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The Basic Circle Guidelines pdf condenses the art of hosting a circle into a two-page, easy-to-understand document. We offer these basic guidelines to anyone who wishes to call people into council.

These guidelines are excerpted from the books Calling the Circle, the First and Future Culture by Christina Baldwin, and The Circle Way, by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea. Please honour the lineage of the circle and The Circle Way methodology as you use this gift by citing the origin and authorship of this document, and including a link back to this website: http://thecircleway.net.

Various Circle Way colleagues of other nationalities have translated the Basic Circle Guidelines into their native languages. We thank them for their efforts and their generosity.

The Basic Circle Guidelines are currently available in the following languages:

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The Basic Circle Guidelines pdf condenses the art of hosting a circle into a two-page, easy-to-understand document. We offer these basic guidelines to anyone who wishes to call people into council. These guidelines are excerpted from the books Calling the Circle, the First and Future Culture by Christina Baldwin, and The Circle Way, by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea.

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When Layla F. Saad began an Instagram challenge called #MeAndWhiteSupremacy, she never predicted it would spread so quickly.

Using a step-by-step reflection process, she encouraged people with white privilege to examine their racist thoughts and behaviors. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and more than ninety thousand people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Since then, the work has spread to families, book clubs, educational institutions, nonprofits, corporations, event spaces, and more.

Based on the original workbook, Me and White Supremacy leads readers through a journey of understanding their white privilege and participation in white supremacy, so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on Black, Indigenous and People of Color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. The book goes beyond the original workbook by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and includes expanded definitions, examples, and further resources.

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Using a step-by-step reflection process, she encouraged people with white privilege to examine their racist thoughts and behaviors. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and more than ninety thousand people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook. Since then, the work has spread to families, book clubs, educational institutions, nonprofits, corporations, event spaces, and more.

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If one seeks to understand Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) history, one must consider the history of Haudenosaunee land. For countless generations prior to European contact, land and territory informed Haudenosaunee thought and philosophy, and was a primary determinant of Haudenosaunee identity.

In The Clay We Are Made Of, Susan M. Hill presents a revolutionary retelling of the history of the Grand River Haudenosaunee from their Creation Story, through European contact, to contemporary land claims negotiations. She incorporates Indigenous theory, Fourth world post-colonialism, and Amerindian autohistory, along with Haudenosaunee languages, oral records, and wampum strings to provide a comprehensive account of the Haudenosaunee relationship
to their land.

Hill outlines the basic principles and historical knowledge contained within four key epics passed down through Haudenosaunee history. She highlights the political role of women in land negotiations and dispels their misrepresentation in the scholarly canon. She guides the reader through treaty relationships with Dutch, French, and British settler nations-including the Kaswentha/ Two-Row Wampum (the precursor to all future Haudenosaunee-European treaties), the Covenant Chain, the Nanfan Treaty, and the Haldimand Proclamation-and details outstanding land claims. Hill's study concludes with a discussion of the current problematic relationship between the Grand River Haudenosaunee and the Canadian government, and reflects on the meaning and possibility of reconciliation.

Awards

SHORTLISTED, The François-Xavier Garneau Medal, Canadian Historical Association (CHA) (2020)

WINNER, Best First Book, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) (2018)

NOMINEE, The Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, Canadian Historical Association (CHA) (2018)

WINNER, Aboriginal History Group Book Prize, CHA (2018)

WINNER, Ontario Clio Prize, CHA (2018)

Reviews

" The Clay We Are Made Of is an impressive book. Hill situates herself as a community-based scholar and yet manifests the ability, as Lakota historian Philip Deloria has recommended, 'to look the Euro-American archive full in the face.' Informed by close readings of Haudenosaunee tradition and untapped archival sources, this book maps out the story of the Grand River's people in a fresh and compelling narrative that overturns many previously held assumptions about the extent of Haudenosaunee agency vis-à-vis the Canadian settler state."

"Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of is an innovative and complex history of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) Confederacy and its relationship to the land it continues to call home on both sides of the Canadian-American border. Grounded in the key epics at the roots of Haudenosaunee history, Hill weaves a retelling of their story from its origins, through European contact, to present-day land claims disputes by deftly employing a wide array of Indigenous and settler sources and approaches. Hill's clear and compelling narrative tells a story not just of dispossession but also of community resilience. As such, Hill's study has resonance not only for the current climate of reconciliation, but it will be a model for community-based Indigenous histories for years to come."

"Susan Hill's prize-winning book The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River offers a comprehensive history of land and governance that is rare in its framing, its focus, and its execution, rendering it one of the most important studies to emerge on Haudenosaunee history to date."

"With The Clay We Are Made Of, Susan Hill offers a path-breaking re-interpetation of the history of the Haudenosaunee. Hill's work speaks to a wide-range of scholars in history as well as to scholars in Indigenous Studies. Hill's contribution is significant because it models how historians can engage with Indigenous ontologies and thereby reorient their interpretive tools and Indigenize their practice. She draws upon diverse sources that go well beyond the colonial record to include oral records, Creation stories, wampum strings, and linguistic analysis. She firmly grounds the history of the Haudenosaunee within the context of overlapping relationships: relationships with the earth and relationships with the ancestors. By doing so, she decenters and reinterprets the relationship that has more commonly dominated the field of Indigenous history, that between Indigenous peoples and Europeans. By situating her chronological history of Haudenosaunee interactions with Dutch, French, and British colonizers within a Haudenosaunee relational worldview, Hill irrevocably changes how historians interpret written colonial records. Moreover, she extends her work to connect past and present-showing how the past endures in the present-and thus underscores the contemporary import of the work in which historians engage."

" The Clay We Are Made Of incorporates Indigenous knowledge, oral records, wampum belt teachings, and historical research to tell the historical and contemporary story of the Grand River Haudenosaunee. This multi-layered approach to research represents the level of relationship building and community engagement that all historians approaching Indigenous history should strive toward."

"A crucial intervention in the study of Indigenous land claims. It is at once a comprehensive account of the history of Haudenosaunee land tenure leading up to present-day Six Nations territory, and a rumination on Haudenosaunee relationships with the land based on traditional Indigenous Knowledge."

"The book is a re-examination of the historiography and the archives in light of Haudenosaunee epistemology. Hill has chosen land as her reference point for analysis, and the book maintains consistent focus on a broad range of land-based issues including treaties, war and dispossession, Haudenosaunee environmental ethics, gender and the land, property and race, relationships between humans other creatures, and colonial land governance. The Clay We Are Made Of is accessibly written and ideal for helping students understand the ways in which colonialism and Indigenous dispossession, and legitimate claims to land restitution, must be a starting point for many of the stories we tell about our pasts."

"Hill succeeds in presenting a decolonized representation of the Haudenosaunee past in order to guide future generations.

"The author quite effectively describes Haudenosaunee beliefs and how they fit into their history of land tenure in southern Ontario. She details the history of Six Nations land loss, pointing out that today the Six Nations people at Ohsweken have 55,000 acres, 5% of the land promised by the British to their allied Haudenosaunee allies in 1784. Yet, instead of just recounting Haudenosaunee land loss and treating them as mere victims, she quite effectively uses her facility in the Mohawk and Cayuga languages and her insider's position as a Mohawk scholar to tell both sides of the story."

About the Author

Susan M. Hill is a Haudenosaunee citizen (Wolf Clan, Mohawk Nation) and resident of Ohswe:ken (Grand River Territory). She is the Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies and an Associate Professor in Indigenous Studies and History at the University of Toronto.

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If one seeks to understand Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) history, one must consider the history of Haudenosaunee land. For countless generations prior to European contact, land and territory informed Haudenosaunee thought and philosophy, and was a primary determinant of Haudenosaunee identity. In The Clay We Are Made Of, Susan M.

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Chelsea Vowel's Blog

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Non-Fiction
Delgamuukw. Sixties Scoop. Bill C-31. Blood quantum. Appropriation. Two-Spirit. Tsilhqot'in. Status. TRC. RCAP. FNPOA. Pass and permit. Numbered Treaties. Terra nullius. The Great Peace...

Are you familiar with the terms listed above? In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel, legal scholar, teacher, and intellectual, opens an important dialogue about these (and more) concepts and the wider social beliefs associated with the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. In 31 essays, she answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community.

Winner: Manitoba Book Awards, Manuela Dias Book Design and Illustration Award

Finalist: Manitoba Book Awards, Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher; Québec Writers' Federation, Concordia University First Book Prize; Québec Writers' Federation, Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

This Place: 150 Years Retold (May 1, 2019)

Explore the last 150 years through the eyes of Indigenous creators in this graphic novel anthology.

In Chelsea's chapter "kitaskînaw 2050", readers follow wâpanacâhkos, a young Métis girl who is sent from a decolonized future back to the 21st century.

Writers: Richard Van Camp, Chelsea Vowel, David Alexander Robertson, Jennifer Storm, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Brandon Mitchell, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Katherena Vermette, and Sonny Assu

Artists: Tara Audibert, Kyle Charles, Natasha Donovan, GMB Chomichuk, Scott B. Henderson, and Andrew Lodwick

Colour Artists: Scott A. Ford and Donovan Yaciuk

Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Nov. 15, 2018)

Refuse: CanLit in Ruins provides a critical and historical context to help readers understand conversations happening about CanLit presently. One of its goals is to foreground the perspectives of those who have been changing the conversation about what CanLit is and what it could be. Topics such as literary celebrity, white power, appropriation, class, rape culture, and the ongoing impact of settler colonialism are addressed by a diverse gathering of writers from across Canada. This volume works to avoid a single metanarrative response to these issues, but rather brings together a cacophonous and ruinous multitude of voices.

Chelsea has a poem in this collection titled, "No Appeal", the title of which can be read in multiple ways: a direct response to the decision not to appeal the Gerald Stanley verdict in the killing of Colton Boushie, and also as an Indigenous perspective of CanLit as an extractive and tokenizing industry.

Contributions by: Zoe Todd, Keith Maillard, Jane Eaton Hamilton, kim goldberg, Tanis MacDonald, Gwen Benaway, Lucia Lorenzi, Alicia Elliott, Sonnet l'Abbé, Marie Carrière, Kai Cheng Thom, Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Natalee Caple & Nikki Reimer, Lorraine York, Chelsea Vowel, Laura Moss, Phoebe Wang, A.H. Reaume, Jennifer Andrews, Kristen Darch & Fazeela Jiwa, Erika Thorkelson and Joshua Whitehead.

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Non-Fiction Delgamuukw. Sixties Scoop. Bill C-31. Blood quantum. Appropriation. Two-Spirit. Tsilhqot'in. Status. TRC. RCAP. FNPOA. Pass and permit. Numbered Treaties. Terra nullius. The Great Peace... Are you familiar with the terms listed above? In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel, legal scholar, teacher, and intellectual, opens an important dialogue about these (and more) concepts and the wider social beliefs associated with the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada.

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Names for Indigenous Peoples
Any discussion needs a certain number of terms that can be understood by all participants; otherwise, communication ends up even messier than usual. I've read a lot of books about Indigenous peoples, and it seems every single one spends some time explaining which term the author will use in the rest of the text, and why he or she chose that particular term. I've tried avoiding that sort of thing when talking to people, but it absolutely always comes up.

I find it somewhat easier to start with a list of what you should definitely not be calling us - a little housecleaning of the mind, if you will. Surprisingly, there are a great number of people who still think the use of some of these terms is up for debate, but I would sincerely like to help you avoid unintentionally putting your foot in your mouth. So, between us, let's just agree the following words are never okay to call Indigenous peoples:

This is not an exhaustive list, and there are plenty of other slurs we do not need to mention that are obviously unacceptable. I do not intend to spend any time discussing how the above terms might not be offensive, because engaging in a philosophical sidebar about whether words have inherent meaning tends to end in recitals of Jabberwocky; before you know it, you've wasted half the night trying to translate it into Cree, yet again. Or, so I've heard.

A lot of people who would like to talk about Indigenous issues honestly do not want to cause offence, and get very stressed out about the proper terms; so, it is in the interest of lowering those people's blood pressure that I'm now going to discuss various terms in use out there.

First, there is no across-the-board agreement on a term. The fact that all Indigenous peoples have not settled on one term really seems to bother some people. I would like those people to take a deep breath, and chill out. It's okay. Names are linked to identity, and notions of identity are fluid.

For example, did you have a cute nickname when you were a young child? I did. My parents called me "Goose Girl. " Twenty-five or so years later, if my employer called me "Goose Girl," it would be awkward at best. There are terms of endearment that my friends and family call me that would sound very strange coming out of the mouth of someone I just met.

When meeting new people, we tend to err on the side of formality to avoid giving a poor first impression. So it is with identifiers for Indigenous peoples. Terms change; they evolve. What was a good term 20 years ago might be inappropriate now, or it has been worn out through constant repetition - like every hit song you used to love but can no longer stand to listen to. There is also an issue of terms becoming co-opted and changed by government, industry, or by pundits searching for new ways to take potshots at us. Sometimes, a term is abandoned because it has become so loaded that using it suggests tacit agreement to some bizarre external interpretation of who Indigenous peoples are.

Indigenous peoples are incredibly diverse; there are all sorts of internal arguments about which terms are best, what they actually mean, why people should reject this and that, and so on. What I'm okay with you calling me might really annoy someone else. If you were hoping this chapter was going to help you avoid that completely, I want to be upfront with the fact that you will leave disappointed. Be aware: no matter how safe you think a term is, someone somewhere might get upset if you call them that. No one can give you a magical pass so you never have to re-examine the terms you are using - not even your Native friend.

Be prepared to listen to what people have to say about the term you use, and to respect what they suggest you call them instead. This is surprisingly easy to do, and goes a very long way in keeping the dialogue useful. I mean, it would be a bit off to deliberately keep calling someone "Susie" when she's asked you to call her "Susan," right?

Here are some of the names in use:

Indian

NDN

Aboriginal

Indigenous

Native

First Nations

Inuit

Métis

Native American (more in the United States than in Canada)

the name of a particular nation (Cree, Ojibway, Chipewyan, and so on)

the name of a particular nation in that nation's original language (nêhiyaw, Anishinaabe, Dene sųłiné, and so on)

Notice that I always capitalize the various terms used to describe Indigenous peoples. This is deliberate; the terms are proper nouns and adjectives referring to specific groups. "To capitalize or not to capitalize" ends up being a heated debate at times, but I feel it is a measure of respect to always capitalize our names when writing in English. This is my rule of thumb: if I can swap out "Indigenous" with "Canadian" (which is always capitalized), then I use the big I. I also capitalize names for non-Indigenous peoples throughout this book.

The term Indian is probably the most contentious. There are a couple of theories about where the term originated, but that's not the point. In Canada, Indian continues to have legal connotations, and there is still an Indian Act; so you'll see it used officially, as well as colloquially. There is also a long history of this term being used pejoratively - two good reasons why it doesn't sit well with everyone.

However, it is also a term that is often used internally. Please note this does not mean it's always okay for others to use the term. I tend to suggest that avoiding this term is probably for the best, unless someone is specifically referencing the Indian Act. There is a level of sarcasm and challenge often associated with its internal use that is easy to miss, and most likely cannot be replicated. If you are interested in avoiding giving offence, this term is one you might want to drop from your vocabulary.

NDN is a term of more recent origin, in heavy use via social media. This shorthand term has no official meaning and is very informal. If you say it aloud it just sounds like Indian, so its use really only makes sense in text-based situations. NDN is more of a self-identifier than anything.

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Names for Indigenous Peoples Any discussion needs a certain number of terms that can be understood by all participants; otherwise, communication ends up even messier than usual. I've read a lot of books about Indigenous peoples, and it seems every single one spends some time explaining which term the author will use in the rest of the text, and why he or she chose that particular term.

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Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Winner of the 2015 PEN Open Book Award
Winner of the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry

Claudia Rankine's bold recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Reviews
"[Citizen] is an especially vital book for this moment in time. . . . The realization at the end of this book sits heavily upon the heart: 'This is how you are a citizen, ' Rankine writes. 'Come on. Let it go. Move on.' As Rankine's brilliant, disabusing work, always aware of its ironies, reminds us, 'moving on' is not synonymous with 'leaving behind.'" -The New Yorker

"Citizen is audacious in form. But what is perhaps especially striking about the book is that it has achieved something that eludes much modern poetry: urgency." -The New York Times

"So groundbreaking is Rankine's work that it's almost impossible to describe; suffice it to say that this is a poem that reads like an essay (or the other way around) - a piece of writing that invents a new form for itself, incorporating pictures, slogans, social commentary and the most piercing and affecting revelations to evoke the intersection of inner and outer life." -Los Angeles Times

"Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry's forms to disarm readers and circumvent our carefully constructed defense mechanisms against the hint of possibly being racist ourselves. . . . Citizen throws a Molotov cocktail at the notion that reduction of injustice is the same as freedom." -The New York Times Book Review

"Moving, stunning, and formally innovative-in short, a masterwork." -Salon

"Part protest lyric, part art book, Citizen is a dazzling expression of the painful double consciousness of black life in America." -The Washington Post

"The book of the year is Claudia Rankine's Citizen. It would have been the book of any year.... Citizen asks us to change the way we look; we have to believe that that might lead to changing the way we live." -The New Yorker's Page-Turner

"[Citizen] is one of the best books I've ever wanted not to read. . . . Its genius . . . resides in that capacity to make so many different versions of American life proper to itself, to instruct us in the depth and variety of our participation in a narrative of race that we recount and reinstate, even when we speak as though it weren't there." -Slate

"Marrying prose, poetry, and the visual image, Citizen investigates the ways in which racism pervades daily American social and cultural life, rendering certain of its citizens politically invisible. Rankine's formally inventive book challenges our notion that citizenship is only a legal designation that the state determines by expanding that definition to include a larger understanding of civic belonging and identity, built out of cross-racial empathy, communal responsibility, and a deeply shared commitment to equality." -National Book Award Judges' Citation

"Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap. . . . This work is careful, loving, restorative witness is itself an act of resistance, a proof of endurance." -Bookforum

"Accounts of racially charged interactions, insidious and flagrant, transpiring in private and in the public eye, distill the immediate emotional intensity of individual experience with tremendous precision while allowing ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and exhaustion to remain in all their fraught complexity. . . . Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A prism of personal perspectives illuminates [Rankine's] meditations on race. . . . Powerful." -Kirkus Reviews

"Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Its various realities-'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life-are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it." -Hilton Als

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Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry Finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism Winner of the 2015 PEN Open Book Award Winner of the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry Claudia Rankine's bold recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media.

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As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces-the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth-where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

"In this genre-defying work, [Claudia Rankine], as she did so effectively in Citizen, combines poetry, essay, visuals, scholarship, analysis, invective, and argument into a passionate and persuasive case about many of the complex mechanics of race in this country. . . . Rankine writes with disarming intimacy and searing honesty. . . . A work that should move, challenge, and transform every reader who encounters it." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"This brilliant and multi-layered work by Claudia Rankine is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness. . . . A rare honesty toward a potential affirmation. Anyone who turns away from this bold and vital invitation to get to work would be a damn fool." -Judith Butler

"In my work, well-meaning white people consistently ask me how to recognize racism. Yet we might ask, 'How have we managed not to know?' The information is everywhere, if we care to listen. Indeed, here is illuminating testimony that is both poetic and well beyond the abstract. With clarity and grace, Claudia Rankine delivers a gut punch to white denial. Just Us is stunning work-audacious, revelatory, devastating." -Robin DiAngelo

"With Just Us, Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. Written with humility and humor, criticism and compassion, Just Us asks difficult questions and begins necessary conversations." -Viet Thanh Nguyen

"Fiercely intimate, rigorous. . . . [Just Us] lets all of us in on the conversations-with others and the self-that are necessary for survival, which, attested by this all-too-human account, is rooted in the vigilance that racially imagined people must maintain for their very being." -Nuar Alsadir

"In Just Us, Claudia Rankine continues her remarkable and brilliant interrogation of the language, culture, and history that have shaped America, forging through poems, essays, and documents a literary archive that is utterly original and desperately needed." -Dinaw Mengestu

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As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

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About

Jacqueline Francis, Ph.D., is the author of Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). With Mary Ann Calo, Francis is working on a new book about African-American artists' participation in federally funded art programs of the 1930s and their impact on the emergent, US art market of the 1940s. Recently, she has published articles on contemporary artists Olivia Mole, Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, and (with Tina Takemoto) David Hammons, and on the hot topic of Fair Use. Forthcoming are essays on Romare Bearden (The Museum of Modern Art), Mickalane Thomas ( Seattle Art Museum), and Kerry James Marshall ( Kunst und Politik, Jahrbuck der Guernica-Gesellschaft).

During the 2016-17 academic year, Francis was the Robert A. Corrigan Professor in Social Justice in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. In the spring of 2017, she delivered the Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard University and her talks will be published by Yale University Press. She has lectured at other universities, museums, and scholarly meetings, including those held at the National Gallery of Art, King's College London, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, Yale University, and the University of Okayama, Japan.

Francis presently serves on the Advisory Boards of Panorama: Art and Visual Culture of the United States, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, and San Francisco's Luggage Store Gallery. She is the Board President of the Queer Cultural Center (QCC), a multidisciplinary resource and advocacy site for LGBT artistic expression in San Francisco. She is former member of the College Art Association's Board of Directors (2009-14).

With Kathy Zarur, Francis co-curated the art exhibition Where Is Herefor the Museum of the African Diaspora (October 2016-May 2017). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective, Francis creates the occasional visual art object. She has exhibited work in group shows at Southern Exposure Gallery (2016) and the Katz-Snyder Gallery of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (2017); and she will be in the group show Outlook and the Birth of the Queer at the GLBT History Museum in October 2017. She is a recipient of a 2017-18 Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission and she is working on a collection of short stories.

BA, Dartmouth College; MA, University of Wisconsin; PhD, Emory University

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Jacqueline Francis - Visual & Critical Studies at CCA

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Jacqueline Francis, Ph.D., is the author of Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). With Mary Ann Calo, Francis is working on a new book about African-American artists' participation in federally funded art programs of the 1930s and their impact on the emergent, US art market of the 1940s.

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The following is adapted from the foreword to The Racial Imaginary, a collection of essays edited by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, available from Fence Books.

Here are a few of the tropes you would likely encounter if you started looking at writers writing about race these days. One: I met an other and it was hard! That is lightly said, but that is the essence of the trope: the anxious, entangling encounters with others that happen before anyone even makes it to the page, and that appear there primarily as an occasion for the writer to encounter her own feelings. Another: I needed to travel to "meet" race, I went to Africa or to Asia or to the American South or to Central America to look at race, as if it now mainly can be found in a sort of wildlife preserve separate from ordinary, everyday experience. Another: race is racism. And lastly: the enduring American thing of seeing race as a white and black affair, the scene where the real race stuff goes down. Which is accompanied by the trope of the discount: the one that fails to extend to other people of color an authentic fullness of experience, a myopia that renders them in the terms of the "not really."

The matter of craft comes up clearly when we encounter the various tropes that white writers take recourse to repeatedly when race is on the table. These tropes are typically heartfelt; but their repetition should be taken as a sign. Here's one: "The imagination is a free space, and I have the right to imagine from the point of view of anyone I want-it is against the nature of art itself to place limits on who or what I can imagine." This language of rights is as extraordinary as it is popular, and it is striking to see how many white writers in particular conceive of race and the creative imagination as the question of whether they feel they are permitted to write a character, or a voice, or a persona, "of color." This is a decoy whose lusciousness is evident in the frequency with which it is chased. The decoy itself points to the whiteness of whiteness-that to write race would be to write "color," to write an other.

But to argue that the imagination is or can be somehow free of race-that it's the one region of self or experience that is free of race-and that I have a right to imagine whoever I want, and that it damages and deforms my art to set limits on my imagination-acts as if the imagination is not part of me, is not created by the same web and matrix of history and culture that made "me." So to say, as a white writer, that I have a right to write about whoever I want, including writing from the point of view of characters of color-that I have a right of access and that my creativity and artistry is harmed if I am told I cannot do so-is to make a mistake. It is to begin the conversation in the wrong place. It is the wrong place because, for one, it mistakes critical response for prohibition (we've all heard the inflationary rhetoric of scandalized whiteness). But it is also a mistake because our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds. To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial-a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.

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It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn't and shouldn't enter, a space for bodies to transcend the legislative, the economic-transcend the stuff that doesn't lend itself much poetry. In this view the imagination is postracial, a posthistorical and postpolitical utopia. Some writers of color, in the tradition of previous writers like Countee Cullen (a sly and complicated tradition, we acknowledge), don't want to have race dirtying up the primacy of the imaginative work; want the merits of the work made free by more neutral standards. To bring up race for these writers is to inch close to the anxious space of affirmative action, the scarring qualifieds.

So everyone is here.

Transcendence is unevenly distributed and experienced, however. White writers often begin from a place where transcendence is a given-one already has access to all, one already is permitted to inhabit all, to address all. The crisis comes when one's access is questioned. For writers of color, transcendence can feel like a distant and elusive thing, because writers of color often begin from the place of being addressed, and accessed. To be a person of color in a racist culture is to be always addressable, and to be addressable means one is always within stigma's reach. So one's imagination is influenced by the recognition of the need to account for this situation-even in the imagination, one feels accountable, one feels one must counter. So a writer of color may be fueled by the desire to exit that place of addressability. At the same time one may wish to write of race. And again at the same time one may wish to do any or all of these things inside a set of literary institutions that expect and even reward certain predictable performances of race. There can be a comfort, a place to hole up, a place to rest, found in that performance-that is, if that performance conforms. But even if it conforms, the performance returns the writer of color to an addressability that at any moment may become violent rather than safe-may become violent if the performance steps outside or beyond those comforting conformities, or even if the performance stays within them. Because the "favor" of largely white-run literary institutions is founded on an original, if obscured, amassment of racial power: they can always remind you you're a guest.

What we seek to detect in these examples above is the presence of a more general situation, the scene of race taking up residence in the creative act. This is what we mean by a racial imaginary, an unlyrical term, but then its lack of music is fitting. One way to know you're in the presence of-in possession of, possessed by-a racial imaginary is to see if the boundaries of one's imaginative sympathy line up, again and again, with the lines drawn by power. If the imaginative sympathy of a white writer, for example, shuts off at the edge of whiteness. This is not to say that the only solution would be to extend the imagination into other identities, that the white writer to be antiracist must write from the point of view of characters of color. It's to say that a white writer's work could also think about, expose, that racial dynamic. That what white artists might do is not imaginatively inhabit the other because that is their right as artists, but instead embody and examine the interior landscape that wishes to speak of rights, that wishes to move freely and unbounded across time, space, and lines of power, that wishes to inhabit whomever it chooses.

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It should also conversely not be assumed that it is "easy" or "natural" to write scenarios or characters whose race matches (whatever that might mean) one's own. This is the trap that writers of color in particular still must negotiate; it's the place where "write what you know" becomes plantational in effect.

We acknowledge that every act of imaginative sympathy inevitably has limits. Perhaps the way to expand those limits is not to "enter" a racial other but instead to inhabit, as intensely as possible, the moment in which the imagination's sympathy encounters its limit. Or: to realize one might also make strange what seems obvious, nearby, close.

Are we saying Asian writers can't write Latino characters? That white writers can't write black characters? That no one can write from a different racial other's point of view? We're saying we'd like to change the terms of that conversation, to think about creativity and the imagination without employing the language of rights and the sometimes concealing terms of craft. To ask some first-principle questions instead. So, not: can I write from another's point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how. What is the charisma of what I feel estranged from, and why might I wish to enter and inhabit it. To speak not in terms of prohibition and rights, but desire. To ask what we think we know, and how we might undermine our own sense of authority. To not simply assume that the most private, interior, emotional spaces of existence-the spaces that are supposed to be the "proper" material of the lyric and the fictive-are most available for lyric and fictive rendering because they are somehow beyond race. To not assume that the presence of race deforms the creative act, renders the creative act sadly earthbound. We are ourselves earthbound. And race is one of the things that binds us there.

Crucial in what we're saying above is that we don't want to talk only of writing "across" racial divides. For we wish to also unsettle the assumption that it is easy or simple to write what one "is." Why might I assume it is easy to write what is nearest to me? How do I know what that is-and what do I miss when I keep familiar things familiar? It should be difficult to write what one "knows"-and if it is too easy, it is worth asking if that is because one is reproducing conventions and assumptions rewarded by the marketplaces of literature. And here again the racial preferences-the particular plots, the particular characters, the particular scenarios and personae-favored by literary institutions put special pressure on writers of color, threaten to deform what such a writer is assumed to know and expected to produce.

Race enters writing, the making of art, as a structure of feeling, as something that structures feelings, that lays down tracks of affection and repulsion, rage and hurt, desire and ache. These tracks don't only occur in the making of art; they also occur (sometimes viciously, sometimes hazily) in the reception of creative work. Here we are again: we've made this thing and we've sent it out into the world for recognition-and because what we've made is in essence a field of human experience created for other humans, the field and its maker and its readers are thus subject all over again to race and its infiltrations. In that moment arise all sorts of possible hearings and mis-hearings, all kinds of address and redress.

For example: In that moment, writers and readers of color may feel profound and mutual anxieties that all people of color are about to be locked in, locked down, by the representation at hand, no matter who wrote it. But especially if a white writer wrote it. This anxiety is fueled by the fact that racism, in its very dailyness, in its very variety of expression, isn't fixed. It's there, and then it's not, and then it's there again. One is always doing the math: Was it there? Was it not? What just happened? Did I hear what I thought I heard? Should I let it go? Am I making too much of it? Racism often does its ugly work by not manifesting itself clearly and indisputably, and by undermining one's own ability to feel certain of exactly what forces are in play. This happens in reading as it does everywhere else. In a sense, it doubles-down the force of race-you feel it, you feel the injury, the racist address, and then you question yourself for feeling it. You wonder if you've made your own prison.

Another example: white writers can get explosively angry when asked to recognize that their racial imaginings might not be perfect-when asked to recognize that their imagination is not entirely their own-and in particular when confronted with that fact by a person of color questioning something they wrote. And the target of that anger is usually the person of color who shared with them this fact. The white writer feels injured in this moment-misunderstood and wounded-and believes it is the reader, the person of color, who has dealt the injury. This is how the white mind tends to racial "wounds"-it makes a mistake about who or what has dealt the injury. For it is not the reader of color who deals the injury. It is whiteness itself.

To reconstruct the reader of color as the aggressor is one way that whiteness reasserts its power in its moment of crisis. It has been exposed-it must now perform weakness, helplessness, it must pretend to innocence, to harmless and undefended and shocked innocence, in order to "reveal" the reader of color as motivated by unsavory, irrational, aggressive, "political," or subjective tendencies that have lashed out at the innocent and harmed him (this is how "the race card" trope works to disqualify the reader bold enough to call up race where it might not be wanted: the trope enacts its dismissiveness by characterizing any mention of race as irresponsible, an injection of race "where it doesn't belong" when in fact it inheres whether it's called up or not). The white writer was taken by surprise by this attack-how could she have seen it coming? She meant well-surely this inoculates her against any charges. The attack was unfair. And so we must rally to the victim. And thus whiteness goes only briefly contested.

This repositioning appears to cleanse whiteness of its power, of its aggression-for who can't hear the aggression in "I have a right of access to whomever I wish?"-and says of whiteness instead "I have been unfairly characterized and misunderstood, I have been assassinated by someone whose motivations are political and who is thus disqualified from the human endeavor that is art making." Thus the wound is paraded for all to witness, and whiteness gathers to itself again its abiding centrality, its authority, its "rights." Its sanity.

What the white writer might realize instead, in this moment of crisis, is that she may well be an injured party-but the injury was dealt long before. The injury is her whiteness. By saying "injury" we do not mean to erase from view all the benefits and privileges that whiteness endows; we do not mean to invite an unwarranted sympathy. But we do think white people in America tend to suffer an anxiety (and many have written of this): they know that they are white but they must not know what they know. They know that they are white, but they cannot know that such a thing has social meaning; they know that they are white, but they must not know that their whiteness accrues power. They must not call it whiteness for to do so would be to acknowledge its force. They must instead feel themselves to be individuals upon whom nothing has acted. That's the injury, that their whiteness has veiled from them their own power to wound, has cut down their sympathy to a smaller size, has persuaded them that their imagination is uninflected, uninfiltrated. It has made them unknowing. Which is one reason why white people take recourse to innocence: I did not mean to do any harm. Or: I wanted to imagine you-isn't that good of me, haven't others said that was good for me to try? Or: If I cared about politics, I would write a manifesto-what I'm trying to do is make art. Or: I have a right to imagine whatever I want, and it traduces or dirties art to limit the imagination. Or: I don't see color. Or: we're all human beings.

Part of the mistake the white writer makes is that she confounds the invitation to witness her inevitable racial subjectivity with a stigmatizing charge of racism that must be rebutted at all costs. The white writer, in the moment of crisis, typically cannot tell the difference. What a white person could know instead is this: her whiteness limits her imagination-not her reader's after the fact. A deep awareness of this knowledge could indeed expand the limits-not transcend them, but expand them, make more room for the imagination. A good thing.

For one source of creativity lies in the fact that each individual is essentially strange. There is a deep strangeness, an alterity, in the individual human mind, a portion of ourselves that we never fully comprehend-and this is what writing taps, or is at least one of writing's sources, one of its engines. This might explain the enigma of writing for so many of us, that the writing so often seems to know more than we do, that we are 'behind' the writing ("behind it" in that we make it, but also "behind it" in the sense that we can't catch up with what it knows and reveals, that it is out ahead of us driven by energies in our possession but not entirely in our deliberate control). This essential strangeness, this unknowability, is a creative resource, perhaps the creative resource, the wellspring of art that shows us things we did not know but that are somehow inevitable and true-true to a reality or a knowledge we don't yet possess, yet find in the moment of encounter possible, something we accept the fundamental being of even if its nature shocks or startles or repulses or unsettles us (Barthelme's strange object covered in fur can only break your heart if you have accepted, in the instant of encounter, its essential being, even if you have not yet comprehended its strangeness, its otherness).

But while it might be mystifying how creative impulses and decisions emerge from somewhere within, that doesn't mean we must make a fetish of that mysteriousness. For that unknowable portion of the human mind is also a domain of culture-a place crossed up by culture and history, where the conditions into which we were born have had their effect. Part of what is unknowable within us, at least until we investigate it, is the structuring of our very feelings and thoughts by what preceded us and is not our "own," yet conditions our experience nonetheless. So the location of a writer's strangeness is also the seat of history. A writer's imagination is also the place where a racial imaginary-conceived before she came into being yet deeply lodged in her own mind-takes up its residence. And the disentangling and harnessing of these things is the writer's endless and unfinishable but not fruitless task. Another way of saying this: the writer's essential strangeness is her greatest resource, yet she must also be in skeptical tension with her own inclinations. Because those inclinations are in part an inheritance from a racial imaginary that both is and is not hers.

We want to acknowledge that we have fallen into one of the very traps we mentioned at the start-we are having a hard time talking about race separate from racism. Indeed, we're not sure if we can or find it believable to imagine otherwise, imagine a time when or a fashion in which race outruns its birth in racism and becomes some kind of neutral, unfanged category. And we want to acknowledge too: this is a nasty business. We should not pretend that our experiences of race are otherwise. As we write, as we read one another, the internal tumult is unavoidable. It might be soft or it might be loud, but it'll be made up of some admixture of shame, guilt, loathing, opportunism, anxiety, irritation, dismissal, self-hatred, pain, hope, affection, and other even less nameable energies. The particular chemistry may differ depending upon one's idiosyncratic mix of personal history and social location. For some it is nothing short of an assault, an assault no less painful because it is routine, an ordinary effect of negotiating a life in a world of people largely comfortable watching the assault go on, or at least willing to minimize its existence. It's messy, and it's going to stay messy. Because history is not an act of the imagination. Which is the condition from which we start.

What we want to avoid at all costs is something that feels nearly impossible to evade in daily speech: an opposition between writing that accounts for race (and here we could also speak of gender, sexuality, other enmeshments of the body in history) and writing that is "universal." If we continue to think of the "universal' as better-than, as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn't look universal because it accounts for race or some other demeaned category. The universal is a fantasy. But we are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defining the universal, still, as white. We are captive, still, to a style of championing literature that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it-that it "transcends" its category. To say this book by a writer of color is great because it transcends its particularity to say something "human" (and we've all read that review, maybe even written it ourselves) is to reveal the racist underpinning quite clearly: such a claim begins from the stance that people of color are not human, only achieve the human in certain circumstances. We don't wish to build camps. And we know there is no language that is not loaded. But we could try to say, for example, not that good writing is good because it achieves the universal, but perhaps instead that in the presence of good writing a reader is given something to know. Something is brought into being that might otherwise not be known, something is doubly witnessed.

What we mean by a racial imaginary is something we all recognize quite easily: the way our culture has imagined over and over again the narrative opportunities, the kinds of feelings and attributes and situations and subjects and plots and forms "available" both to characters of different races and their authors. The racial imaginary changes over time, in part because artists get into tension with it, challenge it, alter its availabilities. Sometimes it changes very rapidly, as in our own lifetimes. But it has yet to disappear. We cannot imagine it out of existence. Instead our imaginings might test their inheritances, to make way for a time when such inheritances no longer ensnare us. But we are creatures of this moment, not that one.

Selected art from The Racial Imaginary courtesy of Fence. Feature image: Chinoiserie, by Kyungmi Shin, 2003.

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The following is adapted from the foreword to The Racial Imaginary, a collection of essays edited by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, available from Fence Books. Here are a few of the tropes you would likely encounter if you started looking at writers writing about race these days.

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Claudia Rankine, I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.

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Claudia Rankine, I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.

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Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

Feature

My college class asks what it means to be white in America - but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

In the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. "What's redlining?" someone would ask. "George Washington freed his slaves?" someone else would inquire. But as I listened to Donald Trump's inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect the treatment of the undocumented with the treatment of Irish, Italian and Asian people over the centuries?

In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to "any alien, being a free white person," develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from "free white person"? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation at the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black people's freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921? How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?

I wanted my students to gain an awareness of a growing body of work by sociologists, theorists, historians and literary scholars in a field known as "whiteness studies," the cornerstones of which include Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness," Matthew Frye Jacobson's "Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race," Richard Dyer's "White" and more recently Nell Irvin Painter's "The History of White People." Roediger, a historian, had explained the development of the field, one that my class would engage with, saying, "The 1980s and early '90s saw the publication of major works on white identity's intricacies and costs by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, alongside new works by white writers and activists asking similar questions historically. Given the seeming novelty of such white writing and the urgency of understanding white support for Ronald Reagan, 'critical whiteness studies' gained media attention and a small foothold in universities." This area of study aimed to make visible a history of whiteness that through its association with "normalcy" and "universality" masked its omnipresent institutional power.

My class eventually became Constructions of Whiteness, and over the two years that I have taught it, many of my students (who have included just about every race, gender identity and sexual orientation) interviewed white people on campus or in their families about their understanding of American history and how it relates to whiteness. Some students simply wanted to know how others around them would define their own whiteness. Others were troubled by their own family members' racism and wanted to understand how and why certain prejudices formed. Still others wanted to show the impact of white expectations on their lives.

Perhaps this is why one day in New Haven, staring into the semicircle of oak trees in my backyard, I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself - a middle-aged black woman - walking up to strangers and doing so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Ind., did when his female colleague told him during a diversity-training session that he benefited from "white male privilege"? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. ( She was placed on paid administrative leave, and a reprimand was placed permanently in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert and just forgot my camera crew? The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don't normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.

Weeks later, it occurred to me that I tend to be surrounded by white men I don't know when I'm traveling, caught in places that are essentially nowhere: in between, en route, up in the air. As I crisscrossed the United States, Europe and Africa giving talks about my work, I found myself considering these white men who passed hours with me in airport lounges, at gates, on planes. They seemed to me to make up the largest percentage of business travelers in the liminal spaces where we waited. That I was among them in airport lounges and in first-class cabins spoke in part to my own relative economic privilege, but the price of my ticket, of course, does not translate into social capital. I was always aware that my value in our culture's eyes is determined by my skin color first and foremost. Maybe these other male travelers could answer my questions about white privilege. I felt certain that as a black woman, there had to be something I didn't understand.

Just recently, a friend who didn't get a job he applied for told me that as a white male, he was absorbing the problems of the world. He meant he was being punished for the sins of his forefathers. He wanted me to know he understood it was his burden to bear. I wanted to tell him that he needed to take a long view of the history of the workplace, given the imbalances that generations of hiring practices before him had created. But would that really make my friend feel any better? Did he understand that today, 65 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the American population? White men have held almost all the power in this country for 400 years.
[The grief that white Americans can't share.]
I knew that my friend was trying to communicate his struggle to find a way to understand the complicated American structure that holds us both. I wanted to ask him if his expectation was a sign of his privilege but decided, given the loss of his job opportunity, that my role as a friend probably demanded other responses.

After a series of casual conversations with my white male travelers, would I come to understand white privilege any differently? They couldn't know what it's like to be me, though who I am is in part a response to who they are, and I didn't really believe I understood them, even as they determined so much of what was possible in my life and in the lives of others. But because I have only lived as me, a person who regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect and abuse, I fell into this wondering silently. Always, I hesitated.

I hesitated when I stood in line for a flight across the country, and a white man stepped in front of me. He was with another white man. "Excuse me," I said. "I am in this line." He stepped behind me but not before saying to his flight mate, "You never know who they're letting into first class these days."

Was his statement a defensive move meant to cover his rudeness and embarrassment, or were we sharing a joke? Perhaps he, too, had heard the recent anecdote in which a black woman recalled a white woman's stepping in front of her at her gate. When the black woman told her she was in line, the white woman responded that it was the line for first class. Was the man's comment a sly reference? But he wasn't laughing, not even a little, not even a smile. Deadpan.

Later, when I discussed this moment with my therapist, she told me that she thought the man's statement was in response to his flight mate, not me. I didn't matter to him, she said; that's why he could step in front of me in the first place. His embarrassment, if it was embarrassment, had everything to do with how he was seen by the person who did matter: his white male companion. I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his imagination, she said. Should this be a comfort? Was my total invisibility preferable to a targeted insult?

During the flight, each time he removed or replaced something in his case overhead, he looked over at me. Each time, I looked up from my book to meet his gaze and smiled - I like to think I'm not humorless. I tried to imagine what my presence was doing to him. On some level, I thought, I must have dirtied up his narrative of white privilege securing white spaces. In my class, I had taught "Whiteness as Property," an article published in The Harvard Law Review in 1993, in which the author, Cheryl Harris, argues that "the set of assumptions, privileges and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect." These are the assumptions of privilege and exclusion that have led many white Americans to call the police on black people trying to enter their own homes or vehicles. Racial profiling becomes another sanctioned method of segregating space. Harris goes on to explain how much white people rely on these benefits, so much so that their expectations inform the interpretations of our laws. "Stand your ground" laws, for example, mean whites can claim that fear made them kill an unarmed black person. Or voter-registration laws in certain states can function as de facto Jim Crow laws. "American law," Harris writes, "has recognized a property interest in whiteness."

On the plane, I wanted to enact a new narrative that included the whiteness of the man who had stepped in front of me. I felt his whiteness should be a component of what we both understood about him, even as his whiteness would not be the entirety of who he is. His unconscious understanding of whiteness meant the space I inhabited should have been only his. The old script would have left his whiteness unacknowledged in my consideration of his slight. But a rude man and a rude white man have different presumptions. Just as when a white person confronted by an actual black human being needs to negotiate stereotypes of blackness so that he can arrive at the person standing before him, I hoped to give the man the same courtesy but in the reverse. Seeing his whiteness meant I understood my presence as an unexpected demotion for him. It was too bad if he felt that way. Still, I wondered, what is this "stuckness" inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies? I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.
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The phrase "white privilege" was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define "invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." McIntosh came to understand that she benefited from hierarchical assumptions and policies simply because she was white. I would have preferred if instead of "white privilege" she had used the term "white dominance," because "privilege" suggested hierarchical dominance was desired by all. Nonetheless, the phrase has stuck. The title of her essay "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies" was a mouthful. McIntosh listed 46 ways white privilege is enacted. "Number 19: I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial"; "Number 20: I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race"; "Number 27: I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared"; "Number 36: If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones." I'm not clear why McIntosh stopped at 46 except as a way of saying, "You get the picture." My students were able to add their own examples easily.

My students and I also studied the work of the white documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow. In the last couple of years, Dow has been part of Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (Incite), which gathered data on more than 850 people who identify as white or partly white and the communities in which they live. He filmed more than a hundred of their oral histories. This work, like McIntosh's, was another way of thinking about the ordinariness of white hierarchical thinking. I asked Dow what he learned in his conversations with white men. "They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their own narratives and coming up short," he said. "I include myself in that," he added after a moment. "We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male archetype. The individual actor on the grand stage always had the support of a genocidal government, but this is not the narrative we grew up with. It's a challenge to adjust."

The interviews, collected in Incite's initial report, "Facing Whiteness," vary greatly in terms of knowledge of American history and experiences. One interviewee declares: "The first slave owner in America was a black man. How many people know that? The slaves that were brought to America were sold to the white man by blacks. So, I don't feel that we owe them any special privileges other than that anybody else has, any other race." While this interviewee denies any privilege, another has come to see how his whiteness enables his mobility in America: "I have to accept the reality that because I'm a man, I - whether I was aware of that or not at any specific time - probably had some sort of hand up in a situation." He added, "The longer I'm in law enforcement and the more aware I am of the world around me, the more I realize that being of Anglo-Saxon descent, being a man and being in a region of America that is somewhat rural, and because it's rural by default mostly white, means that I definitely get preference." This interviewee, who while recognizing his privilege, and who according to Whitney Dow had been "pretty ostracized because of his progressiveness" in the workplace, still indicates - through his use of words like "probably" and phrases like "because it's rural by default mostly white" - that he believes white privilege is in play in only certain circumstances. Full comprehension would include the understanding that white privilege comes with expectations of protection and preferences no matter where he lives in the country.
[How privilege became a provocation.]
How angry could I be at the white man on the plane, the one who glanced at me each time he stood up the way you look at a stone you had tripped on? I understood that the man's behavior was also his socialization. My own socialization had, in many ways, prepared me for him. I was not overwhelmed by our encounter because my blackness is "consent not to be a single being." This phrase, which finds its origins in the work of the West Indian writer Édouard Glissant but was reintroduced to me in the recent work of the poet and critical theorist Fred Moten, gestures toward the fact that I can refuse the white man's stereotypes of blackness, even as he interacts with those stereotypes. What I wanted was to know what the white man saw or didn't see when he walked in front of me at the gate.

It's hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence. Frank Wilderson III, chair of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, borrows the sociological term "social death" to explain my there-but-not-there status in a historically anti-black society. The outrage - and if we are generous, the embarrassment - that occasioned the white passenger's comment were a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of the understood privileges of whiteness.

I was waiting in another line for access to another plane in another city as another group of white men approached. When they realized they would have to get behind a dozen or so people already in line, they simply formed their own line next to us. I said to the white man standing in front of me, "Now, that is the height of white male privilege." He laughed and remained smiling all the way to his seat. He wished me a good flight. We had shared something. I don't know if it was the same thing for each of us - the same recognition of racialized privilege - but I could live with that polite form of unintelligibility.

I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing (as well as obnoxious). Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play about white male privilege in one act. I appreciated the drama. One or two of them chuckled at their own audacity. The gate agent did an interesting sort of check-in by merging the newly formed line with the actual line. The people in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and accepting.

After I watched this scene play out, I filed it away to use as an example in my class. How would my students read this moment? Some would no doubt be enraged by the white female gate agent who let it happen. I would ask why it was easier to be angry with her than with the group of men. Because she doesn't recognize or utilize her institutional power, someone would say. Based on past classes, I could assume the white male students would be quick to distance themselves from the men at the gate; white solidarity has no place in a class that sets out to make visible the default positions of whiteness.

As the professor, I felt this was a narrative that could help me gauge the level of recognition of white privilege in the class, because other white people were also inconvenienced by the actions of this group of men. The students wouldn't be distracted by society's abuse of minorities because everyone seemed inconvenienced. Some students, though, would want to see the moment as gendered, not racialized. I would ask them if they could imagine a group of black men pulling off this action without the white men in my line responding or the gate agent questioning the men even if they were within their rights.

As I became more and more frustrated with myself for avoiding asking my question, I wondered if presumed segregation in business or first class should have been Number 47 on McIntosh's list. Just do it, I told myself. Just ask a random white guy how he feels about his privilege.

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I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem? Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

On my next flight, I came close. I was a black woman in the company of mostly white men, in seats that allowed for both proximity and separate spaces. The flight attendant brought drinks to everyone around me but repeatedly forgot my orange juice. Telling myself orange juice is sugar and she might be doing my post-cancer body a favor, I just nodded when she apologized for the second time. The third time she walked by without the juice, the white man sitting next to me said to her: "This is incredible. You have brought me two drinks in the time you have forgotten to bring her one."

She returned immediately with the juice.

I thanked him. He said, "She isn't suited to her job." I didn't respond: "She didn't forget your drinks. She didn't forget you. You are seated next to no one in this no place." Instead, I said, "She just likes you more." He perhaps thought I was speaking about him in particular and blushed. Did he understand I was joking about white male privilege? It didn't seem so. The red crept up his neck into his cheeks, and he looked shy and pleased at the same time. He brought both hands up to his cheeks as if to hold in the heat of this embarrassing pleasure.

"Coming or going?" he asked, changing the subject.

"I'm returning from Johannesburg."

"Really?" he said. "I was just in Cape Town."

Hence your advocacy, I thought ungenerously. Why was that thought in my head? I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem?

As I looked at the man in Seat 2B, I wondered if my historical positioning was turning his humanity into evidence of white male dominance. Are white men overly determined by their skin color in my eyes? Are they being forced, as my friend suggested, to absorb the problems of the world?

On the long flight, I didn't bring up white male privilege, jokes or otherwise, again. Instead we wandered around our recent memories of South Africa and discussed the resort where he stayed and the safari I took. I didn't bring up Soweto or the Apartheid Museum that I visited in Johannesburg or the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala., which the Apartheid Museum reminded me of. I wanted my fellow traveler to begin a conversation about his privilege this time. For once. I wanted him to think about his whiteness, especially because he had just left South Africa, a country that suffered, as James Baldwin said, "from the same delusion the Americans suffer from - it too thought it was a white country." But I imagined he felt the less said about race relations in the United States or South Africa, the more possible it was for us to be interlocutors. That was my fantasy, in any case.

Back home, when I mentioned these encounters to my white husband, he was amused. "They're just defensive," he said. "White fragility," he added, with a laugh. This white man who has spent the past 25 years in the world alongside me believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition. These phrases - white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation - have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation. At that moment, he wanted to discuss our current president instead. "That," he said, "is a clear case of indignation and rage in the face of privilege writ large. Real power. Real consequences." He was not wrong, of course, but he joined all the "woke" white men who set their privilege outside themselves - as in, I know better than to be ignorant or defensive about my own privilege. Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white male dominance is the privilege. There's no outrunning the kingdom, the power and the glory.

I finally got up my nerve to ask a stranger directly about white privilege as I was sitting next to him at the gate. He had initiated our conversation, because he was frustrated about yet another delay. We shared that frustration together. Eventually he asked what I did, and I told him that I write and teach. "Where do you teach?" he asked. "Yale," I answered. He told me his son wanted to go there but hadn't been accepted during the early-application process. "It's tough when you can't play the diversity card," he added.

Was he thinking out loud? Were the words just slipping out before he could catch them? Was this the innocence of white privilege? Was he yanking my chain? Was he snapping the white-privilege flag in my face? Should I have asked him why he had the expectation that his son should be admitted early, without delay, without pause, without waiting? Should I have asked how he knew a person of color "took" his son's seat and not another white son of one of these many white men sitting around us?

I was perhaps holding my breath. I decided to just breathe.

"The Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues," he added after a moment. Perhaps the clarification was intended to make it clear that he wasn't speaking right now about black people and their forms of affirmative action. He had remembered something. He had recalled who was sitting next to him.
[50 years of affirmitive action: what went right and what it got wrong?]
Then I did it. I asked. "I've been thinking about white male privilege, and I wonder if you think about yours or your son's?" It almost seemed to be a non sequitur, but he rolled with it.

"Not me," he said. "I've worked hard for everything I have."

What was it that Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing? "I got into Yale Law School. That's the No. 1 law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college." He apparently believed this despite the fact that his grandfather went to Yale. I couldn't tell by looking at this man I was sitting next to, but I wondered if he was an ethnic white rather than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, in "Whiteness of a Different Color," describes "the 20th century's reconsolidating of the 19th century's 'Celts, Slavs, Hebrews and Mediterraneans.' " By the 1940s, according to David Roediger, "given patterns of intermarriage across ethnicity and Cold War imperatives," whites stopped dividing hierarchically within whiteness and begin identifying as socially constructed Caucasians.

I said to the man, "What if I said I wasn't referring to generations of economic wealth, to Mayflower wealth and connections?" I asked him if he gets flagged when he passes through T.S.A. "Not usually," he said. "I have Global Entry."

"So do I," I said, "but I still get stopped." The "randomness" of racial profiling is a phenomenon I could talk about forever, but I stopped myself that day. "Are you able to move in and out of public spaces without being questioned as to why you are there?" I asked. "Do people rush forward asking how they can help you?" I knew the answer to my question, but I asked it anyway, because I wanted to slow down a dynamic he benefited from.

He said he saw my point. I wanted to say, "It's not my point, it's your reality," but the declarative nature of the sentence felt sharp on my tongue. I wanted to keep talking with this man, and I knew my race and gender meant he was wary of me and my questions - questions that might lead to the word "racist" or "sexist." If only skin color didn't have such predictive power.

I didn't want our different historical positioning derailing our already strained chat. I wanted to learn something that surprised me about this stranger, something I couldn't have known beforehand. Then it hit me. There wasn't enough time to develop trust, but everyone likes a listener. "Coming or going?" is the traveler's neutral, nonprying question. So now I asked him. He was heading home.

The word "home" turned him back to his son. He said his son's best friend was Asian and had been admitted to Yale on early action or early decision or early admissions. Neither of us knew the terminology. I wondered how he comforted his son. Had he used "the diversity card" as he had with me? I didn't want to discuss college-admissions policy anymore. I wanted our conversation to go down any other road, but I had somehow become a representative of Yale, not a stranger sitting next to another stranger.

I reminded myself that I was there only to listen. Just listen. The man was deeply earnest and obviously felt helpless about the uncertainty of his son's future. But it couldn't be too dismal if Yale was still an option. Don't think, I reminded myself. Know what it is to parent. Know what it is to love. Know what it is to be white. Know what it is to expect what white people have always had. Know what it is to resent. Is that unfair? Resentment has no home here. Know what it is to be white. Is that ungenerous? I don't know. Don't think.

I didn't ask this white man why he thought his son was any more entitled to a place at Yale than his son's Asian friend. I didn't want him to feel he needed to defend his son's worth or his son's intelligence to me. I wanted his son to thrive. I did. Were his son to arrive in my class, I would help him do his best. The more he achieved at Yale, the more pleased I would be for both of us. If his son told the class he got into Yale because many of his white teachers from kindergarten on exaggerated his intelligence, I would interrupt him, as I have done in the past, and say, "No, you got into Yale, and you have the capacity to understand that many factors contributed to your acceptance."

College-admissions processes can't be discussed in definitive ways; they're full of gray areas, and those gray areas are often white-leaning, even as plenty of whites are denied entrance. We know that. I was suddenly reluctant to have a conversation about white-perceived spaces and entitlement or, God forbid, affirmative action, which would of course flood the space between us with black and brown people, me included. I said instead, "Wherever your son goes will work out, and in five years none of this will matter." It was in this moment that I recognized my exhaustion. And then came the realization that we were, in fact, in the midst of a discussion about the perceived loss of white male privilege. Was I implicated in his loss? Did he think so?

Not long after this, I was on another flight and sitting next to a white man who felt as if he could already be a friend. Our conversation had the ease of kicking a ball around on a fall afternoon. Or it felt like stepping out the door in late spring when suddenly the temperature inside and out reads the same on your skin. Resistance falls away; your shoulders relax. I was, metaphorically, happily outdoors with this man, who was open and curious with a sense of humor. He spoke about his wife and son with palpable affection. And though he was with me on the plane, he was there with them as well. His father was an academic, his mother a great woman.

He asked who my favorite musician was, and I told him the Commodores because of one song, "Nightshift," which is basically an elegy. He loved Bruce Springsteen, but "Nightshift" was also one of his favorite songs. We sang lyrics from "Nightshift" together: "I still can hear him say, 'Aw, talk to me so you can see what's going on.' " When he asked if I knew a certain song by Springsteen, I admitted I didn't. I could only think of "American Skin (41 Shots)": "No secret, my friend, you can get killed just for living in your American skin." I knew those lyrics, but I didn't start singing them. I made a mental note to check out the Springsteen song he loved.

Eventually, he told me he had been working on diversity inside his company. "We still have a long way to go," he said. Then he repeated himself - "We still have a long way to go" - adding, "I don't see color." This is a statement for well-meaning white people whose privilege and blind desire catapult them into a time when little black children and little white children are judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." The phrase "I don't see color" pulled an emergency brake in my brain. Would you be bringing up diversity if you didn't see color? I wondered. Will you tell your wife you had a nice talk with a woman or a black woman? Help.

All I could think to say was, "Ain't I a black woman?" I asked the question slowly, as if testing the air quality. Did he get the riff on Sojourner Truth? Or did he think the ungrammatical construction was a sign of blackness? Or did he think I was mocking white people's understanding of black intelligence? "Aren't you a white man?" I then asked. "Can't you see that? Because if you can't see race, you can't see racism." I repeated that sentence, which I read not long before in Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility."

"I get it," he said. His tone was solemn. "What other inane things have I said?"

"Only that," I responded.

I had refused to let the reality he was insisting on be my reality. And I was pleased that I hadn't lubricated the moment, pleased I could say no to the silencing mechanisms of manners, pleased he didn't need to open up a vein of complaint. I was pleased he was not passively bullying. I was pleased he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation - random, ordinary, exhausting and full of a shared longing to exist in less segregated spaces.

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I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked. (Published 2019)

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Feature My college class asks what it means to be white in America - but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do. Credit...

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A Space for Race: Decoding Racism, Multiculturalism, and Post-Colonialism in the Quest for Belonging in Canada and Beyond

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A Space for Race: Decoding Racism, Multiculturalism, and Post-Colonialism in the Quest for Belonging in Canada and Beyond

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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea – podcast

Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world.

By Robert P Baird

John A. Powell - john a. powell leads the UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute[1] (formerly known as Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society[2]) and holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion, Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.[3][4]

ANCIENT SPIRIT RISING - Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community by Pegi Eyers

My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies - Resmaa Menakem

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- Natasha Stovall

The idea that whiteness is a problematic state of being, one that requires immediate intervention for the health of the nation, has been seeping into white consciousness since the 1960s, and even earlier. Therapists rarely think to question the role of racial identity in their white patient’s lives, but Benjamin Franklin noted white people problems back during the wars between indigenous tribes and settler Europeans. He puzzled that freed prisoners of war, Native and European, generally chose indigenous life over settler “civilization.” He diagnosed a problem in European culture, in whiteness: “With us are infinite Artificial wants,” he wrote. “No less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy.” Unpuzzling the paradoxes of the white psyche has been a pursuit of non-white people for centuries. Poet Phyllis Wheatley, kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved as a young girl, wrote in 1774 about the bizarre thought process she observed in her slave-owning fellow revolutionaries: “I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree.” Olaudah Equiano, who lived out his enslavement as a sailor, wrote in his autobiography about the circular illogic he saw at work in the minds of whites: “When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faithful!” One hundred years later Sioux chief Sitting Bull spoke to a similar psychic discrepancy: “What white man can say ‘I never stole his land or a penny of his money’? Yet they say that I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian.” From colonization to revolution, slavery to emancipation, O.J. to Obama, white America has engaged in an epic struggle to hide, avoid, and rationalize the glaring gulf between our egalitarian self-image and our repressive group behavior. And we aren’t fooling anyone. The confusion in white people’s hearts is the most poorly kept secret in the world.

Yet the field of psychology, so intimately involved in all matters of the white heart, is nowhere to be found. Despite the outsize drama that whiteness brings to the public scene, it is still not much more than a cognitive wisp in most white Americans’ daily brainscape, including those of most, but not all, white therapists. The silence about whiteness in most therapies is deafening. Almost three hundred years after Franklin’s letter, “we still have no clue what being born white means,” as white NBA coach Gregg Popovich put it. We are white children of white parents, white descendants of white ancestors, yet we have few ideas and even less language with which to make sense of our whiteness. Hovering off-camera, whiteness works in silence, quietly defining our white families, our white marriages, our white jobs, our white government, our white schools, our white police. It courses like electricity through the walls of white American life — silent, comforting, frightful, binding, beneficent, shocking, avoided. “There remain critical forces at work perpetuating racism that operate below and outside the White radar screen,” writes white psychoanalyst Neil Altman. “These forces are built into the political and economic structures of our society, into the value structures by which we were raised, into the selves we construct in an effort to feel good about ourselves.”

Under the microscope, racism and white peoples’ ancient dance with it looks an awful lot like what in other contexts — an inpatient ward, a group therapy session — would be classified as psychopathology.

Coach Popovich’s words shocked people — not just in their bluntness, but that he said them at all. For most white people, whiteness is a minefield — a topic to gloss over, a mask to hide behind, a shame to cringe over, maybe a tool to use, a weapon to hurt with, or be hurt by. Certainly nothing to muse about publicly. “There’s often just this understanding that you’re not supposed to talk about it,” notes black educator and psychologist Beverly Tatum. “You’ve had a lot of lifetime experiences that have told you, ‘don’t talk about this’.” The conflicted silence around whiteness begins at home. We learn early that there is no safe place, no safe relationship in which to speak of whiteness. “Most white Americans believe they were born white, yet their own stories of early racial experiences describe persons who were bred white,” writes Reverend Thandeka, a black Unitarian-Universalist minister who intimately interviewed white Americans for her book Learning to Be White. “Becoming white is the product of a child’s siege mentality. It’s a defense mechanism to stop racial rebukes from one’s own kith and kin.” Reverend Thandeka’s subjects told her “the message they learned was repress, deny and split off from consciousness feelings that, if expressed, would provoke racial attacks from the adults in their own community.” This public silence is replicated in all the private rooms of whiteness, including therapy, the place you are supposed to be able to say anything, be anything.

***

The boil of bizarre behaviors, conflicting cognitions and overwhelming emotions that popped with our first “White” president have long been studied in psychology, but never as specifically white. At heart, mainstream psychology is the story of whiteness, written by mostly white authors trying to understand mostly white characters. If you want to understand the psychology of whiteness, look no further. It’s all there: cognitive dissonance, projective identification, malignant narcissism. Yet despite all the insights psychology could offer about white America’s inner workings and dysfunctions, the field is terribly and suspiciously late to the whiteness party. Scholars in other disciplines have analyzed whiteness for decades. Historians, sociologists, educators, social workers, and philosophers have long made peace with the idea that white Americans, like every other social group, have a unique set of group dynamics. In our case, those dynamics are profoundly and heterogeneously influenced by our history of migration from the peasantry of Europe to the top the bloody American racial caste system, which makes our ingrained habit of immigrant scapegoating a classic case of Freud’s “return of the repressed.” As historians have meticulously established, white (male) identity was the carefully cultivated mode of transmission for the old world’s interlocking hierarchies of religious and political haves and have-nots, and that identity has evolved its own set of often problematic psychological schemas.

Toni Morrison and James Baldwin both diagnosed whiteness as a coping mechanism, one that took the edge off the existential terror of American “freedom.” The fantasy of a pure and good whiteness must have felt as cozy as an old slipper to our European ancestors, warming them in the harsh New World. The familiar stories of saints and scoundrels, good and evil, carried in our ragbags from post-feudal Europe, smoothed the way as we untethered ourselves from millennia of subjugation to lords and clerics, and began the journey to the fearsome autonomy of a much wider world. Down through the centuries, European-descended fatcats offered “whiteness” as ruthless protection against the fear and pressure riding alongside the American dream of unlimited possibility — and charged unfathomable interest. Whiteness provides “an organization of experience around power,” “an omnipotent fantasy, a fantasy of fullness,” Altman observes, guarding against our most primal insecurities about ourselves, and the dangerous unpredictability of life in a world built on economic exploitation. Down to the present day, whiteness gives us a way out of “feelings of lack or ordinariness” and a fantasy that “human vulnerability and powerlessness can be overcome by achieving economic and political power and privilege.” Those who cannot grab the brass rings of whiteness, economically or emotionally, are destined for the scrap heap: the depression of debt and failure, the disorientation of a failed identity, and the confusion and rage of “the left behind white.” White writer Donna Minkowitz, who has covered white supremacist movements for decades, points out that it increasingly seems like 21st century capitalism needs white supremacy, perhaps pulling for the most extreme racism in order to keep itself intact. And here we are again, back to the thing, white identity in hyper capitalism, buckling under the weight of its own contradictions. “There’s room at the top, they’re telling you still,” John Lennon sang. “But first you must learn how to smile while you kill.” From the hip white urban capitalist to the exurban white reactionary, whiteness explains everything to us about who we are and who is to blame for our problems: non-white people or poor white “trash.” Lennon’s conclusion, from his working class millionaire’s perch: “You’re still 🤬 peasants as far as I can see.”

Ironically — or not — the field dedicated to uncovering, understanding and repairing our dysfunctional patterns can’t perceive the white elephant in the room. Having put numerous other social and racial groups under the microscope, psychotherapy continues to resist turning an eye inward to the group behavior of white people as white people. White psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers and other mental health workers have been content to treat white group behavior as if it were synonymous with plain old human behavior (ignoring all the ways that white Americans are a particular social group in a world of different social groups) or hyperfocus on white racist behavior (skirting the less dramatic ways that racism and prejudice operate in everyday white life). When challenged, those white mental health experts can get testy. Esteemed black psychologist and researcher Janet Helms faced a firestorm in the ’90s when she suggested that white psychologists “include themselves (that is, their own racial group) in the study of cross-cultural perceptions.” Informed by white colleagues that white people think so little about their racial identity it couldn’t possibly influence their behavior, Helms shot back with an article entitled, “I Also Said, ‘White Racial Identity Influences White Researchers.’” “I did not then nor do I now understand White people well enough to truly consider myself an expert on in their psychology,” she wrote. “But I also do not think many White psychology researchers or scholars can claim such expertise either.”

***

Whiteness is nothing if not unconscious. Whatever our intentions, whiteness does what most unconscious conflicts do: wreak havoc. It works through our bodies into actions, or non-actions, that seep into the world, and explode. We recoil in defense against our reflection in the eyes of “others” — when we hear words like microaggressions, white supremacy, basic — yet we are hard pressed to comprehend, explain, or address the racial dimension of our lives. When confronted, we feel shame, hopelessness, rage, aggression. Or we feel guilty, and we resent the guilt. Then we settle back into a cloud of vaguely shameful dissociation and begin to forget again. There is a cycle, familiar to any experienced therapist: Like clockwork the racial nature of American reality gets pushed closer to the surface and the pressure mounts on (and within) white people to acknowledge our thing: slave auctions, lynchings, fire hoses, Hurricane Katrina, Philando Castile, Unite the Right, Zero Tolerance, “Send Her Back.” It gets hard to hold on to white denial for awhile. We want to change, we swear we’ll get better. But hold on hard we do. Like addicts, we can’t live with our whiteness and we can’t live without it. And we have so few words to talk about it, we can’t even say why. In our wheel-spinning ambivalence we have achieved what prominent sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “racism without racists.” Bonilla-Silva’s skepticism about a post-racial America was pointed: he delivered a talk just days after Barack Obama’s election called “The 2008 Elections and the Future of Anti-Racism in 21st Century Amerika, or How We Got Drunk with Obama’s Hope Liquor and Failed to See Reality”.

As one racialized trauma after another reverberates across the country, and raw racism becomes more and more overt, there is an ever growing call for white people to “do the work” and uproot the psychological structures that maintain the discriminatory status quo. White people are urged to unpack Peggy McIntosh’s invisible knapsack of white privilege and account for why, as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo puts it, “we consciously or unconsciously believe that we are more important, more valuable, more intelligent, and more deserving than people of color.” And as the momentum toward white racial awareness builds, the other side of the cycle starts to spin. We clutch our denial ever closer, holding on to the safety of old defenses: “You will not replace us!” “It’s okay to be white!” “Send her back!” Mass shooters and tiki-torch-style white “nationalism” is the dramatic pale face of this regression, yet the cry is present at lower levels within all white Americans. Celibate 8-chan racistlings, defensive Bernie Bro dirtbags, histrionically persecuted intellectuals pursuing racial IQ differences to the ends of the (flat) earth — all triggered into core meltdown by white self examination and humility — are just the extreme manifestations of the profound dislocation most white Americans feel when we contemplate our whiteness.

If there is a diagnosis, shouldn’t there be treatment? If this is us, what are we going to do about it? Starting with Freud’s psychoanalysis, there are a century’s worth of psychological theories and tools at our disposable, all implicitly designed to guide white people through the complexities of white experience. Psychotherapy is always about behavior change, and behavior change can happen long before psychological healing is complete. Just like you don’t need to wait until the cravings stop to quit drinking, a white person can drastically decrease their racist behaviors and increase their willingness to undermine white supremacy long before their racist thoughts and feelings subside. If you want — and that’s a big “if” — to change the ways your actions are influenced by racial bias, conscious or not, then increasing your awareness of your bias and decreasing its influence over your behavior is a skill you can fairly easily learn and practice. The low-key discomfort with, and hostility toward, people from other races is extremely pervasive in white culture, and thus very challenging to consciously access. Racist behavior, on the other hand, is relatively easy to identify and undo. In therapy, this is called “surface to depth,” meaning you begin with the most easily accessible problems and move toward the core defenses and dysfunctions. A white person can commit to hiring people of color, or not calling the police on people of color who make them uncomfortable, long before they achieve total liberation from the negative thoughts and feelings they have towards people of color. Meditation and mindfulness practices are the keys to the realm of greater awareness, and methods like legal scholar Rhonda Magee’s techniques for using meditation to help law students dismantle their racial bias have shown promising results. LIke Robin DiAngelo’s recommendations for confronting white fragility, meditation-based practices work on the interaction of thoughts, feelings and behavior. These interventions have much in common with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and have a high likelihood of effectiveness given that they are relatively simple to implement and designed specifically to address racial psychological processes.

Janet Helms remains the most significant figure in the theorizing of the thoughts behaviors that make up white identity....Helms called whiteness “a culture shock experience, with race being the source of shock.” Her theory of white identity, built on interviews with average white people, acknowledged the possibility, even likelihood, that most white people would never come to terms with the shock of their whiteness. The shock is blinding, and that is where most white people start, at color-blindness, which Helms calls Contact. The next phase is Disintegration, when a person first acknowledges being white and becomes ambivalent about the unearned racial privileges they enjoy. This is the “white guilt” phase, which is followed, paradoxically, by Reintegration, in which a person tries to lower the cognitive dissonance of whiteness by doubling down on the idea of superiority. This is the overt racism phase, the alt-right phase. An easy place, Helms observed, to get stuck. She hypothesized it would take something emotional — a painful or shocking experience, perhaps — to jackknife someone into the next phase, Psuedo-Independence, when they begin to yet again question the structures of racial discrimination, albeit in a superficial and intellectualized way: the Bernie Bro phase. The next step is Immersion/Emerson, in which the person continues questioning the role of race of their life and society, and becomes increasingly active and personal in their growth, which captures the spirit of many left-leaning white activists. The ultimate goal is Autonomy, in which the white person finally allows themselves to surrender to the emotional weight of America’s racial history. The paralysis of guilt and resistance is overcome by an acceptance of one’s, and one’s people’s, place in the racial landscape. What emerges, phoenix-like, Helms predicted, is an emotionally-charged commitment against racial prejudice, both within oneself and society. The Jimmy Carter phase. Helms acknowledged Autonomy to likely be an ideal, at least for now, a state of consciousness and action to be worked towards and occasionally reached but never fully achieved. Helms’ experience as a counselor therapist informed her ideas about white racial identity, but her work is rarely used in actual therapy sessions with white clients, despite its potential as a template for understanding and reducing racist feeling, thought and behavior.

Psychoanalyst Melanie Suchet is one of a handful of practicing therapists who have thought deeply about whiteness in therapy. She echoes Helms’ prescription for greater white racial awareness as essential to the psychological health of America as a whole. Suchet, a white South African, has a unique perspective on the national and cultural pathology of American whiteness. In her essay “Unraveling Whiteness,” she reflects on the “grip of whiteness” in both nations, “a space we have inhabited for centuries, crystallized and sedimented so firmly in our psychic structure we can feel as if it would be impossible to shift.” She is particularly deft at deconstructing liberal “woke” whites like herself: the well-off urban therapy-providing-and-consuming class who do not see themselves as racist but freely judge other whites as such. Suchet looks at her own history uncovering, resisting and surrendering to the denied parts of her white self: the “racial shame, the shame of the abuser, the despised.” Despite her initial, “white fragility” reaction, Suchet found that submerging herself in racial shame was a portal to deeper understanding. “The work,” she writes, “lies in a deep acceptance of all the parts of the self and the conflicts that accompany me. I am the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the racist and the anti-racist. In accepting this I can occupy a different space with a different awareness and openness to how race is lived and experienced.”

Suchet suggests that the “loss of the idealized white self is a necessary step in the undoing of whiteness.” This loss paves the way for “racial melancholia,” a term coined by therapists David Eng and Shinhee Han writing on the emotional reality of Asian American assimilation. Suchet and others have adapted Eng and Han’s work to describe the feeling when the defenses of whiteness lower and the weight of racial reality sinks in. It is “the melancholia of the beneficiary…the recognition that under the mantle of whiteness there is the perpetration of violence, terror and the infliction of psychological damage.” Racial melancholia is an essential stop on the road to a less toxic, less defensive way of whiteness. It is by definition devastating. “It is with horror that we come to own the destructiveness that is a part of whiteness,” Suchet writes. “We benefit despite ourselves, despite our beliefs, values, and ideas.”

Like any therapeutic process, the healing of whiteness involves significant ‘discomfort,’ — mental health’s favorite euphemism for emotional agony.

There is hope in this process, but also profound pain: “In the acceptance of who one is,” Suchet predicts, “there is an opening up of the inner space….It is only through surrendering the brittle defensiveness of whiteness that a space for mutual recognition can be created.” The pain breeds resistance: to change, to awareness, to the vulnerability that whiteness so expertly smooths over. “Is there is a small part of me that wishes to remain white?” Suchet wonders. “Are we always the unwilling beneficiaries of whiteness or are we more willing than we care to acknowledge?” Suchet is well aware of how much we would like to avoid the reckoning our whiteness both demands and resists. Like any good therapist, she knows the only way out is through: “Bear with me in this struggle. I want to offer you a solution, yet I also know there is none, only a continual process of opening up.”

Janet Helms also predicted that a reckoning with whiteness would be required for white Americans to free ourselves and our country from our racial debts. That is where white America exists now. In the wake of Contact, and of Disintegration following Barack Obama’s election, we see ourselves exploding into Reintegration, the flight back to our collective security blanket, the disturbing and disturbed comfort of racial superiority. White Americans are in the midst of a public mental health crisis — just check the acting out: suicide, addiction, mass shootings. The concurrent return to “white pride,” whether from “very fine people” in Charlottesville or from the president himself, is a dramatic symptom of a broader decompensation of our national psyche. The cries of “white genocide!” and “send her back!,” simultaneously threatening and panicked, are a direct line into the fears of a people regressing into paranoia, lashing out against shadows. According to recent polling, almost half of white adults see the country’s future pessimistically, and a third look with trepidation to the days when we become a racial minority. The violent escalation of scapegoating of immigrants and people of color is, all or in part, a reaction to the recognition that the days of white wine and roses are over. And we are not well equipped for the New World to come.

# data[].attributes.body
1) What is “the thing”? How does white supremacy tie into the core personal and economic issues you have discussed with a therapist, or would in the future? (Have you ever talked about white supremacy in therapy?) How has whiteness negatively affected your mental health, eg. eating disorders?

2) What is the psychological work of anti-racism? (What does solidarity look like?) How to be better allies?
What to do? What steps do you see yourself taking? Where are you on the Helms Model (Whiteness anonymous)

3) How are we failing as allies? What are the missing elements?

4) Unpacking white shame. What is the role of white shame? What was your first experience with racial shame?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Father, Mother, and Me/ Sister and Auntie Say/ All the people like us are We/ And everyone else is They."
- Rudyard Kipling
"England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses/ It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds."
-Sinéad O'Connor

The couch in my therapy office is occupied mostly by white people. Anxious white people and depressed white people. Obsessive white people and compulsive white people. White people who hurt people and white people who hurt themselves. White people who eat too much, drink too much, work too much, shop too much. White people who are bored, envious, guilty, numb. Racist white people and antiracist white people. White people who look across the room and see a white therapist listening. We talk about everything. Except being white.

***

An old saw about therapy is that the thing you don't talk about is the thing. The therapist and patient together avoid this thing, this shameful and threatening thing. The thing is unconscious - sometimes partially, other times totally. You only know it by the silence and illogic that surrounds it, and the extremes to which the patient will go to erase any sign of it in their own mind, and in their therapist's, too. The first step towards unpacking the thing is finding a way to talk about it. Just talk about it, moving step by careful step into a psychic place so raw that even acknowledging this unconscious thing is a threat to safety and sanity. Freud called this process "making the unconscious conscious" and it has defined psychotherapy ever since.

What if whiteness is the thing?

Depending on who you are, that question falls somewhere between obvious and sacrilege. That's one sign that whiteness might be the thing. A spin of today's media dial offers its own data, a smorgasbord of white people flailing within the confines of whiteness: Covington Catholic and Rachel Dolezal, Permit Patty and Baked Alaska. Everywhere we look, whiteness is folding deeply in upon itself: white power mass killers, paranoid Starbucks managers, intellectualized white "nationalists," next door Nazis, itchy trigger police, well-meaning white-guilt sufferers, aspirational "identitarians," privileged privilege-checkers, clean cut MAGA thugs, neo-pagan Islamophobes, self-segregating liberal elites, exponentially-multiplying white opioid addicts, anti-racist street fighters, offended NFL fans. Shitlords and allies and Proud Boys, oh my.

The couch in my therapy office is occupied mostly by white people. We talk about everything. Except being white.

Behind the curtain, we practice the old ways. Killers in uniform and brown-skinned people in cages. Stolen babies and powdered grandees. Daytime puritans and nighttime raiders. The fun-loving exploitation and the navel-gazing narcissism, the helicopter parenting and the high-wire religiosity. The blackface, the projection, the violence, the arrogance. The othering, the scapegoating, the appropriation, the gentrification. The conspicuous consumption and the environmental degradation; the implicit bias and the passive aggression. The binging, the purging, the hoarding, the decluttering. And deeper still: the emotional deprivation, the imposter syndrome, the hair-trigger rage, the self loathing. The narcissism, the status anxiety, the paranoia, the body alienation. The familial estrangement and the boundary violations; the persecutory delusions and the identification with the aggressor. The fear of invasion and the thrill of domination. The craving for pain relief and the hunger for blood and soil.

As Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously suggested, what is within surrounds us. For most white Americans, that is an increasingly thorny concept, a flickering awareness of a mountain of historical and personal debt that has suddenly become due, yet again. In the face of blatant white racial aggression -Dylann Roof or El Paso or Donald Trump - there is a reflexive instinct among white people to proclaim #ThisIsNotUs. But a deeper self asks, How much of this is us? If it is us, who are we?

***

What is whiteness, and which one? Farm-to-table white or Cracker Barrel white? Rust Belt white or Sunbelt White? Electric car white or pickup truck white? Digital white or analog white? One percent honky or precariat ofay? Italian? Irish? English? Ukrainian? Polish? The very idea of white identity - or race itself - is anything but settled. Whiteness appears in no therapy manuals, is absent from catalogs of psychological ailments, is rarely mentioned as a factor in diagnosis or treatment, yet we know it when we see it. Patient is irritable, defensive, obsessive and grandiose. Ego orientation fluctuates between superiority and vulnerability, with an underlying paranoia (trauma related?) focused on external threats and characterized by fantasies of domination, invasion and annihilation. Under the microscope, racism and white peoples' ancient dance with it looks an awful lot like what in other contexts - an inpatient ward, a group therapy session - would be classified as psychopathology. Whiteness is self-perpetuating yet self-defeating yet self-reinforcing, inseparable from power yet quick to decompensate. "Whiteness is inherently fragile, unstable and prone to disintegration," psychologists Arianne Miller and Lawrence Josephs wrote almost 15 years ago in their article "Whiteness As Pathological Narcissism." There is a "vulnerability to states of narcissistic decompensation characterized by white shame and rage." We are a danger to ourselves and others, from the defensive neurosis of white fragility to the paranoid brutality of mass incarceration and Jim Crow, down the psychotic-sadistic rabbit hole of chattel slavery, through the looking glass to the stone cold delusion of racial superiority itself. "I am not a nigger. I am a man," James Baldwin said. "If I'm not the nigger here, and if you invented him - you, the white people, invented him - then you have to find out why." He added, "The future of the country depends on it."

How does a reckoning happen without willingness? What about people who don't want to become less racist, or have no pressing need to? What about people who secretly, or not-so-secretly, enjoy their racism? What about people who are genuinely disturbed? In the 1960s, a group of black psychiatrists petitioned the American Psychiatric Association to add "extreme bigotry" to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, citing the frenzied, often homicidal violence against civil rights activists. The APA rejected the petition, making the claim that "extreme" prejudice was so normative among American whites that it was more of a cultural phenomenon than an individual pathology. (An interesting piece of intellectual jiujitsu - who makes up a culture if not individuals?) Harvard professor and psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint has suggested that more intense strains of racist belief should be classified as a psychosis, specifically a subtype of Delusional Disorder. He described his patients who "projected their own unacceptable behavior and fears onto ethnic minorities, scapegoating them for society's problems." Poussaint interpreted this scapegoating as a symptom of deeper psychological dysfunction that presents a danger to the patient and those around them. He found psychotherapy to be an effective treatment: "When these patients became more aware of their own problems, they grew less paranoid - and less prejudiced." Poussaint has called for guidelines to help mental health providers recognize "delusional racism." Otherwise, Poussant warned, "delusional racists will continue to fall through the cracks of the mental health system, and we can expect more of them to explode."

It is both necessary and unhelpful to separate racist violence from whiteness itself. "Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun," goes the latest iteration of "very fine people." (Putting aside for a moment that the business of guns needs hatred to flourish, and racial hatred racks up nice, big numbers.) In order to treat and heal individuals, racist or not, who are vulnerable to extreme mental states and have the capacity for violence (an extremely small population, overall), it can be useful to harness the tools of psychiatry including diagnoses like psychosis or mania. On the societal level, the use of "mental illness" to explain racist mass murder - innumerable incidents over hundreds of years - is absurd. If it's mental illness, it's a societal one, a specifically white one, in which white males are singularly vulnerable to violent expressions of racial prejudice. These mass killers with their manifestos are the identified patient in the dysfunctional white American family, manifesting all the symptoms, hidden and obvious, of our race problems. Well known to all family therapists, the identified patient takes the family's conflicts and manifests them in personal distress - anxiety, depression, mania, psychosis. When the patient begins to get better, the family unconsciously pressures them to stay sick, because without the identified patient the family's illness is laid bare. Why would we want to take away our white boys' guns? Why would we want to give them mental health care? Why would we want to understand their pull to extreme bigotry instead of just demonizing them? Then we would have to admit that there is a problem, and the problem is us.

The idea that whiteness is a problematic state of being, one that requires immediate intervention for the health of the nation, has been seeping into white consciousness since the 1960s, and even earlier. Therapists rarely think to question the role of racial identity in their white patient's lives, but Benjamin Franklin noted white people problems back during the wars between indigenous tribes and settler Europeans. He puzzled that freed prisoners of war, Native and European, generally chose indigenous life over settler "civilization." He diagnosed a problem in European culture, in whiteness: "With us are infinite Artificial wants," he wrote. "No less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy." Unpuzzling the paradoxes of the white psyche has been a pursuit of non-white people for centuries. Poet Phyllis Wheatley, kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved as a young girl, wrote in 1774 about the bizarre thought process she observed in her slave-owning fellow revolutionaries: "I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree." Olaudah Equiano, who lived out his enslavement as a sailor, wrote in his autobiography about the circular illogic he saw at work in the minds of whites: "When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faithful!" One hundred years later Sioux chief Sitting Bull spoke to a similar psychic discrepancy: "What white man can say 'I never stole his land or a penny of his money'? Yet they say that I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian." From colonization to revolution, slavery to emancipation, O.J. to Obama, white America has engaged in an epic struggle to hide, avoid, and rationalize the glaring gulf between our egalitarian self-image and our repressive group behavior. And we aren't fooling anyone. The confusion in white people's hearts is the most poorly kept secret in the world.

Yet the field of psychology, so intimately involved in all matters of the white heart, is nowhere to be found. Despite the outsize drama that whiteness brings to the public scene, it is still not much more than a cognitive wisp in most white Americans' daily brainscape, including those of most, but not all, white therapists. The silence about whiteness in most therapies is deafening. Almost three hundred years after Franklin's letter, "we still have no clue what being born white means," as white NBA coach Gregg Popovich put it. We are white children of white parents, white descendants of white ancestors, yet we have few ideas and even less language with which to make sense of our whiteness. Hovering off-camera, whiteness works in silence, quietly defining our white families, our white marriages, our white jobs, our white government, our white schools, our white police. It courses like electricity through the walls of white American life - silent, comforting, frightful, binding, beneficent, shocking, avoided. "There remain critical forces at work perpetuating racism that operate below and outside the White radar screen," writes white psychoanalyst Neil Altman. "These forces are built into the political and economic structures of our society, into the value structures by which we were raised, into the selves we construct in an effort to feel good about ourselves."

Under the microscope, racism and white peoples' ancient dance with it looks an awful lot like what in other contexts - an inpatient ward, a group therapy session - would be classified as psychopathology.

Coach Popovich's words shocked people - not just in their bluntness, but that he said them at all. For most white people, whiteness is a minefield - a topic to gloss over, a mask to hide behind, a shame to cringe over, maybe a tool to use, a weapon to hurt with, or be hurt by. Certainly nothing to muse about publicly. "There's often just this understandingthat you're not supposed to talk about it," notes black educator and psychologist Beverly Tatum. "You've had a lot of lifetime experiences that have told you, 'don't talk about this'." The conflicted silence around whiteness begins at home. We learn early that there is no safe place, no safe relationship in which to speak of whiteness. "Most white Americans believe they were born white, yet their own stories of early racial experiences describe persons who were bred white," writes Reverend Thandeka, a black Unitarian-Universalist minister who intimately interviewed white Americans for her book Learning to Be White. "Becoming white is the product of a child's siege mentality. It's a defense mechanism to stop racial rebukes from one's own kith and kin." Reverend Thandeka's subjects told her "the message they learned was repress, deny and split off from consciousness feelings that, if expressed, would provoke racial attacks from the adults in their own community." This public silence is replicated in all the private rooms of whiteness, including therapy, the place you are supposed to be able to say anything, be anything.

***

The boil of bizarre behaviors, conflicting cognitions and overwhelming emotions that popped with our first "White" president have long been studied in psychology, but never as specifically white. At heart, mainstream psychology is the story of whiteness, written by mostly white authors trying to understand mostly white characters. If you want to understand the psychology of whiteness, look no further. It's all there: cognitive dissonance, projective identification, malignant narcissism. Yet despite all the insights psychology could offer about white America's inner workings and dysfunctions, the field is terribly and suspiciously late to the whiteness party. Scholars in other disciplines have analyzed whiteness for decades. Historians, sociologists, educators, social workers, and philosophers have long made peace with the idea that white Americans, like every other social group, have a unique set of group dynamics. In our case, those dynamics are profoundly and heterogeneously influenced by our history of migration from the peasantry of Europe to the top the bloody American racial caste system, which makes our ingrained habit of immigrant scapegoating a classic case of Freud's "return of the repressed." As historians have meticulously established, white (male) identity was the carefully cultivated mode of transmission for the old world's interlocking hierarchies of religious and political haves and have-nots, and that identity has evolved its own set of often problematic psychological schemas.

Toni Morrison and James Baldwin both diagnosed whiteness as a coping mechanism, one that took the edge off the existential terror of American "freedom." The fantasy of a pure and good whiteness must have felt as cozy as an old slipper to our European ancestors, warming them in the harsh New World. The familiar stories of saints and scoundrels, good and evil, carried in our ragbags from post-feudal Europe, smoothed the way as we untethered ourselves from millennia of subjugation to lords and clerics, and began the journey to the fearsome autonomy of a much wider world. Down through the centuries, European-descended fatcats offered "whiteness" as ruthless protection against the fear and pressure riding alongside the American dream of unlimited possibility - and charged unfathomable interest. Whiteness provides "an organization of experience around power," "an omnipotent fantasy, a fantasy of fullness," Altman observes, guarding against our most primal insecurities about ourselves, and the dangerous unpredictability of life in a world built on economic exploitation. Down to the present day, whiteness gives us a way out of "feelings of lack or ordinariness" and a fantasy that "human vulnerability and powerlessness can be overcome by achieving economic and political power and privilege." Those who cannot grab the brass rings of whiteness, economically or emotionally, are destined for the scrap heap: the depression of debt and failure, the disorientation of a failed identity, and the confusion and rage of "the left behind white." White writer Donna Minkowitz, who has covered white supremacist movements for decades, points out thatit increasingly seems like 21st century capitalism needs white supremacy, perhaps pulling for the most extreme racism in order to keep itself intact. And here we are again, back to the thing, white identity in hyper capitalism, buckling under the weight of its own contradictions. "There's room at the top, they're telling you still," John Lennon sang. "But first you must learn how to smile while you kill." From the hip white urban capitalist to the exurban white reactionary, whiteness explains everything to us about who we are and who is to blame for our problems: non-white people or poor white "trash."Lennon's conclusion, from his working class millionaire's perch: "You're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

Ironically - or not - the field dedicated to uncovering, understanding and repairing our dysfunctional patterns can't perceive the white elephant in the room. Having put numerous other social and racial groups under the microscope, psychotherapy continues to resist turning an eye inward to the group behavior of white people as white people. White psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers and other mental health workers have been content to treat white group behavior as if it were synonymous with plain old human behavior (ignoring all the ways that white Americans are a particular social group in a world of different social groups) or hyperfocus on white racist behavior (skirting the less dramatic ways that racism and prejudice operate in everyday white life). When challenged, those white mental health experts can get testy. Esteemed black psychologist and researcher Janet Helms faced a firestorm in the '90s when she suggested that white psychologists "include themselves (that is, their own racial group) in the study of cross-cultural perceptions." Informed by white colleagues that white people think so little about their racial identity it couldn't possibly influence their behavior, Helms shot back with an article entitled, "I Also Said, 'White Racial Identity Influences White Researchers.'" "I did not then nor do I now understand White people well enough to truly consider myself an expert on in their psychology," she wrote. "But I also do not think many White psychology researchers or scholars can claim such expertise either."

***

Whiteness is nothing if not unconscious. Whatever our intentions, whiteness does what most unconscious conflicts do: wreak havoc. It works through our bodies into actions, or non-actions, that seep into the world, and explode. We recoil in defense against our reflection in the eyes of "others" - when we hear words like microaggressions, white supremacy, basic - yet wearehard pressed to comprehend, explain, or address the racial dimension of our lives. When confronted, we feel shame, hopelessness, rage, aggression. Or we feel guilty, and we resent the guilt. Then we settle back into a cloud of vaguely shameful dissociation and begin to forget again. There is a cycle, familiar to any experienced therapist: Like clockwork the racial nature of American reality gets pushed closer to the surface and the pressure mounts on (and within) white people to acknowledge our thing: slave auctions, lynchings, fire hoses, Hurricane Katrina, Philando Castile, Unite the Right, Zero Tolerance, "Send Her Back." It gets hard to hold on to white denial for awhile. We want to change, we swear we'll get better. But hold on hard we do. Like addicts, we can't live with our whiteness and we can't live without it. And we have so few words to talk about it, we can't even say why. In our wheel-spinning ambivalence we have achieved what prominent sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls "racism without racists." Bonilla-Silva's skepticism about a post-racial America was pointed: he delivered a talk just days after Barack Obama's election called "The 2008 Elections and the Future of Anti-Racism in 21st Century Amerika, or How We Got Drunk with Obama's Hope Liquor and Failed to See Reality".

As one racialized trauma after another reverberates across the country, and raw racism becomes more and more overt, there is an ever growing call for white people to "do the work" and uproot the psychological structures that maintain the discriminatory status quo. White people are urged to unpack Peggy McIntosh's invisible knapsack of white privilege and account for why, as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo puts it, "we consciously or unconsciously believe that we are more important, more valuable, more intelligent, and more deserving than people of color." And as the momentum toward white racial awareness builds, the other side of the cycle starts to spin. We clutch our denial ever closer, holding on to the safety of old defenses: "You will not replace us!" "It's okay to be white!" "Send her back!" Mass shooters and tiki-torch-style white "nationalism" is the dramatic pale face of this regression, yet the cry is present at lower levels within all white Americans. Celibate 8-chan racistlings, defensive Bernie Bro dirtbags, histrionically persecuted intellectuals pursuing racial IQ differences to the ends of the (flat) earth - all triggered into core meltdown by white self examination and humility - are just the extreme manifestations of the profound dislocation most white Americans feel when we contemplate our whiteness.

Despite all the white silence and white fragility and white avoidance, psychology hasn't shied away from studying whiteness altogether. There have been efforts to understand stretching back almost a century: a 1937 field study of psychological dynamics under Jim Crow (John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town); a 1951 attempt to quantify the prejudiced personality (Harrison Gough's Prejudice Scale); provocative psychoanalytic theories about the nature of the white psyche (Joel Kovel's 1971 White Racism: A Psychohistory, Kimberlyn Leary's "Racial Enactments in Dynamic Treatment, " Gillian Stryker's 2004 "Race for Cover: Castrated Whiteness, Perverse Consequences, "Melanie Suchet's 2006 "Unravelling Whiteness", and Dorothy Holmes searing 2016 "Culturally Imposed Trauma: The Sleeping Dog Has Awakened: Will Psychoanalysis Take Heed?"). Therapists like Ann Todd Jealous, Caroline Haskell, and Resmaa Menakem have explored how to treat the personal and intergenerational racial trauma carried by their white clients, while academics like Ellyn Kaschak, Andrea Dottolo, Abigail Stewart and Diane Adams have drilled down into how whiteness works in white therapists. Analysis of white prejudice took off in the wake of the Holocaust, when the past nineteen centuries of cyclical European violence against Jews and other "others" suddenly began to look like a core flaw in the white Christian operating system. Giants of the field like Theodore Adorno ( The Authoritarian Personality) and Gordon Allport ( The Nature of Prejudice) have parsed whiteness in depth. Even Sigmund Freud took a stab at whiteness, analyzing a middle aged aristocratic Southerner with vivid dreams of being pulled in a carriage by two horses: one black, one white. Freud interpreted the horses as symbols of the man's conflicted attraction to African American women, which he linked to the man's upbringing in the antebellum South. In this man's social group upper class white women turned their babies over to enslaved black women to raise. The white children inevitably loved their caretakers until they were, in Reverend Thandeka's words, "bred white": taught to reject, sexualize, and dominate the women who reared them. As Lawrence Josephs and Arianne Miller have pointed out, Freud saw right through the symbolism of the dream to the twisted psychic structure underneath: the exploitation and debasement of interracial love, paired with the fetishization of interracial lust, all in service of propping up the physical and economic exploitation of black people for the benefit of a sadistically-inclined white elite. As far as Freud was concerned, the man's psychological conflicts were the natural outcome of his cultural heritage. His whiteness.

***

If there is a diagnosis, shouldn't there be treatment? If this is us, what are we going to do about it? Starting with Freud's psychoanalysis, there are a century's worth of psychological theories and tools at our disposable, all implicitly designed to guide white people through the complexities of white experience. Psychotherapy is always about behavior change, and behavior change can happen long before psychological healing is complete. Just like you don't need to wait until the cravings stop to quit drinking, a white person can drastically decrease their racist behaviors and increase their willingness to undermine white supremacy long before their racist thoughts and feelings subside. If you want - and that's a big "if" - to change the ways your actions are influenced by racial bias, conscious or not, then increasing your awareness of your bias and decreasing its influence over your behavior is a skill you can fairly easily learn and practice. The low-key discomfort with, and hostility toward, people from other races is extremely pervasive in white culture, and thus very challenging to consciously access. Racist behavior, on the other hand, is relatively easy to identify and undo. In therapy, this is called "surface to depth," meaning you begin with the most easily accessible problems and move toward the core defenses and dysfunctions. A white person can commit to hiring people of color, or not calling the police on people of color who make them uncomfortable, long before they achieve total liberation from the negative thoughts and feelings they have towards people of color. Meditation and mindfulness practices are the keys to the realm of greater awareness, and methods like legal scholar Rhonda Magee's techniques for using meditation to help law students dismantle their racial bias have shown promising results. LIke Robin DiAngelo's recommendations for confronting white fragility, meditation-based practices work on the interaction of thoughts, feelings and behavior. These interventions have much in common with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and have a high likelihood of effectiveness given that they are relatively simple to implement and designed specifically to address racial psychological processes.

Having put numerous other social and racial groups under the microscope, psychotherapy continues to resist turning an eye inward to the group behavior of white people as white people.

Anti-racism interventions geared toward motivated white participants often hit a predictable snag. When white people process "racial issues" in mixed company - racial justice activism or diversity training, for example - we are often seen venting our obsessive racial defenses, sucking all the air out of the room. This defensive lack of awareness, which Robin DiAngelo skewers as a privileged vulnerability to "race-based stress," often lands on people of color as yet another incidence of ignorance at best, and at worst, further emotional trauma. What is a treatment plan for whiteness that doesn't simultaneously inflict more pain? The twelve-step model - Whiteness Anonymous, if you will - offers the benefit of anonymity and privacy, thus protecting people of color from the inevitable messiness of white racial self-exploration, as well as encouraging white people who are too inhibited to participate in a public discussion. It offers a framework that balances reducing harm (abstinence from racially biased behavior, a fearless moral inventory, making amends when necessary) with growth (self-awareness, self-compassion and a commitment to taking reparative action and helping others access the benefits of recovery). Dr. Gail Golden, a white clinical social worker, has rewritten the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, withwhite supremacy as the addictive substance: admitting powerlessness over our socialization into a racist society is the first step. Individual psychotherapy, if you can access it with a therapist willing to address whiteness, also offers confidentiality and privacy. Its implements are specifically tooled to unearth and pry free the parts of ourselves that we unconsciously, jealously guard and resist changing.

Janet Helms remains the most significant figure in the theorizing of the thoughts behaviors that make up white identity. Helms began her career as a counselor and came to see white American racial identity - like all American racial identities - as healthiest when it faces head-on the complexity, pain and shame of racial reality, past and present. Her White Racial Identity Model is still, after three decades, the most thorough explication of how white people evolve, or don't, in their relationship to people of color and the racial hierarchy at large. One of Helms' core tenets is that racial identity permeates every aspect of our lives, including every relationship, even the one between therapist and client. She didn't see that as a bad thing. (Helms titled her self-help book for white people A Race is a Nice Thing To Have.) As an African-American working in an almost exclusively white field, Helms' theory was informed both by research and personal experience. She put her model to use as a tool for helping white clinicians better understand their own racial identities, in order to be more aware of their racial biases with non-white clients. It has since been taken up and expanded by a generation of psychological researchers and clinicians, especially in the field of diversity training.

Despite developing 'cultural competence' through a required multiculturalism class in graduate school, and contemplating my own racial and ethinic identity from time to time, I never thought of my whiteness as a source of psychological vulnerability.

Helms saw race as an inherently conflicted part of how Americans understand themselves. Like any psychological conflict, white identity could be resolved. Or not. Helms called whiteness "a culture shock experience, with race being the source of shock." Her theory of white identity, built on interviews with average white people, acknowledged the possibility, even likelihood, that most white people would never come to terms with the shock of their whiteness. The shock is blinding, and that is where most white people start, at color-blindness, which Helms calls Contact. The next phase is Disintegration, when a person first acknowledges being white and becomes ambivalent about the unearned racial privileges they enjoy. This is the "white guilt" phase, which is followed, paradoxically, by Reintegration, in which a person tries to lower the cognitive dissonance of whiteness by doubling down on the idea of superiority. This is the overt racism phase, the alt-right phase. An easy place, Helms observed, to get stuck. She hypothesized it would take something emotional - a painful or shocking experience, perhaps - to jackknife someone into the next phase, Psuedo-Independence, when they begin to yet again question the structures of racial discrimination, albeit in a superficial and intellectualized way: the Bernie Bro phase. The next step is Immersion/Emerson, in which the person continues questioning the role of race of their life and society, and becomes increasingly active and personal in their growth, which captures the spirit of many left-leaning white activists. The ultimate goal is Autonomy, in whichthe white person finally allows themselves to surrender to the emotional weight of America's racial history. The paralysis of guilt and resistance is overcome by an acceptance of one's, and one's people's, place in the racial landscape. What emerges, phoenix-like, Helms predicted, is an emotionally-charged commitment against racial prejudice, both within oneself and society. The Jimmy Carter phase. Helms acknowledged Autonomy to likely be an ideal, at least for now, a state of consciousness and action to be worked towards and occasionally reached but never fully achieved. Helms' experience as a counselor therapist informed her ideas about white racial identity, but her work is rarely used in actual therapy sessions with white clients, despite its potential as a template for understanding and reducing racist feeling, thought and behavior.

***

Helms' model assumes something that, when she suggested it 30 years ago was considered controversial, but now is almost mainstream: that white supremacy is bad for white mental health. An Angel Kyodo Williams, a black Zen Buddhist teacher puts it, "how intolerable it is to be so intolerant." Helms predicts that white people's conflicts and confusion, racial or otherwise, will only be relieved by ending structural racism in the present. White people commit and tolerate racism for many reasons, and effective therapy for white people will have to reframe - and combat - the ways that white people interact within the dysfunctional status quo, from the sadistic and self-defeating pleasure of being racially elevated over other people to the convenient and invisible (to us) subsidies to our purses and power. A patient in a psychiatric emergency room once told me, "I don't want to hurt anybody. And I don't want to be hurt." The treatment for white supremacy should be guided by the same principles: the hurting and the hurt are intertwined. "The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks - the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind," James Baldwin wrote, arriving decades ahead of time as usual. "The white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being."

In my years as a therapist, I have often recognized white patients as being out of "fruitful communion with the depths of their beings." Until recently, I never chalked it up to their being white. Despite developing "cultural competence" through a required multiculturalism class in graduate school, and contemplating my own racial and ethinic identity from time to time, I never thought of my whiteness as a source of psychological vulnerability. Despite my familiarity with the DSM concept of "culture bound syndromes" - the culturally and socially determined mental health issues of other racial and ethnic groups - I never considered that white Americans could have their own culture bound syndromes, like anorexia maybe, or mass shootings. (Sudden individual acts of mass violence, or amok, were until recently listed as a culture bound syndrome in the DSM - among Southeast Asians). That is, until a few years ago when I noticed that white people were literally and figuratively running amok in ways that were all too familiar to me as a psychologist and a white person. I began to look for guidance in cultural competence for treating American whites. I found nothing: no recommendations from the American Psychological Association or the American Psychiatric Association, no therapy manuals, few scholarly articles. What I found instead was a patchwork, almost secret, history of white and non-white people in and out of psychology, trying to understand whiteness. And almost synchronously, research became reality: white patients began to bring whiteness into our sessions, in the form of cross-race friendships that got complicated, or resentment toward "woke" coworkers of color who express anger about racism, or just distress over the relentless build of racist violence in the last three years. And once I began to consider that white people could be a separate social group, with particular psychological dynamics, influenced by our specific cultural history, all meticulously detailed in the annals of psychological theory and research, I couldn't stop. And by coincidence or not, the world wouldn't let me stop, because whiteness in 2019 wants you to rub your nose in it and inhale deeply.

But all that is a lot of intellectualizing, another culture-bound syndrome, or at least typical psychological dodge, of whiteness. All of the above happened in the course of my own non-professional experiences, my own feelings, my own questions about whiteness. All of this happened in the shadow of my own history as a lost-track-of-the-generation white American woman, descendant of indentured servants and slave owners, daughter of white parents who tried to slip around whiteness and rebel against it, of grandparents who held on for dear life on one side and tried their darndest to reinvent it without losing it on the other, all of us never escaping, always returning to drink from the well of whiteness when our thirst for comfort and security overcame us. All of this happened inside the frame my own whiteness, whatever it is, whatever that means.

Psychoanalyst Melanie Suchet is one of a handful of practicing therapists who have thought deeply about whiteness in therapy. She echoes Helms' prescription for greater white racial awareness as essential to the psychological health of America as a whole. Suchet, a white South African,has a unique perspective on the national and cultural pathology of American whiteness. In her essay "Unraveling Whiteness," she reflects on the "grip of whiteness" in both nations, "a space we have inhabited for centuries, crystallized and sedimented so firmly in our psychic structure we can feel as if it would be impossible to shift." She is particularly deft at deconstructing liberal "woke" whites like herself: the well-off urban therapy-providing-and-consuming class who do not see themselves as racist but freely judge other whites as such.Suchetlooks at her own history uncovering, resisting and surrendering to the denied parts of her white self: the "racial shame, the shame of the abuser, the despised." Despite her initial, "white fragility" reaction, Suchet found that submerging herself in racial shame was a portal to deeper understanding. "The work," she writes, "lies in a deep acceptance of all the parts of the self and the conflicts that accompany me. I am the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the racist and the anti-racist. In accepting this I can occupy a different space with a different awareness and openness to how race is lived and experienced."

Suchet suggests that the "loss of the idealized white self is a necessary step in the undoing of whiteness." This loss paves the way for "racial melancholia," a term coined by therapists David Eng and Shinhee Han writing on the emotional reality of Asian American assimilation. Suchet and others have adapted Eng and Han's work to describe the feeling when the defenses of whiteness lower and the weight of racial reality sinks in. It is "the melancholia of the beneficiary...the recognition that under the mantle of whiteness there is the perpetration of violence, terror and the infliction of psychological damage." Racial melancholia is an essential stop on the road to a less toxic, less defensive way of whiteness. It is by definition devastating. "It is with horror that we come to own the destructiveness that is a part of whiteness," Suchet writes. "We benefit despite ourselves, despite our beliefs, values, and ideas."

Like any therapeutic process, the healing of whiteness involves significant 'discomfort,' - mental health's favorite euphemism for emotional agony.

There is hope in this process, but also profound pain: "In the acceptance of who one is," Suchet predicts, "there is an opening up of the inner space....It is only through surrendering the brittle defensiveness of whiteness that a space for mutual recognition can be created." The pain breeds resistance: to change, to awareness, to the vulnerability that whiteness so expertly smooths over. "Is there is a small part of me that wishes to remain white?" Suchet wonders. "Are we always the unwilling beneficiaries of whiteness or are we more willing than we care to acknowledge?" Suchet is well aware of how much we would like to avoid the reckoning our whiteness both demands and resists. Like any good therapist, she knows the only way out is through: "Bear with me in this struggle. I want to offer you a solution, yet I also know there is none, only a continual process of opening up."

Janet Helms also predicted that a reckoning with whiteness would be required for white Americans to free ourselves and our country from our racial debts. That is where white America exists now. In the wake of Contact, and of Disintegration following Barack Obama's election,we see ourselves exploding into Reintegration, the flight back to our collective security blanket, the disturbing and disturbed comfort of racial superiority. White Americans are in the midst of a public mental health crisis - just check the acting out: suicide, addiction, mass shootings. The concurrent return to "white pride," whether from "very fine people" in Charlottesville or from the president himself, is a dramatic symptom of a broader decompensation of our national psyche. The cries of "white genocide!" and "send her back!," simultaneously threatening and panicked, are a direct line into the fears of a people regressing into paranoia, lashing out against shadows. According to recent polling, almost half of white adults see the country's future pessimistically, and a third look with trepidation to the days when we become a racial minority. The violent escalation of scapegoating of immigrants and people of color is, all or in part, a reaction to the recognition that the days of white wine and roses are over. And we are not well equipped for the New World to come.

***

Melanie Suchet emigrated to the United States, ironically she admits, to escape race. She returned to South Africa years after the fall of apartheid. "I was struck by the precariousness of whiteness," she wrote, witnessing South African whites adrift in "a profound sense of insecurity, marginalization, a sense of having lost one's place, of being out of place, not knowing exactly what that place might be." She noted the fearful coping mechanisms used by white South Africans to manage their sudden (perceived) vulnerability as a racial minority: "the retreat into a fortified world as exemplified by the high walls topped with barbed wire or electrified fences, security checkpoints, and guard dogs." Despite the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africans continue to struggle with the psychological damage of apartheid, alongside the economic and societal aftershocks. "The dismantling of white authority is not a smooth process," writes Suchet. "There is no linear absolution," for whites; "the colonizer within can never be shed, only disrupted again and again." Like any therapeutic process, the healing of whiteness involves significant "discomfort," - mental health's favorite euphemism for emotional agony. It is likely the only way out of the morass in which we find ourselves. In the absence of a white political leadership willing to engage in racial healing - which much of the white population rejected from an African-American president - it is left to average Americans to try to solve the puzzle. What Melanie Suchet saw in South Africa is not promising. When people do not have a safe way to surrender their destructive patterns, the potential for healing stalls, and people get stuck. As Janet Helms predicted, the temptation to retreat from the challenge of racial melancholia and reverse into comforting notions of white superiority and racial resentment is strong, nearly automatic. Without the psychological wisdom white people have been building for ourselves for more than a century, we are even more lost in the grip of whiteness. "When violence and mistrust is the norm, then this complex process of internal reorganization is less possible, and the precariousness of identity is more evident," Suchet writes. And then? "And whiteness, as it was, will continue to unravel."

* * *
Natasha Stovall is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City.

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Clinical psychologist Natasha Stovall looks at the vast spectrum of white people problems, and why we never talk about them in therapy.

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Whitewalling: Art, Race and Protest in 3 Acts

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Whitewalling: Art, Race and Protest in 3 Acts

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Follow-up question:
Can programming repair harm? When an institution has caused real harm, it seems like a natural first step is to offer opportunity for public discussion, a public forum, or even programming more of a certain demographic of artist or exhibition type. But does this do what we imagine it should or could, does it help change the institution? What are some other strategies that might be useful?

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inc. is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists - artists' books or artists' publications. founded as a for-profit alternative arts space in 1976 by artists and artworkers

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printed matter reincorporated in 1978 to become the independent non-profit organization that it is today. originally situated in tribeca

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printed matter moved to soho in 1989 where for twelve years the book displays and artists¹ projects in the large storefront windows contributed to the artistic and intellectual vibrancy of the neighborhood. in february 2001 printed matter relocated to its current space in chelsea

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where it continues to foreground the book as an alternative venue for artists¹ projects and ideas. recognized for years as an essential voice in the increasingly diversified art world conversations and debates

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printed matter is dedicated to the examination and interrogation of the changing role of artists¹ publications in the landscape of contemporary art.

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Aruna D'Souza - Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts - Printed Matter

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In 2017, the Whitney Biennial included a painting by a white artist, Dana Schutz, of the lynched body of a young black child, Emmett Till. In 1979, anger brewed over a show at New York's Artists Space entitled The Nigger Drawings. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition Harlem on My ...

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Book Club: Whitewalling: Art, Race and Protest in Three Acts by Aruna D'Souza
June 22, 2021

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Preliminary Reading List on Museums and Cultural Protest

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Follow-up Questions, Resources and Links 

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Follow-up Questions, Resources and Links 

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Some questions to reflect on after the reading:

-What did you notice as you were analyzing the text; does the visual language of formatting the text according to your prompt reveal anything to you?

-What prompts overlap with each other? What can this tell us?

-What part of the article stood out to you? What should we revisit altogether to take a closer look?

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White Artists Need to Start Addressing White Supremacy in Their Work by Angela Pelster-Wiebe

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CAFKA_ Summer Reading Series (White Artists Need To Start Addressing White Supremacy In Their Work) - Google Docs

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Can or do white artists have the right and responsibility to explore the problem of white supremacy through their work? Is this truly possible without re-traumatizing an already traumatized people (BIPOC)? 

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Can or do white artists have the right and responsibility to explore the problem of white supremacy through their work? Is this truly possible without re-traumatizing an already traumatized people (BIPOC)? 

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From the CAFKA Summer Reading Series, White Elephant Edition: Discussion Group

White Artists Need to Start Addressing White Supremacy in Their Work by Angela Pelster-Wiebe

June 8, 2021

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Lately, I've been thinking about ownership. I've been considering it within the context of writing and art making, wondering who has the right and responsibility to explore the problem of white supremacy, and how, or even if it can be done by white artists without furthering the trauma of marginalized people. I've been swimming through these ideas in one way or another for years now, but they all snapped into focus a few days ago when I was in conversation with another writer friend, commiserating over what he called "self-celebrating liberals"-those people who imagine themselves allies to people of color but refuse to address their own complicity in white supremacy. Specifically, we were discussing a growing trend we've noticed in the publishing world: that only people of color should make art about racism.

"What should white people be writing about if not racism?" he said. "I feel like half the work that means anything is trying to place and understand the destructiveness of my whiteness."

This conversation came up, in part, because I am a white woman writing about the toxic inheritance of white supremacy. It is, admittedly, a fraught position to write from with no shortage of examples of seemingly well-intentioned white women (and men) doing their damnedest to address racism while contributing to it instead. There've been some epic disasters of late with Anders Carlson-Wee's poem published in The Nation and quickly called out for its blackface performance of language, director Kathryn Bigelow's 2017 gratuitously violent movie Detroit, based on the 1967 race protests and the Algiers Motel murders when three teenagers were beaten and killed by the Detroit police during the protests; there's Dana Schutz's sorrow-stealing painting, Open Casket, of Emmitt Till at the Whitney Biennial and her later defense of her right to paint it since she, too, is a mother; and then there's Minneapolis's Walker incident with Sam Durant's traumatizing Scaffold sculpture that referenced, among other historical executions, the 38 Dakota men hung by the state in 1862 after the federal government broke their treaty agreements and the starving Dakota rose up in protest.

White artists and writers have done such a poor job of addressing white supremacy in their work that it's practically its own sub-genre. I'm not interested in shaming them further here, but these instances, in conjunction with the conversation with my friend, have made me question why we have so few examples of white artists who do this work well, and what that lack might point to.

When white art that is meant to address white supremacy fails, the reason most often given for that failure is that the white artist hasn't taken the time to listen to the groups they imagined they were advocating for. In an interview in the Los Angels Times, Durant addressed his failure to engage with his subjects in a non-traumatizing way by saying that, "The museum-and I'm sharing the blame -didn't reach out to the community. We didn't think of it, to start a dialogue before we started building it. There was no information."

This is, no doubt, a large part of the issue. But it doesn't get at what seems to me to be the underlying problem at hand: white artists often fail at this work because they haven't centered themselves within the violence of their own whiteness. Had any of them placed themselves in the position of the aggressor instead of the victim, and then asked themselves what it means to inherit the violent history of being born white, I imagine some different kinds of art might have been made.
"If there's anything that good art has in common across the spectrum of forms, it's that good art is always, at heart, in some deep and profound way, honest about being human."
Last summer, in a public conversation on Facebook that I watched from a distance about white artists and their art making across a spectrum of forms, Christopher Harris, the chair of the prestigious MFA film program at the University of Iowa, wrote that he wished white people would start making art about being white and stop trying to embody the stories of black people. When I heard that, I thought, yes. Absolutely. This is what we need to learn how to do better: investigate our own whiteness. Ask ourselves why we are so committed to it, and why we become afraid and violent when we imagine someone taking it from us.

Why white people try to embody stories of marginalized people instead of the ones of white oppression isn't really a mystery-it's much easier and more comfortable for a white person to position themselves within the body of the wronged instead of within the body of the aggressor. Few people want to be seen as that asshole-or worse, that murderer or thief-in life or in art.

But beyond avoiding asshole status, speaking from the mouths of marginalized people can seem to white artists like access into the experience of oppression, and an imagined kind of "honorary membership" to that community, one in which the burden of having to work through the inheritance of white supremacy is no longer necessary. In a distorted way, I imagine that this can seem reasonable to white artists-art making is usually about transgression and traversing spaces in one form or another-breaking the rules, pushing at boundaries, imagining experience that you haven't had and making connections where there are none-so this borrowed pain feels similar to other art making choices, like a work of imagination instead of the appropriation or ventriloquism that it is-ventriloquism being less about exploring another body's reality and more about using that body to emphasize your own voice.

This is especially problematic because it ignores the fact that the pain can be returned like a pair of too large shoes when the white artist has finished with it. But it's also an enormous problem because it denies white artists the opportunity to address the fact that being born white means they've already been the aggressor at some point, whether through ignorance, unequal opportunities given them, insensitivity, cruelty, a sense of superiority or through the generalized benefit of living in a world that bends itself to the pleasure of whiteness. To imagine otherwise is to be dishonest, and if there's anything that good art has in common across the spectrum of forms, it's that good art is always, at heart, in some deep and profound way, honest about being human. To bypass that truth in favor of speaking from a less culpable position is to make art that doesn't engage with the difficult truth at hand.

It seems important to acknowledge here that I, too, have been dishonest in the interrogation of my whiteness in my own work at times. In the five years this new book has taken me to write, I've read countless stories of what it means to be a person of color in the United States; I've spent hours upon hours in archives reading old diaries, newspapers and journals; I've toured museums, read history books, gone to lectures, talked to friends, watched movies, asked for feedback, done everything I can to try to recognize the place where my whiteness pushes through and alters my understanding of reality.

And yet, I'm still white, living in a white-centered world. I will never be able to be completely aware of the way that shifts my understanding because that work is a lifetime commitment, I know, and not a one-stop-shop where I learn a single lesson and move on.

What I've also noticed since I began to write about whiteness, is that a lot of white people don't like it. Surprising, I know, and this is also what brought me to that conversation with my friend. White artists and gatekeepers have told me often, and in a variety of ways, that my writing inserts me into places I don't belong, and that it also puts them on the defensive-that I should take a more "side-winding" gentler approach to such a "touchy" subject as race. Since I began this book, I've learned that to feel the emotions of defensiveness rise up within me is to wake to the violence of my absorbed white supremacy. What's also disturbing to me though, is how I've seen too many liberal, white "ally" artist/gatekeepers transform that defensiveness into distance between themselves and that feeling, and then hear their proselytizing that to be white and to address racism is to insert yourself into a conversation that you don't have the right to be a part of.

In his essay Why I'm Done Talking About Diversity Marlon James says, "It's not for the black person to be more open-minded. It's for the white person to be less racist." White supremacy is a white problem that white people need to fix, and it's a further imbalance of justice to sit around expecting people of color to do the work of addressing it for us. There is nothing noble or generous in stepping aside and playing the observer in this work. Not only is that a gross misunderstanding of actual justice, it's not going to do a thing to move this country towards real and true equality.

I also want to acknowledge that white people have a history of taking things over-countries, industries, cultures, movements. We get excited about something, even a good thing like ending racism, and pretty soon we're pushing marginalized people off platforms in order to take center stage ourselves. We're not very good at following someone else's lead (and following the lead of people of color in this is absolutely necessary), because we are used to power and used to leading everything ourselves. We've had centuries of standing in the spotlight with no intention of widening the circle to include other people. We've taken up all the publishing spots, lecture spots, teaching spots, student spots, governing spots, but have taken only the smallest pains to show we have any intention of really changing things in a meaningful way.

But just because we have a history of needing to control everything for our own benefit, doesn't mean that it's not our responsibility to learn how to collaborate better now. In my mind, this is one of the trickiest parts of the conversation, because the answer isn't an either/or solution. It's necessary to acknowledge that people of color have been silenced through exclusion, violence, diminishment of ability and opportunity, and to address that through equalizing access to historically white spaces (which is another way of saying all spaces); but it's also possible for white people to use this as an excuse to step so far to the side that we step out of the conversation altogether and place that burden solely on the shoulders of people of color. It's easy to pass this side-stepping off as an attempt at increasing diversity, when it's actually disinterest in the work, or a desire to maintain power, or based on a fear so strong, of getting things wrong, that stepping aside becomes more like running away. And none of this even touches on the fact that artists and writers of color are often expected to live out some kind of eternal recurrence on a theme of only addressing racism in their work when the entire universe of ideas is at their feet, same as any other artist.
"White supremacy is a white problem that white people need to fix, and it's a further imbalance of justice to sit around expecting people of color to do the work of addressing it for us."
This increasing social fear of white writers and artists at the possibility of getting this work wrong and causing harm when they intended good, is a reasonable fear for anyone who is actually paying attention, but not for the decrease in social status that's driving it. A corrected white person can be devastating in their embarrassed and terrified thrashing when confronted. And when it comes to absorbing the effects of white supremacy, it isn't just the matter of increased amounts of stress that people of color have to deal with-though those are substantial and destructive in their own right-but actual bodily harm: we've ruined and taken lives while we turn inside our fear, and so the risk of addressing white supremacy is never equal. What a white person stands to lose in these attempts gone wrong is not the same as what a person of color stands to lose: their very lives.

Put within that context, the possible embarrassment of getting the work of addressing white supremacy wrong is a gross imbalance, and yet, it's a hurdle that white artists and writers stumble over repeatedly. I've often heard them defend their criticized art or actions or language with the words "but that's not what I meant, " as if not meaning to cause harm excuses you from doing so. But intention is only a part of the puzzle, not the entire picture, and it works in conjunction with history and culture and power.

The fact that these elements sometimes merge in ways that reveal a white lack of understanding the still traumatizing effects of history, was made manifest in Daniel Handler's "ill-advised" joke about Jacqueline Woodson being allergic to watermelon at the National Book Awards in 2014. His comments left her devastated on a night when she should have only felt celebrated, and exposed the flabbergasted nature of seemingly well-intentioned white people who function as though there is a silly secret rulebook for people of color, illegible to white people, instead of an historical context for pain that they haven't bothered to understand. And this feels like a good place to acknowledge, again, that I've done this also-that I am still learning how to do this work in ways that do not harm.

All of this brings to mind the artists and writers of the future, or, at least the ones represented in my mostly liberal, white undergraduate writing students, and the growing unease I've seen building within them. I teach at an institution that works hard to make its students aware of white supremacy and how they are a part of that structure-either in upholding it or dismantling it. There was a time when most of them would have felt emboldened to drone on for entire class periods if I didn't stop them, to proclaim how horrified they were about their racist uncle, and can you believe some people still say that kind of stuff? But now, most of them know better. Kind of. They know that it's not all right to talk over people of color, or to speak on their behalf, or from within their bodies, and they feel the social danger of messing that up, but most of them don't exactly know why they shouldn't, and they don't know how to do it in a way that's not taking over. And so they, like many of us, choose silence instead of engagement, and back out of the conversation completely.

I will admit, there are ways that this makes my teaching life seem easier. I worry about my students of color becoming the training ground for these white students to practice on, and the furthered trauma of students of color becoming the cost of the white students' awakening is obviously not the solution either. But to follow all this side-stepping and silence through to its logical endpoint, means that my students of color are left feeling forced into only making art that addresses white supremacy, and my white students are excused from having to learn to be a part of the conversation and get to sit like sulky teenagers at the table, judging and rolling their eyes without contributing anything meaningful to the difficult and painful conversation that the adults are having.

Like any good conversation, the work of undoing white supremacy as a white person means learning to take your turn, putting in the effort to understand where the other person is coming from, apologizing when you get it wrong, knowing when to shut-up and just listen, and how to notice that someone else is being crushed under its burden, in need of another body to step up and take on that devastating weight themselves.

How to simultaneously protect people of color from further trauma without excusing the white ones from participating altogether is a conversation that I think white artists should be working to be a part of in all the spaces they find themselves in throughout this country. It's the work that terrifies me and draws me on the most, all of which is to say it's the work that I'm committed to learning how to do better, alongside anyone interested in walking that path with me.

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White Artists Need to Start Addressing White Supremacy in Their Work

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Lately, I've been thinking about ownership. I've been considering it within the context of writing and art making, wondering who has the right and responsibility to explore the problem of white sup...