Welcome. A look at an issue that has kicked up quite a lot of dust recently. I’d love to know what you think. Please comment. Also commend if you think it is helpful. Subscribe if you want it in your inbox by every Wednesday morning.Do White People have Privilege?
What Privilege did Richard Root have?
I have not traced the Root family back beyond my great-grandfather Richard Root, who on my grandfather’s marriage certificate of 1896 was entered as a labourer. My grandfather was born in Linton, Cambridgeshire in 1870, so it is possible that his father Richard was born in the early 1830s into an agricultural labouring family, at a time when his infant contemporaries in the Caribbean were still being born into slavery. In comparison with them what benefits did Richard Root have?
Friedrich Engels (in)famously wrote in ‘The Condition of the Working Classes in England’ (1847) concerning factory workers in Manchester: “But these operatives are condemned from their ninth year to their death to live under the sword, physically and mentally. They are worse slaves than the Negroes in America, for they are more sharply watched, and yet it is demanded of them that they shall live like human beings, shall think and feel like men!” Engels underplayed the suffering of slaves in America, and perhaps the plight of rural farm labourers was not as bad as urban factory workers, nonetheless Richard Root’s life, struggling for food and clothing and with the wind whipping in from the Urals, would have been very hard.
He certainly would not have seen himself as privileged, but aside from comparing and contrasting harsh physical conditions Richard Root and his descendants had several significant benefits over against contemporaries in the Caribbean.
* The privilege of belonging.
Richard was part of a society which, however riven by differentials of power and wealth, nonetheless was a continuum where people from poor backgrounds could and did rise above their disadvantages. My maternal grandfather (who worked as third footman at Kings Bromley Manor in Staffordshire but eventually became a successful publican, and significant local figure) would commend people by saying ‘they could become prime minister’. His awareness of what ambition could achieve contrasted with the reality that for black people the simple fact of their race presented significant much tougher barriers to progress and social mobility.
* The privilege of pride.
Richard Root would have had some notion that he was English and that that meant something. He may or may not have known of the Great Exhibition of 1851 but the sense it carried that this was a great country claiming European, and indeed global hegemony would have been part of the air he breathed. We were leaders in engineering, in exploration, in art, in culture. It would be our language that came to be the nearest to a global language. For black contemporaries in the Caribbean, culture, tradition, language, above all a sense of pride in one’s identity was being crushed. ‘Rasta na born ya, we come from yonda, we only live on ya’. (The Lionelaires, 1972).
* The privilege of prosperity.
Whatever his personal circumstances Richard lived in a country that was prospering, not least because of the wealth derived from slavery in the Caribbean. His son William, my grandfather, was born in the year of Foster’s Elementary Education Act that established primary education for all. The year before my father was born the Old Age Pensions Act (1909) guaranteed a basic income to all over-70s. Richard Root was born near the beginning of a trajectory which, if not without substantial exceptions, propelled a large majority of British people to a life of comfort and security. It was a situation that by the end of the 1940s encouraged growing numbers of people in the Caribbean to leave a life of hard material struggle for life with better prospects in Britain.
What Privilege do white British people have today?
Last month’s start of new university year led to attention on programme’s designed to get new (white) students to consider their privileges. At St Andrews is was compulsory for students to undertake a compulsory module intended for them to acknowledge their personal guilt as ‘a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias’. At the University of Kent a similar course, Expect Respect, invited them to agree that white privilege means ‘I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race’, or that ‘I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race’.
I can see what the courses are getting at. White people have materially benefitted from the exploitation of black people. White people don’t usually feel that their behaviour is putting the reputation of their entire race on the line. At the same time there is, as I shall argue later in the blog, a lack of authenticity, a woodenness, as well as serious over-simplification behind these initiatives.
As to what fueled the initiatives, and ‘the clearly expressed student demand’ for them (St Andrews), quite possibly it was a number (how big?) of students reading the main text on the topic by an American woman, Robin DiAngelo, on ‘White Fragility: Why it is so hard for white people to talk about racism’ (2018). Echoes of DiAngelo’s voice can be heard in many of the questions confronting the students.
DiAngelo’s book is like Marmite. Trevor Phillips derides it as ‘written mainly for American readers who enjoy being flagellated for their unconscious racism without having to do anything much about it’. On the other hand writers such as Jeremy Williams in ‘Climate Change is Racist’ (see last week’s blog) pay tribute to DiAngelo’s influence on their thinking. Personally I find her book, and her approach, both illuminating and annoying.
What’s Illuminating about ideas of White Privilege?
Piety can easily be mocked, and there is something about DiAngelo’s relentless seriousness that is off-putting (perhaps more so to Britons than Americans), and then something rather cult-like about the earnest devotees who seek to implement her ideas. But that doesn’t mean that she is not making important and serious points that need attention.
1. Whites are not the norm.
‘Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of colour as a deviation from that norm’ (p 25). Thus DiAngelo stresses the need for white self-understanding as a group (p 51) and to learn to see ourselves from the outside (p 12). Attempts to be ‘colour blind’ are simply blind, the false assumption that others are like ‘us’, white people.
The result is that white people don’t have ‘racial stress’ (p 1); that is the sense alluded to in the University of Kent question that our entire ethnic group will be evaluated by how we behave, or that we are seen as representing and putting up for judgement not just ourselves but an entire ethnicity. It is only when white people see themselves as active participants in the vast and complex kaleidoscope of inter-ethnic relationships that they can begin to take responsibility for the damaging contributions that they make. White people have the luxury of assuming that the way we are is natural and needs no justification; for non-whites the way they are – in so far as it is distinct from white norms -is seen as in need of justification and explanation. This is one way in which a white person can never fully internalize what it is like to be not white. We will never fully understand, for we do not carry our colour around with us.
2. Racism is not just chosen bad behaviour.
Everyone knows that racism is bad. Therefore to be accused of racism requires you to admit to being a bad person. DiAngelo documents frequent instances where white people have failed to recognize the ways they have been racist, because this would make them a distinctly ‘bad’ person, rather than simply recognizing that their racist assumptions or behaviour patterns were simply part of the air they breathe; in that sense they are ‘systemic’. This fails to account for the ways that assumptions of racial superiority, or seeing other cultural patterns as ‘odd’ is unconsciously acquired
3. Racism is an arena of conflict.
One of DiAngelo’s most challenging points is the need to break with white solidarity in the face of racist assumptions, remarks, jokes or what she refers to as ‘racial disdain’. She writes of ‘the expectation of racial comfort that our culture engenders’ (p 101). But where there hangs in the atmosphere an expectation that whites are more likely to be effective, or negative stereotypes of black people abound then racial discomfort is required. She rightly says that white people are reluctant to do this.
What’s annoying about ideas of ‘White Privilege’.
1. They absolutise race.
DiAngelo uses ‘white’ and ‘people of colour’ as binaries. Whilst she pays lip service to the differentiating impacts of history on social groups, it is clear she has two main, large, clear blocs in her mind. ‘People of colour’ are essentially African Americans, with ‘Latinx’ and First Nation Americans trailing along, with South and East Asians (surely darker coloured than most Latinx) rarely coming into view. As for whites, DiAngelo’s work is mainly consultancy for large companies paying well for courses on inclusion and diversity, and it is such workers likely to hold ‘ideologies of individualism and meritocracy’ (p 8), but working class whites rarely appear.
This has become particularly controversial in Britain where the differentials in educational levels, income and career success are decreasingly correlated with ethnicity, both through the successes of non-white groups, and the continuation of white pupils on free school meals performing badly. This doesn’t mean that white privilege doesn’t exist. It does mean that the relationship of colour to social standing is far too complex for right/wrong answers to questions about privilege to carry the weight they are given.
2. They create artificiality in relationships.
The questions to which students at the University of Kent have to give right answers are not unilluminating. They can usefully be pondered. But they can not be universally applied. People differ not just in the particularities of ethnicity or class, but in their personalities and attitudes. The one-size-fits-all approach to relationships may help avoid a few white faux pas, but at the cost of inhibiting natural, easy, growing friendship. DiAngelo’s business workshop environments put a greater premium on avoiding productivity-damaging ruptures, and give greater prominence to establishing some form of cross-racial rules of engagement. In more informal contexts, where possible ruptures can lead to either disengagement or slow, possibly penitent, repair then the free flow of relationships, graciousness, and the value of slow learning come to the fore – whether amongst students, neighbours or church members.
In these contexts it is the art of relating well that needs to be learned, not principles of anti-racist behaviour. One writer on Cultural Intelligence (a sphere that covers similar ground to DiAngelo’s with different emphasis) underlines that ‘Lists of ‘Do’s & Dont’s’ are a Don’t’. But St Andrews and Kent are basically offering those sort of simplistic check-lists. It is a little like trying to help people become great artists by giving them paint-by-numbers exercises. In earlier blogs I have quoted the Cultural Intelligence writer, David Livermore, on the importance of learning from our mistakes. Check lists may help people avoid mistakes, they can also prevent the learning and growth that come from exploring, taking risks andmaking mistakes.
3. They ignore cultural differences.
DiAngelo’s book is built on the expectation of equality of outcome. She refers approvingly to Ibram X Kendi’s simplistic argument that ‘if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity in condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination’ (p 17) , as though patterns of learned behaviour within different cultures do not create significant differences of outcome for different ethnic groups. As a good progressive, accordingly she writes ‘the romanticized “traditional” family values of the past are racially problematic’ (p 61). She gives no evidence for this dismissal. By contrast it is arguable that it is the loss of past patterns of family stability that is a major cause of unequal ‘disparity in condition that DiAngelo and Kendi regret but which their ‘progressive’ blinkers hinder them from recognizing. (More on this topic next week).
Summary
Richard Root’s three privileges of Belonging, Pride and Prosperity are still real and observable. They are also, in terms of race relations in the British context, given added weight by the native/immigrant contrast. In any society newcomers are at an unavoidable initial disadvantage; that becomes considerably more entrenched when it is reinforced by colour. But as society evolves those disadvantages can diminish, or distinctive identities can be even used for advantage, as Jews and latterly Indians have done.
So, DiAngelo is correct that white people need to be aware of the privileges they inherit, even if they can also be offset by other calibrations of advantage/disadvantage such as economic progress or community cohesion where privilege is lacking. The everyday expressions of those advantages are elusive. DiAngelo’s accounts are too heavily American and workplace focused, and the situation is less intractable than she suggests, and is changing for the better. That the universities of St Andrews and Kent have taken up the issue may reflect positive changes in the national mood. Their proper attempts to pin down the ways white privilege manifests itself can stimulate awareness, but the attempt to codify that awareness, and even worse make agreement with their examples compulsory, seeks to set inter-racial relationships in stone, rather than have a flow that is creative and life-giving even if also at times turbulent.
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Video of the Week:
Rev Anthea Carmichael shares her experience of training and entering the ‘official’ Church of England. Disturbing. 7 mins. Accessed at:
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Coming Events
* Sankofa Collective - October Meeting
Sankofa Collective exists to create a space for Christians to be able to come together to work towards racial justice. As Christians, we have received the “ ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18), so we want to serve, encourage and equip the UK Church to engage in a journey of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
We're delighted to welcome you to our next Sankofa Seminar, taking place on Tuesday 26 October at 7.30 online (Zoom). We'll be hearing from Rev. Kate Coleman and Rev. David Shosanya on 'Racial Justice Through the Lens of the Gospel'.
Our hope is to explore the theme of Justice throughout the narrative of the Bible and to look at the gospel's effect on racial justice specifically. We always want Sankofa Collective to be a space where we teach history, but also connect the dots in terms of theology and really dig into spiritual discipleship.