The desire to withdraw physically or psychologically to avoid the discomfort is a symptom of what Robin DiAngelo has called “white fragility”: in essence, a low tolerance for the cognitive and emotional stress that comes from exposure to new information that disrupts one’s sense of racial equilibrium.12
If, despite the strong impulse to withdraw, the individual remains engaged, he or she can turn the discomfort into action. Once they have an awareness of the cycle of racism, many people are angered by it and want to interrupt it. Often action comes in the form of educating others—pointing out the stereotypes as they watch television, interrupting racial jokes, writing letters to the editor, sharing articles with friends and family. Like new converts, people experiencing disintegration can be quite zealous in their efforts. A White woman in her forties who participated in an antiracist professional development course for educators described herself at this stage:
What it was like for me when I was taking the course [one year ago] and just afterwards, hell, because this dissonance stuff doesn’t feel all that great. And, trying to put it in a perspective and figure out what to do with it is very hard.… I was on the band wagon so I’m not going to be quiet about it. So there was dissonance everywhere. Personally, I remember going home for Thanksgiving, the first Thanksgiving [while taking the course], back to our families… and turning to my brother-in-law and saying, “I really don’t want you to say that in front of me—I don’t want to hear that joke—I am not interested.”… At every turn it seemed like there, I was responsible for saying something.… My husband, who I think is a very good, a very liberal person, but who really hasn’t been through [this], saying, “You know I think you’re taking yourself too seriously here and where is your sense of humor? You have lost your sense of humor.” And my saying, “It isn’t funny; you don’t understand, it just isn’t funny to me.” Not that he would ever tell a racial joke, but there were these things that would come up and he would just sort of look back and say, “I don’t understand where you’re coming from now.” So there was a lot of dissonance.… I don’t think anybody was too comfortable with me for a while.13
My college students had similar experiences with family members and friends. Though they wanted to step off the cycle of racism, the message from the surrounding White community seemed to be, “Get back on!” A very poignant example of this was shared with me by a young White man from a very privileged background. He wrote:
I realized that it was possible to simply go through life totally oblivious to the entire situation or, even if one realizes it, one can totally repress it. It is easy to fade into the woodwork, run with the rest of society, and never have to deal with these problems. So many people I know from home are like this. They have simply accepted what society has taught them with little, if any, question. My father is a prime example of this.… It has caused much friction in our relationship, and he often tells me as a father he has failed in raising me correctly. Most of my high school friends will never deal with these issues and propagate them on to their own children. It’s easy to see how the cycle continues. I don’t think I could ever justify within myself simply turning my back on the problem. I finally realized that my position in all of these dominant groups gives me power to make change occur.… It is an unfortunate result often though that I feel alienated from friends and family. It’s often played off as a mere stage that I’m going through. I obviously can’t tell if it’s merely a stage, but I know that they say this to take the attention off of the truth of what I’m saying. By belittling me, they take the power out of my argument. It’s very depressing that being compassionate and considerate are seen as only phases that people go through. I don’t want it to be a phase for me, but as obvious as this may sound, I look at my environment and often wonder how it will not be.
The social pressure from friends and acquaintances to collude, to not notice racism, can be quite powerful.
But it is very difficult to stop noticing something once it has been pointed out. The conflict between noticing and not noticing generates internal tension, and there is a great desire to relieve it. Relief often comes through what Helms calls reintegration. In the reintegration frame of mind, the previous feelings of guilt or denial may be transformed into fear and anger directed toward people of color. The logic is, “If there is a problem with racism, then you people of color must have done something to cause it. And if you would just change your behavior, the problem would go away.” The elegance of this argument is that it relieves the White person of all responsibility for social change.
I am sometimes asked if it is absolutely necessary to experience this kind of reintegration thinking. Must one resort to blaming the victim to restore a sense of emotional equilibrium? Although it is not inevitable, most White people who speak up against racism will attest to the temptation they sometimes feel to slip back into collusion and silence. Because the pressure to ignore racism and to accept the socially sanctioned stereotypes is so strong, and the system of advantage so seductive, many White people get stuck in reintegration thinking. The psychological tension experienced at this stage is clearly expressed by Connie, a White woman of Italian ancestry who took my course on the psychology of racism. After reading about the process of White identity development, she wrote:
There was a time when I never considered myself a color. I never described myself as a “White, Italian female” until I got to college and noticed that people of color always described themselves by their color/race. While taking this class, I have begun to understand that being White makes a difference. I never thought about it before, but there are many privileges to being White. In my personal life, I cannot say that I have ever felt that I have had the advantage over a Black person, but I am aware that my race has the advantage.
I am feeling really guilty lately about that. I find myself thinking: “I didn’t mean to be White, I really didn’t mean it.” I am starting to feel angry toward my race for ever using this advantage toward personal gains. But at the same time I resent the minority groups. I mean, it’s not my fault that society has deemed us “superior.” I don’t feel any better than a Black person. But it really doesn’t matter because I am a member of the dominant race.… I can’t help it… and I sometimes get angry and feel like I’m being attacked.
I guess my anger toward a minority group would enter me into the next stage of Reintegration where I am once again starting to blame the victim. This is all very trying for me and it has been on my mind a lot. I really would like to be able to reach the last stage… where I can accept being White without hostility and anger. That is really hard to do.
“But I’m an Individual!”
Another source of the discomfort and anger that Whites often experience in this phase stems from the frustration of being seen as a group member, rather than as an individual. People of color learn early in life that they are seen by others as members of a group. For Whites, thinking of oneself only as an individual is a legacy of White privilege. As McIntosh writes, “I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.… I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.… I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.”14 In short, she and other Whites are perceived as individuals most of the time.
The view of oneself as an individual is very compatible with the dominant ideology of rugged individualism and the American myth of meritocracy. Understanding racism as a system of advantage that structurally benefits Whites and disadvantages people of color on the basis of group membership threatens not only beliefs about society but also beliefs about one’s own life accomplishments. For example, organizational consultant Nancie Zane writes that senior White male managers “were clearly invested in the notion that their hard work, ingenuity and skills had won them their senior-level positions.” As others talked about the systemic racist and sexist bar
riers to their own achievement, “white men heard it as a condemnation that they somehow didn’t ‘deserve’ their position.”15 If viewing oneself as a group member threatens one’s self-definition, making the paradigm shift from individual to group member will be painful.
In the case of White men, both maleness and Whiteness are normative, so acknowledging group status may be particularly difficult. Those White women who have explored their subordinate gender identity have made at least some movement away from the notion of a strictly individual self-definition and may find it easier to grasp the significance of their racial group membership. However, as McIntosh and others have pointed out, understanding one form of oppression does not guarantee recognition of another.
Those Whites who are highly identified with a particular subordinate identity may also struggle with claiming Whiteness as a meaningful group category because they feel far from the White male middle-class norm. For example, Whites who grew up in impoverished circumstances often struggle with the idea that they had anything described as “privilege.” Jewish people of European ancestry sometimes do not think of themselves as White because for them the term means “White Christian.” Also, in Nazi Germany, Jews were defined as a distinct, non-Aryan racial group. In the context of an anti-Jewish culture, the salient identity may be the targeted Jewish identity. However, in terms of US racial ideology, Jews of European ancestry are also the beneficiaries of White racial privilege.16 My White Jewish students often struggled with the tension between being targeted and receiving privilege. In this case, as in others, the reality of multiple identities complicates the process of coming to terms with one particular dimension of identity. For example, one student wrote: “I am constantly afraid that people will see my assertion of my Jewish identity as a denial of whiteness, as a way of escaping the acknowledgment of white privilege. I feel I am both part of and not part of whiteness. I am struggling to be more aware of my white privilege… but I will not do so at the cost of having my Jewishness erased.”
Similarly, White people whose central group identification is with the LGBTQ community sometimes find it hard to claim privileged status as Whites when they are so targeted by homophobia and heterosexism, often at the hands of other Whites. Heather Hackman, a social-justice educator who identifies as a lesbian, describes her own journey as a college student, initially resisting any new understanding of race.
I just wanted people to stop calling me a racist. [I] took in just enough information to make it seem like I was on board with racial issues. But if one were to scratch beneath the surface, one would see that I had no real knowledge of racial issues, and worse, I had no real desire to know.… I could not see why I should care about it because I could not see myself in this country’s story of race.… But something was percolating in me that made this ignorance untenable for much longer. My identity as a feminist, coming out as a lesbian, and learning how the systems of oppression associated with those identities worked were beginning to make it impossible for me to persist in my racial delusions. My last two years of college were filled with moment after moment, lesson after lesson, and conversation after conversation that helped me to see that learning about racial issues in earnest and then speaking out about racial oppression was deeply connected to my speaking out about gender and queer oppression and that I could not advocate for the latter without addressing the former.17
Even when White men and women don’t see or think of themselves as White, other people still do. As White people begin to understand that they are viewed as members of a dominant racial group not only by other Whites but also by people of color, they are sometimes troubled, even angered, to learn that simply because of their group status they may be viewed with suspicion by many people of color. “I’m an individual, view me as an individual!” For example, in a racially mixed group of educators participating in an antiracist professional development course, a Black man commented about using his “radar” to determine if the group would be a safe place for him. Many of the White people in the room, who believed that their very presence in the course was proof of their trustworthiness, were upset by the comment, initially unprepared to acknowledge the invisible legacy of racism that accompanied any and every interaction they had with people of color.18 The White people in the course found some comfort in reading Lois Stalvey’s classic memoir, The Education of a WASP, in which she describes her own responses to the ways Black people tested her trustworthiness. She writes,
I could never resent the tests as some white people have told me they do.… But to me, the longest tests have always indicated the deepest hurts. We whites would have to be naive to expect that hundreds of years of humiliation can be forgotten the moment we wish it to be. At times, the most poignant part of the test is that black people have enough trust left to give it. Testing implies we might pass the test. It is safer and easier for a black person to turn his back on us. If he does not gamble on our sincerity, he cannot be hurt if we prove false. Testing shows an optimism I doubt I could duplicate if I were black.19
Sometimes poorly organized antiracism workshops or other educational experiences can create a scenario that places participants at risk for getting stuck in their anger. Effective consciousness-raising about racism must also point the way toward constructive action. When people don’t have the tools for moving forward, they tend to return to what is familiar, often becoming more vigorous in their defense of the racial status quo than they were initially.
As we have seen, many White people experience themselves as powerless, even in the face of privilege. But the fact is that we all have a sphere of influence, some domain in which we exercise some level of power and control. The task for each of us, White and of color, is to identify what our own sphere of influence is (however large or small) and to consider how it might be used to interrupt the cycle of racism.
Defining a Positive White Identity
As a White person’s understanding of the complexity of institutional racism in our society deepens, resorting to explanations that blame the victim becomes less likely. Instead, deepening awareness usually leads to a commitment to unlearn one’s racism and marks the emergence of the pseudo-independent status.
Sometimes epitomized by the “guilty White liberal” persona, the individual whose thinking is dominated by a pseudo-independent mindset has achieved an intellectual understanding of racism as a system of advantage but doesn’t quite know what to do about it. Self-conscious and feeling guilty about one’s own Whiteness, the individual often desires to escape it by associating with people of color. Ruth Frankenberg, author of White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness,20 describes the confusing emotions of this process in an autobiographical essay. “I viewed my racial privilege as total. I remember months when I was terrified to speak in gatherings that were primarily of color, since I feared that anything I did say would be marked by my whiteness, my racial privilege (which in my mind meant the same).”21 When her friends of color were making casual conversation—chatting about their mothers, for example—she would worry that anything she might say about her own mother would somehow reveal her race privilege, and by the time she had sorted it out mentally, the topic of conversation would have changed. She writes, “In that silence, I tried to ‘pass’ (as what? as racially unmarked? as exceptional? as the one white girl who could ‘hang’?).”22
Similarly, a student of mine wrote:
One of the major and probably most difficult steps in identity development is obtaining or finding the consciousness of what it means to be White. I definitely remember many a time that I wished I was not White, ashamed of what I and others have done to the other racial groups in the world.… I wanted to pretend I was Black, live with them, celebrate their culture, and deny my Whiteness completely. Basically, I wanted to escape the responsibility that came with identifying myself as “White.”
How successful these efforts to escape Whiteness via people of color will be depends in part on the REC-identity dev
elopment of the people of color involved. Remember the Black students at the cafeteria table? If they are having racial encounters and are in the immersion mode of active exploration of their Black identity, they are not likely to be interested in cultivating White friendships. If a White person reaches out to a Black person and is rebuffed, it may cause the White person to retreat into “blame the victim” thinking. However, even if those efforts to build interracial relationships are successful, the reality of one’s own Whiteness must eventually be confronted.
We all must be able to embrace who we are in terms of our racial and cultural heritage, not in terms of assumed superiority or inferiority but as an integral part of our daily experience in which we can take pride. But, as we see in these examples, for many White people who have come to understand the everyday reality of racism, Whiteness is still experienced as a source of shame rather than as a source of pride.
Recognizing the need to find a more positive self-definition is a hallmark of the immersion/emersion status, as described by Helms. Bob, a White male student in one of my racism classes, clearly articulated this need.
I’m finding that this idea of White identity is more important than I thought. Yet White identity seems very hard to pin hole. I seem to have an idea and feel myself understanding what I need to do and why and then something presents itself that throws me into mass confusion. I feel that I need some resources that will help me through the process of finding White identity.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 22
