Anti-racism and white privilege are not meant to put guilt trips on white people. This podcast helps us understand these key ideas with stories and insights from a range of perspectives.
Transcript: Key Terms: Anti-racism and white privilege.
Eric: Anti-Racism or to be an anti-racist is someone who opposes racist policies.
Will: As a white person, as a male, we tend to not notice our privilege, we tend to focus on the hard work we do. What we also don't notice often is when a person of color or a woman has to work twice as hard as we do.
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity & Inclusion for All project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Welcome, everyone, to the diversity and inclusion for our project. Today, we're exploring again different topics in race in America. I'm joined again by my colleagues and friends, Eric Washington and Will Katerberg. And we want to take a look today at some key insights for big ideas in diversity and inclusion today.
So I'm going to throw out some terms and then we're just going to have a few moments for each one to kind of unpack it a little bit. Point out some really important insights or things that are maybe misconceptions and need to be corrected slightly, and then maybe a helpful takeaway for each term. So here we go. I'm going to start with the term anti-racism. What's important to know about how this is being used and where it comes from?
Eric: Anti-Racism or to be an anti-racist is someone who opposes racist policies. And I would say that anti-racism as a term and as a concept, really, it goes it goes all the way back shoot to basically the reconstruction, although nobody’s using that language. But I think the term becomes becomes bandied about…it becomes used in the 1960s, late 1960s, with talks about reparations coming out in the late 60s and early black power movement. And you see it used in the 70s, for example, the Combahee River Collective, a group of African-American women, who were lesbians, they employ the term. And you see it employed during during the 1980s in legal scholarship. So it actually has a long history in terms of a concept. And it seems as though right now people are jumping on the term as though the term and concept is new and fresh.
Penny: I think one of the reasons it's been so prominent lately is actually the book and the work by Ibram Kendi. Right, How to be an Anti-Racist. That's actually helped people think about that again, undo, even though the term has been with us for a long time.
Eric: I think you're right. I think Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning that he published a few years ago, won won the National Book Award for non-fiction. He he placed he placed a term anti-racism as a category in terms of people who oppose racist policies throughout American history. So. So, yeah, he pulls that out and then puts it in the handy dandy book and it’s a bestseller. Especially from last year. And yes, anti-racism is a household term now.
Penny: And for me, I really associate the current way it's being used with this call to not be neutral, like to not float along and say, oh, racism or that diversity that just isn't my deal. It isn't my shtick -- isn't an option, because if you do that, you're actually part of the inertia and the problem. And what we need to do is actually get off the cart that's rolling down the hill and start pushing the other direction. So it's really for me, the way it's being used right now, when people talk about being anti-racist or anti-racism, it's really saying, hey, we all have to kind of do something. We have to recognize the problems and then work together to make our society and our world better and less racist and more fair and equitable.
Will: Yeah, I think that that's right, Penny, that I've used this metaphor and it's not mine, it belongs to Howard Zinn. But he said you can't be neutral on a moving train. As long as you're on the train, you're going with it. Whether you're choosing to actively or whether you're just like it's where it's going and it's …you're not really thinking about it. And so, when Kendi says you can't be neutral when it comes to racism, he means that when we don't think about it or we don't think it's our job or responsibility to think about it, our actions or inactions are passively supporting it. And for someone like me, who's white, when I'm not thinking about the privileges I have, if I'm simply accepting the privileges I have, if I'm consciously enjoying the privileges I have, in any of those cases, I'm passively or actively supporting racism as opposed to combating it. So, it does suggest that we have a burden to be clear about what our views are and to make a choice and then acknowledge that we've chosen to either be passively accepting, actively accepting racism, or actively opposing it.
Penny: It's a good challenge for all of us to just consider consider that in our own lives. Right.
Penny: White privilege. What does it mean, what does it not mean, and what's a helpful way to think about that?
Will: Well, since I'm white, I'm gonna jump in on this one, just as an anecdote, and then I'll let you all pick … pick this up from there. I didn't think about it, And this is precisely a mark of my white privilege. But when I go into a store, I don't worry about the salespeople or the store manager keeping an eye on me because he or she is worried that I might shoplift. I usually worry that they're going to harass me by asking me, can they help me? What would I like to buy? Can I get to get something for me? I just want to be left alone and look. But I've talked with, you know, African-American colleagues and and friends, and they've said that, you know, even when they're well-dressed, middle class looking, and, in fact, are middle class, you know, a professor or a lawyer, a doctor, they're aware that when they walk into a store and they're black, the salespeople are likely to keep an eye on them. And it's not because they're interested in selling them something, although they are that, too, presumably, but they're just a little bit more worried about black folks shoplifting than white folk. And I have the privilege of not being surveilled in that way when I walk into stores. And it's one of those little things I never noticed because, well, I was privileged.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah. And it's …in it's… in terms of like being watched in in the store. I want to let folks know that it's just not white people who are working in the store, that they're looking at black people or brown people, black people, because I've definitely experience black workers who keep an eye, who kept an eye on me, especially when I was a kid, woukld keep an eye on me the whole way. I'll be reading the magazine and the magazine rack at a local drugstore, and I'm reading the magazine, and in my peripheral vision, I see an African-American security guard looking right at me. And I might holler something at them or something. “I'm just reading,” you know, and yeah, being being accused of stealing is one thing and being watched in store. But also in terms of white, white privilege or not, you're talking about white privilege not being accused of stealing. And so forth, not being watched. But in terms of white privilege, also, it's it's also the accumulation of benefits. And again not being watched is is like a benefit. You get the benefit of the doubt. But it's it's an accumulation of benefits that white folk get generally that persons of color do not get. So it could be as important as black folk, for example, who are unable to get business loans and mortgage loans at a good rate, whereas someone white can. That's a privilege. And also going all the way back, because right now I'm doing doing some reading on on on Haiti, colonial …, and Haiti, the Haitian Revolution and the whole the whole system in a colonial sense, the whole colonial system privileged white people. And it was varying amounts of privilege, but it all centered on on on a racial hierarchy. Whereas if you were white, you at upper echelon and you had you had some benefits. And if you were, say, a person who was biracial, you have you had more privilege than somebody who was enslaved, who was like black in terms of skin color. So this this stuff goes all the way back to colonial era, goes all the way back to encounters and the creation of slave societies here in the Western Hemisphere
Penny: I think it's important to recognize that when some people hear white privilege, it kind of annoys them. It’s a trigger because they feel and rightly so, that they are family, maybe isn't rich or doesn't come from a wealthy background, that maybe they grew up with a lot of disadvantages and they really feel like their family, that they themselves have had to work really hard to get where they're at. And so they hear white privilege and they think, you're telling me that I don't deserve what I've worked really hard for or that that somehow it's unfair that I have a house now. But I've worked really hard and my family didn't inherit it,..give it to me with some big inheritance. So how can we talk about white privilege and explain it a little bit so that it makes sense to people coming from that perspective?
Will: From my point of view, I think two things. One is that as a white person, as a male, we tend to not notice our privilege, we tend to focus on the hard work we do. What we also don't notice often is when a person of color or a woman has to work twice as hard as we do because that person doesn't have the same generational wealth because of what Eric was describing. Not just in their own lives, but in their parents and grandparents and great grandparents and maybe even further back access to loans, to less expensive auto and home and life insurance and all those things. So they have generational wealth, even if it's very, very modest that a person of color, especially African-Americans in the United States, they have less. So we tend not to notice our privilege. We take it for granted as just the way things are. And then we don't like to hear that: well, yeah, you worked hard, but folks like me have to work even harder.
The other piece of it, I think, is that we're very bad in the United States when it comes to talking about economic class. And I think that's not just true on the right where you might think it's obvious they don't want to talk about economic class because they want to celebrate capitalism, but it's also become true on the left in the United States. There were there are strong ideas and it was very much President American politics to think about economic class and social class and and how the middle class and the well-off and the people who are born into those groups benefit in ways that skilled blue collar workers and unskilled blue collar workers didn't have. But we've kind of lost that language, I think, since the 1950s and 60s in the United States. And so we're left then to be aware of racial inequities and inequities of gender, but we don't have a good language of privilege and inequity when it comes to economic class. So I think that this is a national problem, but it does put a burden on those who are thinking about fighting racism and sexism to be conscious of their audiences and where people did grow up in difficult economic circumstances, whether in rural areas or in urban areas.
Eric: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. One thing that the language of white privilege does not argue, but those of those who use the term do not argue is it doesn't negate the fact that white persons work hard. They’re diligent, frugal, all that good stuff. And those who know the history of this country, especially the history of immigration, will argue that, of course, you know, Irish poor. Other other folks came here poor and they worked themselves to middle class status and above. But knowing that history actually helps to understand privilege, because, for example, this one book that I haven't finished reading it, like two thirds of it, two thirds done … autobiography written by Alex Wagner, who is a journalist, and I think she still is connected with MSNBC, but also the Atlantic. Her father is Irish and Irish ancestry. I think German, the German from Luxembourg, and her mother is from Burma. Now, people call it Myanmar. And when she is, she's writing on her father's family's trek to the United States. And she drew it plain in her language and pointed in her language to say that when they came to the United States, they moved to Iowa and they were able to get cheap land. Well, she said …she raised a question: who lived on that land before they got there. And she names an indigenous nation and talks about how those folk lost their land owing to an unjust treaty that they signed with the United States government. So she said, yeah, my my my poor, great, great grandfather left Luxemberg, came to land that had been cleared away and opened because of the indigenous group that had that had been forced off of that land. And she also talks about the system of capitalism that was built off of the backs of enslaved Africans. So she gets into that to talk about privilege. And she's not saying that her her great, great grandfather and great great grandparents didn't work hard. Of course, they worked hard to build what they have, but they have advantages that other folks did not have.
And a personal personal aside, I'm continually working on my own family history and doing genealogy, reading, reading census records. And, you know, it last year really dawned on me how my family, like every side of my family, fits within this narrative that we're talking about in terms of privilege and dis-privilege. Yeah. Oh, my great, great grandparents were born into slavery. They were young when when slavery ended, but they all were born enslaved. And then I look at the 1870 census records. So, 1880 census records. And I notice what they are doing in terms of occupation. And it's like farm laborer, and I look, if they own their houses and all the records say they rent. Well, in rural Louisiana, I know what that means. That means that they were sharecroppers, so they were enslaved. Then tied to the land through sharecropping. And then when my grandparents left rural Louisiana and moved to New Orleans, they didn't go, they didn't slide into good high paying jobs. They they were day laborers or they worked at a dry cleaners making 120 dollars a month. My mother's mother, she would do like day work from time to time, where she would go into a white person's home and do laundry or cook or do this, do that. My mother tells me that she would go along with my grandmother sometimes to do that work to help her. It’s that disadvantage that is stark when you compare to, again, newcomers who are coming to the United States, yeah, coming coming poor, but by the time we get to the 1960s, a lot of those groups have had to have achieved middle class status. But but why not? But why do African-Americans in general? So you have to look at the whole system that's been against African-American progress. So that's gonna spill over into other discussions.
Penny: Yeah, I think for me, too, it's helpful just to remember that the idea of white privilege does not mean that white people aren't also poor and don't also struggle and have challenges and work really hard to get where they're at. But it does mean that the color of their skin is not one of the hurdles that they've had to face. And that I mean, we can look historically, that historically in our country, sort of the rules of the game to be successful have been stacked against certain groups by law. Right. There were laws that that allowed people to be slaves and other people to be masters or that allowed certain people to not to say, you, if you're black, you can't live in this neighborhood effectively and you can't get good loans. And so historically, even if we don't even talk about today, which is historically the rules of the game have been sort of stacked against certain people and allowed other people to play the game and have a good chance to succeed. So there's just been sort of those things happening that's part of white privilege.
Will: That's exactly right. And it's thinking in terms of layers of privilege or inequity. And if you're well-off, white and male, then you really don't have any hurdles. If you are poor, black and female, you've got a lot of lot of hurdles. And so we need, yeah, we need to think in terms of intersections where things like gender, race and economic class either overlap or don't overlap.
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