The blog, Stuff White People Do, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary, has re-posted a very interesting article about learned whiteness–the beliefs and values that blogger Macon D (who is white) says are consciously and unconsciously taught to white people, beginning in childhood.
First, Macon D quotes Lilliam Smith, who in 1949 published a searing memoir about growing up in the South:
I began to understand, slowly at first but more clearly as the years passed, that the warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also. Each is on a different side of the frame but each is pinioned there. And I knew that what cruelly shapes and cripples the personality of one is as cruelly shaping and crippling the personality of the other.
Then the writer offers some examples of the “frames” that are often put around white children:
1. You are different from other children. Even though your initial impressions in pre-school, at the park, or on the playground behind your apartment building tell you that other kids are just kids like you, some of them are not just like you.
2. You go to a school populated mostly by other white kids. If you don’t attend such a school, you’re an unusual white kid. There’s nothing wrong with going to a school that’s mostly white—it’s normal.
3. You are not to ask why you’re surrounded mostly by other white kids, nor why your neighborhood or town is so very white. You are also not to ask how things got that way. Adults do not have answers to these questions, and they quickly change the subject if you ask them.
4. You are an individual who is responsible for your own actions and accomplishments; your own racial membership is not a factor in your life. Nobody tells you that your race has anything to do with who and what you are, nor with what you achieve (nevertheless, as you might learn later in life, it does). The rules for white conduct are not explicitly stated as such, and you instead learn what you supposedly are as a white person by learning what other people supposedly are. The characteristics displayed by figures who are presented to you as “black,” “Indian,” “Mexican,” and so on, help to define what you are by defining what you are not.
Readers, what do you think? Do you agree with this assessment? And if you are the white parent of a white child, how will you avoid placing Smith’s “warped and distorted frame” around your children?
FYI: I’m caucasian, was raised and still am middle-class.
I was certianly raised with the value of “Personal Responsibility.” That “we” could be anything we want if only we applied ourselves. The assumption then, was that “Blacks” could too, if only…. But they must be intrinsically different….lazy maybe….morally inferior….because “look, they are poor, have more crime, drugs…etc.”
But, what about the priveledged starting point that told us this message in the first place?!! In other words, it is (almost totally) true of us (economocally stable) caucasians, that we could be alot if we applied ourselves…but isn’t that largely because we have the PRIVELEDGE of having almost no other barriers except OURSELVES, and the priveledge of thinking all that stands between us and “success” is hard work?!
I agree with much of what Macon D has to say here. As a white woman raised in the typical liberal so-called ‘color-blind’ kind of environment, the process of truly recognizing my own race and ethnicity and the role that it plays in my life was profound. I was taught (not explicitly, but without question) that white = normal or ‘regular’ – that the holidays we celebrated and way we celebrated them, the way we recognized family events, etc were all just the normal way. As a WASP I think this was especially true, since I had some good Irish Catholic friends who sort of seemed like ‘white plus ethnic’. As I got older I realized that I felt a lack of ethnic identity – as if being white was the bottom line and other ethnic and racial identities were ‘extra’ layers on top of that. Starting to see that we are all equal pieces of the same pie was a revelation. Beverly Tatum’s book “Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” really helped me put my growing awareness into a larger context and see how many white people don’t even know how to answer the question, what is your ethnicity? I have argued even with my social work professors at Berkeley about their use of the word ethnic to mean people of color – this just perpetuates the idea that white people are somehow one thing and everyone else is other.
Now, as the mother to a white toddler, I am definitely conscious of trying to counter this piece of racism by developing race and ethnicity awareness in my son. For me, part of that is about developing genuine pride and knowledge of his own ethnic heritage and therefore a platform for understanding how wonderful it is to have diverse people and cultures in the world. To see himself and our culture as one of many, not the standard against which all others should be measured.
I think this is a thoughtful list and helpful for thinking about how race is not “natural.” I mostly like the Stuff white People Like site. Yes, it’s mostly focused on white people of a certain socio-economic niche, but it is a clever way to highlight to learned nature of race and racism.
I am white and my kids are Black. I often think about how the issues that concern me in making life for my kids–making sure there are plenty of Black adults and other children around them, for example–would be not so very different if I had white kids. I’d just need to do the same kinds of things for different reasons. The “frame” trope is a helpful way to articulate that.
Where are all the other white parents of white children? I’m dying to here your perspecitive on this.
I just linked back here in a post on the CA NOW Blog about the recent Miss California kerfuffle (http://www.canow.org/canoworg/2009/04/miss-californias-homophobia-perez-hiltons-sexism.html), because this is one of the best examples showing how oppression hurts both the oppressor and the oppressed.