Tonight at dinner, out of a clear blue sky, my ten-year-old daughter told me how she’d learned in school today about how Olaudah Equiano, in his Interesting Narrative of his slavery and freedom, had referred to his white captors as “savage.”
My daughter is white. Her glee at this description was undisguised.
I asked her later this evening whether she was offended by Equiano’s assessment. She replied immediately and adamantly. “No. Because the white people were being obnoxious, and their thoughts toward black people were crazy.” Full stop.
I suspect that Joan Walsh would not be pleased with my kid. I am, tho.
Yesterday at Salon, Walsh put up a piece called “How To Talk About White People,” in which she called for “care and respect, not stereotyping and scorn.” That’s all well and good, as far as it goes. Stereotyping is bad, and scorn isn’t of much use as a go-to rhetorical style. Fair enough.
But come on.
Once, years ago, back in the days when I was still a student, I was at a student conference and someone was talking about the persistence and pervasiveness of racism in America. A white hand went up, and a question that wasn’t really a question was asked: “It sounds like you hate white people!”
I scribbled a note, and passed it to a friend: “If you don’t hate white people, you’re not paying attention.”
Now, I don’t actually hate white people. I’m a white people, my kids are white people, my parents are white people. Most of my friends, truth be told, are white people. I love lots of white people. I even love white people as a group. But I stand by my scribbled note, because white people have a hell of a lot to answer for, and not just in Olaudah Equiano’s day. If we want to move forward, we have to be prepared to hear that anger.
“If they want to widen their coalition in the post-Obama age,” Walsh writes, “Democrats, and all of us, ought to think about how to talk to America’s newest minority with care and respect.” But what she’s calling for isn’t care and respect. It’s coddling and pandering.
Because when I talk to you with respect, part of that is respecting you enough to tell you the truth. Not just the truth about you, but also the truth about how I feel about you. When I hedge, when I couch, when I play down, that’s the opposite of respect.
My ten-year-old gets this. I asked her tonight why she thought it was so cool that Equiano had called white people savages, and she said it was “the fact that he could write, because most slaves couldn’t. And because he could write he could put down that awesomeness. I bet you lots of other slaves and blacks thought that they were savages, but they couldn’t write it down. And if they said it, they would be killed.”
This is exactly right. When someone who has been oppressed has the freedom and the space to say what they really believe about their oppressor, that’s a thing of beauty and a joy forever. If you’re a white person, and a person of color tells you what they really think about white people, they’re not disrespecting you, they’re giving you a gift.
“Don’t assume that whites are Republicans,” Walsh writes, and then goes on to acknowledge, while straining not to, that most whites are Republicans, just as most Republicans are whites. “Don’t assume whites are wealthy,” she writes, pointing out that Asian-Americans have a higher average household income, but not mentioning that income and wealth aren’t at all the same thing. “Don’t assume whites are racist,” she writes, chiding us that “the reluctance of many white working-class people to vote for President Obama was routinely ascribed to their racism, rather than legitimate doubts about whether his policies would address their problems.”
I’m not a big fan of calling people racist, myself. (I’m not a big fan of calling people Republicans or wealthy either, though if the shoe fits…) But the idea that any white voter’s antipathy to Obama can be ascribed to either “racism” or “legitimate doubts,” with no murky uncomfortable gray area in between? That’s, as my kid would say, crazy.
Racism is in the water in which we swim. It’s in the air we breathe. When we decline to acknowledge that, it’s out of delicacy or cowardice, not respect.
Roger Ebert got this. Roger Ebert was a white guy, born in the 1940s, raised in a racist America, and he got this. He understood that the racism of American society was profound and lasting, and that the project of bringing that reality to white people’s attention was an essential and urgent one.
Writing about Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing in 2001, Ebert said that he was chased out of the world premiere of the movie by a fellow critic who buttonholed him to call it “a call to racial violence!” He thought this was utterly wrong, but he understood the mentality of that critic. She “was most disturbed,” he wrote,
“I suspect, because it was Mookie who threw the trash can — Mookie, who the movie led her to like and trust. How could he do such a thing to Sal? The answer to that question is right there on the screen, but was elusive for some viewers, who recoiled from the damage done to Sal’s property but hardly seemed to notice, or remember, that the events were set in motion by the death of a young black man at the hands of the police. Among the many devastating effects of Lee’s film, certainly the most subtle and effective is the way it leads some viewers (not racist, but thoughtless or inattentive or imbued with the unexamined values of our society) to realize that they have valued a pizzeria over a human life.”
Look at what Ebert does there. Look at how he demurs from the characterization of white moviegoers as racist, and why, and to what end.
They’re not racist, he says — you’re not racist, he says — but they are, and you, white reader, are “thoughtless or inattentive or imbued with the unexamined values of our society,” and those failings, however we choose to characterize them, have rendered us, as my kid would say, obnoxious.
I tweeted this afternoon that one reason I loved Roger Ebert was that he was “a white guy who was eager to talk to other white people about race, and who said stuff worth saying.” He spoke to me as a white person. He challenged me as a white person. He challenged me white person to white person, and I loved him for that.
14 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 5, 2013 at 1:07 am
Mike Gibbs
You are spot on about white people, racism, and Roger Ebert. He seemed to see things others always missed. Some subtly hidden, others hiding in plain sight. Great article.
April 5, 2013 at 1:14 am
Adriana Valencia (@av)
A sharp kid, and a lovely essay
April 5, 2013 at 9:50 am
Angus Johnston
Thanks, folks. And yeah, my kid is pretty awesome.
April 5, 2013 at 1:57 pm
RomanCandle
This article did not challenge me as a white person.
April 5, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Current Events | Annotary
[…] Sort: Newest Oldest Title Publisher More from Sarah Couri: Miscellaneous Sort Share studentactivism.net 4 minutes […]
April 5, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Charles H. Tucker
Great essay, and an exceptional daughter, Tom. Outstanding!
April 5, 2013 at 8:52 pm
Fred Brunoise
Funny. What this is about is you asserting status relative to white people you hate. You regard them as “other”, and as lesser. It’s not “respect”. The point of the whole exercise is to enjoy regarding them as an inferior “other”.
It feels good to hate a group of people. It feels good to talk and think about how you’re just naturally better than a large, varied group of people you’ve never met. It feels good to teach your children to hate and look down on a large, varied group of people they’ve never met either. You’re not the first one to come up with this stuff, you know. Bigotry is a very old habit. You’re also not the first one to project his own sins onto others and then congratulate himself for his own moral purity.
Incidentally, you regard black people as no more fully human than the “wrong kind of white people” you’re bigoted against. In your mind, both of them are just stage props for your own little narcissistic psychodrama.
As for black people, if black people hate me because of something some other unrelated white person did decades ago, or because of what they’re doing to each other now, that’s not “respect” either. It’s nonsense. I didn’t enslave anybody. When I meet black people, I treat them with respect, as fellow human beings, just like I treat everybody. I’m not some creep like you who goes around looking for silly excuses to shit on his fellow man.
Am I willing to listen to any more of it? No. And I don’t respect any individual who wants me to sit still and listen to abuse. The plight of black Americans today doesn’t benefit me. If they were competing for my software development job, that would be fine, because they’d be buying as much stuff as I am, and there would be more jobs for everybody. Vastly fewer of them would be committing crimes, saving the government all kinds of money, and they’d be paying more taxes too. If racism is keeping them down, it’s not doing me any great favors either. Sure, they’re suffering incomparably more than I am, but I didn’t do it to them, I gain nothing from it, and if I could do anything to alleviate it, I’d do it in a flash.
What the hell are you trying to accomplish here, other than making yourself feel superior? If the white people you hate were to take your nonsense seriously, what would that fix? How would it fix anything? It wouldn’t, because it isn’t meant to. Grow up.
April 5, 2013 at 9:24 pm
Angus Johnston
This might be a more compelling argument if you actually engaged specifically with anything I said, Fred. As it stands, you’re just yammering.
April 6, 2013 at 12:45 pm
White Folk | Toeachfromeach's Blog
[…] vague statistics about wealth and income and, as Angus Johnston points out in his wonderful, must-read post about Walsh’s piece, she ignores the economic differences between wealth and […]
April 6, 2013 at 4:35 pm
Dan A. Avery
Sorry, but i feel like your position is a little too pat: White people have a race problem but no one else does?
Also, what exactly does “white” mean in 21st century America? As a gay Eastern-European Jew and a second-generation American, I check off the “white” box on forms but can’t say I’ve ever felt the sense of privilege you’re supposed to get from being Caucasian. Neither have my immigrant Greek neighbors who struggle with the language and culture and have menial jobs to support their families.
You know what is a sign of privilege? Patronizing essays that reek of superiority masked as liberal white guilt.
April 7, 2013 at 10:48 am
StillLearning
That’s the whole point. You don’t feel the sense of privilege because it’s taken for granted. It’s (as Angus wrote) the water you swim in. When you walk into a store and the salesperson smiles and asks you if they can help you find something, it’s unremarkable; normal because that’s what always happens. When you apply for and get a job, no one questions whether you were hired because you’re white and your colleagues don’t assume that you don’t know what you’re doing until you prove it over and over again, and then check your work for the first 3 months just to be sure. Regardless of how menial or professional the job is.
As an LGBT person of color, I am almost certain that your sexuality hasn’t reduced your privilege as much as it would if you weren’t white, or male. As a first-generation immigrant I empathize with your immigrant Greek neighbors and wish them well. That doesn’t make me blind to the fact that they have privileges in this country no matter how long I’ve lived here, how many degrees I have and how many zeros there are at the end of my paycheck.
April 14, 2013 at 9:15 am
Inverness (@Inverness)
Remember the London riots a few years ago? So many people were dismissing the rioters as sneaker thieves. What precipitated them? The killing of an innocent black man.
Same old story.
April 14, 2013 at 10:32 am
Weekend Reading | Backslash Scott Thoughts
[…] Joan Walsh and Roger Ebert: White Folks Writing About White Folks. […]
April 20, 2013 at 8:17 am
Why Are White People Called Caucasian? | Talesfromthelou's Blog
[…] Joan Walsh vs Roger Ebert: White Folks Writing About White Folks (studentactivism.net) […]