Common questions about racism: How do I deal with white guilt?

[sqbr]

Partly because I'm trying to mentally prepare for my panel at femmeconne, and partly because people keep asking me these sorts of questions and I can't come up with a good answer on the spot, but mainly because I'm bored: I've been preparing some answers to common questions I get asked (or have seen others asked, or have asked myself) about racism.

I know this is all very wordy, but in my experience this stuff is a lot more complicated than people think. Truly, I have found this all as difficult to get my head around as some of the stuff in my Phd. Not that people didn't ask me to explain that in a few sentences too :)

It's important to note these are just my opinions, and one of the first rules of antiracism is that you should listen to the opinions of POC(*), ie not me. To this end (and because this stuff often
doesn't click until you hear it multiple times in different ways, it didn't for me), I have included links to either POC or at least more articulate white people (mostly from Angry Black Woman's required reading and The Great Race Discussion Linkspam)

These all assume you are familiar with the basic ideas underlying my anti-racism.

(*)I am using the term "POC" instead of "non-white" since afaict it offends less people and, well, is easier to type :)


How do I deal with white guilt?

(I had an epiphany about this today, it's a question I've asked myself intermittently, so this is aimed as much at me as anyone else! Unfortunately I think that has made it end up a bit preachy...)

White guilt is a distraction. Anti-racism is not about feeling guilty, it's about fighting racism. Sometimes in the process of fighting racism you might say or do something that makes you feel guilty, but that's a side effect, not a goal, and as with all negative emotions, unless you can make that guilt useful (say as a motivator) it serves no purpose.

Pretty much every time I see anything about the greenhouse effect/endangered animals etc, I feel depressed and useless and guilty. I do not then go and do anything to help the environment. But this is my problem: the environment isn't trying to make me feel bad, and my feeling bad does absolutely no good. I need to know what's going on with the environment, and this is going to make me feel bad, and it's up to me to get over it and try to do something to fix things. It's possible that some environmentalists lay it on a bit thick, but the main problem is everyone's (including my own) tendency to see-saw between complacency and useless terror.

It's like that with racism: yes, learning about it is depressing and makes you feel bad. But that is, unfortunately, an inevitable consequence and there's nothing anyone can do about it (really, I have seen people try to explain things as nicely as possible, people still freak out). On the plus side, despite common opinion, fighting racism doesn't require you to feel guilty, and at least in my experience the more you get used to hearing about this stuff, and get involved in working against it, the less guilty you feel. I'm very aware (though still not as much as I should be) of my privileged position as a white person in this country, of the dark history of oppression my position is built on, and the responsibility that privilege gives me to fight racism, but I don't feel guilty about it. I didn't choose to be born white in a racist society. I can't even help having a bunch of subconscious racist motivations and assumptions.

I do feel guilty for my own racist actions, especially the many I've done when I demonstrably should have known better. But I do lots of stupid selfish things which make me feel guilty, and the only way to deal with them is apologise etc as appropriate and then try to do better in future.

So: either you stay deliberately misinformed and complicit with injustice, or you feel bad all the time, or you learn to get over your guilt and try to get involved in fixing things. The last option is the hardest, but if it's any small comfort, in my experience it's overall less difficult and more rewarding than writing a thesis on computational group theory :)

EDIT: I realise this needs to be said: Don't feel bad for feeling bad! (I've been in that spiral enough times to know how unfun it is) Emotional reactions are not something you can control. You just have to acclimatise yourself until the reaction dies down, it's like dealing with a phobia or whatever.

And yes, I really need to get over my Environment Guilt! But it's all so overwhelming... *is a big fat hypocrite* On the plus side I do have a lot of sympathy for people who feel the same way about race (which is of course easy to say when I don't experience racism myself. But that's the topic of another question...)

Links:
Baby-stepping away from racism: A guide for white people
White Liberal Guilt
Race to Our Credit:Denial, Privilege and Life as a Majority

Comments

[delicious-irony.livejournal.com]

Amen.

I'm trying to teach myself that the only things I need to atone for are things for which I am personally responsible through my own actions. Which is a hell of a lot easier to conceive of than to carry out.

Oh well.

Like I say; you can't help how you feel. Only what you do about it.

:P

[alias_sqbr]

Amen indeed :)

when caring =/= sharing

[out-fox.livejournal.com]

Very relevant about the distracted + depressed = inaction point.

Don't feel bad for feeling bad!

Yeah, it's what you do in response to the bad feeling that matters. I think it's easier to remember in anti-racism if people have certain cultural meanings for shame, rather than neurotic guilt.

Cos, [in some cultures] "shaming" stems from awareness of failing a shared moral code, but it remains clearly in the persons ballpark that they can, and now are expected to, change.

e.g. with relatives with that more collectivist culture take on shame, I can have shame as a "bad feeling" or they can tell me I am "shame" ..and it's not an neurosis or conflict etc cue at all.

It's *much* easier to call out racism, or anything, in those relationships than more liberal individualist ones because "shame" is generally understood to be saying:

-we are all already in some form of relationship
-I am being told that I have dropped the ball, *so that* I may pick it up. It is a bad call, but also a call acknowledging my capacity and now responsibility to pick up already.

Which is where anti-racist talk about guilt seems to derail if it says that:

-white guilt is useless, so don't feel bad about racism at all!

-white guilt can be realistically alerting me to racism, so navel gazing IS validated!

Guilt, again depending on your cultural framework, seems more tied to the to the idea that the "answer" to "feeling bad" is within ourselves. [I'm thinking individualist psychology or religious views].

Like dwelling on my own emotional landscape, rather than public ethical responsibilities, is validated as a passive response in anti-racism if:

- the construct of guilt in use centres the self not social ethics
- the self in question is already white privileged and/or politically disengaged.
- said white person is mainly in anti-racist dialouge with also white privileged individualists, who're less likely to call the substitution of personal development/derail for social/political development

Again I have made a comment of doom on your journal. Please take this as saying..your posts are really provacative, not e-stalking. [there's google maps for that/joke]

Re: when caring =/= sharing

[out-fox.livejournal.com]

Also, have you read much Fiona Nichols? Has some interesting journal articles about facilitating whiteness discussions as a still learning white person: how whites will want her to model the "right" response, rather than everyone taking responsibilty for their own POV.

Thought of her re:your femmeconne concerns. Because it's not like you need to have the answers or know everything - your role is more focussing others on thinking through the topic for themselves yes/no?

Re: when caring =/= sharing

[alias_sqbr]

First: thankyou for mentioning Fiona Nicholls, she does sound good though unfortunately I can't find her via google. Did you maybe mispell her name?

I had a REALLY frustrating conversation yesterday with a pagan friend about the self-actualisation vs community responsibility thing wrt cultural appropriation of religious elements. I think focussing on the individual and our own experience/feelings/needs etc is a major problem with these issues, though coming from a white socialist background I can say with confidence that it's not the only problem, and fixing it won't stop people being defensively racist :/

your posts are really provacative
That's cool, as long as it's the good, thought-provoking sort of provocative and you don't just want to slap me upside the head :)

*blinks* Huh, hey, you (and the other not-real-life-friends on my flist) could like stalk me via google maps etc. But if you can't trust strangers off the internet, who can you trust? :)

Finally: I keep seeing those fannish-cartoony icons around the place (P&P, not Star Trek), where do they come from?

Re: when caring =/= sharing

[out-fox.livejournal.com]

I did mispell it *facepalm*. It's Nicholl, sorry.

Her Are you calling me racist (http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/nicoll_teaching.htm) teaching piece in the Whiteness Studies (http://www.borderlands.net.au/issues/vol3no2.html) issue of Borderlands.

"A big challenge for me was learning and teaching how to disarticulate whiteness from a reductive kind of identity-politics, which in recent years has become the subject of endless polemics about ‘political correctness’. So rather than focusing on identity per se I had to keep bringing the focus to bear on the processesthrough which individuals identify with and invest in patriarchal white sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson, 2003b)."

The fangirls icon is from redscharlach (http://redscharlach.livejournal.com/162463.html) c/ cross posting them in P&P coms.

Re: when caring =/= sharing

[alias_sqbr]

Oh thankyou. My brain is creaking a little under the strain of understanding humanities-academic speak (a common problem I face with this stuff), but other than that so far it seems just what I was looking for :)