We need to talk about whiteness. Whiteness isn’t something that many people, especially white people, think about a lot. For me, being brown is a huge part of my identity – I literally wrote a whole blog about it. However if a white person says that being white is a huge part of their identity we often conjure up images of EDL members holding up English flags - I panicked a lot when the football world cup was on and there was suddenly a rise in English flags being displayed in pub windows! We almost implicitly consider ‘white identity’ to be interchangeable with the old school notions around white supremacy.
Now, I would be very surprised if my blog name (and actual name) didn’t give this away, but I am not white and so I do not have any personal lived experiences of understanding white identity. To all my white friends reading this, I’d love to know how you have thought about your own whiteness and the role it plays in your identity, and perhaps how this has changed as you have embarked on your anti-racism journeys?
One of the reasons that many white people have not had to think about what it means to be white (or about race in general) is because, in the vast majority of western societies, whiteness is perceived to be the norm, and anything outside of whiteness is other – if you are not white you are considered to be a ‘minority’ in the UK, which is a term people are finding increasingly annoying as many of us non-white folk are not in the minority on a global level.
White people’s actions are rarely judged as being representative of the whole white population – when one white person commits an act of terror no one jumps to the conclusion that all white people must be terrorists. The same cannot be said for communities of colour.
Just like with all other races, there is a huge variance in people’s experiences as white folk. But there are a few things that are important to talk about when it comes to whiteness that lots of people may not have had to think about:
1. White supremacy
When we think about white supremacy, we tend to conjure up images of men in white cloaks and hoods, of people burning crosses or of people going around towns standing on a bus shouting ‘go home’ (ok that last one was just our former prime minster – nice one Theresa May).
But white supremacy is not just this idea of outright violence from white people towards people of colour, especially Black people. It is not just the open and explicit opinion that someone is better because they are white – which I like to think is a view that none of the white people I know hold.
White supremacy is something that all white people benefit from, as do all non-Black people of colour to a certain extent. This is because white supremacy is not just about actively thinking that white people are better or that white people are entitled to more rights than all those people who are not white.
White supremacy is any system that puts the value of white lives above those of non-white lives. It is a racial hierarchy that places whiteness at the top, so the closer you are to whiteness the more access you have to the privileges this affords.
After all the recent incidents that have happened in America by the police, and those that have happened closer to home (I was pretty shocked when I read about the criminal justice system in the UK and its disproportionate impact on people of colour), I don’t think any of us are going to deny that we live in a society that places more value on the lives of white people than others, especially more so than the values placed on the lives of Black people - hence the need for the Black Lives Matter movement.
When we see the way the media treats Black versus white victims of crimes and Black versus white perpetrators of crimes, we see this kind of white supremacy played out in real time. When we see that black women are 5x more likely to die in childbirth than white women, we see white supremacy in action. When we see systems where people of colour, especially Muslim people, have to change their names so they sound less ethnic in order to get jobs, or have to apply for significantly more jobs than their white counterparts, even if they are more skilled, that is white supremacy.
White supremacy is not just something on the fringes of our society that a few idiots engage in (including the president of a large north American country). White supremacy is what our country has been fundamentally built upon. You only have to look at how the slave trade and colonialism built our economy to see this.
So dismantling white supremacy is more than just telling off outright KKK members. It involves all of us, even those of us who are not white, taking an honest look at ourselves and seeing how we have benefitted from white supremacy and how we are complicit in perpetuating white supremacy.
2. White privilege
The next thing we need to talk about is white privilege. White privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all people of colour – it is completely obvious this is not the case. I am a cisgender, able-bodied, middle class brown woman so of course I have more privilege than, say, a trans, disabled, socioeconomically disadvantaged white person – no one is trying to deny that when they talk about white privilege.
The concept of white privilege is that white people do not face disadvantages PURELY DUE TO THE COLOUR OF THEIR SKIN. That is it.
People often feel defensive when it comes to talking about privilege because it makes them realise they may have had an unfair advantage compared to others, and no one wants to think that - especially when those in privileged positions (shout out to any wealthy, able bodied, cishet white men reading this) have been conditioned by our society to think they are intrinsically better than others, and that their natural superiority is the reason behind them winding up in all the leadership roles in the country.
Acknowledging any sort of privilege, not just white privilege, is uncomfortable; it means that you have benefitted from systems that are unfair and you may not have had the same benefits if we lived in a fair system. But sometimes the uncomfortable things in life are the things we need to address the most.
3. White fragility
Now this is the one that I struggle with the most – it’s an area I’m often on the receiving end for, particularly from white women. White fragility can take many forms.
It can take the form of white people centring themselves in conversations about race. It can take the form of people of colour having to dilute their language, or play down the reality of their experiences, to protect white people or so as to not overwhelm them.
White fragility means we have to say things like ‘I take your thoughts on board’ or ‘thank you for sharing and taking part in this conversation’ when we really we want to say ‘why not educate yourself before trying to tell me what my lived experiences are!!’.
White fragility often involves tears from white people, especially white women, as though you are the one in the wrong for upsetting them in bringing up the fact that they have said something racist, or even just that racism exists on a systemic level and they benefit from it. White fragility is white people making you assuage their guilt around their complicity in upholding systemic racism.
Dealing with white fragility is exhausting. I would love to wave a magic wand and miraculously end up in a world where I never have to pander to white fragility anymore. But unfortunately something we people of colour are all too aware of is the fact that we need white people ‘on our side’, we need them to listen to us and to ‘be on board’ with the fact that systemic racism exists. So sadly we cant afford to tell them where to go when they come to us with their white fragility.
To all my white friends, here is a call to be aware of white fragility and call it out when you see it.
4. White saviourism
How many adverts or social media posts have you seen that involve wealthy white people going to India or countries in Africa for a couple of weeks, taking pictures with some brown or Black babies and commenting about how hard things were there, how backwards these places are and how inspired they were by the tenacity of these poor folk?
How many movies have you seen where there’s some poor brown or Black person, often a child, that needs to be saved by a white person because there’s no possible way that they could get anywhere without a white person helping them (say by making a fair system that doesn’t put people in these positions in the first place)? See ‘the Blind Side’, ‘the Help’, ‘Lion’ and many more for such examples.
White saviourism is the idea that brown and Black people need white people to come save them. It does not acknowledge the fact that a big reason for many of these countries being in early stages of economic development compared to the UK is because of how much British colonialism set these countries back and ruined their economies. Voluntourism, where people on their gap yahs (with no skills) go and volunteer somewhere abroad, is rooted in white saviourism.
White saviourism is extremely patronising and is fundamentally just another form of white supremacy in disguise.
So these are some of my thoughts around whiteness. Now as I said, I am not white (my skin is a fabulous shade of brown) and so I do not have the lived experiences to speak to the white identity. I would love to hear from any white people reading this about their thoughts on how they view their whiteness and whether any of the points in this blog resonated with them.