So I’m supposed to figure out what it’s like to be black? Do you know what it’s like to be white these days?
Chris Lebron’s “Navigating Blackness In A White World”¹ shares his encounter with a white Ivy League dean, someone so certain he holds his Woke Racial Liberal card that he opened his mouth and erased all doubt about who he really is. Turns out hosting a speaker series promoting diversity doesn’t necessarily make you racially aware.
side note for my white peeps: Do you know what it’s like to be white? is almost always followed with Everything we say is taken wrong!! It might be worth thinking about why we feel like we’re always sticking our collective foot in our mouths. Just sayin.
“All Black people in America are first and foremost survivors. And the first thing survivors learn are the ways of those who actively prey upon them and/or comfortably benefit from that predation.” (Lebron)
It’s impossible for a person of color to live in America and not know what it’s like to be white. White is a culture so dominant it’s woven into every aspect of our lives – healthcare, education, banking, employment, government, opportunity, housing. A Black person cannot survive, let alone succeed, in America without intimately understanding how each of these systems is stacked against him/her then learning to navigate them. Looking for a few examples? We’ll take the first two.
Healthcare. Okay, this is a touchy one. Lots of white people can’t get/afford health insurance right now and bringing up this issue tends to elicit a “See? It’s being poor that’s the problem” response. A few thoughts: Employer sponsored coverage grew significantly between 1940 and 1960, which worked great. For those who were employed. Using December 2009 stats²:
white unemployment: 9.0% Black/African American unemployment: 16.1%
Now extrapolate that to the ’40s when it was even harder for Blacks to secure employment, let alone healthcare coverage. That doesn’t even begin to address the current discrepancy in healthcare quality between races.
Education. I wrote about racial disparity in gifted/talented classes and school suspensions here. There’s underrepresentation of POC in top tier schools plus the assumption that minority students are there to fill a quota. Then there’s this dean’s presumption that of course his voice would be the authority on race in America. Jesus take the wheel.
I could go on, but Chris Lebron says it best.
“Whiteness in America is to know in your bones that this land is your land, and every institution will work to grant you its bounty before anyone else.” (Lebron)
Damn.
I hope you come into the Small Bites space with an open mind and heart. Thank you to everyone who’s been willing to share their own thoughts in the comments. You can find other entries by selecting small bites in the drop down menu under “series posts.”
Sources:
¹ Lebron, Chris. “Navigating Blackness In A White World.” The North Star, 7 April 2019, thenorthstar.com/articles/navigating-blackness-in-a-white-world. Accessed 11 April 2019.
² Bureau of Labor Statistics. United States Department of Labor, data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet. Accessed 11 April 2019.
Riddle from the Middle 
Institutionalized racism makes sure gaps don’t close. As I’ve said before, I live within a diverse community — NOT primarily white, but the home OWNERS are primarily white and that’s not coincidence.
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So true. It’s hard to grasp all the ways systemic preference works against POC to make getting ahead 100 times harder.
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Being White means not having to think about what it means to be White. ‘Cause White is just regular, right? <-sarcasm alert
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Right. And for many folks White is regular so regular is right so White is right and look where we are.
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Disclaimer: (something I feel I must do, because I’m white?) I am in no way disagreeing with your points, nor am I stupid enough to think there’s no racism. As a 60-yr-old white woman who went from fairly pampered, unknowing privilege with a low-six-figure income, to facing poverty and impending homelessness, I see a lot of the issues being more income based than racial. Of course, there is the racial component to poverty issues. But I wonder if you clumped all the poor folk of all races together, all the poor-but-getting-barely-by folk, middle-income, etc., would the differences of the system be stacked more against race or by income? Going from white privilege to white-trash poverty has opened my eyes, a lot. And no, I don’t think I’m white trash, but you can bet that I’m being put in that category by others simply by being in financial straits.
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No disclaimer needed here. I think we’re better for hearing everyone’s voice, and you definitely have a unique perspective. Going from wealthy to serious financial trouble brings a whole new level of clarity about bias in America. The only point I’ll share is one several black people have made (ones I follow on social media) — it’s not so much that the system is stacked more against race or by income, it’s that a white person suffering from the exact same challenges as a black person will not have their situation worsened by racial bias.
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I believe that societally that is true, that a poor person of color has the added racism to deal with. Institutionally? I dunno, seems like our “safety nets” have been designed to screw people over regardless of race. It’s always been bad, and it is often just been mouth noises made at “war on poverty” but now it is an overt war on poor people, not poverty.
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In addition to being white, there’s the whole being male thing. I know it’s probably off-topic for this post, and I’m sorry about that, but I just heard a story on NPR about how everything from healthcare to car safety is predominantly based on males. These are things I hadn’t thought about, (like there’s virtually no safe vehicle for a pregnant woman) and I think that’s really the point. The bias is endemic to our society. It’s just part of the fabric on which everything was placed.
The big issue that is getting my attention today, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) – we hear all about the wonderful things self-learning stuff will be able to do, but everything learns from a base bit of knowledge, and there is very likely to be bias built into that base. We like to think that with enough energy, enough voices and enough press coverage, issues of bias will diminish over time, but we keep finding new places to build in the same old bias, and that tends to favor white males. And yes, like an earlier comment, I am one, so…
Sorry for going off topic and for writing a small blog post. You came close enough to one of my hot-buttons.
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But what a great sub-post it is! Did not know that fact about car safety but can’t say it surprises me. I can’t remember where I heard/read another story but it was discussing implicit bias in programming because the workforce population in Silicon Valley is primarily a) male and b) white (56%)/Asian (30%). I don’t say that to dog on men but because human nature inevitably seeps into programming and THAT’S gonna show up in AI. Definitely a topic worth researching…
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It’s a very significant issue with AI and it’s largely being ignored. Racial bias in AI will carry old stereotypes into a totally new future, and that’s truly sad.
I don’t remember the statistic but something like 80% of crash-test dummies are “male” (restrain yourself on the jokes).
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You make good points about how this country is geared to grant white people most everything no questions asked, but anyone else must prove *somehow* that they deserve things. It’s a paradigm that repeats itself to some degree with each generation, but I hope it’s one that is slowly changing into an equitable system. We’ll see, won’t we?
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It’s progress measured in such micro increments that I find it exasperating and it seeps into every aspect of life. For example, I knew getting bank loans is a problem, but while researching this I found even the fees/minimum amounts for opening & keeping a checking/savings accounts are higher in majority black neighborhoods. I mean, seriously??
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Is that a fact? Well, of course it is… but so wrong.
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Right? And the fact that I’m even surprised by it is just that white thing again. So frustrating to see how broken we are.
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I’m a middle aged white man living spin a nice part of England. Pay taxes but in return have access to healthcare, education and a social care system. I really am so the wrong person to comment on this. All I know is that the system is screwed up for so many people. That’s wrong. All I can do is try as best I can to understand what people are going through.
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You’re absolutely not the wrong person to comment on this. You’re actually a really important person to be reading it (well, don’t know about England but definitely white middle aged men in America should) so thank you. If you’re interested in understanding/learning more The North Star is a really good resource.
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I will check that out.
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