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PART 1
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FACING UP TO
WHITE PRIVILEGE
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
We live in a world that is imbued with the idea that the human population is divided into races (Irvin Painter, 2010:119; Kendi, 2016:18). This may not always be obvious, particularly if we are white and live mostly among white people. White people do not usually think of themselves as āhavingā a race, but in this book, I will challenge the attitude, often held by white people, that they are racially and culturally neutral (Dyer, 1997; Frankenberg, 1999; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998). We live within a racialised world, in other words, one in which all are divided into different races (Bonnett, 2000). Although originally thought to have a biological basis (Mahoney, 1997), this has been thoroughly discredited. Nevertheless, race is still very much a powerful social construct that influences the way we relate to others.
This book has many challenges to white people. I challenge the idea that white people are without a race, that our political arrangements are superior to others, that we have liberal-minded and fair societies, that past injustices are in the past and that we, on the whole, have been a net positive for the world, particularly as our technologies have actually brought the world to the possibility of extinction. This hard-hitting quote from Susan Sontag, written as long ago as 1967, puts this very well:
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean and Algebra, Shakespeare, Parliamentary Democracy, Baroque Churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets et al., donāt redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white races are the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone ā its ideologies and inventions ā which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. (Sontag, 1967:57)
This book is based on two connected ideas. The first is to show how white people are over-privileged compared with other races. The second is that white privilege will come to an end before too long. I hope this book will demonstrate how white people can, nevertheless, contribute positively to the way in which power is distributed worldwide in the future by not denying or clinging on to their privilege.
Reaching these thoughts has been a long journey. When I was a child I was surrounded by white people and I only had a few images of black people to inform my knowledge of them. One was from a childrenās geography book that depicted Africans dancing round a fire holding spears. I also remember well the story of Little Black Sambo, which was not considered racist at the time. It just depicted a little boy who saved his family from a tiger. These depictions nevertheless gave the impression of rather simple people, particularly through the illustrations, and no doubt had an effect on my sense of who black people were. My gollywog was one of my favorite toys and I remember having a feeling of loss when, in my late teens, I came to realise that this stylised black soft toy with big features and fuzzy hair, who was incongruously dressed in a red jacket, striped trousers and bow tie, should be rejected as a racist artefact. I even saved tokens from jars of jam to acquire a āgollyā brooch. A warm memory of my childhood was destroyed. Although there is a way in which I was an innocent child delighting in a toy without any knowledge of its meaning in the wider world, it nevertheless affected my sense of who black people are, as it does all people who are given such representations of black people as children.
It did not occur to my parents, who were liberal-minded socialists, that there was anything wrong with these influences and images. They taught me that it was wrong to be prejudiced against black people but my mother, for instance, if referring to a black man, would say that he was a ācoloured gentlemanā in a slightly coy voice. The impression was that she thought she was being broad minded in calling him a gentleman. These sorts of influences go very deep and have no doubt affected me to this very day, although I now see myself as being white within a multicultural society. At some other level, these formative experiences cannot be eradicated.
My first real encounter with a black person was a Nigerian friend at school who became my ābest friendā when I was about 14. When I was 12 we heard that a Nigerian girl was coming to the school and there was some discussion about what colour her skin would be. One girl said she would be black all over and I said that the palms of her hands would be white, which was strenuously denied by the others. When we saw her palms, no one was quite sure what colour they were, so it wasnāt mentioned. She was often mocked by some of the children at school ā called Coco, for example. There was no attempt to curb this behaviour by the teachers. The drama teacher made her āwhite upā with pink make-up to play the part of Chorus in Shakespeareās Henry V, in spite of the fact she could well have played this role as a black person without it being very radical. It made her look ridiculous, but she bore it with fortitude. When we left school at the age of 18, she came to understand the racism she had encountered and she rejected us all. It was a great sadness to me at the time, and remains so. I have often tried to find her through the internet when such things became possible ā so far unsuccessfully.
I did not seriously think of myself as being white until I started my doctoral research in the late 1990s although, if asked, I would have said I was white. I discovered that, like me, most white people do not think of themselves as having a race at all. I was nevertheless interested in cultural difference and promoting racial equality and understanding. Maybe my experience with my school friend led me to be concerned with these issues most of my life. However, I thought of this concern as coming from a desire to challenge racist views and work for equality and understanding between races.
It was through my doctoral research that I came to see that the problem of racism starts with white people and that, if I am to understand racism, I must first understand myself and the culture in which I am embedded as a white person. This journey continues and, having started with my doctoral research and subsequently written a book about being white ā Being White in the Helping Professions (Ryde, 2009) ā I know there is always more to explore, learn and understand.
It is important for me to remember, as I write this book, that it is impossible for me not to write from inside my own experience. This is also true of the reader when reading it ā you can only read it in the light of your own experience. I am white. I come from a culture that is implacably imbued with white experience and a sense of entitlement. I look out of those eyes and see the world from that perspective, however hard I try not to do so.
Of course, like other human beings, I can be self-reflective and empathetic to others. I can have good intentions and desire to change. But I can never really and thoroughly experience the world from an other-than-white perspective. This, of course, limits me but does put me in a good position to challenge other white people, including, but not only, those in the helping professions such as social workers, counsellors and psychotherapists, and that is the purpose of writing this book. It is an important challenge, as finding a way to create and work towards a more equal world is vital. The destructive power of global inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009) leads some people and nations to live in poverty, while others are vastly more wealthy. Besides the conflict this inevitably brings, it also leads to the rich (mostly white) nations over-exploiting the worldās resources, which is the biggest threat to the flourishing of life on earth, and even its survival. Towards the end of this book, in Chapter 13, I will be exploring how a more equal global society can lead to a more peaceful and sustainable world.
Since writing the book Being White in the Helping Professions (Ryde, 2009), I have defined white people as those who are from western Europe or the diaspora that originated there. It therefore includes many people now living in North America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and other countries where western Europeans settled and colonised.
Originally it was assumed, by explorers and travellers and later by scientists, that there was a hierarchy of human races, Anglo Saxons being at the top and āNegrosā at the bottom (Irvin Painter, 2010; Kendi, 2016). Although it is now well known that āraceā as a category has no physiological basis (Cambell & Oakes, 1998; Mahoney, 1997), attitudes that arise from this idea persist and appear to be engrained in the human psyche, as we will see as this book unfolds. I will explore the history of āwhiteā as a racial category in Chapter 2.
Much of what I have described above has not changed since I wrote my book in 2009 but, although less than a decade has passed between then and writing this book, the world has moved on in various significant ways that make a difference to the position of white people globally. This will be explored in later chapters but suffice it to say at this point, changes in the economic power of Asian nations are set to transform the balance of power globally, and the further spread of wars in the Middle East and the rise of nationalism and far-right politics in Europe and America have brought with them a global āperfect stormā which could force change more quickly than seemed likely to me a few years ago.
So why do I use the word āprivilegeā in the title of this book? It was western Europeans who named themselves as white and saw others as āpeople of colourā, whether brown, black, red or yellow. Other writers used other, quasi-scientific names such as Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid (Alcoff, 2015; Baum, 2008; Irvin Painter, 2010). They imagined themselves, as white people, to be more capable and intelligent than those from other races. They saw non-whites as being available for their own use, much as they liked to think of animals (Irvin Painter, 2010). The history of this will be briefly outlined in the next chapter. It is not an exhaustive history of all white peoples. For instance, I do not give much mention to the European colonisation of South America. I hope, nevertheless, that I have written enough to show how deep the underpinning of white peoplesā sense of superiority goes, and the way their historical determination to enforce dominance has given them an ability to sit in a privileged position, with benefits that continue to this day.
It comes home to me more and more that white people tend to see racial prejudice as a problem black people have, but it would not even exist as a problem if white people had not invented it and put themselves on the top of the pile. In her book, Notes on a Foreign Country, Suzy Hansen (2017: 89) says:
The revelation to me was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to theirs. Iād had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality.
This book is an exploration of white privilege within the context of a world in which the idea of āraceā affects the relationship between groups of people in a way that provokes dangerous conflict, unthinking prejudice and disastrous misunderstanding. As recently as the second half of the 20th century, with laws prohibiting racial prejudice in many countries globally, it seemed to me, and those I knew at the time, that the world was heading for greater racial equality. In recent years, there has been a marked upsurge in the rise of far-right nationalistic political parties and politicians in Europe such as Alternative fĆ¼r Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), Front National in France, Freiheitliche Partei Ćsterreichs (Freedom Party of Austria), The Finns in Finland, The Danish Peopleās Party, Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) in Holland, Lega Nord (North League) in Italy, Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) and The UK Independence Party in Britain. They all have nationalistic sentiments, want to greatly restrict immigration and are enthusiastically followed by a great percentage of the population of each country, if not the majority. They can no longer be considered to be on the very fringes of the electorate. To a party, they have welcomed Donald Trump who has, of course, been the most successful far-right politician and came to power almost in spite of the American Republican Party. With the UK voting to leave the European Union (Brexit) and Donald Trump becoming President of the USA, it now seems that progress towards racial equality has halted or even reversed.
Todayās world is rapidly changing. It is becoming more and more interlinked as globalisation becomes the norm (Menzies, 2016) and digital technology advances exponentially, but it is also under great pressure from over population and crises due to climate change and political, often violent, upheavals. These changes are complex and frequently connected with each other (Fioramonti, 2016). This will be explored in more detail in Chapters 4 and 13.
This book is written with the āhelpingā professions in mind (doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors) but will be of interest much more widely, including to anyone who is interested in thinking about what will help us to live in a more just, peaceful and equal world. We all live and work within a racialised society and it behoves us to understand the complex way in which cultural attitudes affect individuals and groups within it.
Even workplaces and professions have their own culture which ensures that they are blind to their own prejudices. My own profession of psychotherapy, for instance, is very slow to be more diverse in spite of an espoused desire to become less monocultural. The vast majority of its practitioners are white. This, in itself, has a huge effect on the experience of non-white people, many of whom think that psychotherapy is not for them.
That is not to say that psychotherapy as a profession has nothing to offer those who are not white (Ryde, 2009). Some of the insights that originate in psychotherapy theorising can be useful to understand these issues and I will draw on them in this book. I will also draw on the work of sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, economists, historians, philosopher...
