Race, Privilege, and Color-Blindness: A White Boy's Perspective

Responding to a previous post titled “Deconstructing Niggy: A Brief Exploration of Race and Hip Hop,” a friend asked me: “Why do you like to discuss race?  I’m curious about that more so than the race issues themselves—what’s your own background anyway?”

Here is my response.  Before you read it, you should know that i hereby acknowledge that a) i am white, b) i have been white my entire life, and c) i still carry a LOT of naivete around the subject of racism and oppression. That said, i think there are obviously a tremendous amount of cultural taboos that continue to cloud this subject, and i have always been a fan of trying to look at those spaces between us where most spend a lavish amount of time and energy trying not to see. I have largely grown up in the cultural vacuum of identity politics, in which you are not allowed to say anything about anyone else’s experience, culturally or personally, other than your own—and so i feel like i am sitting on the end of a particularly wobbly branch, completely unsure if the winds will knock me off.  But i guess this is an effort to cut through my own fear of personal expression, and probe a bit deeper into the sensitive wounds that continue to exist beneath our cultural scabs.

Why do i like to discuss race—that is a really difficult question to answer!  A quick response might be to say that i think part of it has to do with my relationship with music and trying to take a “trans-genre” approach to djing.  Music has long been a sort of window into other cultures, perspectives, and ways of being for me.  And as i see it, the “conscious dj” has an enormous amount of responsibility when it comes to not just playing music that sounds good and has a catchy beat, but having a very real, in-depth understanding of the artists and cultures s/he is representing.

Being a good dj is sort of like being a cultural archivist (for good examples, check out Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, among many others). DJ’s are usually looked to for their cultural expertise, as they are typically the ones who are most passionate about music and music culture, and therefore the most knowledgeable. They tend to represent some form of “lower-left quadrant” mastery, and are looked to for this expertise, in much the same way that listeners form kinships with certain music reviewers who are trusted for their meta-perspectives on cultural trends and innovations. In this sense, dj’s are rather like the “Mavens” described in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, acting as trusted cultural experts to help expose people to artists they would never have been exposed to by the mainstream industry-controlled channels—and in order to live up to that responsibility, he or she needs to be exposed to as many different subcultures as possible.  And once you start stepping into subcultures other than your own, you inevitably bump into the often tricky business of race and racism.

For example, i find it fascinating that, in hip hop culture, just about any race can find acceptance as a dj, but it is very very difficult to gain the same level of recognition and acceptance as an mc if you are not black. I think much of this has to do with economic advantage—turntables, mixers, and crates of records are expensive, and it’s no secret that black communities have historically remained on the shit end of the socio-economic stick.  (In fact, hip hop as an artform exploded throughout New York City following a massive two-day blackout in 1977, during which the looting of music stores by impoverished blacks brought new technology to poor neighborhoods and ghettos for the first time ever.)  Because technology is so expensive, yet everyone is born with a voice, it is much easier for the art of rapping to remain anchored in ethnocentric thinking—making it more difficult for non-black mc’s to be accepted by the hip hop community.

So there’s one example of my interest in race and racism, from an artistic perspective.

On a personal level, i guess it comes down to becoming increasingly aware of my own “white privilege”—which is why i find the question fascinating: “Have you had any experiences which forced you to deeply acknowledge, confront, or even simply feel your skin color?”  My guess is that, for most white Americans (at least those who have not traveled beyond the borders of the U.S.) the honest answer would be “never.”  Which is a bit of a luxury, you know what i mean?  Most minorities are made to feel the color of their skin on a daily basis, from subtle cultural biases to flagrant racial profiling.

This is why when people ask me why i moved from Boulder to Denver, i often half-jokingly respond “too many white people.”  Or, if i’m feeling a little more socially lubricated, “too many self-assured white people who think they are above racism, without ever having to interact with people who don’t look like them.” I can be an elitist asshole when i am socially lubricated.

I remember the first time i ever felt the color of my skin.  I was in 9th grade, and though i came from a pretty racist family, my mother and stepfather were very careful to keep me away from such toxic values.  As a result, i was raised to be “color-blind” to questions of race.  It was all very naive, as i was largely unconscious of the struggles minorites were experiencing every day.  I think there is a sort of expectancy for post-amber whites to become “color-blind” to racial differences—especially in the zeitgeist of postmodernism.  But i think that such “color-blindness” is a sort of covert racism—after all, the only people who can afford to be “color-blind” are the ones who never have to even think about the color of their skin.  The ones who aren’t forced to confront their own identity on a daily basis in the same way that minorities are.  “Color-blindness” is just another perk of white privilege, along with mortgages, small classroom sizes, and free access to the country club pool.

Then, the Rodney King trial went down.  Four white cops beat a black man within an inch of his life, with no reasonable threat made to them.  Although a bystander recorded the entire incident, the four white cops were found innocent, the entire city of Los Angeles exploded in mass riots, while many other parts of the country trembled in the aftermath. It was as though decades of repressed anger and rage had exploded through the whole nation, and people were finally given license to say something about it.

A few days after the riots began i was sent to the vice-principal’s office.  I was late to school that day. Clumsy and awkward, i walked across a row of seated students and accidentally stepped on some black kid’s foot. (Again, my identity politics made me hesitate to say “on some black kid’s foot,” because the phrase “some black kid” may sound condescending or lead the reader to believe that skin color is my primary way of relating to him as a human being, and that all my culturally-inherited fears and half-truths around the word “black” color my perception of “black people” in general—thereby making me only able to see their blackness, instead of their full humanness.  But as it turns out, his skin color is about the only thing i knew about him as a human being, other than the fact that he definitely had a foot, and that i had indeed stepped upon that foot. But i couldn’t very well describe him as “some footed kid’s foot;” that’s just redundant.)

Anyway, i accidentally stepped on his foot, and was promptly reminded that i was, in fact, a stupid motherfucker. As if i didn’t already know. I stammered a nervous apology and took my seat at the end of the row.

After detention at the end of the school day, i was walking alone down the sunlit hallway connecting the cafeteria to the classrooms when i saw the kid whose shoe i had earlier accidentally stepped on.  He was with about a half dozen of his friends, all human beings who happened to be black.  He pointed me out, and they all ran at me.

There was a very funny episode of the animated series Boondocks in which one of the characters said: “I’ve said it before, expensive sneakers are like $150 land mines. Step on one and BOOM! A perfectly rational black man can explode.” This whole thing kind of reminds me of that.  (I should mention that i edited out of the quote the part that referred to these shoe-related explosions as an example of “nigger moments,” because that is an identity politic i am particularly sensitive about as a white person, and personally think that is a cultural taboo that whites should continue to respect.  But i included it in this parenthetical because i am edgy like that.)

Next thing i knew, the dude i stepped on punched me in the jaw, and i dropped to the floor like a sack of meat, whereupon they all proceeded to kick the living shit out of me—in the ribs, in the back, and in the head.  Fortunately, just a minute or two into my beating, Taharka—another melanin-abundant guy and the only name i remember from the entire incident—pulled them all off me, and brought me to the nurse’s office.

It was horrifying.  I was just a bit bruised up, no real damage at all, but i was so shocked and confused—i was fourteen years old, i had never hurt anyone, i was just a shy and socially awkward white kid trying to keep his head down and avoid being noticed by anyone.  But on that day, i stood out—i was the enemy, and for a moment was offered a circus-mirror glimpse of how minorities must feel almost every day: singled out for no other reason than the color of my skin.

I cried when my dad came to the school to pick me up.  It was one of the most important days of my life.

***

I believe that the civil rights movement is not over, but is a struggle that must be fought every single day.  By everyone.  It’s not enough for blacks, or asians, or latinos, or any ethnic group to fight the battle alone, which i think has largely been the case since the late sixties/early seventies.  Meanwhile many young whites take the revolutions of the sixties for granted, as if it were our parent’s struggle, and not our own.  As a result, much of the progress from that era is taken completely for granted—and i have the sense that many whites believe that the major victories have already been won, and silently wonder why non-whites aren’t somehow “over it” by now, especially in Obama’s America.

But the civil rights movement is barely half a century old—a tiny sliver of human history—and though the seeds have already been planted and are even now taking root deep in our collective psyche, the fruit of a genuinely post-racial America will only be tasted by unborn generations.

Whites can no longer lean upon the accomplishments of our parents and grandparents as justification for no longer thinking critically about the subject.  In much the same way that a healthy feminism can only flourish alongside a healthy masculism, i believe that questions of race and racism must be as much of a struggle for whites as it is for anyone else.  If civil rights are to continue to flourish in the future, whites need to be just as invested in the discussion as anyone else.  And i just don’t see that happening within mainstream white culture.

And since the Integral movement is currently composed mostly of male white perspectives, it is very important to me personally to emphasize these sorts of civil responsibilities to everyone in the community—especially since Integral consciousness is vastly more capable of understanding and addressing the roots of racial injustice.

Many of us have learned to be accountable to our upper quadrants in relation to race and racism—cultivating certain sense of “Right Thoughts” and “Right Behaviors,” to use Buddhist terms.  But the lower-quadrants—the invisible bedrock of racial biases, socio-economic imbalances, and historical circumstance—has remained fairly untouched in recent decades, especially in white cultures.  Much of this, i believe, stems from the vigorously-enforced identity politics found in academia, which ironically prevents any real perspective-taking from occurring.  I could feel this sort of unseen tension as i was writing this piece—as i pointed out, even using the words “black man” feels like i am betraying the politically-correct superego i was indoctrinated with, as though it were inappropriate to ever use one’s racial heritage as a descriptive qualifier.  But it is exactly this sort of sterilized relationship with language that prevents any genuine conversations around race to move forward in a constructive and meaningful way.

That said, i do think identity politics has it’s place.  As i said, i think it is extremely inappropriate for whites to use the “n-word.”  It will likely take many generations before that radioactive word is able to cool down enough for whites to be able to use it casually and in good taste.  If black communities wish to transmute for themselves the tremendous pain and gravity that word continues to carry (as Saul Williams attempts to do with The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of Niggy Tardust) that is obviously acceptable and their own right to do so.  We can clearly argue that slavery in general is NOT a white vs. black issue, but a developmental issue of both values and technological capacity—but until some of the cultural scars around that word have begun to heal, it should be voluntarily relinquished from the vocabularies of those directly descending from people who have used it as a euphemism for the enslavement and dehumanization of an entire people.

That said, any of you can totally feel free to call me a cracka.  It’s open season for crackas everywhere.  Cracka with an “a” that is—don’t you dare try calling me a “cracker.”  That one is ours.

Related:

Deconstructing Niggy: A Brief Exploration of Race and Hip Hop
Race, Stereotyping, and Socially-Constructed Knowledge by Sean Yang (KenWilber.com)
Beyond Race and Racism with Mark Palmer and Ken Wilber (Integral Naked)