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Race and Ethnicity
Listening While White
Part 1: Does being White shape how we listen when talking about race?
Posted April 3, 2021 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
What is it like for White people to listen to people of color (POC) talk about their experiences of racism in contemporary America? I want to focus particularly on our schools and educators, since that’s the group with which I am most familiar.
Race is such a fraught topic, carrying a lot of baggage for us all. The situation in schools has only gotten worse because of the pandemic and the political battles of the past years. We may feel we don’t have time to listen to each other, or if we do, we may be afraid of what we’ll hear—or say. At a time when we all need to listen better, we’re hypervigilant, constantly in “fire alarm mode,” fearful of being called out.
So, I hope to write here in such a way that people—White, Black, Brown, and anyone in between—feel safe enough to examine their own experience. I’m going to invite you to become an anthropologist of your own experience, particularly what it means to have white skin in American society today.
It would be great if we lived in a time and place where we treated everyone as individuals instead of responding to them—in part—in terms of their skin color. Yet, alas, we live in a racialized society where the color of a person’s skin has great significance for their life experience.
I invite you to consider how having White skin can lead to particular ways of listening and speaking when in conversations about race, ways that can create problems and miscommunications.
In what follows, I will draw on some examples from my own experience, but I’m not suggesting that my experience is yours. I simply offer examples to stimulate thinking, and I’ll have some questions to consider as we go along. I want to get beyond too-easy and misleading labels and dichotomies, and deeper into the lived experience of what it means to be White in an age of color.
My hope is that at the end we all may feel less alone while wrestling with some really hard questions. First, let’s talk about White identity and why many of us don’t identify as White.
A Time to Be Stupid
One of the most liberating statements I’ve read was by sociologist Crystal Fleming, author of How To Be Less Stupid About Race: “We’re all stupid about race. I’m stupid about race." We are all stupid because we grow up in a culture that has made invisible and mute the very power dynamics that shape our lives.
We aren’t used to feeling what it’s like to be white, and what is it like to be racialized—to be seen in terms of your skin color. For many of us, whiteness “just is”—it’s the norm we have grown up with. It’s a bit like asking the proverbial fish what the water is like. For White people, skin color may seem like not such a big deal.
Rather than identifying with “being white,” we may instead identify with the place our family emigrated from, or with our religion or even with a geographic region. We may say, “I’m Scottish,” or “I’m Catholic,” or “my family is from France” or “I’m a proud Southerner.”
In my case, for a long time I didn’t think of myself as white; I thought of myself as Jewish, and I figured I got a pass on “the race issue.” Jews and blacks, after all, have significant shared oppression in their histories.
So I toodled along in my equivalence between the black and Jewish experience, thinking, “I have this,” and being upset at the racial tensions in our country but not thinking of myself as part of the white majority.
The Difference White Skin Can Make
So, how did I come to realize I am White? Partly, it was simply watching the difference between the way that Black and White people have reacted to some events over the past several years. We can all, I’m sure, do the roll call, one that goes back deep in our history; for me it runs from Emmett Till to George Floyd to the latest items in today’s newspapers. The reality of threat in the everyday lives of POC is there for us all to see, if we open our eyes.
Still, what really brought it home for me was going through TSA security a few years ago with a black friend and colleague returning from a conference.
Usually dour, my faculty colleague became a model of cheerfulness and friendliness with the TSA agents, making jokes, thank-you-and-yes-sir, being quite patient. Afterwards, on the way to our gate, I remarked to my friend, "You seem in a really good mood today.” He stopped, looked me right in the eye, and said, “Sam, that’s how a black man goes through security.”
Oh. His words, pointing to the everyday difference between us in lived experience, spoken in such a matter-of-fact yet kind manner, provided me an embodied understanding, something I felt in my body, not as an abstraction. I felt sad, ashamed, and aware, all at once. What is it like not to have what I take for granted, so that no matter how powerful or successful you are, you are always in danger of being racialized and losing whatever sense of self and safety—up to and including losing your life—in an instant?
My friend’s words brought home the best meaning of “white privilege” I’ve found: the freedom to not see certain things. This experience helped me see.
And now…
I invite you to be an anthropologist of your own experience. Private writing, or journaling, is a great way to interview yourself. I invite you to do some journaling, using the two sets of questions below. You may want to focus on one question that resonates most for you. Or you could simply journal about your experience reading this post—what resonates for you, what doesn’t.
Good luck—and please remember that there are no “right” answers in response to any of these questions.
- What are the anchors of your identity? What makes you really you? What were early messages in your life about being White….or being Black? Were these messages explicit or implicit? Did you accept or reject these messages, or both? What feelings did these messages provoke then and now?
- What have you noticed about the difference between your experiences and those of people of color (or of white people)—in reactions to the news and in your daily personal experience? Do you think these differences are informed by a white perspective or lens?
