Assholes in the news

[Rev. Rye]

Then why do you want people to stop being so white when you don't even believe white is a real thing?

You want me to stop being racist? Can you send me a link to a dictionary definition that says being against discrimination based on skin colour is racist? I thought it was the opposite, but maybe my dictionary is getting it wrong.

I understand very well about unconscious bias and how we're all a little bit racist when it comes down to it. I'm imperfect just like everyone else, but assuming a white person is oppressive right off the bat and telling them to stop being white is racist as hell. Only a racist wouldn't see that.

Because we don't exactly live in the ideal world where all whiteness means is you're more likely to get sunburn. We live in a world where whites conquered everything and gave everyone else the shaft. You say white people put men on the moon, well, it ain't as simple as that.

This is Katherine Johnson. She was the woman (and a black one at that, although she's light-skinned and the black and white film doesn't pick it up very well) who calculated the trajectory for the Apollo 11 moon landing, and it took forever for her to get any recognition for that fact. Case in point, she only even got a Wikipedia article at the tail end of 2009. Looking at the "legacies and honors" section of her Wikipedia article, apart from her "Alumnus of the Year" award, it looks like she only started getting properly recognised for her contributions SIX YEARS AGO. Why? Here's where the other definitions of whiteness, specifically the ones DiAngelo uses, come in.

See, the definitions she uses for whiteness aren't quite what you might use to define whiteness. It's not exactly about skin colour, or even European ancestry. It's about how our perceptions of it interact with society's power structures. Like, to take Katherine Johnson's example, why someone like Wernher von Braun (a former Nazi even if his relationship with the party was complex as fuck) could be a household name at the time and how she only even got within spitting distance of that recognition when she was pushing 100. It's how it never even occurred to me that black women could have played such a crucial role in the Apollo and Mercury programs until I started hearing buzz about the Hidden Figures movie. And more crucially, it's about how much of an outlier Katherine Johnson was. You might think "of course she's an outlier! You know how few people are good enough at STEM to become a part of NASA?" Well, even among those lucky few, black people are still underrepresented. This chart is from 2015, and it doesn't look like things are much better now:



While the educational system for black people isn't as dire as it was when Johnson was still in school, it's still shockingly grim. Many black people still live in poverty and the neighbourhoods they live in are still de facto segregated due to the legacy of a little thing called redlining, and because most schools are funded by property taxes and there isn't much property tax to go around, these schools are underfunded and thus, frankly, crap. It's potentially possible for them to get out of the ghetto, but actually doing so is a lot harder than just working hard. It's a hell of a lot harder to go up in the world than it is to go down, and it's even harder when you have fewer resources, like many black people in poverty do. And there's a LOT of black people in poverty. Even at its lowest point, there were at least twice as many black families in poverty than white families:


Frankly, this isn't even close to everything I could say about systemic racism, and I've been writing this for over an hour just using what I could find about Katherine Johnson's story as a jumping off point. But suffice it to say, the fact that white people live in a bubble that's so insulated from the consequences that we can't even see it for what it is when we actually encounter it is a big part of what DiAngelo called whiteness. When she talks about making people be less white, remember that that's the big thing she wants people to stop doing.

You know the legend of how the Buddha lived his first years in a little bubble and only got to see the outside world and found out that illness, old age, and death were a thing when he was 29?



What if young Siddhartha saw these things and, instead of being concerned about what he saw, just asked why they weren't moving around like people should and he couldn't process the fact that sometimes, shit like that was due to factors beyond their control? That would be a perfect metaphor for how blind we are to our privilege and how society doesn't grant that privilege to others. That, more than anything else, is what this whole presentation, is trying to combat.

We can argue about whether or not using that exact terminology is counterproductive, but the underlying idea is sound.