The current discourse in this country around issues of race
and discrimination can often feel like many steps backwards from any “progress”
we’ve made. However, the nature of this discussion, often hateful and cruel,
actually has a silver lining. First, it puts the myth of the U. S. as a
“post-racial” society behind us. Second it has opened an honest, serious, and
much needed dialogue about the place we all hold in this society and not only
what it means to be black in America, but also what it means to be white.
For us teachers this means it must also come into our
classrooms. We need to be ever more conscious of tackling the “hard history” of
what race has meant to the history of our nation and how in turn that still
resonates with our culture. A sometimes difficult concept for white students is
to try to understand exactly what it means to be white.
When we teach the nature of slavery, or Jim Crow, or
segregation, we rightly focus on how these forms of institutional racism have
impacted black Americans. But another important factor to consider is how these
things, instituted to preserve white supremacy, impact the people who
perpetuate them, and what that does to the relationship between blacks and
whites in this country and their ability to move beyond racial stereotypes and
biases.
A resource for addressing the impact of slavery on white
Americans is the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he gives considerable
attention to how the institution of slavery impacted the mentality of white
slaveholders, perpetuated the institution itself, and marked the relationship
between blacks and whites throughout southern society. In one section Douglass
relates the story of the wife of one of his slaveholders Mistress Hugh. When
Douglass came into this household as a boy, she had no experience with slavery.
Because of that, she began to care for Douglass and even to teach him to read.
As she quickly learned from her husband, a more experienced slave owner, to
treat a slave as a human being is to make him “unmanageable” as a slave. The
cruel and violent nature of the institution required “irresponsible power” on
the part of the owner; which meant slave owners were never held accountable for
the violence or cruelty they perpetuated on their slaves. To treat them as
human, would essentially ruin them as slaves. So under slavery’s power, Mistress
Hugh, once pious and kind, became violent in her oppression toward Douglass.
“Slavery,” he noted, “proved as injurious to her as it did to me.”
James Baldwin clearly spelled out the meaning of whiteness
in his work during the Civil Rights era. In his seminal The Price of the Ticket (1985) and especially his essay “On Being
‘White,’” Baldwin argues that, in fact, white is not a race. When the Irish,
Italians, Norwegians, or any other European group came to America, they were
not considered “white.” In fact, they faced their own array of discrimination
and oppression from WASP Americans. However, many in these groups made the
“moral choice” to become white. To become white, one must buy into the American
system of racism and white supremacy. As they “opted into” whiteness, it meant
seeing another “race,” African Americans or Native Americans, as inferior, as
well as to willingly participate in institutionalized racism, which includes
denying the brutal, genocidal, and racist history of the country. How did they
do this? “By deciding they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By
persuading themselves that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared with a
white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could
buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men and Black children
had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to
respect. An in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and
defamed themselves.” Once a group’s own identity is based off the demise of
another, the moral choice becomes “moral erosion,” and “they cannot allow
themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers.” As with
Douglass, Baldwin clearly shows that by dehumanizing others, one ultimately
dehumanizes himself.
Fortunately, the discussion of whiteness continues in the
publication of great recent works by scholars Michelle Alexander, Michael Eric
Dyson, Jennifer Eberhardt, and Ibram X. Kendi, among others, has helped push
whiteness front-and-center again in our national discourse. As a white man, I
cannot truly understand the impact of racism in this country simply by studying
what that oppression has done to African Americans. I must also try to
comprehend what it has meant in the hearts and minds of whites and in myself.
