Screenshot from MTV's documentary, "White People"
In the wake of a lot of heated discussion online and in the media about
Black Lives Matter, it's clear that more discussions about "whiteness" and the related subject of "white privilege" are necessary. I admit I don't watch normally watch MTV because at age 68, I'm not in their target demographic of millennials. But it is perhaps serendipitous that they have just released a documentary, "
White People," which premiered on July 22, 2015.
What does it mean to be white? MTV’s “White People” is a groundbreaking documentary on race that aims to answer that question from the viewpoint of young white people living in America today. The film follows Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and filmmaker, Jose Antonio Vargas, as he travels across the country to get this complicated conversation started. “White People” asks what’s fair when it comes to affirmative action, if colorblindness is a good thing, what privilege really means, and what it’s like to become the “white minority” in your neighborhood.
The release of "White People" set off a critical debate from the left and the right. Follow me below the fold for more discussion, and tools that you may find useful in exploring "whiteness" and privilege.
As a black woman I have to be aware of my "blackness" and the history of all things racial in this society. I also have to be cognizant of and able to cope with the dominant culture in the United States, which is white. Far too often, when one is white, the concept of "whiteness" is often a given, with no introspection involved. It is the normative societal default.
As an anthropology and gender studies professor who teaches at a majority white state university, I am always looking for new materials to spark discussion about this complicated subject with students.
Here's a sample of some of the critical reactions to "White People."
The Atlantic's Spencer Kornhaber wrote an article titled White People 101, with a sub-head: "MTV’s documentary points out some facts about race that might seem obvious until you realize that for many Americans they’re not." Kornhaber writes:
The most moving segment comes early on, when a white gay man from the South who’s attending a historically black college sits down for dinner with a racially mixed group of friends. He starts talking about how he can act “ghetto” just like black girls, and you can see that what he thought was a harmless comment—the exact same kind of comment you often hear from white people who consider themselves enlightened, especially white gay men—is actually hurtful. One of the girls bursts into tears, saying that “ghetto” has often been used to make fun of her. The soundtrack goes tender; hugs are had.
The special’s insistence on making sure that each example of racial misunderstanding is resolved into a moment of reconciliation probably dilutes the message—conversation doesn’t, in fact, heal all wounds in the real world. And the documentary conspicuously relegates the vast history of violence associated with white dominance to a very quick primer during a visit to an Indian reservation. Vargas and his producers likely chose to pull their punches in hopes of keeping the audience as broad as possible, and to placate skeptics who might accuse the show of attacking white people. Judging from some of the reaction that’s unfolded on social media, a lot of those skeptics were never going to be converted anyways. But with its combination of basic fact-giving and straightforward emotional appeal on a subject that white people are usually allowed to be oblivious about, there’s reason to hope that at least some viewers got the message.
Slate's Willa Paskin and Aisha Harris panned it in
Why White People Should Not Watch the MTV Documentary White People, and suggested watching Tim Wise's
White Like Me instead.
Los Angeles Times reviewer Mary McNamara had a more nuanced take:
Not surprisingly, many "white people" don't like it very much. When MTV announced they would be airing a film called "White People," conservative pundits hit the roof, predicting an exercise in race-baiting disguised as an exploration of white privilege packaged in a hashtag-worshipping world of the network's target audience.
It is none of these things.
Jose Antonio Vargas spoke out in
this interview with
The Daily Beast's Amy Zimmerman:
“We wanted to make a film that creates a space where we can hear people,” said Vargas. “I traffic in empathy. That’s what I do. To me, the reaction just proves how necessary this documentary is. Talking about race is hard enough—the moment you start racializing white people, that’s really hard for people. Many white people are so not used to seeing themselves as a race, as a race to be questioned and dissected and explored. Think about Soledad O’Brien specials on being black in America, Asian in America…we’re thought of as the other. But to people of color in America, white people are the other. We’re standing there going, ‘Do you know what you’re saying…do you see yourself…do you know what’s going on?’”
Despite its empathetic treatment of its young white subjects, White People does not validate its cast’s feelings, especially when they’re factually inaccurate. Vargas does not treat racism or racial ignorance lightly. Discussing the Black Lives Matter movement, he notes how so many white people took to social media to rebrand the hashtag as “All Lives Matter,” despite the fact that #BlackLivesMatter is a response to a criminal justice system created by white people for white people. In light of painfully common incidents like these, one can read White People not just as an anthropological study, but as a step towards re-education—a move against the brand of sheer ignorance that gave rise to the all lives matter counter-reaction.
Okay. It's clear that the reactions were very mixed, and I decided to watch it. In my humble opinion, no one film or textbook is the be-all and end-all for exploring the complexities of race, racism, and privilege in the U.S.
I watched the entire film several times and decided that I will be using it in class. Why? Because I think some of the young people captured here on film, no matter how briefly, remind me of some of my students before they have taken my classes. If this documentary can open the eyes of any young folks in the U.S. (or their parents), it is a step in the right direction.
You can watch the full documentary below, or see clips at the website.
What does it mean to be white? MTV’s ‘White People’ is a groundbreaking documentary on race that aims to answer that question from the viewpoint of young white people living in America today. The film follows Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and filmmaker, Jose Antonio Vargas, as he travels across the country to get this complicated conversation started. ‘White People’ asks what’s fair when it comes to affirmative action, if colorblindness is a good thing, what privilege really means, and what it’s like to become the “white minority” in your neighborhood. For more information on ‘White People,’ and to join the conversation, head to race.lookdifferent.org.
I am currently reading
Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving. It's a book about white privilege, written by an upper-middle class white woman. I haven't finished it yet, but I will be using excerpts from it in class.
Waking Up White is the book Irving wishes someone had handed her decades ago. By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As Irving unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she's changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the antiracism movement as a whole. Exercises at the end of each chapter prompt readers to explore their own racialized ideas. Waking Up White's personal narrative is designed to work well as a rapid read, a book group book, or support reading for courses exploring racial and cultural issues.
WBUR's "Here & Now" program did
an interview with Irving on August 10, 2015:
Debby Irving grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts, in a predominantly white, upper middle class community. For much of her life, she hadn’t given much thought to race, even though she had encountered racial tensions at work and her children’s schools.
Then, when she was in her 40s, Irving took a graduate school course in “Race and Cultural Identity” and began to comprehend how much she had benefited over the years because she was white. As Debby Irving tells Here & Now’s Robin Young, “I see what I am spared day in and day out and I am focused on how easy it is for me to just wake up and go about in a world that was constructed for me.”
You can also watch and listen to Irving in the following Ted Talk:
Finding Myself in the Story of Race | Debby Irving | TEDx Fenway
I'm going to digress for a bit from the "white privilege" issue to explore a subject that my cultural anthropology students are always surprised by. In the beginning of the semester, I ask students to describe themselves by "race," ethnicity, gender, and social class. The majority of my students are white, and among that group more than half use the term "Caucasian" to describe themselves. Anthropologists have abandoned the use of this outdated term. But when discussing race as a social construct, it is still embedded in flawed concepts of biological race.
One of my favorite historians is Nell Irvin Painter. Here's a bit of her bio from her own website:
Nell Irvin Painter, a leading historian of the United States, is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University. In addition to her earned doctorate in history from Harvard University, she has received honorary doctorates from Wesleyan, Dartmouth, SUNY-New Paltz, and Yale.
A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nell Painter has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Antiquarian Society. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. Those presidential addresses have been published in the Journal of American History (“Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons” in March 2009) and the Journal of Southern History (“Was Marie White?” February 2008). The City of Boston declared Thursday, 4 October 2007 Nell Irvin Painter Day in honor of her Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center in 2006.
A prolific and award-winning scholar, her most recent books are The History of White People (W. W. Norton, 2010, paperback, March 2011), Creating Black Americans (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Southern History Across the Color Line (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). A second edition of Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 and a Korean translation of Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol appeared in 2008.
She wrote an opinion piece titled
"What is Whiteness" for
The New York Times, following the terrorist massacre in Charleston, S.C., in which she explained:
By the 1940s anthropologists announced that they had a new classification: white, Asian and black were the only real races. Each was unitary — no sub-races existed within each group. There was one Negroid race, one Mongoloid race, one Caucasoid race. Everyone considered white was the same as everyone else considered white. No Saxons. No Celts. No Southern Italians. No Eastern European Hebrews. This classification — however tattered — lives on, with mild alterations, even today.
The useful part of white identity’s vagueness is that whites don’t have to shoulder the burden of race in America, which, at the least, is utterly exhausting. A neutral racial identity is blandly uninteresting. In the 1970s, long after they had been accepted as “white,” Italians, Irish, Greeks, Jews and others proclaimed themselves “ethnic” Americans in order to forge a positive identity, at a time of “black is beautiful.” But this ethnic self-discovery did not alter the fact that whiteness continued to be defined, as before, primarily by what it isn’t: blackness.
Below is a slightly edited clip of a Painter lecture on the history of the terms "white" and "Caucasian," called
Why White People are Called Caucasian.
Beyond books and film:
In Debby Irving's talk she brings up the White Privilege Conference founded by Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. The 17th annual White Privilege Conference (WPC) is going to be held in Philadelphia in April 2016. From the conference's website:
WPC is a conference that examines challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offers solutions and team building strategies to work toward a more equitable world.
It is not a conference designed to attack, degrade or beat up on white folks.
It is not a conference designed to rally white supremacist groups.
WPC is a conference designed to examine issues of privilege beyond skin color. WPC is open to everyone and invites diverse perspectives to provide a comprehensive look at issues of privilege including: race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, etc. — the ways we all experience some form of privilege, and how we’re all affected by that privilege.
WPC attracts students, professionals, activists, parents, and community leaders/members from diverse perspectives. WPC welcomes folks with varying levels of experience addressing issues of diversity, cultural competency, and multiculturalism.
WPC is committed to a philosophy of “understanding, respecting and connecting.”
Who attends the WPC?
The conference is unique in its ability to bring together high school and college students, teachers, university faculty and higher education professionals, nonprofit staff, activists, social workers and counselors, healthcare workers, and members of the spiritual community and corporate arena. Annually, more than 1,500 attend from more than 35 states, Australia, Bermuda, Canada, and Germany.
I'm planning to attend this conference, and will report on it here next year.
There are ways you can expand your reading right here. Daily Kos has a White Privilege Working Group, which is described as, "A group for anti-racist activists interested in discussing and producing learning materials about white privilege."
Posts on the subject are republished to the group, along with related topic areas.