Why are white people so often unaware of racism and white privilege?

Tackling an issue like this is like kicking a nest of rattlesnakes. I was recently asked this question in an on-line forum and Í am very unlikely to please everyone with my answer no matter what I say. However, I think it is an honest question that deserves a real answer. 

I can easily see how it seems preposterous to people of color that most white people in highly developed, multicultural societies in the twenty-first century remain almost entirely ignorant of and oblivious to racism and white privilege. I mean haven’t we just spent the better part of a century learning the hard way about these issues? The civil rights movement came and went and we learn about it in school. We work, study and live with people of color—well, many of us do—so why does it seem that we are no wiser than we were seventy years ago? 

Original creative commons image by jamesapfairlie of flickr.com

Are white people just self-centered and willfully ignorant? That’s the question I hear behind the confusion of people of color when they ask how it is possible that white people still don’t get it. 

So, here goes. I’m a white person. And I honestly agree that most white people—including myself for an embarrassing number of years—are unaware of both white privilege and most of what constitutes racism. That’s the sad truth. But the other side of it that I have to say is that it isn’t because we are self-centered or willfully ignorant. It has to do with lack of experience and perspective. It is an honest lack of understanding. 

Let me start by illustrating the problem on my own sorry self. When I was a college student in the 1990s I thought that African Americans were constantly going on and on about racism even though the worst of it had been left in the past. I had nothing against black people. I grew up in a very rural place and the only African American I saw growing up was my mother's friend from college who came to visit. 

And I was brought up in a very anti-racist family. My mother was the only white student made an honorary member of the Black Students Association at her college in Michigan. This was not because my mother was a great activist for civil rights or something of the sort. It was simply because as a young girl thrown out of her home at the age of seventeen (in 1968), she crossed a bridge between St. Joseph to Benton Harbor and got herself a room to rent. I have a hard time seeing my mother, who has never been a big risk taker, in this role, but that’s what happened. 

So, this was my claim to lack of racism when I was a young white liberal. My mother was open-minded at a time when very few white people were. I, on the other hand, grew up in a rural, even isolated, place in the mountains of Eastern Oregon. I was told that people of color are just as good as anyone and that racism is bad. And I learned the history of civil rights and all that came before. It was history. I thought it was quite interesting, but I also thought it was over.

Thus—as I said—in college myself in the 1990s, I silently thought my African American classmates were a bit obsessed with the issue. I never said anything. I tried to be supportive, but I didn't really understand. I thought it was because of past trauma, because so many white people wanted to whitewash the past. I had no idea how much of it was still happening. I had no idea of the white privilege all around me.

I could very well say that this is because I am actually physically blind. I am. I could not see people's facial expressions and so there are certain social things that go over my head at the best of times. And perhaps a white person with as much desire to understand as I had could have understood sooner, had they been visually observant. but I couldn't be visually observant and the fact is that most white people are not even if they can see well. It is not willful lack of seeing, however. It is truly lack of understanding. It took me many years and some hard knocks to get it--at least to the degree that I have "gotten it.”

One such hard knock was spending several months studying in Zimbabwe at a time when race was a very hot subject. I walked down the street and felt like I wasn't white but rather neon-colored. I was harassed doing nothing—going to a store, hanging out with my Zimbabwean journalist friends. I applied for an internship and was yelled at and demeaned by an editor over a tiny mistake in my application. I was not angry. It was a few months, not a lifetime. It was a small country, not a bastion of wealth and power like my homeland in America. I could walk away any time I wanted to and I came to understand the first bit about privilege. Privilege is not being harassed just for being, not being yelled at over a triviality. Privilege is being able to walk away from such a situation and go back to a life where that won’t happen.

Then I spent a year following children in a racially segregated school in Central Europe to make a documentary. I spent another few years writing about ethnic conflict in the Balkans. And then the one thing that I think can really change a person's understanding happened. My family became racially mixed. 

Now when I walk into a school with my children or just down the street, I am no longer a "normal" white person. It comes up in a myriad of ways—constantly. And it's exhausting. I know the difference because when I walk down the street alone, it is different. And I know that it isn't long dead history.

But it took all that. It took coming from a family that was open with parents who vehemently wanted me to understand, it took trying out being the only person of my color at a night club in a country with racial tension, it took studying racial and ethnic conflict intensively and in the end it took being part of a family that isn't all white in a country that thinks it isn't racist but is.

One little example. My son is five and in preschool. He has a best friend named Johnny and they are inseparable. But they also fight. And my son is slightly bigger, so when they push Johnny falls down. It has happened twice now in two years that Johnny has been physically hurt in one of these incidents. Once he had a goose egg on his forehead. This time, he had a raw pink scrape on his back from falling onto the Lego pile at preschool. Another boy who is quite trustworthy saw the incident. He said both boys were pulling at a toy and then my son pushed Johnny and Johnny fell on the Legos. There is no real controversy over what happened. I expressed sympathy and my son had no evening video for two days and lost his allowance for a week. And Johnny’s mother is up in arms. She sends me hate mail and detailed photos of her son’s scrape. She has been telling other parents that my son is evil and violent. She tells me that she teaches her son to hit back, so that he won’t become a victim. She is angry and I can’t possibly belittle it. I was bullied terribly as a child. I won’t ever turn my back on a situation that could possibly be bullying. 

But here’s the thing. My son is the only non-white kid in his class. The teachers say he is no more violent than any of the other kids. One boy is known for staying out of the scrapping. But both my son and Johnny are fighters and they tussle and push and sometimes someone gets hurt. The teachers insist that my son isn’t a problem and the boys still want to play together, even though Johnny’s mother has made the school separate them. 

She teaches her son to hit back, but I can’t afford to do that. I must teach my son to be careful and meek. I don’t even teach him to stand up for himself with loud words and a strong stance. I tell him strenuously that he must not push and shove at school. There are serious consequences both at home and at school. First off, he has lost the ability to play with his best friend. He’s five, so I don’t tell him what the consequences may be when he’s older. But I know. 

I know how many young men and boys of color are shot, arrested and jailed for the tiniest infractions. I know that society will not give him the same leeway it will give Johnny. I know that Johnny’s mother can scream and yell at me in the schoolyard and Johnny can watch and learn that this is how to solve conflicts. And when he grows up if he yells at another parent, nothing much will happen. But I cannot yell back even though it is well within my feisty temperament and it costs me a great deal to remain calm. Because my son cannot yell at another parent when he is older. CANNOT. Ever. 

I owe him this. I owe him a good role model because for a man of color to become loud in this society is hugely dangerous and would result in much greater response from authorities.

This is what I now know about white privilege. By becoming the parent of a non-white child, I lost a bit of that privilege. I lost the ability to respond in an argument with an aggressive parent without incurring significant consequences for my child. This is what parents of color know from the get-go that I had to learn. They must raise their children to be more careful, more courteous. It isn’t just a matter of manners. In many places it can significantly affect the chances of survival as a teenager. To be allowed to sometimes be vehement in a discussion with a rude person in public--that is white privilege. A little piece of it at least.

So, I am not as unaware as I once was. But I still have empathy for white people who don't understand this. That may piss you off, but I don't know how to explain it to other white people with words, not words I would have understood and taken under my skin twenty years ago. Many white people will read my description of the problem at my son’s preschool above and still be confused about why that was about white privilege. They’ll scratch their heads, even though I just put it as clearly as it can possibly be put. 

I cannot tell my former self these things in simple terms and if I couldn't hear it then, there are few people who can. I wanted to learn and to understand. I wanted to "see" in that way and I might as well have been physically blind twice over. I could not "see" without experience.

This is why white people are unaware. Because they lack experience. They lack understanding. They don't see the social cues going on around them because they are not exposed to the consequences of them. They take much of what is going on for granted. It is not their fault individually that they don't see these things. We are fallible and human and it would help move toward a less racist society if people of color could come to understand that these concepts are not simple for us—that many white people do try.

I try to educate people, to change things for the better. I now live in the Czech Republic. Here the group of color which is most feared and hated is the Roma. They have skin only a shade darker than most Central Europeans. Many Americans can’t tell any difference. But people here can. And that is the identity of my children.  In a few years, my children will be looked at with suspicion when they enter stores. They will be the first Romani students at their primary school because school desegregation is just beginning here. So, I do what I can to educate. 

I volunteered at my children's preschool the other day. Race and ethnicity is so controversial here that the preschool teachers would not let me do a craft and story session on Romani culture. Their faces go blank when I mention it. So, instead I did it on Zimbabwe. I read story books showing black children in nice city houses, playing with toys and making messes just as children do here. I gave them plastic containers and led them in a snappy African drumming session. And at the end I pulled out my red, yellow, white and black paints and mixed them up several batches of gradated brown paint to demonstrate that we are all brown, just different shades of brown. 

The teachers were stunned and excited with new understanding. They had never seen anything like this before. And yet I have no illusions that I have made a dent in racism with these volunteer classes. They are a tiny breath of fresh air against a tide of smog. I do it not because I think I can change other white people or turn around a racist society. I do it because my children are sitting in the class too and any bit of the endless explanation to white people that I can bear is a bit they won't have to. And they are my children and when you're a parent, you bear whatever you can to make the burden of your children lighter. I know about the huge burden of endless explaining to clueless white people that people of color bear. That's one of the things I know about now.

If you explain and try to help white people understand this, you give a gift to the children of your community. It is very hard to know where to begin and it is a very long road to mutual understanding. I hope it may be worth it to some to try.