"The White Privilege Discourse is Missing an Important Element: Empathy and Compassion for the Oppressor"

This is one of a series of posts in honor of the late Joel Olson.

The research on white racial identity has evolved since coming to public prominence during the 1980's. At first, "Whiteness Studies" (as it was called at the time) was focused on the idea that White racial identity was a story of absence, typified by loss, and a parasitic relationship to blackness. This first wave was also derided by many conservatives, as well as more Left radical thinkers, as being merely a type of exploitative "white trash studies."

The anti-multiculturalism, dead white male crowd was hostile to any critical intervention that sought to highlight how questions of race and racial hierarchy were/are operative in American society. Forward thinking progressives and liberals were concerned that Whiteness Studies was simply another way of making white people central to conversations about racism. Consequently, Whiteness Studies did the work (however unintentional) of White Privilege even as it sought to problematize the concept.

Joel Olson was part of a second--or perhaps even third wave...depending on how one periodizes the genealogy--of scholars and students who worked to make a "critical" intervention against Whiteness. As a qualifier, "critical" is a much overused descriptor in academic writing. Oftentimes, critical is just a way of separating your own "original" contribution from those of other scholars. It has no real meaning beyond being an attention getter or flag that often signifies what are only minor differences in argument or content.

However, I would suggest that Critical Whiteness Studies was substantively different from earlier scholarship on the subject. The critical intervention here, a tradition I count myself part of, is that we now see Whiteness as not merely or only centered on absence. Rather, Whiteness has content, substance, and meaning. While Whiteness is still parasitic relative to blackness, it does have identifiable attributes, traits, contours, boundaries, characteristics, and substance.

In all, Whiteness is a type of property, privilege, normality, and invisibility. Whiteness is also something that its owners, and those who desire it, are deeply invested in protecting and maintaining. I would also add that Whiteness is a type of racial glue that masks and holds together other, often contentious and disparate identities, which white people as complex individuals possess.

Ultimately, the study of Whiteness, and the loose discipline we know as Critical Whiteness Studies, is about much more than white privilege. Yes, the latter is a foundational concept and useful entry point into the conversation for laypeople; white privilege is also a nice hook for those curious about what Whiteness means in American society on a day-to-day basis. But, it should be a beginning, and not an end, to the rigorous work that is exploring racial ideologies and their consequences for American society.

Psychology Today's "Between the Lines" is a column by Mikhail Lyubansky that explores the linkages between "race, culture, and community." Several of the pieces in that series have focused on White Privilege and how race continues to matter in "post-racial" America. The most recent entry is a nice complement to Joel Olson's work. There, Mikhail Lyubansky offers up a ten point list of what readers should know about White privilege.

Some of the suggestions are very useful for journeyman travelers (the idea that Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack is helpful, yet is just a beginning, and that reading McIntosh does not make you an expert on these matters; White Privilege is not to be minimized as a "historical" phenomenon, it is about the present; and the roots of the White Privilege discourse must be acknowledged as springing forth from the likes of Du Bois, James Baldwin, Harold Cruse, Gloria Anzaldua and Theodore Allen).

Mikhail Lyubansky's other observations are more inside baseball: anti-racism activities by whites can actually be paternalistic and reproduce many of the same dynamics which these same well-meaning white folks ostensibly desire to unsettle; what to do with white anti-racist activists who are now the face of advocacy on these issues, as they ironically make money off of white racism?

In keeping with the idea that Critical Whiteness Studies should be centered on rigorous inquiry in the service of theory building as we strive to more accurately model how race, power, and social relationships interact, there are two points in Mikhail Lyubansky's essay that are problematic.

First, he suggests that:

8. Racial-minority privilege exists and serves an important function. I'm not saying that it is equivalent to white privilege — the power differential alone makes that impossible — but there is such a thing as racial-minority privilege. In marginalized spaces (also called counter spaces), this means that people of color generally have the privilege of speaking about race without having their point of view challenged solely on the basis of their racial identity or racial appearance.

Mikhail Lyubansky offers up a thorough qualification of this claim and how it relates to colorism in black and brown communities, as well as issues of intersectionality. However, I am more interested in the first principle: how can racial minorities (and this holds for gays and lesbians, and also women) have any type of "privilege," be it relative or absolute, in a society and set of social institutions which are prefaced on white superiority and white domination? For example, black and brown people may have what are problematically called "safe spaces" on colleges and universities. But, these "safe spaces" are prefaced on the idea that their voices are not heard or listened to elsewhere. Of symbolic and practical import, these "safe spaces" are often ghettoized in the Office of Multicultural Affairs or Diversity Relations.

The second problematic is as follows:

9. The privilege discourse is missing an important element:empathy and compassion for the oppressor. Social justice activist, Kit Miller (a White woman), observes that empathy has a hard time flowing upstream. Few are more starved for empathy than those who have structural power, because they are often dehumanized on the basis of having that power. How many of us, for example, see police officers as individual human beings motivated by the same universal human needs (e.g., love, acceptance, contribution, mutuality) as the rest of us? How about the politicians belonging to the political party you dislike most?

In the context of race relations, this means that there is not much empathy coming to white folks from across the racial divide. This, of course, is perfectly logical. It is certainly not the responsibility of the oppressed and marginalized to take care of the oppressor's emotional needs. Suggesting otherwise would be, at best, an egregious expression of white privilege. Yet, it is also true that those who oppress others (and certainly those who do not perpetrate oppression themselves but stand by while others do so) have likely themselves experienced oppression and are themselves harmed by their own actions or lack of thereof.

While it certainly impacts people of color disproportionately and more negatively, racism (and racial color-blindness) hurts everyone, even those who are part of the majority group...

It is often not obvious, but to maintain their status, those who are in power must justify their behavior to themselves and that requires a partial loss of their humanity.

Mikhail Lyubansky's take here is very defensive. He is desperately trylng to avoid the smear known as "reverse racism." However, when one proceeds from an anxiety about a specious and disengenous concept such as reverse racism, your argument is flawed from its inception. The idea that those with power are starved for empathy also strikes me as the worst type of feel good tripe that is offered up in a moment when some white folks feel aggrieved, or their feelings hurt, when the institutional and personal power afforded by Whiteness is called out and made transparent.

Perhaps, on a cognitive and philosophical level I am incapable of understanding Mikhail Lyubansky's version of "the love principle." Moreover, Mikhail Lyubansky's social justice take--that one needs to show empathy for those who are deeply invested in maintaining their disproportionate power and control over society to the disadvantage of people of color in mass--as Whiteness works to maximize the life chances of its owners, participants, and allies (to the detriment of others), is simply a bridge too far.

Am I being unfair in these critiques? Is my critical project being handicapped by an inability to both empathize and relate to the perilous anxieties and fears of those who we call "White" in America? What is your critical take on these conversations?