
June 7, 2006.

What do white people have to be afraid of in a world structured on white 
privilege? Their own fears.

It may seem self-indulgent to talk about the fears of white people in a 
white-supremacist society. After all, what do white people really have 
to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? It may be 
self-indulgent, but it's critical to understand because these fears are 
part of what keeps many white people from confronting ourselves and the 
system.

The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact 
that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that 
we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to 
achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have is the 
product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across society, over 
which we may have little or no control individually. No matter how hard 
we work or how smart we are, we all know -- when we are honest with 
ourselves -- that we did not get where we are by merit alone. And many 
white people are afraid of that fact.

A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have -- 
literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the 
economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more 
just and equitable. That fear is not completely irrational; if white 
privilege -- along with the other kinds of privilege many of us have 
living in the middle class and above in an imperialist country that 
dominates much of the rest of the world -- were to evaporate, the 
distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would 
change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That 
redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world 
in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort, that 
possibility can be scary.

A third fear involves a slightly different scenario -- a world in which 
non-white people might someday gain the kind of power over whites that 
whites have long monopolized. One hears this constantly in the 
conversation about immigration, the lingering fear that somehow "they" 
(meaning not just Mexican-Americans and Latinos more generally, but any 
non-white immigrants) are going to keep moving to this country and at 
some point become the majority demographically.

Even though whites likely can maintain a disproportionate share of 
wealth, those numbers will eventually translate into political, 
economic, and cultural power. And then what? Many whites fear that the 
result won't be a system that is more just, but a system in which white 
people become the minority and could be treated as whites have long 
treated non-whites. This is perhaps the deepest fear that lives in the 
heart of whiteness. It is not really a fear of non-white people. It's a 
fear of the depravity that lives in our own hearts: Are non-white people 
capable of doing to us the barbaric things we have done to them?

A final fear has probably always haunted white people but has become 
more powerful since the society has formally rejected overt racism: The 
fear of being seen, and seen-through, by non-white people. Virtually 
every white person I know, including white people fighting for racial 
justice and including myself, carries some level of racism in our minds 
and hearts and bodies. In our heads, we can pretend to eliminate it, but 
most of us know it is there. And because we are all supposed to be 
appropriately anti-racist, we carry that lingering racism with a new 
kind of fear: What if non-white people look at us and can see it? What 
if they can see through us? What if they can look past our anti-racist 
vocabulary and sense that we still don't really know how to treat them 
as equals? What if they know about us what we don't dare know about 
ourselves? What if they can see what we can't even voice?

I work in a large university with a stated commitment to racial justice. 
All of my faculty colleagues, even the most reactionary, have a stated 
commitment to racial justice. And yet the fear is palpable.

It is a fear I have struggled with, and I remember the first time I ever 
articulated that fear in public. I was on a panel with several other 
professors at the University of Texas discussing race and politics in 
the O.J. Simpson case. Next to me was an African American professor. I 
was talking about media; he was talking about the culture's treatment of 
the sexuality of black men. As we talked, I paid attention to what was 
happening in me as I sat next to him. I felt uneasy. I had no reason to 
be uncomfortable around him, but I wasn't completely comfortable. During 
the question-and-answer period -- I don't remember what question sparked 
my comment -- I turned to him and said something like, "It's important 
to talk about what really goes on between black and white people in this 
country. For instance, why am I feeling afraid of you? I know I have no 
reason to be afraid, but I am. Why is that?"

My reaction wasn't a crude physical fear, not some remnant of being 
taught that black men are dangerous (though I have had such reactions to 
black men on the street in certain circumstances). Instead, I think it 
was that fear of being seen through by non-white people, especially when 
we are talking about race. In that particular moment, for a white 
academic on an O.J. panel, my fear was of being exposed as a fraud or 
some kind of closet racist.

Even if I thought I knew what I was talking about and was being 
appropriately anti-racist in my analysis, I was afraid that some 
lingering trace of racism would show through, and that my black 
colleague would identify it for all in the room to see. After I publicly 
recognized the fear, I think I started to let go of some of it. Like 
anything, it's a struggle. I can see ways in which I have made progress. 
I can see that in many situations I speak more freely and honestly as I 
let go of the fear. I make mistakes, but as I become less terrified of 
making mistakes I find that I can trust my instincts more and be more 
open to critique when my instincts are wrong.