My life in books

The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege by Robert Jensen is not an easy book for a white North American to read. Which is exactly why we should read it. (While the book is U.S.-centric, it certainly applies in great measure to Canada, and I suspect it will also have some meaning in other countries where white people are politically, economically and socially dominant - but I'm not going to make that assumption part of this discussion.)

Jensen examines the concept of whiteness - that is to say, the social construct rather than the physiological state of being pale-skinned - and how it affects all persons in North America, white or non-white (Jensen talks about why he uses the term "non-white" instead of the more common term in modern anti-racist discussion, "people of colour" - he wants to put the focus on white people, because he is addressing racism as a problem of white people, and I will follow his choice of terms in this discussion).

This idea of whose problem racism is runs through the book. Jensen refers to W.E.B. Dubois:

In the opening of his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois wrote that the real question whites wanted to ask him, but were afraid to, was: "how does it feel to be a problem?"

What Jensen is saying in this book is that "the problem" has nothing to do with non-white people - the problem is whiteness, and whiteness is something that no white person in North America can escape being influenced by. We (white people) are saturated with it, and we need to acknowledge it, and fight it, in our society and in ourselves, or we will be destroyed by it.

To accept whiteness, to truly believe in it, is to deform oneself. The privileges and material benefits that come from being white in a white-supremacist society come at a cost to us white people. Whiteness is based on lies not only about others but lies about ourselves, and we can't lay claim to our full humanity until we find our way out of the web of denial.

Jensen reminds us that the ultimate white privilege is the privilege to ignore racism, to pretend there is no such thing as white privilege, to dabble in anti-racism knowing that we can walk away and it won't mean anything to us personally, to simply decide that this isn't something we want to make one of our "causes." Non-white people can never walk away from racism in North America.

That's part of white privilege - the privilege to ignore the reality of a white-supremacist society when it makes us uncomfortable, to rationalize why it's not really so bad, to deny one's own role in ti. It is the privilege of remaining ignorant because that ignorance is protected.

The problem of whiteness is different from, and far more widespread than, personal expressions of overt racism. It is what allows white people to create, maintain and strengthen, often without even being conscious of it, the edifices of institutionalised racism. It is what allows us to pretend that the shelter and protection of white privilege isn't really there. It is what lets us say, proudly, "but some of my best friends are..." as if that were enough, that we don't actively discriminate in our personal lives.

...virtually all white people have to face the fact that racism lurks in our hearts and our minds as a result of being raised in a white-supremacist society; it is difficult - maybe impossible - to find a white person who hasn't been affected in some way by such a society. But the question "are all white people racist?" misses the point. Better to ask: "Do most white people recognize that they live in a white-supremacist society that nominally supports ideals of racial justice but continues to accept practices and institutions that maintain white privilege?" From there, we can ask: "Do most white people engage in critical self-reflection about white privilege or undertake political projects to challenge institutionalized racism?"

Jensen comments on, and critiques, some of the responses of white people to racism, looking at both guilt and fear (fear of saying or doing the worng thing, fear of showing that one is, despite being committed to anti-racism, also still influenced by a sense of whiteness and privilege) as ways to avoid actually doing anti-racist work. He suggests that the most appropriate response for white people is anger - including anger at our own sense of whiteness - but tempered anger that does not get in the way of citical thought or of action.

We have to get angry, stay angry, but not let that anger swallow us. We have to let our passion for justice fuel our work but also make sure it doesn't lead us to overlook our own flaws and failures.

Jensen takes us from recognition that we are part of the problem, to identification of what we can do to be part of the solution. In between lies our own will to take that journey.