Unit 1: Introduction to the Course: Anti-Black Racism in Canada
Week 2 – Day 1 – Decentering Whiteness
“You can choose not to see the sky, but it exists.”
Reni Eddo-Lodge
Today’s class will explore the racialization of ‘whiteness’ and introduce Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS). Specific topics to be explored are:
- The process of white racial formation and how people can claim it and be denied it.
- Problematizing whiteness as a corrective to the traditional exclusive focus on the racialized “other.”
- ‘Whiteness’ as a social construction that is used to maintain white supremacy.
- The meaning of white privilege and white privilege pedagogy, as well as how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism.
Required Material
Eternity Martis, They Said This Would Be Fun.
- “Introduction” (pages 1-10)
- “All I Wanted Was to Be Wonder Woman” (pages 11-28)
- “Token” (pages 29-47)
- “Go Back to Your Country” (pages 48-81)
- “Visible Bruises” (pages 82-111)
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Eddo-Lodge, R. (2017). Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. The Guardian. [link]
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Robin DiAngelo (2016). White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism. The Good Men Project. [link]
What is Whiteness?
Whiteness refers to the specific dimensions of racism that elevate white people over all other people, where Western “whiteness” is valorized and privileged. When addressing the realities of anti-Black racism, Black scholars W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin urged white people to stop focusing on “the Other” and turn their attention onto themselves to explore the power and privileges of whiteness or white supremacy — “the pervasiveness, magnitudes, and normalcy of White privilege, dominance, and assumed superiority” (Sensory and Di Angelo, 2017, p.120).
Whiteness, “has a set of linked dimensions…first, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege…second, it is a “standpoint”, a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society…third, “whiteness” refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (Frankenberg, 1993, p. 1)
The following is a short (6 minute) video of Nell Irvin Painter discussing the expanding definition of whiteness, whereby various “nonwhite” ethnic groups have become defined as “white” throughout more recent history.
Irvin Painter, Nell. (2012). The Expanding Definition of Whiteness (Video). BigThink. Available at: https://bigthink.com/videos/the-expanding-definition-of-whiteness/
What is White racial identity and why is it important?
What does it mean to decenter whiteness?
It is the disruption, investigation and critique of whiteness. It involves making white supremacy cultures visible and the universalization of whiteness ensures structural privilege for white people. Resulting in unequal power dynamics and systemic inequalities that harm Black and racialized peoples. In fact, if “racism is the systemic power imbalances between white people and people of colour, then whiteness can be understood as the specific qualities of racism that advance white people above other races. While basic rights and freedoms, resources, and opportunities are meant to be available to all, these are often only possibilities for white people” (Sensory and Di Angelo, 2016, p.119). This is white privilege, and while many white people experience this privilege, they are not conscious of it or its inherent power. In order to decenter whiteness, we must first understand what it is, as most white people do not understand whiteness as a racialized identity, “to see one’s race as having no meaning is a privilege only whites are afforded” (Sensory and Di Angelo, 2012, p.119). Indeed, being unconscious of one’s own race and attributing no meaning or unique feelings to what it means to be white is unique only to white people. Seeing no meaning in one’s own race is a privilege that only white people experience; to be “normal,” “simply human,” or outside of race/raceless is one the most permeating expressions of whiteness.
Of course, white people are racialized, however, their racialized identities can be invisible, unacknowledged, or seemingly “normal”. This is in part because whiteness must rarely be negotiated or thought of since whiteness is maintained as the normative standard by which other races are measured against. In fact, white people may not see themselves as part of a race while simultaneously maintaining their whiteness by racializing non-whites. In other words, no other race has the immunity to trade in their race for being “normal”. As a result, whiteness has remained self-fulfilling. Even more, folks may identify themselves as white, but do so with discomfort, or without understanding what it means to be white as it relates to power and privilege (Sensory and Di Angelo, 2016). Therefore, Thompson, 2003 asserts
What happens when I try to talk race with white people?
“You can choose not to see the sky, but it exists”
That’s how Reni Eddo-Lodge responds when somebody tells her they don’t see race. Trying to raise the topic in white-dominated social circles often led her to an immediate shutdown, one that might spring from others’ fear of being wrong, she says. Eddo-Lodge offers her Brief but Spectacular take on talking to white people about race for PBS NewsHour (PBS, 2017). Watch the 3-and-a-half-minute video here: https://www.pbs.org/video/bbs-1512087209/
The next video is another of Eddo-Lodge, discussing her book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race—an urgent and powerfully-argued exploration of race and racism in contemporary Britain, and of the experience of being a person of colour in today’s society.
Introducing her book—which was adapted from her blog post of the same name—Eddo-Lodge describes how, in attempting to raise issues of race and racism in progressive circles, she received reactions trying to shut down her argument. Talking about the idea of colour blindness, in which issues of racism are avoided by ‘not seeing race’, the author also describes how much of the narrative around race and civil rights looks to the US, at the cost of overlooking black British history. Here the author talks about her journey to writing the book, about the layers of structural racism an individual might encounter across their life, and of the rise of far-right politics around the globe.
White Fragility
White Fragility in a 1970s experiment
The following video depicts a segment of Jane Elliott’s famous classroom experiment.
The original documentary was produced and distributed by ABC in 1970, two years after Jane Elliott first conducted the “Blue Eyes Brown Eyes” experiment in her third-grade classroom. The initial experiment was prompted by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and was originally an adaptation of two lessons she had planned about “Native Americans” and Martin Luther King Jr. (before he had been assassinated). Although many of the students still express how much this experience changed their lives, there were plenty of negative reactions from parents suggesting it was cruel to subject their white children to such discrimination. In 1985, PBS filmed a follow-up called A Class Divided for their series Frontline (publicly available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mcCLm_LwpE)
NOTE: The following clip was posted by a YouTube user, but the material is copyright American Broadcast Company. Many videos online depict clips of varying length and composition, but this one is concise and does not involve extra interview components as can be found throughout the web.
White Fragility and Racism
“White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress … White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable [for white people], triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium”
DiAngelo, 2011, p. 54-63
The following video depicts Robin DiAngelo (author of White Fragility) explaining what is meant by white fragility, what it means, and why white people should stop avoiding conversations about race.
White Supremacy
It is common to think about extreme hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan when we think of white supremacists, or images of confederate flags may come into mind. It is also common to think of “bad racists” – individual people who are unambiguously racist. However, white supremacy is used in anti-racist education as a term to capture and acknowledge the belief systems underlying whiteness, including white privilege, dominance, and assumed superiority. As such, white supremacy is the combination of white power and white privilege and the ideology that preserves white racism. White supremacy, then exists in overt ways: shaping right-wing power groups, and in self-fulfilling ways: shaping systems, societies, and individual thoughts and beliefs.
Accordingly, our exploration of the prevalence of anti-Black racism in Canada understands white supremacy consistent with Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) who are “not referring to extreme hate groups or “bad racists.” [They] use the term to capture the all encompassing dimensions of White privilege, dominance, and assumed superiority in mainstream society “ (p. 165). This understanding frames the ways in which white supremacy is taken up within this course.
Further, as explained by bell hooks in this short video the concept of white supremacy is preferable to racism as white supremacy “isn’t a white thing”. This framing helps us understand how white supremacy is socialized, internalized, reproduced, and maintained. For example, Black and racialized people growing up in a white-dominant society often internalize negative stereotypes about their racial identity (which can lead to colorism, anti-blackness, and white adjacency (a concept will explore in more detail in Unit Three). Watch the short clip here: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx8Wa9K3KsQKlxXjUkR26XCUq_5Qe1ARMh
White Supremacy in Canada 2022
Canada is continually constructed as a (geographically and) demographically “White” place and space (Johnson and Aladejebi, 2022). However, Indigenous peoples have lived [on this land] for 10,000 to 20,000 years, and have advanced civilizations, societal structures, and governance long before the landings of white, European colonizers about 500 years ago. The enslavement of African peoples in Canadian societies meant that white supremacy could be further supported and advanced, while tools such as segregation forcefully maintained a racialized population even after slavery was made illegal (Maynard, 2017). Further, while slavery is often made out to be a problem for Black folks rather than white folks, it’s important to recognize that the enterprise of slavery was lawfully coordinated by White Europeans based on premises such as “natural” superiority grounded xenophobic and Eurocentric beliefs and supported by the pseudo-science of human difference via distinct ‘races’ (as discussed in Day Two, What is Race?).
European colonization used the science of ‘race’ to justify the expansion or the enslavement of African peoples. Such that white supremacy must be understood as foundational to the origins of Canada as a nation state. Certainly, Canada is widely regarded as a “White Country” for its Christianity, English and French languages, and its systems of law, politics, governing, and economy being (White) realities. Yet, Canada has been distinguished from the United States historically and contemporarily as a nation of racial and cultural tolerance, multilingualism and multiculturalism. This national narrative of “benign Whiteness” or “racial innocence” distorts the realities of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada. Eva Mackey argues, racialized communities were (and are) the “necessary ‘others’ who reflect back white Canada’s self-image of tolerance” (as cited in Johnson and Aladejebi, 2022).
Critical Whiteness Studies
- an academic field, “committed to disrupting racism by problematizing whiteness as a corrective to the traditional exclusive focus on the racialized ‘other’” (Applebaum, 2016).
Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) is a relatively recent and growing field of scholarship “whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege” (Applebaum, 2016). It presumes racism is connected to white supremacy and examines the meaning of white privilege and how it is connected to complicity in racism. Barbara Applebaum stresses that CWS requires white people “to acknowledge, rather than deny, how whites are complicit in racism” and to develop an awareness that critically questions the Eurocentric ‘white gaze’ (Morrison, 1987) and associated frames of truth and conceptions of the “good” through which they understand their social world (Applebaum, 2016). Alison Bailey (2014) contends that if white people can move to a position that eschews guilt or conflict for an intellectual and emotional openness, they have a vulnerability that is a condition for anti-racist potential.
Critical whiteness studies (CWS) is underpinned by the following beliefs:
- That whiteness is a social construction, “a modern invention, [that] has changed over time and place” (Nayak, 2007, p. 739).
- That whiteness is a social norm that is tied to a myriad social, political, and cultural advantages–an index of unacknowledged privileges.
- “Critical accounts of whiteness are a vital and necessary corrective to a sociology of race that myopically explored colour-based racisms [anti-Black racism] with little attempt to reflect upon constructions of whiteness” . In understanding the mutually constitutive aspect of whiteness and the racial “other”, CWS “subverts the idea of whiteness as a universal norm” (Nayak, 2007, p. 739) .
References
Applebaum, B. (2016). Critical Whiteness Studies. Oxford Research Encyclopedias, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.5
Baily, A. (2014). ‘White Talk’ as a Barrier to Understanding the Problems with Whiteness. In George Yancy (ed.), White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-racism: How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem? Lexington Books. pp. 37-57. Chapter retrieved from: https://philpapers.org/archive/BAIWTA.pdf
DiAngelo, R. (2020). How ‘white fragility’ reinforces racism [Video]. Guardian News.
DiAngelo, R(2011). White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism. The Good Men Project. [link]
Elliott, Jane. (1970). The Eye of the Storm (Video clip). American Broadcast Company. [link]
Frankenberg, R. (1993). The social construction of Whiteness: White women, race matters. University of Minnesota Press.
Frontline PBS. A Class Divided. [Video]
Johnson, M. and F. Aladejebi (2022). Unsettling the Great White North. University of Toronto Press.
Nayak, A. (2007). Critical whiteness studies. Sociology Compass, 1(2):737-755.
Sensoy, Ö and DiAngelo R. (2017). Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (2nd Ed.), Teachers College Press, New York, NY.
a growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege. In advancing the importance of vigilance among white people, CWS examines the meaning of white privilege and white privilege pedagogy, as well as how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism. (Applebaum, 2016)
a dominant cultural space with enormous political significance, with the purpose to keep others on the margin. (OCT, 2021)
the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups, in particular Black or Jewish people. (OCT, 2021)
the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed upon people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it. (McIntosh, 1988)
More about white privilege can be found here.
