I am\u00a0at work on an essay\u00a0about white privilege that I am tentatively calling “Am I Alive Today Because I Am White?” It’s actually something I started trying to write about a year ago, after Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri by Darren Wilson, a white police officer and\u00a0Eric Garner was essentially strangled by Officer Daniel Pantaleo and his colleagues. One of the things I am trying to write about is\u00a0a troubling (to me at least) aspect of how some well-meaning white people\u00a0talk about\u00a0white privilege. These paragraphs-in-progress start to deal with that. They reference the now-moribund #CrimingWhileWhite hashtag that started in response to the killings of Brown\u00a0and\u00a0Garner, Tamir Rice and others, because part of the essay talks about why I\u00a0ended up not writing what I was trying to write back then. Here are the paragraphs:<\/p>\n
….I did not want to be one more voice in what was beginning to seem like a chorus of white voices expressing outrage without actually taking responsibility, without somehow holding myself accountable\u2014though for what precisely was something I had a hard time putting my finger on. Better, I thought, to listen, learn, and wait to see if a moment presented itself when it would make sense for me to speak.<\/p>\n
#CrimingWhileWhite at first seemed to be that opportunity. Here were white people telling our stories, albeit in much abbreviated form, in a conscious attempt\u00a0to make visible, from our perspective, what it’s like to be on our side of this country’s racial dynamic. Still, the more I read through the Twitter stream, the more skeptical I became as to what the hashtag was actually accomplishing. I do not want in any way to diminish the importance of white people taking responsibility for how differently we are treated–or, and the difference is subtle but important, how we are treated differently–not just by the police, but by almost any sector of society through which we choose to move. Reading the #CrimingWhileWhite tweets made clear to me, however, in a way I had not understood before, the limitations of stopping there. It wasn’t just the way the Twitter stream devolved, as Twitter streams are wont to do, into self-indulgent irony, name calling, attempted hijackings, tit-for-tat argument, accusation and more; it was rather the way that even those tweets which had very obviously been posted in the original spirit of the hashtag seemed neither to connect to anything larger than themselves nor to cohere into the collective truth-speaking I think the hashtag was intended to facilitate.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to make the mistake of expecting tweets to be more than they can be. Twitter’s\u00a0140-character limit will put a serious crimp in anyone’s attempt to be more subtle and nuanced than a soundbite. Indeed, that limitation is very likely why the overwheling majority of the tweets I read focused attention not on the interior experience of being white, of what it feels like to have your life shaped by your own whiteness, but rather on the experience the white people who wrote the\u00a0tweets had of being treated more\u00a0professionally, politely, leniently, casually\u00a0by the police because they were white. How, in other words, the police officers in question responded to the surface of whiteness. It was as if the authors of those tweets were trying to hold up these manifestations of white privilege as a mirror in which they hoped other white people would see ourselves, recognize the\u00a0privilege we all shared, and be motivated by the obvious unfairness of having\u00a0such privilege\u00a0in the first place to begin the work of substantive change.<\/p>\n
Ironically, though\u2014or so it seemed to me\u2014the #CrimingWhileWhite focus on the outward manifestations of white privilege, important as it was (and is), had precisely the opposite effect. The more I read, the more\u00a0the hashtag\u00a0seemed to function\u00a0not so differently from white privilege itself, or at least its more liberal version, deflecting attention away from what is at stake for white people in being white and pointing instead towards a definition of fairness in which white privilege–though of course we wouldn’t call it “white” anymore–would be extended to everyone. To put it another way, to the extent that white people’s call to end white privilege remains merely a call to end the unfairness of that\u00a0privilege, then all\u00a0we are really calling for is\u00a0the now-discredited ideal of the “color blind society,” one in which citizens somehow “do not see” skin color when dealing with people of other races or ethnicities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am\u00a0at work on an essay\u00a0about white privilege that I am tentatively calling “Am I Alive Today Because I Am White?” It’s actually something I started trying to write about a year ago, after Michael Brown was shot and killed … Continue reading