The Good Ally

Nova Reid

• Publisher: HQ
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008439507
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

1. The Trouble with White Privilege and its Intersection with Racism

‘White supremacy is not the shark. It’s the water.’

GUANTE1

We cannot talk about racism without talking about white privilege and we cannot talk about white privilege without talking about white supremacy. So let’s start there.

In order for racism and systemic disadvantage to exist, white supremacy and systemic advantage need to co-exist. That’s the core component conveniently missing from conversations about racism that gets glossed over or ignored. We have to acknowledge and name white supremacy without spiralling into shame.

Let me clarify: when other anti-racism educators and I talk about white supremacy, we are not talking about a group of ‘bad’ white men in pointy hoods with skinheads and swastika tattoos. We’re talking about an entire system.

There are key moments in history when white supremacy and racism really started to take hold and having racist laws helped. From the early fifteenth century, the white British elite embedded slave codes in Virginia. These English common laws extended to nearly all of its American colonies, including the Caribbean, and controlled the treatment of Africans.2 The Act prevented Black people and Indigenous Americans having protection from the law and placed them outside of civil society, with Africans given the lowest human status.3 In 1661, another law, embedded by the British, called ‘An Act for Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes’ (also known as the Barbados Slave Code) was used to legalise the enslavement of Black people. The code, according to historian David Olusoga, described Africans as ‘heathenish’, ‘brutish’, and an ‘uncertain and dangerous pride of people’.4 According to Civil Rights lawyer Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, no other human community was ‘designated nonhuman by law and treated as cargo’.5 None. The seed of Black inferiority was well and truly sown and these Acts gave legal right to inflict violence as a means to control Africans.

White supremacy was galvanised in the eighteenth century when white, male European scientists started to fuse a dangerous concoction of prejudice, ignorance and science. The aforementioned Friedrich Blumenbach coined the term ‘Caucasian’, inspired by Mount Caucasus which straddles Europe and Asia, because he thought the most ‘beautiful race of men’ lived there: the Georgians. He came to the conclusion that because white people can turn from white to brown but not vice versa6 and because their skulls were also the ‘primitive colour of mankind’7 – even though all human skulls are white – they should be referred to as Caucasian (yes, I too remain baffled).

Fellow ‘scientist’ Linnaeus didn’t just stop at categorising humans by skin colour either. He started to assert positive or negative biases and apply them to entire groups of people. Such as Europeans (white) being ‘gentle, acute and governed by laws’ and Africans (Black) being ‘lazy’.8 These negative stereotypes by these scientists (that were often concocted without ever coming into any contact with Africans), still impact us today. For instance, in 2019, Research by NatCen and Runnymede Trust reported that 44 per cent of those surveyed believe some races are born harder working that others.9

If we look at history as far back as the Roman Empire, slavery was a common global practice, and empires would often enslave prisoners as a consequence of war, not as a consequence of the colour of one’s skin.10 Interracial relationships were commonplace. Skin colour was not a notable mark of character and you were more likely to be judged by tribe or religion.11 Fast forward to the fifteenth century during colonial invasion, when Indigenous people were the original ‘preferred choice’ for white Europeans to enslave. The Taino people in Jamaica were known as a thriving community until the Spanish colonial invasion, when they started to die at alarmingly rapid rates from exposure to European diseases, such as smallpox, and from colonial enslavement, and by the mid-sixteenth century they were near extinction12 and white elite Europeans had started to set their sights on Black Africans instead. This is where the function of slavery took on an even more sinister turn.

It was pseudoscience that created anti-Blackness, the targeted racial prejudice towards Black people – especially those with darker skin tones – and their culture and values. It was this ‘science’ that was used to introduce chattel slavery (where an enslaved person became the personal property of another), and it was this science that was used to legitimise kidnapping, torture, oppression and the dehumanisation of Black people. This wasn’t just a blip in history. It wasn’t just a social practice enforced for a couple of years. It was a social practice that was embedded in law that formed a huge part of the global economy, for centuries.

White supremacy is a system that has such a powerful and suffocating grip. It is often invisible, upheld consciously and unconsciously and continues to have a detrimental impact on society, human rights and societal disadvantage and societal advantage such as white privilege.

Understanding White Privilege

‘A mark of maturity from white people is moving from shame and defensiveness about what we didn’t know, to taking responsibility for hate we should have known.’

DAVID W SWANSON13

‘White Privilege’ is an academic term, still relatively new to the mainstream – and that is why it is so often misinterpreted and misunderstood. Understanding its origins and being able to explain examples will not only deepen your own understanding, but as an ally, will also be key to busting reductive myths.

Originally named ‘White Skin Privilege’ in the 1960s – it was born out of an in-depth 40-year study spearheaded by white American academic, writer and activist Theodore W. Allen, published in the height of the American civil rights movement. Through his analysis, the data consistently revealed that there were societal privileges that benefit people identified as white beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the exact same social, political, or economic circumstances. That’s it. It is an inescapable consequence of the construct of white supremacy.

Of course, white (skin) privilege (and it’s not clear when or why ‘skin’ was eventually dropped), will intersect with class, and let’s face it, us Brits in particular don’t have a healthy relationship with class. We often associate privilege with greed, and poverty with laziness and not working hard enough. Class disparities remain rife. However white (skin) privilege has absolutely nothing to do with wealth; it doesn’t mean you haven’t experienced trauma, abuse, wrongdoing or financial hardship. It just means that, as a white person, whatever challenges or circumstances you may personally face in your life, you have not received systemic racism because of the colour of your skin in addition to those challenges. Being able to acknowledge that without it taking away from your own experiences of struggle, or turning it into an ‘Oppression Olympics’ event, is vital.

While white (skin) privilege can’t be directly compared to other ‘privilege’, we can better understand where we benefit from societal privilege by taking into consideration our social location. Our social location is the social position each of us holds within society, based upon social characteristics deemed to be important by any given society. Our social location can vary and be defined by many different things, from class, to skin colour, to geographical location, to gender, to body size, religion, ability and sex orientation. For example, we all have forms of societal privilege. I have societal privilege as a heterosexual woman. I can kiss my husband in public without a second thought, without fearing a homophobic attack for simply expressing a public display of affection.

A common and extreme defensive response I get (mostly from men, interestingly enough) is, ‘You can’t say that white homeless people are privileged, they’re homeless.’ Aside from displaying a strong commitment to misunderstanding the phrase ‘white skin privilege’, if we look through the lens of social location, unsurprisingly (given our history of social housing discrimination and private landlords who still discriminate based on race to this very day),14 homelessness disproportionately impacts Black folk and folk in other Marginalised Ethnic Groups, with one in three homeless households being Black and other Marginalised Ethnic Groups, compared to one in seven homeless households being white15; Black people are three times likely to experience homelessness.16 What statements like this also highlight is that their racial bias and perception of poverty in Britain is solely a white problem.

Whilst a white person will experience the very real systemic disadvantage of homelessness and all the dehumanisation, violence and stigma that comes with it, they will not be experiencing the abuse of racism on top. Acknowledging that doesn’t take away from the real experiences of facing homelessness for anyone, nor does the suffering of white people who are homeless somehow justify the continued racial abuse of Black and Brown people who aren’t.

Let’s reframe privilege as advantage. Even though I experience discrimination for being a woman and racism for being Black, in my social location, I can also recognise, as a Black able-bodied woman I still have societal advantage. As a woman and then a Black woman, whilst statistically receiving less pay than white women, nearly 40 per cent less than white men in similar roles, I will statistically receive more than my Black peers who also have a disability. Accepting and acknowledging this does not take away from my own very real and painful experiences of gender discrimination, systemic racism and anti-Blackness as a dark-skinned Black woman.

I don’t feel ashamed about who I am as an individual or those ‘unearned societal privileges’ I have acquired for simply being born in this body, but I make sure I am continuing to be aware of the myriad of ways my disabled peers are impacted by discrimination, how I may uphold and benefit from a society that is built for able-bodied people so I can better raise awareness, advocate and support.

In the same vein, we don’t want you to feel ashamed for simply being born white. That’s not the work. We do, however, want you to be better aware of it, to acknowledge and interrogate how you continue to benefit, to find ways to address it, influence change and advocate for better race equity for all and to accept that white skin privilege only exists because systemic racism and anti-Blackness co-exist.

Guilt and shame are common and normal responses to people who care about tackling racism. But you staying stuck in guilt and shame is no good to any of us and certainly isn’t solid grounds for allyship.

The Power of Acceptance

I will never forget Jude Kelly, CBE, founder of Women of The World Festival and someone I would describe as an ally, likening anti-racism work to the first step of the 12-step programme, an observation that deeply resonated with one of my anti-racism students who, at the time, was eight years sober. She explained to me that what was most impactful was Jude’s emphasis on the power of acceptance in both addiction and anti-racism: acceptance that there is a problem and acceptance of your role as a white person or someone who benefits from white skin privilege in it, highlighting that no genuine progress in anti-racism can be made until you accept your own racism.

I witness students going through a full range of emotions before they truly get to a place of acceptance. I know it’s a confronting and vulnerable place to be. This work can turn your world and self-perception upside down, and what I observe is a grieving process. From facing hard truths, to letting go of the person you thought you were and also being willing to let go of unearned societal privileges. That is a form of loss. In order to process loss, we have to go through a grieving process; we can’t bypass it.

Donna Lancaster, an author, healer and therapist, explains that grief is not just about bereavement, but a natural response to any kind of loss, but there is a widespread resistance to grieve, because of a desire to avoid experiencing darker feelings, so we cut off emotions instead. Why? Because grief brings about big feelings and for some, it’s simply just too painful.

The stiff upper lip and ‘keep c...