On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

  To understand how whiteness works across generations, imagine buying the winning lottery ticket for the largest lottery in history, and then having someone steal your ticket. You try to get it back, but you fail. The thief then cashes in, and his family benefits from this wealth for the next twenty generations. Later, your kids are able to identify that the theft happened. But when they ask for recompense, they are told that nothing can be done, that the past is the past, and that they need to move on. But what does moving on look like? How does one move on when the original harm isn’t addressed and when the consequences of that harm continue to cause suffering?

  This is how whiteness works. White people benefit from a set of choices in the past that still have an impact today, and though almost no one now living has caused the initial harm, they benefit. To recognize the original harm is not the same as repairing it, though repair is, of course, impossible without recognition. The point is that active theft isn’t required for people to participate in and perpetuate the harm.

  Another example to consider could take place in a middle-school classroom. A teacher tells her students that they need to bring in their own rulers to use on an upcoming test. So the kids go home and tell their parents they need rulers. Some parents go to the local store, we’ll call it ABC Grocer, and buy the rulers. Others buy rulers elsewhere. Unbeknownst to the kids or their parents, the rulers that were shipped to ABC Grocer had a manufacturing defect. The kids who used those rulers generally performed worse on the test. When a student spots an error on her ruler, she brings it to the teacher’s attention, but she’s told, “That’s unfortunate, but we’ve already moved on. You’ll just need to make sure you have a properly functioning ruler next time.” The child may go home to complain, but if her parents are anything like my father, the teacher would get deference.

  Whiteness is the dynamic that creates a set of kids who performed better because they had the right ruler. Their superior performance then poises them for advanced classes the following year, setting them on an entirely different trajectory for life. Now on two different tracks, the self-worth and perceived ability of some will be inflated, and will necessarily be deflated for others. And kids on both sides will simply assume that this is the natural order of things, how the world is supposed to function. The kid with the bad ruler might never see someone overcome their disadvantage, so she just buckles down and does her best given the circumstances.

  Now, years later the ruler manufacturer is discovered to have known about the defective rulers. Instead of throwing them out, it offered to sell them at a steep discount. Some store owners took advantage of their offer and bought them at the discounted price. The owner of ABC Grocer knew that his customers had less means, so he bought them and reduced the price, but still made a healthy profit. After all, he rationalized, how serious is a flawed ruler anyway?

  It also turns out that upon becoming aware of the defective rulers, the parents who purchased them brought the problem to the attention of the school board. The parents of the kids who scored higher wanted to make sure their kids maintained class standing to get at the limited number of advanced spots the following year. These parents argued for fairness and equality next year, for standards that would affect future students. And, importantly, they argued that since their kids didn’t mean to do anything wrong, they shouldn’t be punished, even if that meant other kids were being punished. To them, they didn’t cheat or exploit an unfair advantage. And in asking that the results remain, the parents were just fighting for their kids.

  It’s easy to read this story as one of poverty and access and not necessarily about race. To be sure, the allegory is imperfect. But when race is the axis by which poverty and access function, it simply can’t be ignored. Moreover, many things happen at the intersection of race and class, but race has a way of tipping the scales in a negative way even for people of means.

  This is whiteness. Some know about the advantage; some don’t. And though not every white person is a cheater, every white person still benefits from what happened, and that’s the point.

  Even when the cheating is exposed, it doesn’t change the impact of what has already taken place.

  And the farther you move from the initial incident, fewer people believe that it happened at all, and that the source of the ultimate outcome was intentional. As time goes by, it’s increasingly hard to trace the event’s impact. We think, How could someone allow this incident to become so bad? Or, How do we fix it, it happened so long ago? Those who advocate for some sort of fix or acknowledgment of the problem become the people who “refuse to move on.”

  Whiteness is an ideology that says that some people will always have more than others. Predicated on theft and exploitation, it actively profits off the prejudices, systems, and institutions that promote inequality. If whiteness were a business, we could think of white people as the founders. At first the company was private. Over time, they sold pieces of ownership to other groups. To become eligible for a stake, you not only needed the resources but also had to meet certain membership requirements. With each sale, the existing members profited, with the founders profiting the most. The criteria that makes someone eligible to buy shares has shifted over time, and the cost of a share has increased significantly. The power of whiteness lies in its ability to make people conform to its membership requirements. And because the benefits of membership pass on from generation to generation, a legacy member can take for granted, or become blind to, the benefits. When people “unpack their privilege,” they are owning the benefits afforded their membership.

  But too often, in practice, rather than serving as a catalyst for tackling whiteness, this unpacking serves as an end point in itself. For people in a position of privilege this work is certainly necessary, but it alone is not sufficient, as it only examines an individual’s relationship to whiteness. If we are ever to change the system, we will need to use the individual’s relationship to whiteness as a lens to see how the decisions aggregated over time intentionally created these disparities.

  When James Baldwin says that white is a metaphor for power, he is actually noting that whiteness is a metaphor for power over as opposed to power with—that it is automatically imbued with a sense of domination. He is reminding us that our goal as people of color is never to become white; that is, it is never to extend the idea of domination, but rather to change the conception of power itself. Indeed, we must end the idea of domination as an organizing principle in society. Audre Lorde said it best when she spoke of fighting old power on its own terms: “We cannot fight old power in old power terms only. The only way we can do it is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence, at the same time as we are resisting.”*

  It’s common to hear well-meaning white people come to their own defense over the legacy of power and privilege that they’ve inherited. Individual arguments tend to fall into one of several categories: guilt, shame, denial, mockery, or indifference. From institutions, the response is either denial or justification of entitlement.

  Guilt is manifested when people feel that they have taken racist actions in the past and feel bad about having taken those actions. Guilt, as Brené Brown notes, does motivate people to change their actions, but it is not a sustainable motivator. This sounds like, “I now understand what I did wrong or the things that were problematic in the past, and I will change moving forward.” The difficult part of white guilt for white people is that it forces them to reckon with their past. It often pushes people to focus so much on personal transformation, however, that they forget that there is a larger system that led to their personal advantages. To get through guilt, it’s important to remain focused on the fact that although the past is fixed, the present and future are very much in play. Atoning for the past is not just an inward act but a forward-looking proposition, one that should be predicated on actions and decisions that actively dismantle guilt through real-time change.

&
nbsp; Shame is manifested when people feel that they are themselves bad and/or racist, not that the actions they have taken are bad and/or racist. This is a fixed way of thinking about one’s identity. Such people often feel that because whiteness is rooted in exploitation, and because they cannot be unwhite, that they are inherently bad. To deal with this shame, white people will sometimes acknowledge the underlying injustice, but create an exception that says: I didn’t participate in it. It often is verbalized as, “But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. I’m a good person.” Or, “I worked hard for everything I have. Whiteness didn’t help me. I don’t even know what whiteness is.” Or, “White pain is pain too,” as if there is a parallel between individual trauma and systemic trauma. The way that white people can or should work through shame is to remember that while they have all made decisions, they are not their past decisions. Shame destroys us and forces us to double down on our beliefs. But if white people understand that they are not the decisions they’ve made, they can begin to see a pathway to change.

  Denial is related in many ways to shame, but instead of distancing themselves from the problem, denial refutes the existence of the problem. It says that white supremacy and racism are not real, and that claims of either are overblown. Denial is also manifested as the performance of innocence, the perplexity in the statement, “I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.” I gave a talk recently where a student challenged me by asking, “Why are you making everything about race? How do you know that redlining was racist?” The same sentiment has been expressed to me in statements like, “You don’t know how it was; you weren’t there.” I’ve found that those employing the tactic of denial will often bombard me with questions—regardless of whether the questions bear any relevance to the matter at hand—with the express purpose of pushing the conversation to a completely new space.

  When the student started to ask me about how I knew that redlining was racist, I told him about the literal red lines drawn on maps by the Federal Housing Administration, and then I asked him, “When I show you the maps and show you that red lines were specifically in black communities and not others, will you still deny it?” He then shifted his stance to suggest that whatever the nature of the design—racist or not—redlining did not have the impact that I was claiming it had. That I’d answered his original criticism was suddenly beside the point.

  I’ve found that in order to respond to those engaged in denial, we must shift the cognitive burden to them. We do this by building a chain of questions that force them to reinvestigate basic truths, which then lead to larger acknowledgments. But for some, this tactic only results in distraction, as there is no earnest engagement that will shift them, because they know that they are engaging in lies.

  Mockery presents itself when people blame the oppressed, as if it is their collective choice to be so. This underlying attitude restricts the generosity of spirit afforded to disadvantaged groups. Instead of acknowledging that poverty might be experienced differently and more fully by people who had been systematically denied access to the building blocks of wealth and industry for the majority of this nation’s existence, the focus is on adding work requirements to food stamps and housing. The imposition of work requirements is used as a bulwark to prevent the poor from exploiting poverty for a “free ride,” or to incentivize them to get away from the poverty line, as if hovering just above or below the line is something to aspire to. There is a pervasive focus on making those who have suffered from whiteness both prove their oppression and defend the interventions aimed at addressing the effects of that oppression. The familiar earn-deserve paradigm rears its ugly head. And it sounds like, “Well, if they had made different choices then they’d be able to buy a house.” Or when low standardized-test scores for third-graders signal, “Something simply must be wrong with the kids,” the notion is perpetuated that the oppressed are to blame, and not the system.

  There is also indifference. People who are so removed from the oppressed that oppression simply plays out at the periphery of their lives, if it all. They are aware of injustice and hardship, but it’s not present enough to evoke a response like the four cited above. Indifference is the absence of attention, the notion that an issue need not be discussed or attended to. The indifferent offer that the issues are so big that they aren’t necessary to engage with, or are just a feature of the world—like starving children in African nations or ethnic cleansing in Syria. Their indifference can be a by-product of the communities in which they live or their lack of proximity to people of color or those who experience visible hardship. As income stratification continues to increase along socioeconomic lines, indifference is poised to become a more common characteristic of white people and those who benefit from whiteness.

  Individuals have individual responses, but institutions are the collective response of individuals, hardened over time. Institutions have a set of behaviors that incubate in denial and are manifested in the behaviors of entitlement. When an institution attempts to wrestle with its role in perpetuating white supremacy or to recognize how whiteness has influenced its design and function, it can be unwilling to engage in a narrative that acknowledges the structural issues at play that promote oppression. It can, for example, say with a straight face that because we are fifty years removed from the poll tax, the need for a Voting Rights Act is moot. Here the institution focuses on the last fifty years of “fairness” under the law and ignores the preceding two-hundred-plus years of oppression that created the structural unfairness in the first place. Institutional denial reflects an unwillingness to acknowledge historical or active systems and structures that work to uphold racism. The manifestation of this denial is an entitlement that claims unearned benefits. It puts the onus on the oppressed to not only make the case for the impact of their exploitation, but also to manufacture the solutions. The ultimate portrayal of denial is a defensive stance that says that even though things were obtained by exploitative means, the recipients deserved them.

  * * *

  —

  I OFTEN TWEET “watch whiteness work” to describe the way that whiteness is manifesting itself in a particular moment. Once, someone sent me a long email, frustrated with my use of the phrase. He was particularly upset that I did not say “white supremacy” or “racism.” I didn’t have time to email him a reply, but I did email him to ask for his number. I called him, and as we talked I tried to push him to understand the way that whiteness functions outside of examples like lynching and enslavement.

  I reminded him that when we go to the store and buy “nude” clothing, it looks like his skin and not mine. And that Band-Aids are a skin tone—again, his and not mine. And that when we read books, the characters are white until named something else. I was explaining to him that all these things are about power, they’re all a function of the fact that whiteness is normative, that whiteness has been set up as the standard and that everything else is a deviation from it. And that this is its own form of power and not a result of hard work or self-mastery.

  There are other examples of whiteness at work that people are either unaware of or have roundly overlooked. In high school, I thought a map was a map. I’d never considered that the display of countries and continents was also a political act. It was much later that I would learn about the Mercator projection, the sixteenth-century map projection that displays the continent of Africa as similar in size to other countries when in fact it is much larger. In the Economist, they note the following about the projection: “Africa looks about the same size as Greenland under the Mercator projection, for example, even though it is in fact 14 sizes bigger.” And the Mercator projection is the template for Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, and Bing.*

  The same underlying principle is at work when people try to say that the Confederacy was not about white supremacy. All we have to do is look at the Cornerstone speech, delivered by Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens for insight into the founding principles of
the confederacy:

  Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

  There is no way to support the Confederacy and not simultaneously support white supremacy.

  * * *

  —

  THE IMPORTANCE OF defining whiteness lies in the fact that without doing so, a well-meaning white person cannot meaningfully engage in the work of breaking it down. But this is only the first step and it is important only insofar as a person who benefits from whiteness can take the personal experience and link it to the structural experience, and is able to identify and acknowledge an intentional set of structures, systems, and institutions that allow the privilege to manifest. If white people stop at self-exploration or unpacking their privilege, they easily fall into a cycle of self-congratulation in which they are celebrated for seeing what people of color around them have always had to see and live through, for survival. And this cycle of self-congratulation doesn’t actually change anything about the power dynamic. But it does make white people feel better. Memorizing and reciting is not the same as learning. And it is only through learning that allies are poised to partner in the work.

  It seems that “allyship” is the buzzword of the day, and we need allies too. However, too many people claim to be “woke,” but cannot see beyond their own experience. And, thus, I have grown tired of the notion of an ally. I prefer the language of an “accomplice.” An ally loves you from a distance. An accomplice loves you up close. We need allies to make the transition to accomplices. An ally is someone who has unpacked her personal privilege but hasn’t yet made the link to institutional issues and is not willing to risk anything besides her mental comfort. An accomplice rolls up her sleeves and engages in the work that is beyond her. She’ll march in the streets, yes. But an accomplice also faces her own participation in whiteness, acknowledges it, and then looks beyond that personal acknowledgment to identify how her awareness can be applied to changing the systems and mind-sets that prop up the system.