A great guest post by Berneta Haynes over at Womanist Musings
The Privilege of Just Being a PERSON: Whiteness and Race Anxieties
Discusses the question: “Can we just be friends (or lovers) without you being black and me being white?”
To answer the aforementioned question, then, I have nothing to gain from such a scenario, and in fact I have everything to lose, including part of my sense of self. The white friend is the person who gains in this scenario, but only in an illusory way. As James Baldwin would suggest, nothing is ever gained from avoiding culture (and as the notion of race is very much the foundation of American culture and the culture of whiteness, my white friend’s question is very explicitly an attempt to avoid culture and society). But what does he/she gain, however illusory: relief from his/her role in the hierarchy responsible for my very position of inferiority in that system of racial domination. What does he/she gain: the ability to sleep easy at night, and think, “I’m not racist because I can see them as just people. I’m not like the others who look like me.” What does he/she gain: the ability to think, as whiteness often does, “I’m an individual, unformed by any collective experience of race. I am beyond that (despite that fact that I benefit everyday from my whiteness).”
Discusses the question: “Can we just be friends (or lovers) without you being black and me being white?”
To answer the aforementioned question, then, I have nothing to gain from such a scenario, and in fact I have everything to lose, including part of my sense of self. The white friend is the person who gains in this scenario, but only in an illusory way. As James Baldwin would suggest, nothing is ever gained from avoiding culture (and as the notion of race is very much the foundation of American culture and the culture of whiteness, my white friend’s question is very explicitly an attempt to avoid culture and society). But what does he/she gain, however illusory: relief from his/her role in the hierarchy responsible for my very position of inferiority in that system of racial domination. What does he/she gain: the ability to sleep easy at night, and think, “I’m not racist because I can see them as just people. I’m not like the others who look like me.” What does he/she gain: the ability to think, as whiteness often does, “I’m an individual, unformed by any collective experience of race. I am beyond that (despite that fact that I benefit everyday from my whiteness).”