Welcome to Whiteness Wednesdays. I wrote last time about the brainwashing that is being brought up White in this country. The ways in which the truth is hidden from us are many and varied, not the least of which is by downplaying and skipping over the few bits of the story allowed to slip through (it is, of course, impossible to deny slavery existed, but it is quite possible to lie about it and skip over as much of it as possible to try and ignore it).
This culture-wide art of self-deception has always been necessary to avoid facing the horrific truth of the cost of Whiteness — from the first decisions in the 17th century that first birthed chattel slavery in the Americas and distinguished Blacks from Whites, to the hand-wringing of the Founding Fathers, to the truly impressive levels of self-deceit in the notion of the White Man’s Burden (though conceived about British Imperialism, Americans up to and including Confederates like Robert E. Lee spoke of slavery in the same “it’s for their own good, really” terms), we have had to tell ourselves stories to soothe our collective conscience.
Eventually, though, the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice, and in due time (even if it is quite literally over our dead bodies) the horrible truth becomes inescapable: there was no legal justification for segregation, chattel slavery was barbaric, the “three types” of humans are at best vaguely tied to some minor (in the evolutionary sense) flukes of ancestry and chance compared to actual speciation, etc.
The truth becomes inescapable, so what do we do? We tell more lies, new ones, to replace the ones we can’t use anymore.
“The Civil War was over states’ rights, and slavery was dying out anyway”
“Reconstruction was a corruption fest and a total failure that only plundered the South further after the terrible destruction wrought in the, as previously mentioned, purely political dispute between states”
“Everyone loved and respected Martin Luther King Jr., and it was a national tragedy that such a peaceful and kind man would be killed by...someone, doesn’t matter who really, or why,”
You get the idea. Being White means teaching your children propaganda and calling it “history”, and one area where this is particularly clear is the concept of racism itself. It’s classic Orwellian doublethink: racism doesn’t exist anymore, and if you try to point out any racism you see you’re a racist.
It’s a very useful paradox, as long as you are willing to ignore it’s complete nonsense.
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Alright, back to the writing.
Well, one of the inescapable truths we’ve encountered, sometime around the 1960s, was “Racism is Always Bad,”. It seems like the sort of really obvious thing that shouldn’t have taken us, as a species, roughly a quarter of a million years to sort out, up there with ”always wash your hands after going to the bathroom,” but we’re apparently a bit slow on the uptake, collectively.
So, obviously, if racism is always bad, we need to stop being racist. Sounds straightforward again, but Whiteness is just racism as a way of life. it’s like those infamously banned old cartoons like The Island of Pingo Pongo or All That and Rabbit Stew: once you strip out the racism, there’s nothing left. The whole thing is just a justification for an arbitrary race-based caste system.
So, with only two choices (dismantle the concept of Whiteness, or find a new lie), it should come as no surprise that the majority of White people, having been raised in a society where racism was not just good but expected, would opt for a new lie that let them keep their racism. The lie that racism is gone, and everything else is not actually racist. We had pioneered it during Jim Crow, and despite the blatant and obvious nature that Separate but Equal was clearly never equal nor meant to be, the fact so many could defend it as such with a straight face showed there was never an issue with self-delusion.
Racism is bad? Fine, we’ll stop saying Black people are dumber, less civilized, genetically-inferior brutes and start blaming it all on impoverished lives, broken homes, and high crime in inner city ghettos. Statistics and evidence aplenty can be found to back up the narrative (when overt and blatant lies aren’t used instead, especially nowadays with the internet). Supposed race-blind things like laws and numbers aren’t “racist”, since only people can be racist to other people.
This is part of why I personally find the argument over “racist or bigoted?” or “is systemic racism real or not?” something of a red herring: the issue isn’t that White people don’t understand what racism is, it’s that they’re telling themselves a lie based on lies and irrational assumptions. You can’t defeat it with lofty academic arguments like “without the backing of the power structure racism cannot, technically, exist, only personal race-based bigotry,” It makes for a very satisfying philosophical discussion about the nature of power, racism, and oppression, but it’s utterly useless for convincing someone whose entire belief system and understanding about racism is built on a foundation of fallacies and self-deception.
This is why you see such hostile deflection and denial when White people saying or doing obviously racist things are called out as “racist”. The lie has to be maintained, in order to avoid facing the truth.
How can “a system” be racist? Facing that truth means unpacking the complex ways personal racism affects the larger whole (corruption and bias in cops and how they enforce the law, bias in how and against whom prosecutors choose to charge, bias in how judges sentence the same defendants for the same crimes over time, all of which are perpetuated by individual humans who can and in many cases are indeed quite racist).
It means understanding how pervasive racism really is in our society, actually seeing the problem in all its awful enormity.
It’s a terrifying thing to contemplate because, like a sweater with a loose thread, the more you tug the more it all unravels. You can feel the naked, shameful truth under it all being revealed.
All of Whiteness depends on the plausible deniability being upheld, at all cost. It must be anything but racism to blame, because we have collectively agreed that racism is bad and must end; ergo, if we’re not ending it, we’re part of keeping it alive.
Therefore the only way to keep enjoying the perks of a racist society is to pretend the racism no longer exists. You see this in the ways we are constantly giving benefit of the doubt in opposite directions: cops are presumed innocent and honest to a fault, while Black people are questioned to insane degrees and scrutinized for any possible reason to deny them that same good faith; Black children are consistently punished more harshly by educators and routinely seen as more dangerous than their White peers, though we can and have proven that the differences between the two are entirely superificial.
I recall getting into a heated argument with another White person about a police shooting caught on tape. They were willing to excuse the cop’s decision to pull a gun and kill a man in front of his own daughter for a thousand reasons, while simultaneously fabricating justifications and rationales for why the driver might have, indeed, been a threat.
Calling it out, you get called a “racist”. Always. Because the second you point out the truth, the listener either has to start acknowledging it or deflect with another lie.
So, call it broken homes. Call it aggressive behavior. Call it being in fear for your life. Call it too much noise. Call it children trespassing on your property. Call it suspicious behavior. Call it economic anxiety. Call it anything, ANYTHING but racism.
Because otherwise, you’re racist against White people. And we all know racism is bad.
