Particularly in work settings, where people of color are isolated and often in the extreme minority, the opportunities to connect with peers of color are few and far between. White people are often unaware of how stressful such a situation can be. There are many situations where White people may say and do things that are upsetting to people of color. For example, a Black woman working in a school district where she was one of few Black teachers—and the only one in her building—was often distressed by the comments she heard her White colleagues making about Black students. As a novice, untenured teacher, she needed support and mentoring from her colleagues but felt alienated from them because of their casually expressed prejudices. When participating in a workshop for educators, she had the chance to talk in a small group made up entirely of Black educators and was able to vent her feelings and ask for help from her more-experienced colleagues about how to cope with this situation. Though such opportunities may not occur daily, as in a cafeteria, they are important for psychological survival in such situations.
In fact, more and more organizations are creating opportunities for these meetings to take place, providing time, space, and refreshments for people of color and other underrepresented groups (e.g., women, people with disabilities, those who identify as LGBTQ) to get together for networking and support. Some corporate leaders have found that such interventions (sometimes called “affinity groups” or “employee resource groups”), particularly when championed by a senior executive, support the recruitment, retention, and heightened productivity of their employees.35 Like the SET program described in Chapter 4, a company-sponsored resource group can be an institutional affirmation of the unique challenges facing historically marginalized employees of color.
I was invited once to give a speech at the annual meeting of a national organization committed to social justice. All the managers from around the country were there. Just before I was introduced, a Black man made an announcement that there would be a breakfast meeting the next day for all interested people of color in the organization. Though this national organization had a long history, this was the first time that the people of color were going to have a “caucus” meeting. Following the announcement, I was introduced and I gave my talk, entitled “Interrupting the Cycle of Oppression.” After a warm round of applause, I asked if there were any questions. Immediately a visibly agitated White woman stood up and asked, “How would you feel if just before you began speaking a White person had stood up and said there would be a breakfast meeting of all the White people tomorrow?” I replied, “I would say it was a good idea.” What I meant by my response is the subject of the next chapter.
PART III
Understanding Whiteness in a White Context
SIX
The Development of White Identity
“I’m not ethnic, I’m just normal.”*
I often begin the classes and workshops I lead by asking participants to reflect on their own social class and ethnic background in small discussion groups. The first question I pose is one that most people of color answer without hesitation: “What is your class and ethnic background?” White participants, however, often pause before responding. On one such occasion a young White woman quickly described herself as middle-class but seemed stumped as to how to describe herself ethnically. Finally, she said, “I’m just normal!” What did she mean? She explained that she did not identify with any particular ethnic heritage and that she was a lot like the other people who lived in her very homogeneous, White, middle-class community. But her choice of words was telling. If she is “just normal,” are those who are different from her “just abnormal”?
Like many White people, this young woman had never really considered her own racial and ethnic group membership. For her, Whiteness was simply the unexamined norm. Because they represent the societal norm, Whites can easily reach adulthood without thinking much about their racial group. For example, one White teacher who was taking a professional development course on racism with me wrote in one of her papers: “I am thirty-five years old and I never really started thinking about race too much until now, and that makes me feel uncomfortable.… I just think for some reason I didn’t know. No one taught us.”1 There is a lot of silence about race in White communities, and as a consequence Whites tend to think of racial identity as something that other people have, not something that is salient for them.
That is just how Debby Irving understood racial identity until, at age forty-eight, she “woke up White.” In her memoir, Waking Up White, she recalls, “The way I understood it, race was for other people, brown and black-skinned people. Don’t get me wrong—if you put a census form in my hand, I would know to check ‘white’ or ‘Caucasian.’ It’s more that I thought all those other categories, like Asian, African American, American Indian, and Latino, were the real races. I thought white was the raceless race—just plain, normal, the one against which all others were measured.”2 Like my students, Irving’s awakening came in the context of an academic course she was taking.
Whether the silence about race is broken in a college classroom, in a cross-racial friendship or intimate relationship, in a corporate office, or in some other life circumstance, once it is meaningfully broken, a process of identity development—specifically linked to an understanding of what it means to be White in a race-conscious society—begins to unfold. Counseling psychologist Janet Helms has described this unfolding for Whites in her book Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice.3 She assumes, as do I, that in a race-conscious society, racial group membership has psychological implications. The messages we receive about assumed superiority or inferiority shape our perceptions of reality and influence our interactions with others. While the task for people of color is to resist negative societal messages and develop an empowered sense of self in the face of a racist society, Helms says the task for Whites is to develop a positive White identity based in reality, not on assumed superiority. In order to do that, each person must become aware of his or her Whiteness, recognize that it is personally and socially significant, and learn to feel good about it, not in the sense of a Klan member’s “White pride” but in the context of a commitment to a just society.
It comes as a surprise to some White people to think about their race in this way. “Of course White people feel good about being White,” they say. But that is not my experience with my students or with the people who come to my workshops. Many of the White people in my audiences either have not given much thought to the meaning of their racial group membership and so don’t feel anything, or they have thought about it and feel uncomfortable. The nature of the discomfort can vary and is often linked to their socioeconomic position. Social justice educator Paul Kivel, author of Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, notes:
Those of us who are middle-class are more likely to take it for granted that we are white without having to emphasize the point, and to feel guilty when it is noticed or brought up. Those of us who are poor or working-class are more likely to have had to assert our whiteness against the effects of economic discrimination and the presence of other racial groups. Although we share the benefits of being white, we don’t share the economic privileges of being middle-class, and so we are more likely to feel angry and less likely to feel guilty than our middle-class counterparts. Whatever our economic status, many white people become paralyzed with some measure of fear, guilt or defensiveness when racism is addressed.4
This psychological discomfort is part of the hidden cost of racism for Whites.
How can White people achieve a healthy sense of White identity? Helms’ model is instructive.5 There are two major developmental tasks in this process, the abandonment of individual racism and the recognition of and opposition to institutional and cultural racism. These tasks are represented by what Helms calls six statuses (or states of mind): contact, disintegration, reintegration, pseudo-independent, immersion/emersion, and autonomy.6
Abandoning Racism
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In the contact frame of mind, like the women quoted in the opening of this chapter, Whites are paying very little attention, if any, to the significance of their racial identity. As exemplified by the “I’m just normal” comment, individuals operating from this perspective rarely describe themselves as White. If they have lived, worked, or gone to school in predominantly White settings, they may simply think of themselves as being part of the racial norm and take this for granted without conscious consideration of their White privilege, the systematically conferred advantages they receive simply because they are White.
While they have been breathing the “smog” and internalizing many of the prevailing societal stereotypes of people of color, they typically are unaware of this socialization process. They often perceive themselves as color-blind, completely free of prejudice, unaware of their own assumptions about other racial groups. In addition, they usually think of racism as the prejudiced behaviors of individuals rather than as an institutionalized system of advantage benefiting Whites in subtle as well as blatant ways. Peggy McIntosh speaks for many Whites with a contact frame when she writes, “I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.”7
Some White people may grow up in families where they are actively encouraged to embrace the ideology of White superiority (children of Klan members or members of other White nationalist groups, for example), and as a result, they may have an elevated sense of White identity from an early age. In such cases, socialization of attitudes about Whiteness and the assumed inferiority of others has been overt and intentional.8 However, for most Whites, the contact frame of mind in Helms’ model of racial identity development represents the passive absorption of subtly communicated messages.
Robert Carter, another racial identity researcher, illustrates this point when he quotes a forty-four-year-old White male who grew up in upstate New York, where he had limited direct exposure to Black people or other communities of color.
There was no one to compare ourselves to. As you would drive through other neighborhoods, I think there was a clear message of difference or even superiority. The neighborhoods were poorer, and it was probably subtle, I don’t remember my parents being bigoted, although by today’s standards they clearly were. I think there was probably a message of superiority. The underlying messages were subtle. No one ever came out and said, White people are this and Black people are like this. I think the underlying message is that White people are generally good and they’re like us, us and them.9
These messages may go unchallenged and unexamined for a long time, perhaps a lifetime.
While active exploration of what it means to be Black is an almost universal experience for African American adolescents due to the encounters with racism they commonly have, the same is not true for White youth. For White people living in largely White environments, it is possible to live one’s entire life without giving focused attention to what it means to be White. Ethnic identity (being of Irish, Italian, Polish ancestry, for example) may be celebrated as part of a family’s cultural traditions, but being White may go unexplored because it just seems “normal.” But if one’s social context changes, in college for instance, there may be new experiences that trigger active exploration of this dimension of identity. If that happens, the disintegration state is likely to occur next.
Disintegration is marked by a growing awareness of racism and White privilege as a result of personal encounters in which the social significance of race is made visible. For some White people, disintegration occurs when they develop a close friendship or a romantic relationship with a person of color. The White person then sees firsthand how racism can operate. For example, one female college student described her experiences shopping with a Puerto Rican roommate. She couldn’t help noticing how her Latinx friend was followed around in stores by suspicious store clerks. She also saw how her friend’s Black boyfriend was frequently asked to show his college ID when he visited their residence hall, while young White men came and went without being questioned.
For other White people, disintegration may result from seeing racial incidents captured on video, as was the case for Jill Robbins, a White female blogger. She titled her essay describing her reaction to the online video of the shooting of Philando Castile “How I Finally ‘Got’ the Meaning of White Privilege.” Here’s an excerpt:
If I look into my rearview mirror and see flashing red lights, I’m not afraid. I probably have an “oh shit” moment but I have zero fear that I’ll be harmed or even harassed by a police officer. I’m a nice white lady in a minivan… in suburbia USA. I might walk away with a ticket or maybe just a warning. No police officer is going to perceive me as a threat or a problem. I don’t know what it’s like to be hunted or profiled.
And that right there is white privilege. It’s the knowledge that being a victim of police brutality is probably never going to happen to me.… I know that if my white husband had been the one pulled over for a busted tail light that odds of him getting shot are almost nonexistent…
A man I don’t know who died two days before his 33rd birthday has had such a profound impact on me. It means more than something ugly on the news. I don’t know if walking away less tunnel-visioned here in my white, suburban bubble means anything to anyone else but it means something to me.10
When that bubble starts to pop, the cycle of racism becomes increasingly visible. The visual image of Philando Castile slumped and bleeding in his car while his girlfriend tries to make sense of what just happened and her four-year-old daughter sits in the backseat is hard to explain away. But there are other, more commonly encountered visual images that also illuminate the cycle of racism in operation. For example, in my Psychology of Racism class, I often showed a very powerful video, Ethnic Notions,11 on the dehumanizing images of African Americans in popular culture from before the Civil War through the late twentieth century. The video links the nineteenth-century caricatures of Black physical features, commonly published racial epithets, and the early cinematic portrayals of stupid but happy “darkies,” menacing Black “savages,” and heavyset, caretaking “mammies,” to their updated forms in today’s media. After seeing this film, students reported that they couldn’t help but notice the pervasiveness of contemporary forms of racial stereotyping on television each night. The same programs they used to find entertaining now offended them.
They also started to notice the racism in the everyday language of family and friends. For example, one White student reported that when she asked her roommate to get her a glass of water, the White roommate jokingly replied, “Do I look Black to you?” Although I had never heard of this expression, it was very familiar to the student. Yet, before then, she had never recognized the association of Blackness with servitude and the assumed superiority of Whiteness being conveyed in her roommate’s casual remark.
This new awareness is usually characterized by discomfort. The uncomfortable emotions of guilt, shame, and anger are often related to a new awareness of one’s personal prejudices or the prejudices within one’s family. The following excerpts from the journals of two White students illustrate this point:
Today was the first class on racism.… Before today I didn’t think I was exposed to any form of racism. Well, except for my father. He is about as prejudiced as they come.
It really bothers me that stereotypes exist because it is from them that I originally became uninformed. My grandmother makes all kinds of decisions based on stereotypes—who to hire, who to help out. When I was growing up, the only Black people that I knew were adults [household help], but I admired them just as much as any other adult. When I expressed these feelings to my parents, I was always told that the Black people that I knew were the exceptions and that the rest… were different. I, too, was taught to be afraid.
Others’ parents were silent on the subject of racism, simply accepting the status quo.
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Those whose parents were actively antiracist might have felt less guilt but often still felt unprepared for addressing racism outside the family, a point highlighted by the comments of this young woman:
Talking with other class members, I realized how exceptional my parents were. Not only were they not overtly racist but they also tried to keep society’s subtle racism from reaching me. Basically I grew up believing that racism was no longer an issue and all people should be treated as equals. Unfortunately, my parents were not being very realistic as society’s racism did begin to reach me. They did not teach me how to support and defend their views once I was interacting in a society without them as a buffer.
When the disintegration frame of mind emerges, White individuals begin to see the degree to which their lives, and the lives of people of color, have been affected by racism in our society. The societal inequities they now notice directly contradict the idea of an American meritocracy, a concept that has typically been an integral part of their belief system. The cognitive dissonance that results is part of the discomfort that is experienced at this point in the process of development. Responses to this discomfort may include denying the validity of the information that is being presented or psychologically or physically withdrawing from it. The logic is, “If I don’t read about racism, talk about racism, watch those documentaries or special news programs, or spend time with those people of color, I won’t have to feel uncomfortable.” (In the case of my students, this was usually not an option. By the time they were feeling these emotional responses deeply, it was too late to drop the course.)
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 21
