Being a white male in a permanently racist society

As a white male from a middle-upper class upbringing, my daily existence is permeated by the privilege of simply being without being forced to reflect on my race or class position. My family and most of my white friends feel themselves to be living in a post-Civil Rights society in which we’ve all finally learned and agreed upon the truth that all people are created equal. Therefore, our story goes, we’re beyond the days where race matters: to even discuss race is to revert, inappropriately, to an earlier age. It is as such that the fundamental premise undergirding Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, spoken into the world from which I come, is utterly incomprehensible and thereby disruptive: “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society” (Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, ix).

There are multiple white people in my life—also male, also middle-upper class—who, when confronted with the idea of racism’s continued existence, and especially through conversations on affirmative action, become deeply offended and reactionary: I am not a racist; slavery happened a long time ago—I didn’t do it; reverse racism is just as bad, they say. Thus, from such a perspective, to suggest that racism is not only permanent but is embedded within the very formation and essence of the U.S. (10, 155) is as backwards a position as they come. But on the “permanence of racism,” Bell, it seems to me, is right.

The reason many white people find arguments like Bell’s incomprehensible is that “racism,” for such people, tends to connote segregated water fountains and lunch counters and schools. In the absence (at least in explicit forms) of such segregation, it seems to many folks, racism is a thing of the past. Racism = segregation, “the n-word,” hoses and dogs, the KKK. But the point that critical race theory thinkers like Bell illustrate is that racism is fundamentally adaptive, that when it is widely rejected in one form, it takes new shape, goes “underground,” as it were, and manifests itself in new ways. Today, racism exists less through the clear dividing line between white men shouting slurs at black men, women, and children quietly walking through the world, and more through institutional violence upheld through racisms so deeply entrenched in our systems and consciousness that they are hardly even discernible to a white person unless trained to see it.

But for Bell’s claim, which he illustrates compellingly through his stories, that racism is permanent in American society, he nevertheless insists that claiming as much is not merely defeatist. On the contrary, to name racism’s permanence, to name the fact that black people cannot achieve full equality in the U.S., is, in itself, he suggests, “an act of ultimate defiance” (12). As his character Geneva says after the fifth rule in “The Rules of Racial Standing,” which dictates that prophecy and truth-telling are not, in themselves, enough—nevertheless: “SPEAK UP, IKE, AN ’SPRESS YO’SE’F!” (125-126). This corresponds to the notion of “both, and” that Bell utilizes in the book’s conclusion—that all civil rights-based legislative and equality-minded actions are ultimately futile, and yet “something must be done” (199). Ultimately, Bell suggests that racism is so deeply embedded in a white supremacist society such as ours that the only way racial injustice will come to an end is if that end corresponds to the interests of whites (107). In the meantime, black people must seek survival and dignity, as Malcolm X often said, by any means necessary.

Bell’s book has caused me to reflect even more deeply on what I, as a white male eager to struggle for racial justice, can and should do. I found Erika, the character in Bell’s story “Divining a Racial Realism Theory” (89-108) profoundly interesting. Coming from a “colorblind” consciousness in my earlier years, I have only more recently come to see the value of more so-called “militant” approaches to the realities of racism. For most of my life, the answers to racism were addressed and solved in the Civil Rights movement. I am still committed to the legacy of Dr. King, but I also see the ways in which the Civil Rights movement did not go far enough, or perhaps the ways in which its aim was slightly off in the presupposition that the U.S., deep down, has room for black people in its self-identity. I remain compelled by the tactics of the movement, but today I am more convinced by the notion that the white supremacy of the U.S., as a nation, is constituted in part by a necessary exclusion or displacement or “othering” of blackness.

So what is a white male to do? Grab a gun and head to the woods in preparation of ways to fight on behalf of black people when white supremacists attempt to take over? Not so much my style. I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced, either, that civil rights-type legislation is entirely futile. Sometimes reform can help pave the way for abolition by making it imaginable. In my own scholarship, I hope to help further articulate the ways in which racism works in social systems and structures, and how it does so theologically, and the ways in which those structures act upon human life. But that scholarship will mean nothing if I do not, in my own spheres, speak as a white male and as someone who is, by default, an inheritor and bearer of both racism and privilege, against racism, critically and constructively, meaning that I must speak to people like my relatives and friends who believe racism is a thing of the past, in ways they can hear. White people must give up racism, but it’s also more than an individual or community problem: structures that exist as a result of racism must be reformed to the point of abolition, particularly the U.S. prison system and structures that perpetuate poverty.

It is unfortunately part of the legacy of racism itself that white people will believe it more if it comes from a white person, but perhaps that is a privilege I can deploy on behalf of racial justice, speaking and writing, as a white person, in ways that illuminate the fact that yes, racism does indeed still thrive, and here is where, how, and why. As Bell’s character Erika put it, “America’s race problem is a white problem” (94).

Episteme #8