[DEBATE] : Reminder of CCS Seminar: Robert Jensen on racism, whiteness - today, 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.