What the Fuck is Going On with Perceptions of Racism by the Left These Days?

[Queequeg]

Maybe this has always been in some kind of corner since the 90s and I'm only starting to realize it, but the amount of pseudo-intellectual discourse around race among my generation of Americans seems to have really skyrocketed.  I just don't get it.

Link.

Civil rights activist and Sweet Honey in the Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagan once said about coalitions that if you're comfortable, "you're not really doing no coalescing." I've taken this quote to heart this past week, while processing two great articles about privilege.

The first is a discussion with activists Suey Park and Dr. David Leonard, on the "problem" of white allies in the movements against racism and white supremacy. Leonard offers suggestions as to how white-privileged activists ought to regard and approach racism in society, alongside communities of color, while also accounting for their privilege. Find some choice excerpts below!

I will soon follow up with the second article, about PMC (professional middle class) privilege and building bridges across class differences.
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SP: As you know, the concept of the white anti-racist or white ally has been put into question. Why do you think this is? Are these words oxymorons? What is a better word?

DL: First and foremost, [these terms] presume that struggles against injustice are the responsibility of someone else – those who are subjected to the violence of racism, sexism, homophobia – and that the "allies" are helping or joining forces with those who are naturally on the frontlines. The idea of white allies also reinscribes the idea that whites have a choice as to whether to fight racism, to fight white supremacy. And while this may be true, it turns any agitation into a choice worthy of celebration. At the same time, it turns struggles against racial violence and injustice to a discussion of "what people are" rather than one focused on what people are doing in opposition to white supremacy.

Secondly, the mere fact that we don't talk about Black, Latino, Indigenous or Asian American anti-racists, at least with the same public resonance, reflects this idea: people may see anti-racist struggle as organic and natural within communities of color, which not only embodies this logic but erases the risks, sacrifices and hard work necessary to battle racism.  The idea of allies reinscribes this binary, whereupon white allies are seen as doing something different, special, and necessary, furthering the privileging of white action.

Thirdly, I also have a problem with the entire focus on defining white people in these exceptional terms.  White, yet anti-racist – these are the ideas that emanate from the labeling. As if participation in struggle or consciousness cancels out whiteness, privilege, and position within America's white supremacist hierarchy. No amount of work cancels out my whiteness, my masculinity, my class status, or my heterosexuality; no amount of activism erases the power and privilege generated because of white supremacy... It's not about choosing the right word, it's about making the commitment to racial justice.
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SP: I often hear that "people of color should not have to educate white folks" [indeed, that's why I started this blog about privilege] and "white folks need to take their cues from people of color" simultaneously. Is this a contradiction?

The presumption here is that white people need/want to be educated about issues of racism, about inequality, or about differences in experience, and that this desire should compel people of color to act. This is all about white desire; it is about white agency and the expectation of Others helping white folk grow, learn, and be better people.

Asking whites engaged in social justice or anti-racist work to "take their cues from people of color" is about accountability and decentering white desire and white needs. It is no longer about what white people need and want but the agency, action, and politics of organizations of color. It is about being accountable and listening as opposed to demanding recognition, ownership or power.

Each is about asking whites to put aside their own needs, desires, and privileged position.

Many white folks, including Tim Wise, say that racism needs to be fought not to "help" people of color, but because all people are hurt by it, including white people. Do you agree that racism hurts white folks?

Whether or not it hurts whites is the wrong place to start. The centering of whiteness, of white humanity, desire, and history, is a core element of white supremacy so our conversations and actions should not and cannot focus on "how racism hurts" white America. 

When we talk about white supremacy, we need to focus on the structural violence directed at communities of color – we are talking about issues of life and death, from healthcare to food insecurity, from labor exploitation to systems of mass incarceration. Recognizing intersectionality and varied levels of privilege, racism empowers, privileges, and protects white America.

Do you think that being a white man gives you more agency to do anti-racist work with folks who might not be ready to hear it from people of color?

White supremacy codifies agency, choice, and freedom, so it would be ridiculous to deny its existence within the spaces I occupy as a teacher, a writer, a commentator, and an activist... When I walk into a classroom, I am often seen as more objective, as embodying what many view as an "expert" and a "professor." When I walk on campus, whether wearing a hoodie or argyle sweater, I am seen as non-threatening, as belonging, and as being desirable. 

I have a role, to teach. I have a role to challenge racism, to educate those who believe there is equal justice under the law, those who think that racism is a thing of a past, who perpetuate rape culture through jokes and media culture, who think that sports are innocuous rather than a site of racial pedagogy.

Do you have any tips for white folks who are trying to engage in anti-racist work?

It is important to think about one's whiteness and what it means to be white within contemporary society.

It's crucial to push back the urge to make every conversation about "self."

A friend I consider intelligent posted this, but I found it hard to read without giggling a little bit.  I find the entire perspective crazy, and more than a little perverse.  Whiteness and heterosexuality are treated as something close to Calvinist Total Depravity.  It's fucking pathetic. 

Here's something related from TNR

My freshman year in high school, the administration's diversity czars lined my whole class across the gym and read a series of statements, each accompanied by a command to step forward or backward. "If you are white, take two steps forward." "If your parents went to college, take one step forward." "If you are gay, take two steps back." Before long, we were sorted according to our supposed privilege—and I'm pretty sure all of us, from the children of real estate moguls up front to the mostly black financial aid students in the rear, felt awful about where we stood.

That was almost nine years ago, and the incident upset many students and parents. Today, the phrase "check your privilege"—that is, to acknowledge your relative advantage—is commonplace, as is the tallying of privilege. A recent Buzzfeed "How Privileged Are You?" quiz asks readers to check off a hundred statements—from "I am white" to "I consider myself to be physically attractive"—and spits out a score between 0 ("under-privileged") and 100 ("the most privileged"). Last year, Gawker created "The Privilege Tournament," a March Madness–like bracket that included "race" and "gender" regions but also "allergies."


All this has prompted something of an anti-anti-privilege backlash. You'll find no better example of that than Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang's diatribe in The Princeton Tory last month, "Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege."

The essay, which caught The New York Times's attention last week, was Fortgang's response to comments that he should check his privilege because he is a white man. "I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can't possibly comprehend," Fortgang writes. He then recounts his grandparents' persecution during the Holocaust and their hard work in America. People who tell him to check his privilege, he says, are to be blamed for "diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive."

What Fortgang misses is that the concept of privilege isn't meant to be about history. It's about the benefits accrued today by members of advantaged classes. When people call Fortgang privileged, they're not referring to his grandparents' escape from the Nazis. They're referring to his status as an affluent white American man who attends one of the top universities in the world. Fortgang may have worked hard to get to Princeton, and he should be proud of that accomplishment, but he did have a head start in the race.

That said, Fortgang's frustration is justified. In liberal spheres of debate—spheres that, as a student at an elite college, Fortgang must be familiar with—privilege can be a sort of scarlet letter. Gawker's tournament may have been intended as comedy, but it was not without insight. "Privilege: so sweet to have," Hamilton Nolan wrote in the introduction. "But even sweeter to not have. Privilege has its benefits, but the lack of privilege confers that sweet, sweet moral superiority." The bracket makes explicit the competitive nature of the today's debate about privilege. Everyone is checking everyone else's privilege, competing to be the least privileged person present—and, thus, the most authoritative on the subject of privilege. Privilege is stigmatized; hardship—or assumed hardship—becomes a badge of honor.


Take, for example, the biographies of the students who run the popular tumblr "Check Your Privilege at the Door." If the blog weren't so self-serious, I'd assume this was parody: "I am mixed race (white and Korean) and a lesbian. I also identify as fat and as an atheist. My privileges include white-passing privilege, cisgender privilege, class privilege and able-bodied privilege. I am an extrovert with low social skills." Nothing about her personality, interests, or achievements—only where she stood in the Internet equivalent of my high school's sorting exercise. Mixed race: one step back. Fat: one step back. Cisgender: two steps forward.

The real problem with the phrase "check your privilege"—aside from the fact that it reduces people to the sum of their characteristics—is that it has become a handicapping device. White male? Then what could you possibly know about racism or sexism? Calling out privilege often isn't intended to make someone consider his advantages in life so much as to dismiss his perspective. But I want to be able to discuss sexism or feminism with men, and I think their opinions are no less worthy or relevant for the fact that they are male. Similarly, anyone should be able to participate in a conversation about racism without being discounted or silenced on account of race.

That's why I find Fortgang's reaction not wholly out of place. Told to check your privilege, it's pretty easy to feel shut out of conversation; an advantage in life might be turned into a disadvantage in debate. "Check your privilege" can come across as an expectation that a person be repentant for sins he has not committed. In its most generous usage, of course, "check your privilege" isn't meant to make anyone feel guilty—only to make them recognize their privileged position. But it has the effect of invoking guilt, in large part because the phrase is so often used ungenerously, as a weapon rather than a gentle reminder. This is partly what outraged Fortgang, who refers to the phrase as a reprimand that "threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them." He concludes, "I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing."

This disconnect stems from confusion about what "check your privilege" really means, which results in accusations and defensiveness rather than a reasonable debate about—well, whatever subject the debate was originally about. Who can remember? But the problem isn't just the phrase "check your privilege," or even the concept of privilege. It's rooted in a basic disagreement over the weight of identity in determining a person's role in social discourse. And that's why Fortgang's opponents and supporters will continue to talk past each other.

Partially inspired by a flamewar on my Facebook involving me, Scipy and some richboy, great looking NYU dropout who took it upon himself to argue that I didn't properly respect my racial privilege. 

Is this new?  Why am I only now recognizing this? 

[Queequeg]

BTW, Scipio, that conversation really, pissed me off. He's fantastic looking and his parents are way wealthier than mine ever were and he wasted all of his looks, brains and money on yay, yet somehow I'm the asshole for not viewing my skin color as a Mark of Cain. 

[Valmy]

Interesting you caught the Calvinist thing so quickly.  Puritanism sure takes weird forms in our country.

I guess while I understand and respect the basic spirit it originates from, it gets pretty ridiculous fast.  I think I described it before like going down the rabbit hole.  I am not going to describe myself with a long line of descriptors.

"I am mixed race (white and Korean) and a lesbian. I also identify as fat and as an atheist. My privileges include white-passing privilege, cisgender privilege, class privilege and able-bodied privilege. I am an extrovert with low social skills." Nothing about her personality, interests, or achievements

The whole things seems a little dehumanizing.  It is sort of like the need to continue adding letters to the LGBT acronym.  I saw one that went on for about five more letters and even added A for allies at the end  , I mean fuck why not just say 'everybody but EVIL people'.  It does seem like some bizarre effort to sort the saved from the damned.  And in the end does all this actually help anybody? 

[Queequeg]

My friend is Irish.  Which is weird.  You'd expect some perspective on the fluidity of racial resentment from an Irishman. 

[Grinning_Colossus]

Many people lack your historical perspective. 


These people drive me nuts. They really do evince an unhealthy preoccupation with purity, and their rhetoric has the effect of alienating everyone who isn't part of a social science department from the struggle for equality.

[Sheilbh]

I've no time for this 'check your privilege' bollocks I see on the American left. I'll go mad if it makes the slightest incursion over here. It also feels like they've only just discovered literary theory.

Also I think trans activists have a really bad habit of driving away people who basically support them.

[Tamas]

I cannot help but seeing Christian guilt-culture behind stuff like this.

[The Brain]

It's just plain old retardism. The only difference is that in the old days retardism didn't have to be about anything.

[Ideologue]

You may complain about the movie reviews, but aren't you all really glad I don't have a "blog about privilege"?

[mongers]

You may complain about the movie reviews, but aren't you all really glad I don't have a "blog about privilege"?

This.

The 25 years in debt thread is bad enough. 

[Ideologue]

You may complain about the movie reviews, but aren't you all really glad I don't have a "blog about privilege"?

This.

The 25 years in debt thread is bad enough. 

Class and generation matter far more in today's America than race, sex, or sexuality.

[Syt]

BBC also has a piece on Tal Fortgang:

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27287402

Tal Fortgang not sorry for being white and privileged

Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang has been told repeatedly to "check his privilege" - to be aware of how his socio-economic and cultural background shapes his views - and he's not happy about it.

"The phrase," he writes, "handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung."

(Weltanschauung means "worldview". I had to look it up. But then, I didn't go to Princeton.)

In an opinion piece originally carried last month by a conservative Princeton student publication and reprinted on Friday in Time magazine, the 20-year-old condemns those who paint him with the "privileged" label for "diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive".

To answer his critics, Fortgang recounts his ancestry, which includes a grandfather who fled Poland after the German invasion in World War Two and a grandmother who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp.

"That's the problem with calling someone out for the 'privilege' which you assume has defined their narrative," he writes. "You don't know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are."

He says he is privileged, but not in the way the liberals think:

It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realise the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.

He says the virtues of "faith and education" passed along from his parents are his privilege.

"It's not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates 'privilege'," he concludes. "And there's nothing wrong with that."

Asking him to apologise for it, he asserts, is "insulting".

The right-wing media have been quick to embrace Fortgang and his story. He's appeared on Fox News and been cited by Glenn Beck's the Blaze.

"This guy is going to go far," writes the American Conservative's Rod Dreher. "And should."

On Saturday the New York Times ran a profile of the freshman, saying his essay "touched a nerve".

All of this nerve-touching has rubbed Salon's Kate McDonough the wrong way. She calls Fortgang's piece "a ridiculous baby tantrum".

"Nothing in the essay is a new or shocking expression of white privilege or the astounding sense of entitlement and self-regard shared by white racists," she writes.

A lot of people in the United States also believe that race-blind meritocracy is real and that discussions of privilege and institutional racism are just sore losers being sore, and many of the people who think this way also happen to make our policies or control most of the wealth in this country.

She continues:

It's likely that Fortgang will have the opportunity at Princeton to learn about the racial wealth gap, the legacy of red-lining, the unemployment rate among college educated men of colour versus their white counterparts, the convergence of racism and sexism that leaves women of colour disproportionately impacted by domestic violence, the gender pay gap experienced by black women, the deadly violence faced by black children and the myriad other manifestations of racism in the United States. Basically all of the things that he will never have to experience as an extraordinarily privileged white man.

Being asked to "check your privilege" means "recognising, identifying and challenging the insidious operations of racism", she concludes. "He doesn't want to confront racism and white privilege because those things have - and will continue to - really, really help him out in life."

Fortgang is a good candidate for an "ideological stoning", writes Mediaite's Luke O'Neil.

He says Fortgang "courageously struck out against the oppressive climate of basic cultural awareness and bare minimum human decency that has despoiled college campuses everywhere".

"Like most entitled white guys, upon finding himself on the opposite end of the entire world's fawning approval, he started crying about it," he continues.

O'Neil says that many of the privileged class, if they go back far enough, can find an ancestor who didn't have it so good. Does everyone with a grandparent who faced adversity get a free pass?

"Violet Baudelaire" on the Jezebel Groupthink site explains privilege in terms of a one-legged man running against a two-legged man in a race. Just because the two-legged man trained hard and persevered doesn't mean he didn't have an innate advantage over the one-legged man. Just because one-legged men occasionally win their races doesn't mean they are competing on a level playing field. And having a one-legged grandfather doesn't mean you can claim you don't have "two-legged privilege".

She writes:

Checking your privilege doesn't mean anyone is asking you to say "I only have things because I am part of privileged groups". It does mean someone is asking you to say "By position of a characteristic I was born with, I have been helped, or at least not hurt, more than others without this characteristic". It does not mean anyone wants you to apologize for it; it does mean someone is asking for an acknowledgement of the implications of it, either for how it is impacted where you are now, how it might be skewing your perspective or level of knowledge in discussing a subject, or for how the lack of that same privilege may have made things different for someone else.

Race and privilege have been hot topics of late, with the controversies swirling around Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and basketball team owner Donald Sterling, and last week's Supreme Court decision upholding Michigan's ban on affirmative action in college admissions.

This explains why an Ivy League college freshman and his "no apologies" defence of a colourblind US meritocracy has become a national story.

It's a Weltanschauung conservatives are eager to endorse.

I bet an editor at The Times wouldn't have had to look up the term "Weltanschauung."

[DontSayBanana]

The comment I always drop to shut down these things: the goal's equality, not to make yet another different class of Untermenschen.

When the guilty party's unable to respond coherently, I just tell them "helping you see your own [circle one: sexism/racism/classism].  You're welcome."

[KRonn]

This "check your privilege" stuff is just nuts, agreed on that. I guess it works, sort of, at some colleges but I have to think it's just pissing many people off and the overbearing of it probably tends to turn them off to real race issues.

[Caliga]

Maybe this has always been in some kind of corner since the 90s and I'm only starting to realize it, but the amount of pseudo-intellectual discourse around race among my generation of Americans seems to have really skyrocketed.  I just don't get it.

I get it.  It's because youngsters these days don't have enough work to do and too much spare time.  Idle hands are the Devil's play-things.