Recently Steve Locke wrote an incredibly on-point and heartfelt piece for The Good Men Project about why he was tired of talking about race. Locke, a talented artist and art professor, explained that "as a black person, I am called on often to speak for my 'race.' I can never give an opinion without it being assumed to be that of a multitude." At the same time Locke details the hypocrisy that often evolves when he engages others in conversations about the continuing impact of racism in American society and is dismissed, attacked, or accused of being incapable of being objective. Locke notes that anyone genuinely committed to learning about race and how race has and continues to shape our country and everyday lives has "libraries full of books, interviews, essays, lectures, and symposia" to draw from but that he, for one, is tired.
Steve, I feel you man, I really do. Talking about race is exhausting, especially in a world that pretends it's a conversation that no longer needs to be had, especially when faced with an already hostile audience because of the color of your skin, and especially because, as you point out, "whenever white people want to talk about race, they never want to talk about themselves." Which is, of course, why we all need to keep talking about race.
And let me be clear about whom I mean by "we." I mean you. Whoever you are, whatever your identity, you should talk about race.
As an educator who researches and teaches about issues of social identity I find myself talking about race almost every day. That's what I signed up for. But the thing is, even if it wasn't my job to talk about race I still live in a raced world where race is talked about around me and to me, whether I like it or not. And that is not only because I am a person of color. Certainly, the color of my skin, like the fact that I was born with a vagina, influences the way the world perceives and treats me, but that same world perceives and treats EVERYONE in certain ways because of the color of their skin. Just as men's everyday experiences are affected by constructions of gender and heterosexuals benefit from constructions of normative sexuality, white people live in a raced world, too. We are all surrounded by implicit (and explicit) race talk. I, for one, want my voice and the voices of others who want progress, to be a part of the conversation.
One of the tenants of feminism is that the lived, everyday experiences of women matter and should be considered equally valuable to those of men if we are to move toward a gender equitable society. We encourage women who have been the victims of gendered violence to tell their stories in order to de-stigmatize this experience. We call out department stores that sell shirts that tell our daughters if they are pretty they don't have to do homework. We ask that our female politicians be judged equally to their male counterparts and not on what they're wearing. We say aloud and repeat the fact that women continuing to make less money than men for the same work is the result of institutionalized sexism. We understand that constructions of gender are everywhere, even when not spoken about explicitly. Those of us invested in gender equality do all these things because talking about gender, naming it and questioning it, can be empowering. The more we talk, the more we redefine the gendered social constructions that hurt us all. I'm sure you see where I'm going here.
Locke's desire not to talk about race reminded me of an experiment conducted last year by John L. Jackson, Jr. (no relation) of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Jackson attempted a 40-day fast from talking about race. In an interview with NPR he explained that from day one this fast turned out to be impossible. "Race is around every corner, so I had to excuse myself from every conversation. I couldn't read any headline because it is there already," he said. "The experiment proved that if you're not talking about race at all you're not actually talking about the contemporary moment in a way that's going to get us to someplace progressive."
Exactly. So let's talk about race.
Contrary to the naive (and destructive) idea that we should live in a "colorblind" society where simply avoiding race as a topic makes it go away, talking about race, identifying its continuing impact on individuals and our society at large, allows us to move toward addressing continuing inequalities and validating a diverse set of experiences.
And let me again be clear, I do not mean that only people of color should talk about race. In fact, I agree with Steve Locke that people of color face the unfair burden of being expected to talk about race, even when they don't want to or don't, frankly, know much about it in an intellectual sense. I have seen this in my classroom when white students fall silent on issues of race and look to their black and brown classmates to address complex racial issues single-handedly. It's as if my white students think that despite their peers sharing their age and educational level, the extra melanin in their skin has imbued them with the wisdom of Martin Luther King, the tenacity of Cesear Chavez, and the patience of Ghandi. I promise you, it has not. Similarly, like Locke, I have experienced the sting of being told I'm being "too sensitive" or "unobjective" about race many times, because of, yep, my race. Which is exactly why I want everyone to talk about race.
As Locke points out, as long as only people of color are asked to speak on race and then dismissed for doing so, white people maintain the privilege of not having to recognize the way race affects their everyday lives. Just as we need "good men" who are willing to talk about how being a man uniquely privileges them and how dominant constructions of masculinity hurt them, men who are willing to speak up against rape culture on college campuses and homophobia in the military, we need white folks to have open, public conversations about how their whiteness affects their everyday lives and to speak up against individuals, policies, and institutions that perpetuate racial hierarchies by refusing to talk about race. Silence isn't only consent; silence is like giving a system based in racial hierarchies a bear hug and cooking it a romantic dinner.
I plan to keep talking about race, just like I plan to keep talking about sexism, homophobia, and classism. I talk about race because I don't know how not to and because I wish desperately that others couldn't help themselves either.
*Originally published on Role/Reboot
Note: Steve Locke already provided a valuable reading list with his discussion, in that spirit I would add:
White Women Race Matters, Ruth Frankenberg
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, George Lipsitz
White Like Me, Tim Wise
Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins
Seeing a Colorblind Future, Patricia Williams
Follow Sarah J. Jackson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sjjphd
What makes Black people "black" is not that they are a different biological specimen from White humanity, but that they have a different ethnicity: black American. Ethnicity is fluid. It accommodates different definitions, assimilation, inter-marriage and change. The fake discussion about race does not.
People can visit others' ethnic neighbourhoods, restaurants, enjoy an ethnic experience, join an ethnic dance group or choir. You can't join a "race". Race is saddled with a terrible history. Ethnicity is not. And not only that, but it dilutes the monolithic white "race", as "white" people get identified and begin to identify themselves by ethnicity as well: Italian, Irish, Jewish, British, Polish, or mixed. Then, instead of white and black, we have: Irish, British, Black American, Jamaican, African, Jewish, Italian, Polish, etc.
When we look at it this way, we see the actual diversity of human experience and the equality of each and every ethnic group.
BTW, This is how we look at it in Canada. You don't hear the Race discussion here (in Canada, I mean). It's time for Americans to move on.
I just think it would be helpful to the Black community in the US to start thinking of themselves as an ethnic group, and as one of the pieces of the mosaic in society instead of a separate "race", which connotes separateness, a different species, and to be frank, apartheid.
The concept of "race" as a classification of peoples based primarily on the color of their skin was first employed by Francois Bernier, a French physician in 1684. It was first used in an authoritative way in 1735 by Carolus Linnaeus in his influential Natural System (West, 1988). As used since then, it refers most often to a person's or group's lineage based on color. Whereas ethnicity has to do with place of origin, race is a socially constructed category based on genetics.
There is some ambiguity and ambivalence in the literature at present about the interplay of race and culture. Racism is (apparently) based on race. Therefore some argue that racism must be seen separately from multiculturalism and argue for multiracial rather than multicultural education as a prescription for combating racism. Many others, however, hold that issues of race, culture, and class are all present in the dynamics of racism, so that multicultural education (understood as including issues of race, culture, class, and gender) is the preferred prescription for racism. Still others prefer to use race to refer to the "human race" and to identify racial groups within that larger descriptor. (See ethnicity, multicultural education, racism.)
From: "Multicultural Terms In Use." An amazon ebook. For the contribution to the conversation of multiculturalism, and diversity, multicultural education, used by writer, educators and journalist,ect.
Relative to race, the only white I can racall without hesitation who stepped up for tue equality of race, was John Brown. LOOK what they did to him.
It was all a lot of fun sort of, but it was just a long-winded way of saying "Respect each other. The business is the task at hand. Step outside the guidelines and there will be consequences, up to and including termination."
I have a slightly different view of talking about race. I think it's become politically incorrect to do so (unless you're a "person of color"), for one, but I also feel that excessive emphasis on race has perpetuated the stereotypes and divides between the races. I believe that the Democratic party, and groups like La Raza, as one example, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as another, have a vested interest in keeping the distinctions and distrust between the races alive and kicking.
Another commenter elsewhere has made an interesting point by asking, Is "Latino" an actual race???? When you think of the diversity of origins "Latino" advocacy groups must encorporate in order to define this group, it just seems all the more manufactured.
Fine, talk about race, but too often it becomes a politcal tool - group politics, group rights, group hate.... all nurtured by the constant reminders that we are different in ways that we all want to believe should be irrelevant.
That you make such a comment on this article says a lot.