International Day to Eliminate Racism 2007

I want to write about being a white racist today.

I could write about how awful racism is, and the horrors it has inflicted in the world. We know this. We know how all the wars since WWII have been fought in developing countries where the people are black and brown. We know about slavery, the black holocaust. We know about the very evil INS, and how there has been talk in the US about actually building a physical wall to keep brown people out. We know about Japanese concentration camps in Canada and the US during WWII. We know about how the global economy is controlled by white folks and works against people of colour, so that people of colour are the poorest in the world. We know about environmental racism, the placing of nuclear waste and test sites and other toxic dumps in communities of colour, about food security, about pipelines in the Canadian north and Alaska that have ruined indigenous people’s food supplies and homes. We know about the internment camps for aboriginals in Australia and Canadian residential schools. We know how white society has done everything possible to try to destroy the cultures of people of colour.  We know how white men came here a couple hundred years ago and stole the land from indigenous people.

We know all this. We know it, and yet, it continues.

Maybe we don’t all know it. Maybe if more people knew it, it would stop. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

The fact is, oppressing people of colour works for those doing the oppressing. It has worked for a long, long time. It serves a capitalist system quite well to have a so clearly divided and identified underclass. It serves the global economy, and micro economies within countries, to keep a particular class of people, so easily identified that all you have to do is look at them, from being able to access every freedom, every opportunity, every right. It serves western capitalism to continue to colonize people of colour, to continue to keep people of colour poor and uneducated. Slavery hasn’t ended; colonization hasn’t ended: we just call it globalization now. Of course, racism and capitalism are two separate things, but they are interlocking. Don’t mistake me for saying that eliminating capitalism is the answer for ending racism.

But, that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about white racism, because I think it’s poorly understood by white people.

I’m white. For many years, I have been a self-identified anti-racist. Anti-racism was the first political movement I could really identify myself as believing in very strongly. And because I was a self-identified anti-racist, I thought that meant that I, myself, was not a racist.

Not so simple, it turns out. Because what I was identifying as “racism” was not enough. I was identifying racism as hateful acts against people because of their racial identity. Not enough. Then I moved to a philosophy that at least recognized racism as social oppression, part of social power relations, that removed the possibility of “reverse racism.” But still, not enough. And I began to accept that racism is pervasive, built into the very structures of society. And that nobody is exempt.

A few months ago now, a friend, Max, challenged me to think harder about racism in my own life, in my own mind, my own way of looking at the world. I did as he asked, and it changed me. I began to see how racism is so subtle it can be imperceptible in even someone like me, who believes in my deepest heart that people should not be valued differently because of their skin colour. I began to see how denying that I, too, am racist is unhelpful to anti-racism work. My own reaction to racism was such repulsion, I couldn’t identify the ways in which I, too, am racist - even as I believe in racial equality. The two were incoherent, incompatible. And yet, they were, side-by-side, present in me.

To be white is to be racist. To be white in a world where white is right, where white is might, is to be racist. It’s inescapable. It’s the MATRIX. It’s passed on through the generations like a family heirloom. It’s built into our education system, into our legal system, into our history, into our philosophy, into our governments - all of which benefit whites, were made by whites, recorded by whites, and as institutions, remain largely white. By the whites, for the whites. We have kept the power for ourselves, and we wield it with terrifying white-hot fury.

To be white is to be racist. Accepting this is the first step in racist recovery.

I don’t claim to be an expert, or to be enlightened, or to be finished my anti-racism work in myself. But I thought today was an appropriate day to discuss this.

Please, if you haven’t read Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” already, go and do it, in the name of all that is good.