This diary began as a comment in reply to Denise Oliver Velez’s wonderful diary from this morning, about the falsehoods and mythology surrounding the perception of white racial victimhood.
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White supremacy is cultured in the medium of white privilege and white entitlement— the idea that whiteness connotes and conveys deserving, with status and opportunity apportioned according to a racial Munsell grade (lighter shades are always better,at least in the racial formulation):
Value (V) indicates the lightness of a color. The scale of value ranges from 0 for pure black to 10 for pure white. Black, white and the grays between them are called“neutral colors.”
White supremacy, and its political expression, white nationalism, are not separate conceptually from the kind of unconscious (or perhaps unreflective, partially conscious) white privilege and white entitlement displayed by the students of Jia Tolentino (those young men and women had been tutored in white privilege and white entitlement by their parents, peers and neighbors their whole life). White privilege and white entitlement, unacknowledged but pervasive, are the nutrient agar from which white supremacy propagates:
Believing that race is “N.M.I” (“Not My Issue”) and being members of one or more groups that also experience systemic discrimination, we use the privilege of emotionally and psychologically removing ourselves from the “white” group, which we see as composed either of demonically racist people who spout epithets and wear Ku Klux Klan robes or white, straight, healthy males.
Like Tolentino’s students, young people are taught from birth that skin tone is access to power, it is an instrument for acquiring and expressing power, as Lisa Delpit articulates so well:
In thinking through these issues, I have found what I believe to be a connecting and complex theme: what I have come to call ‘the culture of power.’ There are five aspects of power I would like to propose as given …
- Issues of power are enacted in classrooms. These issues include: the power of the teacher over the students; the power of the publishers of textbooks and of the developers of the curriculum to determine the view of the world presented; the power of the state in enforcing compulsory schooling; and the power of an individual or group to determine another’s intelligence or “normalcy.” Finally, if schooling prepares people for jobs, and the kind of job a person has determines her or his economic status and, therefore, power, then schooling is intimately related to that power.
- There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a ‘culture of power’. The codes or rules I’m speaking of relate to linguistic forms, communicative strategies, and presentation of self; that is, ways of talking, ways of writing, ways of dressing, and ways of interacting.
- The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power. This means that success in-institutions—schools, work places, and so on—is predicated upon acquisition of the culture of those who are in power. Children from middle-class homes tend to do better in school than those from non middle-class homes because the culture of the school is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes—of those in power. The upper and middle classes send their children to school with all the accoutrements of the culture of power; children from other kinds of families operate within perfectly wonderful and viable cultures but not cultures that carry the codes or rules of power.
- If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier. In my work within and between diverse cultures, I have come to conclude that members of any culture transmit information implicitly to co-members. However, when implicit codes are attempted across cultures, communication frequently breaks down. Each cultural group is left saying, Why don’t those people say what they mean? as well as, What’s wrong with them, why don’t they understand? …
- Those with power are frequently least aware of—or least willing to acknowledge—its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence. For many who consider themselves members of liberal or radical camps, acknowledging personal power and admitting participation in the culture of power is distinctly uncomfortable. On the other hand, those who are less powerful in any situation are most likely to recognize the power variable most acutely. (emphasis added)
White supremacy cannot exist apart from, or outside the framework of, white privilege and white entitlement, as Betsy Lucal notes:
Part of the privilege of whiteness, then,is the ability to choose to be oblivious to the effects of race (Helms 1990; hooks 1994).Racial privilege also structures the way whites deal with people of color. Frye(1983:111) believes that racial privilege gives white people a choice between "hearing and not hearing" the voices of nonwhites.The normative cultural practices that constitute "whiteness" are most visible to those excluded and oppressed by them(Feagin and Vera 1995; Frankenberg 1993).Whites can believe themselves to be invisible to blacks, whereas "[a]ll black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness"(hooks 1992:175). hooks (1992:175) adds,"I learned as a child that to be 'safe,' it was important to recognize the power of whiteness,even to fear it, and to avoid encounter."To be black, then, is to be made continually aware of one's racial status (Feagin and Sikes1994; Gwaltney 1980; Levine 1994) (pg. 247)
It is not only logically indefensible to distinguish the ‘average white folk’, who swim in white privilege and white entitlement, who support and voted for Trump, from the explicit white supremacists, the Nazi and klan marchers; the average white folk who say ‘don’t lump us all together’, ‘we’re not all racists like them’ are attempting an abdication of moral responsibility and accountability— they provide the ecosystem in which white supremacists can flourish, while disclaiming any association.
All those that encourage us to welcome recent converts, in the wake of Charlottesville, to the notion that Trump is wrong to support white supremacists, are making a grave error— absolution so cheaply given to those that made it possible for white terrorists to feel emboldened, to threaten, to assault, and to murder with impunity, only allows the incubator of white supremacy to remain intact. It must be dismantled.