The resource Bob needs most at this point are not people of color but other Whites who are further along in the process and can help show him the way.
It is at just this point that White individuals intensify their efforts to see their Whiteness in a positive light. Just as Cross describes the period of Black redefinition as a time for Black people to seek new ways of thinking about Blackness, ways that take them beyond the role of victim, White people must seek new ways of thinking about Whiteness, ways that take them beyond the role of victimizer.
The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope
In fact, another role does exist. There is a history of White protest against racism, a history of Whites who have resisted the role of oppressor and who have been allies to people of color. Unfortunately these Whites are often invisible to us. While the names of active racists are easily recalled—past and present Klan leaders and Southern segregationists, for example—the names of White allies are often unknown. I have had the experience of addressing roomfuls of classroom teachers who have been unable to name even one White person who has worked against racism without some prompting from me. If they can’t do it, it is likely that their students can’t either.
Those who have studied or lived through the civil rights era (many of today’s students have not) may know the names of Viola Liuzzo, James Reeb, or Michael Schwerner, White civil rights workers who were killed for their antiracist efforts. But most people don’t want to be martyrs. There is a need to know about White allies who spoke up, who worked for social change, who resisted racism and lived to tell about it. How did these White allies break free from the confines of the racist socialization they surely experienced to claim this identity for themselves? These are the voices that many White people at this point in their learning process are hungry to hear.
Biographies of and autobiographies by White individuals who have been engaged in antiracist activities can be very helpful. For example, there is A Season of Justice, the autobiography of Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and a vigorous anti-Klan litigator,23 as well as Memoir of a Race Traitor, by Mab Segrest, a powerful account of her experiences as a White lesbian with deep Southern roots organizing against neo-Nazi and Klan activity in North Carolina.24 There is Outside the Magic Circle, the oral history of Virginia Foster Durr, a Southern belle turned civil rights activist.25 And, already quoted in this chapter, there is The Education of a WASP, the story of Lois Stalvey, a mother struggling to create an antiracist environment for her children during the civil rights era.26 Each of these books is anchored in events of the twentieth century and explores family histories that go back to the nineteenth century or before. Becky Thompson’s book A Promise and Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism is based on the life histories of thirty-nine people who collectively represent a social history of White antiracist activism from the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century.27 Examples of contemporary narratives that extend into the twenty-first century include Bernestine Singley’s edited volume When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories,28 White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son—The Remix by Tim Wise,29 Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving,30 Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It by Shelly Tochluk,31 Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice by Mark Warren,32 and Everyday White People Confront Racial and Social Justice: 15 Stories, edited by Eddie Moore, Marguerite W. Penick-Parks, and Ali Michael.33
These narratives can provide an antidote to the feelings of isolation and loneliness that White people often feel at this point. There is comfort in knowing that others have traveled this terrain. One of the consequences of racism in our society is that those who oppose racism are often marginalized, and as a result, their stories are not widely known. To quote Mark Warren, “While studies of white racism might fill a small library, the studies of white antiracism, if you will, could fit in a small bookcase.”34 Having access to these narratives makes a difference to Whites who are looking for ways to be agents of change. White people who are doing this work need to continue to make their stories known to serve as guides for others.
In my classes I tried to address the lack of knowledge of White role models by providing concrete examples of such people. In addition to assigning reading material, my strategy was to invite a local White antiracist activist, Andrea Ayvazian, to my class to speak about her own personal journey toward an awareness of racism and her development as a White ally. Students typically asked her questions that reflected their fears about social isolation at this phase of development. “Did you lose friends when you started to speak up?” “My boyfriend makes a lot of racist comments. What can I do?” “What do you say to your father at Thanksgiving when he tells those jokes?” These are not just the questions of late adolescents. The mature White teachers I worked with asked the same things.
My White students often found the topic of racism depressing—especially as they deepened their understanding of how deeply ingrained it is in the structures of our society. Yet they found the opportunity to talk with this ally gave them renewed hope. Through her example, they could see that the role of the ally is not to “help” those targeted by racism but to stand in solidarity with them, speaking up against systems of oppression, and to challenge other Whites to do the same. One point that Andrea Ayvazian emphasizes in her speaking and writing is the idea that “allies need allies,” others who will support their efforts to swim against the tide of cultural and institutional racism.35 This point was especially helpful for one young woman who had been struggling with feelings of isolation. She wrote:
About being an ally, a positive role model:… it enhanced my positive feelings about the difference each individual (me!) can make. I don’t need to feel helpless when there is so much I can do. I still can see how easily things can back-up and start getting depressing, but I can also see how it is possible to keep going strong and powerful. One of the most important points she made was the necessity of a support group/system; people to remind me of what I have done, why I should keep going, of why I’m making a difference, why I shouldn’t feel helpless. I think our class started to help me with those issues, as soon as I started to let it, and now I’ve found similar supports in friends and family. They’re out there, it’s just finding and establishing them—it really is a necessity. Without support, it would be too easy to give up, burn-out, become helpless again. In any endeavor support is important, but when the forces against you are so prevalent and deep-rooted as racism is in this society, it is the only way to keep moving forward.
Participation in White consciousness-raising groups organized specifically for the purpose of examining one’s own racism is a powerful way to “keep moving forward.” During my tenure as a professor at Mount Holyoke College, such a group, White Women Against Racism, was formed by White students eager to engage each other in this work. There are similar groups with different names operating formally and informally in local communities around the country.36 Support groups of this nature help to combat the social isolation that antiracist Whites often experience and provide places to forge new identities.
For example, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) is a national network founded in 2009 specifically to educate and organize White people to work for racial justice, not alone but in collaboration with local and national multiracial racial-justice organizing efforts. However, SURJ recognizes the need to provide spaces where White people can be “called in, not called out,” supported in their learning by other White people, knowing that mistakes are inevitable. As stated on the website, the SURJ goal is “to learn from those mistakes and keep showing up again and again for what is right and for racial justice.” As an organization, SURJ has a particular commitment to engaging with low-income and working-class Whites in order to counteract the way that race has been used to pit disenfranchised Whites against people of color: “While people of color
bear the brunt of racism, large numbers of white people have also been failed by the system—facing job loss, inadequate housing and cutbacks in core services. Instead of addressing real fears and insecurity, racist elites actively target working class white people into blaming people of color for the problems their families and vulnerable communities face.”37
In this age of rising racial tensions and economic anxiety, making space for these intragroup conversations among White people is very useful.
I am sometimes asked why such groups need to be made up of Whites only. To many Whites it seems inconceivable that there would be any value in participating in all-White discussions of racism. While of course there is value in cross-racial dialogue, all-White support groups serve a unique function. Particularly when Whites are trying to work through their feelings of guilt and shame, separate groups give White people the “space to speak with honesty and candor rarely possible in racially-mixed groups.”38 Even when Whites feel comfortable sharing these feelings with people of color, frankly, people of color don’t necessarily want to hear about it. The following comment, written by a Black woman in my class, illustrates this dilemma:
Many times in class I feel uncomfortable when White students use the term Black because even if they aren’t aware of it they say it with all or at least a lot of the negative connotations they’ve been taught goes along with Black. Sometimes it just causes a stinging feeling inside of me. Sometimes I get real tired of hearing White people talk about the conditions of Black people. I think it’s an important thing for them to talk about, but still I don’t always like being around when they do it. I also get tired of hearing them talk about how hard it is for them, though I understand it, and most times I am very willing to listen and be open, but sometimes I can’t. Right now I can’t.
Though a White person may need to describe the racist things a parent or spouse has said or done, to tell the story to a person of color may reopen that person’s wounds. Listening to those stories and problem-solving about them is a job that White people can do for each other.
It is at this stage of redefining Whiteness, immersion/emersion, that the feelings of guilt and shame start to fade. Reflecting on her own White identity development, sociologist Becky Thompson chronicles this process: “[I understood] that I didn’t have to recreate the wheel in my own life. I began to actively seek writing by white women who have historically stood up against racism—Elly Bulkin, Lillian Smith, Sara Evans, Angelina Grimke, Ruth Frankenberg, Helen Joseph, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Tillie Olsen, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ruth Seid, Mab Segrest, and others.”
She also realized that she needed antiracist White people in her daily life with whom she could share stories and whom she could trust to give her honest feedback. Her experience in a White antiracism group helped her to stop feeling bad because she was White. She writes, “I started seeing ways to channel my energies without trying to leave a piece of my identity behind.”39
The last status, autonomy, represents the most developed of the racial identity frames. With this mind-set, a person has incorporated the newly defined view of Whiteness as part of a personal identity. The positive feelings associated with this redefinition energize the person’s efforts to confront racism and oppression in daily life. Clayton Alderfer, a White man with many years of personal and professional experience as an organizational psychologist, described the thinking that characterizes this stage. “We have a more complete awareness of ourselves and of others to the degree that we neither negate the uniqueness of each person, regardless of that person’s group memberships, nor deny the ever-present effects of group memberships for each individual.”40
While autonomy might be described as racial self-actualization, racial identity development never really ends. The person who has experienced the deeper understanding of autonomy is characteristically open to new information and new ways of thinking about racial and cultural variables.41 Yet Helms describes each of the six statuses as representing a pattern of thinking that predominates at particular points of development. Even when active antiracist thinking predominates, there may still be particular situations that trigger old modes of responding. It is in those moments that being part of a White support group can be especially helpful.
In her book Witnessing Whiteness, Shelly Tochluk adds to the thinking about this autonomy phase by proposing that rather than striving to “become an ally,” which suggests a completed process, it might be better to speak of “doing effective ally work,” which implies a continuing process of growth and learning.42 Tochluk is part of Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere—Los Angeles (AWARE-LA),43 a grassroots organization that is pushing the “ally” concept further, to what they call a “Radical White Identity.” She explains,
The exploration the Radical White Identity requires and the way it locates white people as meaningful stakeholders in efforts toward social justice offer a sense of hope and inspiration. Within this approach, our antiracism efforts are not in service of people of color, they are part of our own effort to shed the socialization that has led to us behaving in ways that support and maintain the oppression of others. In this way, our sense of ourselves as being fully human is realized when we work toward educational, economic, social, and environmental justice.…
Within this community are people who can help me see privilege and racism more clearly, motivate me to continue constructing a healthy and effective antiracism practice, and support me to keeping moving forward in times when I fail.44
Tochluk also notes that moving from an unconscious or guilty phase to becoming an effective ally is a “massive leap” that requires scaffolding, all the more reason why becoming part of a community of support is so helpful.
A major benefit of the racial identity development process described in this chapter is increased effectiveness in multiracial settings. The White person who has made a significant effort to work through his or her own racial identity process will have a deepened understanding of racism and an appreciation and respect for the identity struggles of people of color. When we see strong, mutually respectful relationships between people of color and Whites, we are usually looking at the tangible results of both people’s identity processes. If we want to promote positive cross-group relations, we need to help young White people engage in the kind of dialogue that precipitates this kind of identity development, just as we need to help youth of color achieve an empowered sense of group identity.
Though the process of examining their racial identity can be uncomfortable and even frightening for Whites, those who persist in the struggle are rewarded with an increasingly multiracial and multicultural existence. In our still quite segregated society, this “borderland” is unfamiliar to many Whites and may be hard to envision. Becky Thompson has experienced it, and she writes: “We need to talk about what living in this borderland feels like, how we get there, what sustains us, and how we benefit from it. For me, this place of existence is tremendously exciting, invigorating, and life-affirming.”45 Though it can also be “complicated and lonely,” it is also liberating, opening doors to new communities, creating possibilities for more authentic connections with people of color, and, in the process, strengthening the coalitions necessary for genuine social change.
* Portions of this chapter are taken from two previously published articles: Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Teaching White Students About Racism: The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope,” Teachers College Record 95, no. 4 (1994): 462–76; and Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom,” Harvard Educational Review 62, no. 1 (1992): 1–24.
SEVEN
White Identity, Affirmative Action, and Color-Blind Racial Ideology
“Affirmative action was nice. It had its time. Its time is over.”
THE WORDS ABOVE COME FROM A PARTICIPANT IN WHITENESS PROJECT, an interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as White understand and experie
nce their race.1 He was not the only project participant to express the sentiment that affirmative action should be a policy of the past. Are they right? In 1996, when I was working on the first edition of this book, I knew that one of the topics I would need to write about was affirmative action. My students always wanted to talk about it. Even White students who supported the concept of expanding opportunity for historically disadvantaged groups worried that it would limit their opportunities, that they might become victims of what some called “reverse discrimination.” Many did not have a clear understanding of what affirmative action actually was, what was allowed by law, what was not. And so I included a brief overview in this chapter. Twenty years later, that overview is still needed, but the conversation about affirmative action has changed.
What is different today is the widespread belief among Whites (and some people of color) that racial discrimination has declined in the post–civil rights era and affirmative action programs are no longer needed. For some, the election of President Barack Obama (not once but twice), the phenomenal success of Black celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, and the increased visibility of Black executives in corporate America are all evidence that the doors of opportunity are now wide open for those with talent and tenacity. We are now, they argue, well on our way to becoming a truly egalitarian society.
Findings from the 2015 American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) seem to reflect that thinking.2 On the one hand, a majority of survey participants agree that Blacks (61 percent) and Hispanics (56 percent) face a lot of discrimination in the United States. On the other hand, they think enough has been done to address it. More than half (59 percent) of White Americans believe that the United States has made the changes necessary to give Blacks equal rights with Whites. Combining several questionnaire items together to form a “Racial Inequity Index,” the PRRI researchers found that a majority (54 percent) of White Americans perceive low levels of racial inequality, “believing that racial minorities today have equal opportunities as whites” do. White working-class Americans, in particular, hold that point of view (61 percent), compared to less than half (45 percent) of White college-educated Americans. By comparison, 66 percent of Black Americans perceive high levels of inequality, “believing generally that systemic discrimination against blacks and other minorities impacts racial inequality today,” while 17 percent perceive moderate levels of inequality and another 17 percent perceive low levels of inequality. Hispanic Americans were more evenly divided in their outlook: 45 percent believe that there are still high levels of racial inequality, 22 percent hold attitudes in the moderate range, and 34 percent perceive low levels of inequality, as measured by the survey.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 23
