On the plane, I wanted to enact a new narrative that included the whiteness of the man who had stepped in front of me. I felt his whiteness should be a component of what we both understood about him, even as his whiteness would not be the entirety of who he is. His unconscious understanding of whiteness meant the space I inhabited should have been only his. The old script would have left his whiteness unacknowledged in my consideration of his slight. But a rude man and a rude white man have different presumptions. Just as when a white person confronted by an actual black human being needs to negotiate stereotypes of blackness so that he can arrive at the person standing before him, I hoped to give the man the same courtesy but in the reverse. Seeing his whiteness meant I understood my presence as an unexpected demotion for him. It was too bad if he felt that way. Still, I wondered, what is this “stuckness” inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies? I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.
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The phrase “white privilege” was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define “invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” McIntosh came to understand that she benefited from hierarchical assumptions and policies simply because she was white. I would have preferred if instead of “white privilege” she had used the term “white dominance,” because “privilege” suggested hierarchical dominance was desired by all. Nonetheless, the phrase has stuck. The title of her essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies” was a mouthful. McIntosh listed 46 ways white privilege is enacted. “Number 19: I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial”; “Number 20: I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race”; “Number 27: I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared”; “Number 36: If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.” I’m not clear why McIntosh stopped at 46 except as a way of saying, “You get the picture.” My students were able to add their own examples easily.
My students and I also studied the work of the white documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow. In the last couple of years, Dow has been part of Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (Incite), which gathered data on more than 850 people who identify as white or partly white and the communities in which they live. He filmed more than a hundred of their oral histories. This work, like McIntosh’s, was another way of thinking about the ordinariness of white hierarchical thinking. I asked Dow what he learned in his conversations with white men. “They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their own narratives and coming up short,” he said. “I include myself in that,” he added after a moment. “We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male archetype. The individual actor on the grand stage always had the support of a genocidal government, but this is not the narrative we grew up with. It’s a challenge to adjust.”
The interviews, collected in Incite’s initial report, “Facing Whiteness,” vary greatly in terms of knowledge of American history and experiences. One interviewee declares: “The first slave owner in America was a black man. How many people know that? The slaves that were brought to America were sold to the white man by blacks. So, I don’t feel that we owe them any special privileges other than that anybody else has, any other race.” While this interviewee denies any privilege, another has come to see how his whiteness enables his mobility in America: “I have to accept the reality that because I’m a man, I — whether I was aware of that or not at any specific time — probably had some sort of hand up in a situation.” He added, “The longer I’m in law enforcement and the more aware I am of the world around me, the more I realize that being of Anglo-Saxon descent, being a man and being in a region of America that is somewhat rural, and because it’s rural by default mostly white, means that I definitely get preference.” This interviewee, who while recognizing his privilege, and who according to Whitney Dow had been “pretty ostracized because of his progressiveness” in the workplace, still indicates — through his use of words like “probably” and phrases like “because it’s rural by default mostly white” — that he believes white privilege is in play in only certain circumstances. Full comprehension would include the understanding that white privilege comes with expectations of protection and preferences no matter where he lives in the country.
[How privilege became a provocation.]
How angry could I be at the white man on the plane, the one who glanced at me each time he stood up the way you look at a stone you had tripped on? I understood that the man’s behavior was also his socialization. My own socialization had, in many ways, prepared me for him. I was not overwhelmed by our encounter because my blackness is “consent not to be a single being.” This phrase, which finds its origins in the work of the West Indian writer Édouard Glissant but was reintroduced to me in the recent work of the poet and critical theorist Fred Moten, gestures toward the fact that I can refuse the white man’s stereotypes of blackness, even as he interacts with those stereotypes. What I wanted was to know what the white man saw or didn’t see when he walked in front of me at the gate.
