- Banned
- #1
How can white Americans be free? - Salon.com
Excerpt:
Now watch, as the naysayers and deniers of the reality, rush to judgment to deny the reality and are quick to call this "racism", because "telling the truth" about them (whites, "in general"), actually is "blaming "whitey", for all of the ills of black and brown peoples, everywhere. No responsibility. No acknowledgment of their part. Just more and more "black racism" and "whining" coming from the left, and minorities "brainwashed" and "shackled" by the Democratic Party, no?
Excerpt:
"The beginning.
In the beginning there was Whiteness. This is the glittering starting point. This is The Default. This is what we measure everything else against.
Its clear that we as Black and Brown Americans, are still recovering from the racist indoctrinations of the past 500 years. Though laughable it sounds, white Americans, too, have suffered from this crime. As our country began and brown races were systematically denied the right to be human and so internalized the role of the savage, white consciousness bullied its way into objectivity. The white mind became the unbiased mind that objectively observed all the rest. This is called The Default: The belief that the white experience is a neutral and objective experience and white consciousness is the standard consciousness unless otherwise specified. White culture, and American culture as a whole, suffers from the tragedy of whiteness as the default setting.
Being The Default keeps white Americans from being liberated because it denies them a specific identity by absorbing them into neutral blankness. This creates a lonely detachment from the rest of the world. Being The Default is the largest privilege granted to white Americans, yet it is so deeply entrenched it is the most invisible (we cannot see the edges of the atmosphere, but it exists). Whites benefit from being The Default by having inherent legitimacy in a way thats denied to people of color. Their experience of life is normal. Whites are free from the constant awareness (and subsequent constant paranoia) of existing in another persons world. Because The Default has so successfully dominated our subconscious, because our egos have been shaped by it from the moment of birth, we perpetuate it in micro ways while fighting inequality with more obvious actions. The silent poison continues to poison. Whiteness as The Default keeps brown people in subjugation by convincing them that every part of their being, physical, spiritual and emotional, exists within a white narrative. When you are made to exist within something you are forced to be smaller than that which contains you. This is precisely the basis of racist thought. Brown existence, brown consciousness is smaller.
Owning Whiteness
White people frequently ask me what my ethnicity is. I like to ask them back and they preface their answer with a sheepish expression, Oh, Im just regular white they say, or Oh, just plain boring white. They dont believe they have an ethnicity because The Default has erased European ethnicity to absorb people of European descent (and a few lucky Middle Easterners) into Whiteness.
My best friend of 12 years is from an Italian-American family. When I discussed The Default with her recently, she talked about never feeling comfortable with checking off white as a race and wanting to write in Italian:
What is being asked for is a statement of your identity, and there is a discord between how I feel about myself (Italian) and how the world boxes me in (white). I dont think I deserve a medal for being Italian, or second generation, or for having inherited issues that I think are not necessarily definitive of all the immigrant experience but certainly are related, but I think my family story is one that has not yet ended, that is still being worked through in my generation, and so to say simply I am white is not only wrong, but it erases the idea that any of that other stuff exists.
How can white people be ethnic without annoying everybody by appearing to deny their white privilege? How can white people be free to suffer without appearing to forget the violent injustices of the country and the enormous burden that the myth of Whiteness places on the black and brown consciousness. How does a white Jewish woman share her genuine pain over her large nose and her curly hair without being punched in the face by a black woman? How do white people fight for freedom for their spiritual selves and legitimacy for their external experience when the world is still so racist and they benefit from their whiteness?
I ask you, again, not to laugh.
In order for white suffering to have a voice, white people must realize the largest and most invisible way in which they benefit from their white privilege, and its the same thing thats causing their frustration being The Default. If Person A is actively supporting and benefiting from a system that oppresses Person B, it is very hard for Person B to hear Person A say, But Im hurt too! However, if Person A is actively working to dismantle the system they benefit from but which oppresses Person B, then Person B is finally seen and Person As pain can be embraced. In order to see a person you must see the truth of their pain. If you deny their pain, you refuse to see them. This is what makes black people invisible. And black invisibility is what makes white pain invisible to black people.
And so we live our lives never seeing each other.
When White Americans see Black and Brown Americans in this way, Brown and Black Americans will accept their pain. It is a cycle that begins with destroying The Default.
The fight against inequality, the fight against The Default, is a fight for white spiritual and emotional freedom, not just the freedom of people of color, women, or gays and lesbians. It is only by seeing white specificity that we can awaken to the fallacy of the idea that humans are separate. Perhaps if whites see their own psychic freedom at risk, a new racial awareness will arise naturally......."
Now watch, as the naysayers and deniers of the reality, rush to judgment to deny the reality and are quick to call this "racism", because "telling the truth" about them (whites, "in general"), actually is "blaming "whitey", for all of the ills of black and brown peoples, everywhere. No responsibility. No acknowledgment of their part. Just more and more "black racism" and "whining" coming from the left, and minorities "brainwashed" and "shackled" by the Democratic Party, no?