Turned thirty-two almost three weeks ago, which is an age that is still considered quite young, but is no longer thought of as that young. It is a strange liminal stage that is past young adulthood and more fully into being, as the kids say, “grown-ass.” Expecting to live to my expected lifespan, I have at least another fifty years, including at least 30 more years of being not old.
It is really interesting to look at it in different units of time, like months, weeks, days, hours. It is a real shock to learn that all of 500,000 hours may remain of my natural lifetime, or in other words 3,000 weeks or so, the equivalent of 690 months.
Yet if I account for how much time until I am north of “retirement age” — while knowing that for most of my cohort we may never actually retire — that leaves only 2,000 weeks, or 460 months, or (roughly) 330,000 hours.
Three hundred thousand hours, give or take, is what I have until society will consider me among the ranks of the elderly. Time really is precious, so there is no point in wasting of any of it worrying over its passage. The truth is, all of our days are numbered; we just don’t know the number.
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Thursday, August 15, 2019
My White Problem — And Yours
Recently, I
made the mistake of conflating ethnicity and race, and so someone lent me a
copy of an essay by one Robin DiAngelo titled “White
Fragility.” It is essential reading for a number of reasons. Published in 2011,
it explores all the ways white folks feel threatened when their privilege is
called into question.
Whereas “mainstream definitions ... are typically some variation of individual ‘race prejudice,’ which anyone of any race can have,” racism comprises “economic, political, social, and cultural structures, actions, and beliefs that systematize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and power between white people and people of color.”
This is virtually always unidirectional and not fluid, as if it is “one day benefiting whites and another day (or even era) benefiting people of color.” There is no such thing as reverse racism, in other words. Any person of any race can be bigoted or prejudiced, but racism is a problem white people have because white people invented it — and, further, whiteness itself was invented.
My error was confusing my Jewish- and Italian-American identity with my discomfort with being put into the racial category of being white. I’m not “white,” I’d thought, I’m “Jewtalian.” That attempt to distance myself from race is, as I now recognize, a privilege only white people have, the privilege of being seen as an individual.
This may be hard for white people, who want to think they “are just people,” to understand. As DiAngelo puts it, “Whites are taught to see their perspectives as objective and representative of reality,” so we can position ourselves “outside of culture” and see ourselves “as universal humans who can represent all of human experience.”
On the other side of the dichotomy, people of color “are never just people but always most particularly black people, Asian people, etc., can only represent their own racialized experiences.” There is, though, this important caveat: “Of course we are all humans, and I do not critique universalism in general, but when applied to racism,
Whereas “mainstream definitions ... are typically some variation of individual ‘race prejudice,’ which anyone of any race can have,” racism comprises “economic, political, social, and cultural structures, actions, and beliefs that systematize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and power between white people and people of color.”
This is virtually always unidirectional and not fluid, as if it is “one day benefiting whites and another day (or even era) benefiting people of color.” There is no such thing as reverse racism, in other words. Any person of any race can be bigoted or prejudiced, but racism is a problem white people have because white people invented it — and, further, whiteness itself was invented.
My error was confusing my Jewish- and Italian-American identity with my discomfort with being put into the racial category of being white. I’m not “white,” I’d thought, I’m “Jewtalian.” That attempt to distance myself from race is, as I now recognize, a privilege only white people have, the privilege of being seen as an individual.
This may be hard for white people, who want to think they “are just people,” to understand. As DiAngelo puts it, “Whites are taught to see their perspectives as objective and representative of reality,” so we can position ourselves “outside of culture” and see ourselves “as universal humans who can represent all of human experience.”
On the other side of the dichotomy, people of color “are never just people but always most particularly black people, Asian people, etc., can only represent their own racialized experiences.” There is, though, this important caveat: “Of course we are all humans, and I do not critique universalism in general, but when applied to racism,
universalism functions to deny the significance of race and the advantages of being white. Further, universalism assumes that whites and people of color have the same realities, the same experiences in the same contexts..., the same responses from others, and assumes that the same doors are open to all.”
White people,
DiAngelo writes, are “taught to value the individual and to see themselves as
individuals rather than as part of a racially socialized group.” In other words, we’re all just people, except in the many ways in which society does not see that for everyone.
“Individualism erases history and hides the ways in which wealth has been distributed and accumulated over generations to benefit whites today,” adds DiAngelo, which “allows whites to distance themselves from the actions of their racial group and demand to be granted the benefit of the doubt, as individuals, in all cases.”
It is revelatory to learn that simultaneously thinking we are all the same and unique individual people is actually a white privilege. In an ideal world, we would all be recognized for our humanity and our differences, but so far we do not live in such a world. Race may be a construct, but the compounded legacy of oppression is not.
“Individualism erases history and hides the ways in which wealth has been distributed and accumulated over generations to benefit whites today,” adds DiAngelo, which “allows whites to distance themselves from the actions of their racial group and demand to be granted the benefit of the doubt, as individuals, in all cases.”
It is revelatory to learn that simultaneously thinking we are all the same and unique individual people is actually a white privilege. In an ideal world, we would all be recognized for our humanity and our differences, but so far we do not live in such a world. Race may be a construct, but the compounded legacy of oppression is not.