Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor
✒️ Author: Layla F. Saad |. 📖 Published: 2020 | 🗓 Read: June 30, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 258
Summary
Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of colour, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
Why You Should Read It
Check your privilege and learn about systematic racism, how widespread it is, and how you unknowingly contribute to it.
Notable Highlights
Building the racial stamina required to challenge the racist status quo is thus a critical part of our work as white people. Rushing ahead to solutions—especially when we have barely begun to think critically about the problem—bypasses the necessary personal work and reflection and distances us from understanding our own complicity. In fact, racial discomfort is inherent to an authentic examination of white supremacy.
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The system of white supremacy was not created by anyone who is alive today. But it is maintained and upheld by everyone who holds white privilege—whether or not you want it or agree with it.
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White supremacy is a racist ideology that is based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore, white people should be dominant over other races.
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White supremacy is not just an attitude or a way of thinking. It also extends to how systems and institutions are structured to uphold this white dominance.
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White supremacy is far from fringe. In white-centered societies and communities, it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created.
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White supremacy is an ideology, a paradigm, an institutional system, and a worldview that you have been born into by virtue of your white privilege.
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White supremacy is a system you have been born into. Whether or not you have known it, it is a system that has granted you unearned privileges, protection, and power. It is also a system that has been designed to keep you asleep and unaware of what having that privilege, protection, and power has meant for people who do not look like you.
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White supremacy is an evil. It is a system of oppression that has been designed to give you benefits at the expense of the lives of BIPOC, and it is living inside you as unconscious thoughts and beliefs. The process of examining it and dismantling it will necessarily be painful. It will feel like waking up to a virus that has been living inside you all these years that you never knew was there. And when you begin to interrogate it, it will fight back to protect itself and maintain its position.
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“Revolution is not a one-time event.” Antiracism work is not a twenty-eight-day journey. It is a lifelong practice.
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I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.2
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Science has proven that the concept of race is not a biological fact but rather a social concept.
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Despite our differences in skin color, hair texture, and other physical traits, genetically, you and I are largely the same. However, because race is a deeply held social construct and because of the existence of white supremacy, you and I are not treated the same. You hold white privilege. I do not.
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White privilege is the reward that white and white-passing people receive in exchange for participating in the system of white supremacy—whether that participation is voluntary or involuntary.
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You cannot dismantle what you cannot see. You cannot challenge what you do not understand.
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DiAngelo defines white fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”5
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In essence, white fragility looks like a white person taking the position of victim when it is in fact that white person who has committed or participated in acts of racial harm.
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The word fragile is so apt, as it describes an inability to withhold even the slightest pressure. Conversations around race and white supremacy are by their very nature uncomfortable. They come loaded with historical and present-day events and experiences that have caused pain, shame, and inequality. White fragility prevents you from having a conversation about racism without falling apart.
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Your desire to be seen as good can actually prevent you from doing good, because if you do not see yourself as part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.
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When conversations of racism arise, you jump into defense mode, making you unable to really hear and understand the pain and challenges of BIPOC. The focus becomes to defend the self (and really, one’s white privilege and white supremacy as a whole) rather than opening yourself up to an experience of becoming consciously aware of what your privilege has protected you from.
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White fragility thus makes you an unreliable ally to BIPOC, because you do not have the resiliency needed to talk about racism.
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Tone policing is a tactic used by those who have privilege to silence those who do not by focusing on the tone of what is being said rather than the actual content.
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Watching the greatest player of all time get tone-policed by a petty man abusing his power was both heartbreaking and infuriating—especially as a black woman… Male players, like James Blake and John McEnroe, have come forward to affirm that they have said much worse to chair umpires without being penalized or fined.8
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It is often a big shock when BIPOC decide they will no longer tone police themselves and instead fully express their range of feelings about racism. People with white privilege wonder with confusion and frustration, Where is all this anger coming from?, not realizing it was always there and that the expression of it is the beginnings of self-reclamation as a BIPOC.
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Tone policing reinforces white supremacist norms of how BIPOC are “supposed” to show up.
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Tone policing is an insidious way of gaslighting BIPOC. Based on the 1938 play Gaslight, in which a man dims the gaslights in his home and then persuades his wife that she is imagining the change, gaslighting refers to a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a person or persons by making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.10
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To talk about pain without expressing pain is to expect a human to recall information like a robot. When you insist that BIPOC talk about their painful experiences with racism without expressing any pain, rage, or grief, you are asking them to dehumanize themselves.
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Tone policing is both a request that BIPOC share our experiences about racism without sharing any of our (real) emotions about it and for us to exist in ways that do not make white people feel uncomfortable.
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Here is a radical idea that I would like you to understand: white silence is violence. It actively protects the system. It says I am okay with the way things are because they do not negatively affect me and because I enjoy the benefits I receive with white privilege.
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However, when it comes to antiracism, leaning on your introversion as a reason why you stay in silence is actually just an excuse to stay in your comfort zone.
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The promise of the Church of Color Blindness is that if we stop seeing race, then racism goes away. That racism will go away not through awakening consciousness of privilege and racial harm, not through systemic and institutional change, not through addressing imbalances in power, not through making amends for historical and current-day harm, but instead by simply acting as if the social construct of race has no actual consequences—both for those with white privilege and those without it. The belief is that if you act as if you do not see color, you will not do anything racist or benefit from racism. And if you teach your children to not see race too, you can create a new generation of people who will not do anything racist or benefit from racism. Unfortunately, that is not how white supremacy works. The problem does not go away because you refuse to see it. And this kind of thinking is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
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When it comes to racial color blindness, what begins as a seemingly noble purpose (eradicating racism by going beyond the idea of race) quickly reveals itself as a magic trick designed to absolve people with white privilege from having to own their complicity in upholding white supremacy.
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When you say “I don’t see color” to a BIPOC, you are saying “Who you are does not matter, and I do not see you for who you are. I am choosing to minimize and erase the impact of your skin color, your hair pattern, your accent or other languages, your cultural practices, and your spiritual traditions as a BIPOC existing within white supremacy.”
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color blindness is a way to avoid not only looking at other people’s races but looking at your own.
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they fail to investigate how the idea of color blindness protects them from having to reflect on what it means to be white in a white supremacist society.
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Anti-Blackness against Black men upholds the colonialist white supremacist view of Black men as violent, almost animal-like savages and brutes who are less intelligent than their white counterparts and who pose a threat to white womanhood and to society at large.
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A person of any race can prejudge a person of any other race based on negative racial stereotypes and other factors.
Notes: 1) Definition of prejudice.
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Racism is the coupling of prejudice with power, where the dominant racial group (which in a white supremacist society is people with white privilege) is able to dominate over all other racial groups and negatively affect those racial groups at all levels—personally, systemically, and institutionally.
Notes: 1) Racism is different than prejudice.
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Therefore, though a BIPOC can hold prejudice against a white person, they cannot be racist toward a white person. They do not have the power (which comes with white privilege) and the backing of a system of oppression (called white supremacy) to be able to turn that prejudice into domination and punishment in a way that a white person would be able to if the tables were reversed.
Notes: 1) BIPOC people can't be racist because they don't have power.
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Cultural appropriation can include the appropriation of another culture’s objects, motifs, symbols, rituals, artifacts, and other cultural elements. However, one person from one racial group can think something is culturally appropriative while another person from that same group disagrees and considers it cultural appreciation or cultural exchange.
Notes: 1) Cultural appropriation is subjective, difficult to define.
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what makes one culture dominant and another non-dominant has nothing to do with the specifics of the countries where those cultures are from (e.g., population size, national GDP, or how far back that culture’s history goes), but rather it is about the historic and present-day relationship that exists between the two cultures.
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Cultural appropriation upholds the white supremacist ideology that white people can take what they pick and choose from Black and Brown people without consequence and that when a person with white privilege adopts something from a Black or Brown culture, they are somehow enhanced because they have adopted something “exotic.”
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They define allyship as “an active, consistent, and challenging practice of unlearning and reevaluating, in which a person of privilege seeks to work in solidarity with a marginalized group. Allyship is not an identity—it is a lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups. Allyship is not self-defined—our work and our efforts must be recognized by the people we seek to ally ourselves with.”32
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White apathy lacks aggression, but it is deadly in its passivity.
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White apathy therefore tries to enforce this idea that white supremacy is a problem inherent to BIPOC and not a problem created and maintained by people with white privilege.
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White apathy says, “Why throw that away? There is so much more to lose than there is to gain.”
Notes: 1) Apathy resonse to White privilege.
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White apathy is like a warm blanket that says, “This is too hard. Let’s go back to sleep.”
Notes: 1) Apathy response to White fragility.
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Exceptionalism gives you a false sense of pride that is really white apathy in disguise.
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White supremacy keeps people with white privilege numb and apathetic to really doing this work. It is not that you did not care about BIPOC. It is that you did not care enough for it to be a high priority.
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“I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people…as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze. And I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.” —TONI MORRISON
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white is seen as “normal” and nonwhite is seen as “other.”
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Under white supremacy, whiteness is centered as the norm.
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white centering is a collective ego that asks the question how is this important to us white people?
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White centering dismisses all other narratives as less important, which was exactly what Morrison was consciously choosing to subvert when she said, “I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”35
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tokenism essentially uses BIPOC as props or meaningless symbols to make it look like antiracism is being practiced while continuing to maintain the status quo of white as the dominant norm.
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white saviorism—the belief that people with white privilege, who see themselves as superior in capability and intelligence, have an obligation to “save” BIPOC from their supposed inferiority and helplessness.
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White saviorism puts BIPOC in the patronizing position of helpless children who need people with white privilege to save them. It implies that without white intervention, instruction, and guidance, BIPOC will be left helpless. That without whiteness, BIPOC, who are seen as inferior to people with white privilege in the white imagination, will not survive.
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