Heart of Whiteness
January 9, 2015 12:59 AM   Subscribe

Could I have played with these words if I had been a racist? No—I couldn’t be a racist. Even as a boy I had been shocked by what happened in Little Rock, the spectacle of pompadoured thugs and women in curlers yelling insults and curses at black kids trying to get to school. With my brother, I joined the March on Washington. We were there.
Yet there was that joke: in the New Yorker Tobias Wolff writes about how deep racism has seeped into his consciousness despite his best efforts.
posted by MartinWisse (63 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
When my daughter was in kindergarten, she often spoke of her favorite classmate, a girl named Alice. Alice was really nice. Alice liked to sing. Alice helped her clean up after a messy art project. Alice was funny. We finally got to meet Alice and her mother at a school parents’ night. She was black. Our daughter had never mentioned that; of all the many things she’d told us about Alice, this detail had seemed too trivial to mention, if she’d noticed it at all. In my daughter’s regard of Alice, of the qualities that made Alice Alice, the color of her skin had counted for nothing. I cannot say how strongly this affected me. These little girls, unconscious of each other in this one way, revived the vision of a possibility that I hadn’t been aware I’d stopped believing in—a land not of races but of brothers and sisters.

The kids are alright.

(this is a fascinating essay, thanks for posting it.)
posted by chavenet at 1:28 AM on January 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


Mostly I didn’t like the sense of exertion I found here, the puppyish falling over myself to amuse and impress another man.

Those are often my weakest moments, and a behavior I abhor in myself. Thankfully I don't do it often, but every time I fall into that mode I climb out feeling greasy and hoping the other person had been distracted and hadn't heard me . Insecurity is a bitch.
posted by HuronBob at 2:57 AM on January 9, 2015 [11 favorites]


I cannot tell you how angry half of this essay made me. I say half, because I didn't make it through the whole thing,

1. I'm so tired of this half-sentence writing style that has permeated American language. Motherfucker, say what you're going to say. Have the courage of your convictions. Believe that what you have to say is important.

2. What this dude has to say isn't important. Oh, it's another white guy who has suddenly discovered that race exists. What a powerful statement. What a fascinating meditation. What a wonder, that a four-year-old can write an article.

3. It's not just black and white. Y'all need to get with it.

4. Yes, I'm angry. I'm tired of being on the sidelines. I'm tired of fighting for my people. No one gives a shit. We'll never be part of the race conversation, despite the fact that we weren't even allowed in the fucking country until 50 years ago. Did you know that? If you didn't, why didn't you?

5. White people -- yes, you -- no one gives a shit. No one is surprised that you're racist, but you. No one struggles with it, but you. No one cares. Live with it. Deal with it. Don't talk to each other; it won't help. Talk to us. Talk to me.

6. Don't be a writer. Be a person.
posted by Errant at 4:00 AM on January 9, 2015 [49 favorites]


I enjoyed the essay. Wish Wolff had had these insights earlier in his life, for his sake, but better late than never. Thanks for the post.
posted by GrammarMoses at 4:12 AM on January 9, 2015


I cannot tell you how angry half of this essay made me.

Actually, you conveyed the angry pretty effectively. Your point, not so much.
posted by Segundus at 4:40 AM on January 9, 2015 [18 favorites]


Has the effect of increasing juror pay been studied?
posted by michaelh at 4:58 AM on January 9, 2015


To be honest, I didn't post this so much because his insights were that interesting or novel, but rather because of the honesty in which Wolff admits to his failings and ability to articulate them.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:05 AM on January 9, 2015 [8 favorites]


Actually, you conveyed the angry pretty effectively. Your point, not so much.

Ok.
posted by Errant at 5:05 AM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


MartinWisse: I have no argument against posting it; it was worth posting. I have only my reaction to it.
posted by Errant at 5:09 AM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


White people talking to each other.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 5:09 AM on January 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


I mean, this is just so....I dunno, basic? Point-missing? And the payoff heart-warming story at the end is that his little white daughter didn't mention that her friend was black, and that's supposed to be a sign of progress? I bet you $100 her friend knows full damn well who's black and who's white in that friendship. Getting to not think about, not even notice race in the US is pretty much only the privilege of the white and the very wealthy. The fact that his daughter lives a manifestation of that privilege isn't necessarily bad; I don't expect every 4-year-old to engage with the meaning of race and privilege...but still.

Also, this:
But look: most of us still live in enclaves. As much as the country has changed since I was young, this has not. Though more and more we work together, learn together, bear arms together, we mostly go home to separate worlds and bring up our children in separate worlds, either by intention or cultural habit or simply as a consequence of economic and class divisions. (emphasis mine)
Dude, you're probably being paid pretty well to write this bullshit. How about doing the absolute minimum of research, and finding out that redlining is a real thing that really, really happened.

This article can be summarized as "vaguely well-meaning white dude kinda realizes that vaguely meaning well isn't good enough, seems to think he's the first to discover it, writes vaguely well-meaning article about it."
posted by tkfu at 5:12 AM on January 9, 2015 [35 favorites]


The main virtue of the piece is that it's written in a way that those in the target audience who need to hear its message will be more likely to listen (e.g., my dad). Hopefully then they can move on to bell hooks or something that might make them notice the uncomfortably heavy privilege knapsack they've been carrying.

Errant--I thought you conveyed your point effectively and am glad you shared your honest reaction in that way.
posted by radicalawyer at 5:45 AM on January 9, 2015 [20 favorites]


Well, this essay has been pretty effectively Metafiltered.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 5:49 AM on January 9, 2015 [24 favorites]


1. I'm so tired of this half-sentence writing style that has permeated American language. Motherfucker, say what you're going to say. Have the courage of your convictions. Believe that what you have to say is important.

Exactly. And tell us the goddamn joke!

Is it in the article? I skimmed through the whole long piece, but couldn't find it. Did I overlook it?

It is not so much that I like to hear racist jokes, but how are we supposed to have an opinion on something that is never told us in the first place? As it stands, we have pages and pages of "I did something really bad in the past" without ever hearing what it is. And if the joke is just one example of all the transgressions in your past, then don't build up to it. Say, "I told some really distasteful racist jokes in the past." Don't say, "I did some terrible things in the past, but I was totally shocked by this one particularly clumsy and witless racist joke."

After all, there are two kinds of readers.
First, there are those who need closure.
posted by sour cream at 5:58 AM on January 9, 2015 [8 favorites]


I love Tobias Wolff and I thought that this essay was very well-written. I appreciate what he has done here and give him credit for publishing it, particularly because he must have known that it is self-evidently a no-win piece: who is going to give you credit for admitting to being less racist than you once were?

I mean, this is just so....I dunno, basic? Point-missing?

Just out of curiosity, how can a personal essay be point-missing?

From the essay: I took a public bus to and from school. I was on my way home one afternoon, sitting on one of the inward-facing benches by the door, when a pregnant black woman got on. She had two big bags of groceries, and the bus was so crowded that she couldn’t make her way past the white people standing in the aisles; she was stuck in the front with everyone staring at her, fighting for balance whenever the bus lurched to a stop or made a turn. Mama-raised little gentleman that I was, I gestured to her and was rising to offer my seat when the woman beside me seized my arm and slammed me back down. She fixed me with a hot, furious stare, then turned it on the black woman, who affected not to have noticed any of this. But I burned with embarrassment and felt I’d done something wrong. I was never tempted to repeat the offense.

My father tells of similar stories from his youth. He was white and his best friend was black, and they spent a lot of time together on their farms. They didn't find their friendship unique -- or at least, my father didn't. But then one day their youth basketball team traveled by bus to another town and, in between games, they decided to go to the public pool. The kids had been instructed to bring their swim suits. As the boys scrambled off the bus, the coach told my father and his friend to sit in their seats. Unfortunately, the pool was whites-only. The coach asked my father to sit with his friend on the bus, to keep him company, and he agreed. For the next hour, the two of them sat together in silence. I'm sure it wasn't a surprise to my father's friend, but it was an absolute shock to my father. As he tells it, he had not previously considered that a person could be treated that way.

After that day, the two boys were not nearly such good friends. Was it because my father was naive about race? Absolutely, of that there isn't any doubt. Was it because he was somehow turned into a racist? Maybe. But it was the social norms that screamed "Your friendship is not acceptable. Do not be friends with that person anymore." that ultimately did them in. It was and is his weakness, above everything else, that he regrets the most. There's a great big cultural force pushing you one way -- too much, probably, for most 10 year-olds to push back. And of course this is my father's story. It is not his friend's story. I'm sure the telling of that story is different. Maybe his friend had known all along that he wouldn't be allowed to swim. Maybe his story is about a dumb-shit white kid he once knew. But that seems okay to me. It's okay to have different stories, so long as we share them. And it's okay for white people to talk to white people and to say, "hey guys, we're fucked up. This isn't right. Is there something we can do to change ourselves?"
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 6:12 AM on January 9, 2015 [45 favorites]


(Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates... Thanks for that comment..... calm, articulate, and reasoned. (I can now put my incoherent rant on the shelf and not embarrass myself..... )
posted by HuronBob at 6:16 AM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


It seems to me that this is a bad way to frame notions of racism: as an external contamination of something inherently pure, as he portrays his daughter at the end. It still constructs racism as a thing of overt malice and evil, apart from the banality, and a thing which comes from the outside rather than being a self-emergent phenomenon. As though the "natural state of man" is objective and rational and fair to all and there's some sort of absolution of past racism to be had, if achieved properly, after which you've got a clean slate equivalent to your primordial purity.

Better to speak of bias and prejudice as the default state, to whatever degree and wherever they may come from, and treat the absence of them as the exception if indeed that can ever be said to really happen.
posted by XMLicious at 6:21 AM on January 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


Yeah, I don't know. If this had been published in Color Lines (it wouldn't have been) then it would have been all wrong. But it was published in The New Yorker, by Tobias Wolff who is able to speak cogently about his own failings even in the midst of his attempts to overcome them. In mental health, we would call Wolff a "peer" and expect that he could speak in specific, different, and helpful ways to others suffering from similar afflictions, even if the tone or the content would not seem appropriate to a professional. In that sense, I think he's very effective here, and I even think it's a worthwhile piece for The New Yorker to publish, rather than, say, another article that would allow their readership to think that all those others are racists but not them.

Yes, the piece is problematic in all kinds of other ways. Wolff is too gentle with himself. He doesn't understand that his daughter still enjoys privilege in her failure to remark on her friend's race. Wolff makes the mistake of only talking about Black and White. The article as a whole is insular and written for other White people, which may perpetuate historical exclusions that should always be challenged. But the piece is absolutely about pointing out failure rather than glorifying in rightness, and that's always a pretty good start for a White writer trying to talk about race and racism.
posted by OmieWise at 6:21 AM on January 9, 2015 [15 favorites]


In the future, every one of us, each and all, will be pecked to death by amateur composition PAs.
posted by maxsparber at 6:22 AM on January 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


Wolff makes the mistake of only talking about Black and White

I disagree. Not every personal essay can be all things to all people. That's very much not the point. In this piece he confronts a past version of himself that crossed the line of Black and White. So that's what he writes about.

I do agree, though, with the sentiment that he completely missed the part privilege played in his daughter's friendship.
posted by GrapeApiary at 6:28 AM on January 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


Yes, I actually agree that for his essay (because for his life) Black/White is the major race axis. I was including that in a list of general criticisms of the content of the essay as an essay on race.
posted by OmieWise at 6:35 AM on January 9, 2015


I do agree, though, with the sentiment that he completely missed the part privilege played in his daughter's friendship.

At the risk of sounding like a Wolff apologist, I think that the last paragraph was intended as a final, cynical coda meant to rebuke notions of perceived racial progress, but that it probably missed its mark. In my opinion it would have been a stronger essay without it. For while I hear and understand the criticisms of Wolff's lack of recognition of privilege, is there a better example of privilege than waiting for Ralph Ellison to come up to your apartment and then being disappointed he never arrived ("one of the great disappointments of my life"), only to learn later that he was turned away by the white doorman? As a writer, Wolff asks you to read between the lines. He's damning the hell out of his younger self here and it is, to me, a pretty epic slam.

My Google-fu is failing me but I know that Wolff and TNC both have connections to The Atlantic. Have either of them ever written about the other?
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 6:41 AM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think maybe I just hate the idea that a magazine called the New Yorker, which is where I was born, counts as "white people talking to white people", even though it totally is.
posted by Errant at 6:42 AM on January 9, 2015 [10 favorites]


Actually, you conveyed the angry pretty effectively. Your point, not so much.

Come me crazy, but perhaps the anger and frustration which permeated the entire comment, including the carefully numbered list, did a quite fine job of articulating several points.

Otherwise, the piece was pretty meh for me, a 40 something black dude. But I'm not the target audience. If the article gets some older white people to rethink a few things, cool. These days, that's about all one can hope for
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:43 AM on January 9, 2015 [15 favorites]


The kids are alright.

My mother tells a story of when I was in pre-school, I remember none of this, but I had a best friend, and apparently one day I became really upset and voiced my opinions loudly.

When they explained it to my mom, I was pissed because they told me my friend was "black" and this was obviously stupid and wrong. Anyone with working eyes could clearly see that he was golden, not black, so why were they being so stupidly obstinate about such an plainly apparent thing?

There is a time before we understand the differences, when the world is a much simpler place. A gold friend, a toy truck, a nap. It was all good back then.
posted by quin at 7:46 AM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


-Wolff makes the mistake of only talking about Black and White

--I disagree. Not every personal essay can be all things to all people.


I dunno; I was able to instantly extrapolate this to all the cringeworthy things I said as an ignorant, redneck small-town middle-schooler in front of my best friend, who I found out when we were both grown up was gay and had spent his teen years in the closet. Oh, it was nothing vile, nothing you wouldn't have heard on Monty Python or Benny Hill - the sick AIDS jokes that were going around at the time made me absolutely furious - but if I could go back and smack that benighted kid I was upside the head I'd do it in a heartbeat.

As frustrating as it may be for people on the receiving end of white (cis, hetero, etc.) privilege to keep hearing it, I'm of the opinion that the privileged groups still need to hear this message: You may think "Oh, I couldn't do anything racist, because racists are total cartoon monsters who burn crosses on front lawns and dress up in white sheets, and as long as I'm not like that, and my intentions aren't pure evil, anything I do is OK," but it's not really true.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:54 AM on January 9, 2015 [7 favorites]


White people talking to each other.

The nerve of them!
posted by Hoopo at 8:09 AM on January 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think this kind of article is a great demonstration of the concept of "The master's tools will not dismantle the Master's house." Someone whose every pleasure and privilege is due to their race, gender, sexual orientation is never going to willingly give up that position.

This article is an "airing out" of the house. It is opening the windows and letting air and sunlight in. It is cleaning out the dust and the dirt. It's letting your neighbors see how much work you put into that dirty laundry, now clean on the line. The person who gets to live in the house, to own it, to have wealth from it now feels cleansed, but the house still stands and nothing changes.

Dismantling white supremacy would be taking everything out of the house, auctioning it off, dividing up the profit, and then burning the fucking house down. It would be turning the ashes over and tilling them into the soil to fertilize it, then putting a garden in its place that everyone could enjoy, and eat from. It would be saying, this house will not be rebuilt, we have learned from our mistakes.
posted by SassHat at 8:30 AM on January 9, 2015 [11 favorites]


The author is a man and also a writer. do not like what he has to say? write your own stuff. He tells us what he feels, know, goes through...has gone through....your experience may be different and of value. Tell us then and stop pissing on a guy giving his .
posted by Postroad at 8:40 AM on January 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


Dismantling white supremacy would be taking everything out of the house, auctioning it off, dividing up the profit, and then burning the fucking house down. It would be turning the ashes over and tilling them into the soil to fertilize it, then putting a garden in its place that everyone could enjoy, and eat from. It would be saying, this house will not be rebuilt, we have learned from our mistakes.

Based on this criteria, it's never gonna happen.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:41 AM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


An excellent essay; I'm kind of sorry it was posted to MetaFilter, because this place is so full of people eager to rend and tear anything that doesn't live up to their fantasies of the Perfect With-It Totally Up-to-Date Multieverything Statement. Ah well, as someone who was brought up, like Wolff, in a pretty much exclusively white environment (and had racist relatives who weren't the least bit abashed about expressing it), it resonated with me. Here's a bit that I thought was worth quoting:
But what if the stain goes deeper than that, into our nerves, into places in our nature where the light can’t reach? Could it be the moral equivalent of a malarial protozoan, concealed and protected by our certainty that we have been cured, then breaking out in a malignant word or joke or thought? Or, more often, presenting in a milder form—in the arched eyebrow shared with a friend when a gay man makes a certain gesture, or a private smile when a black celebrity says “axe” instead of “ask.” Or even in that small self-congratulation we may feel in having easy, familiar relations with a black colleague, such as would not occur to us to feel with a white colleague. Always we are most vulnerable to those ills we think we’re cured of.
But I'm sure it's not as eloquent and honest as it seems to me, because I, like Wolff, am just another white guy and therefore equivalent to a four-year-old and no one gives a shit.
posted by languagehat at 9:24 AM on January 9, 2015 [27 favorites]


Languagehat, that part stuck out to me too. This is totally a White article for White people, but it is also the kind of discussion that needs to happen between white people and the kinds of feelings white people need to express loudly to each other until more white people figure out racism does not just come dressed in swastikas and burning crosses. Non-white people have seen this kind of thing a billion times and are tired to death of it, but this kind of discussion making it out of anti-racism circles and into the general white arena is relatively new for white folks.
posted by Anonymous at 10:00 AM on January 9, 2015


There is a time before we understand the differences, when the world is a much simpler place. A gold friend, a toy truck, a nap. It was all good back then.
quin

There isn't, and this concept of a fall from a state of childlike grace is a fantasy. XMLicious has it right:

Better to speak of bias and prejudice as the default state, to whatever degree and wherever they may come from, and treat the absence of them as the exception if indeed that can ever be said to really happen.

There was a fascinating episode of Mother Jones's Inquiring Minds podcast featuring a discussion with cognitive scientist Paul Bloom on the development of morality. He studies babies, toddlers, and children to learn about how our ideas of morality develop.

He talks about research in this area, which has found that humans are natural discriminators. When born we begin dividing up the world, first into "family" and "not family". The definition of what's "family" starts with those the baby is in immediate contact with at birth, and grows and changes and is shaped by society and education, but in large part is influenced by "similar to my family" vs. "not similar". This means preferences for those that look similar to the family, but interestingly they found that language is an even greater divide than appearance: babies discriminate strongly based on the language they were exposed to even in the womb, and even among accents of the same language, showing a marked preference for their own mother's voice first, and then for people who speak their mother's language.

The good news is, as noted above, this discrimination can be shaped by society, and Bloom says studies have found that children who attend more racially integrated and diverse schools are markedly less racist than children who don't.

Still, the reality is that children have to taught not to be racists, not the other way around, however much we'd like to believe in the Fall.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:10 AM on January 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


In the future, every one of us, each and all, will be pecked to death by amateur composition PAs.

Physician's assistants? I think they'd do a better job teaching writing than this thread. But yeah, weird philistine discussion we've got going here. Not to say it's wrong either to be angry at Wolff or not to like his politics — I had those reactions myself — but it's really weird to displace that onto his prose style, which is exemplary.
posted by RogerB at 10:20 AM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


The reason articles like this are important (to me at least) on the blue, is not to follow the thread for the white dudes like me patting each other on the back and saying "yeah, we're really making progress on this now..." but rather to read and hear what Errant and Brandon Blatcher and others have to say.
thanks for the post, thanks for the discussion.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:32 AM on January 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


but it's really weird to displace that onto his prose style, which is exemplary.

Maybe. The style kind of plays into the whole "recognition as absolution" tack a lot of writers take -- I can admit this problematic thing about myself, so really it's not as problematic as you may think. I mean, it's one thing to say, "Hey, I'm actually pretty racist and the whole system's fucked." It's entirely different to use all of your wealth to set up a college scholarship fund for minority kids, or whatever.
posted by MetalFingerz at 10:34 AM on January 9, 2015


It is not so much that I like to hear racist jokes, but how are we supposed to have an opinion on something that is never told us in the first place? As it stands, we have pages and pages of "I did something really bad in the past" without ever hearing what it is

He told a racist joke in a letter to a friend, many years ago. That's what "it is". There is absolutely no reason why you would have to hear the joke. Including the joke itself would add absolutely nothing to the piece--he admits his joke was racist and he feels shame and realizes maybe he is not and never was "not part of the problem" like he thought he was. Why on earth would anyone think the point of this is for us to pass judgement on the author for how racist his racist joke really was?

And the payoff heart-warming story at the end is that his little white daughter didn't mention that her friend was black, and that's supposed to be a sign of progress?


I think so! Based on what he's talking about, like still being a boy when he was shocked by what happened at Little Rock, the author must be something like in his mid-60s. And the story about his daughter in kindergarten probably happened in the early 1980s, she's not a little girl, she's probably in her mid-30s. Her kindergarten friendship would have represented a huge amount of progress from the time the author was in school. And...that's not the "payoff" of this piece, either.

I think I'm going to leave this thread now, I don't think a lot of you have really bothered to RTFA before lining up to see who can tear off the biggest shreds.
posted by Hoopo at 11:14 AM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


The author is a man and also a writer. do not like what he has to say? write your own stuff.

I'm also both, and I do. What a strange thing to assume, that people writing something here must not write things elsewhere.

I do not generally have a problem with essays about white people awakening to race or their own roles in the race conversation, and I regret saying earlier "don't talk to each other, talk to us", because that's actually the opposite of what I think; it's important for white people to talk to each other about this stuff, and I do recognize that. In my frustration, I wrote something I didn't mean, and I apologize for that. Maybe it's the prose style or the publication location or something else, but this particular one bugs me. Others don't. I don't have a comprehensive list, but, for example, I still remember this one from the Stranger in Seattle a few years ago and thought it was pretty good.
posted by Errant at 11:15 AM on January 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


This is a Tobias Wolff essay. It's lovely. It is what Tobias Wolff does best, has done for decades, what he's known and loved for. It's personal and reflective and beautifully written. That it is not The Great American Treatise on Race is a weird criticism. I don't think it was trying to be that. I don't think everything written on race needs to be that. This is a Tobias Wolff essay. The man's had struggles too. He writes about them. He's good at it.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:28 AM on January 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


Sometimes I forget how well Wolff can write. Because of this post I dug out some of his books and read a couple of stories between breaks this afternoon. I should do that more often.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 12:24 PM on January 9, 2015


(Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates: "There's a great big cultural force pushing you one way"

Yes, a great big cultural force. A mysterious force.

Let's not think or talk about that too much. It would spoil the mood.
posted by yaymukund at 12:28 PM on January 9, 2015


Not that mysterious. It's called systemic racism and structural white supremacy. Didn't think it needed a label in the post but, sure, that's what it is.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 12:30 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've heard this story before. The white parents whose white kid has a bff at school the parent has not yet met. The white kid goes on and on about the bff never mentioning race, so the parent is surprised that the bff is not white. It is a story centered on whiteness.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 12:32 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


The point that white people need to stop pretending we don't see race, and pretending that the race "issue" is "settled" seemed like the most important point to me.

Like most colorblind racists, the moments when I became aware of the shit I was standing in, in terms of racism, remains a lightbulb moment in my head - as does the rethinking of a bunch of history and how I - blindly and ill-prepared - stumbled around being confused about race. In my experience, telling those stories to other white people can be useful; I think there is a common narrative in how we pretend to not notice race - and how we are proud of it! - which is uniquely white, liberal racist, built on a platform bastardized from Martin Luther King, Jr's "I have a Dream" speech.

I'd imagine it must be galling for black people, though, and people of other races. What sets core-white people (by which I mean the white people who now can't be peeled off again - some "white" people have honorary status when it's us against the colored people, but get peeled off again as soon as some anti-Semitism gets into the mix) apart from everyone else is our ability to pretend it isn't a problem and having most of the people in power just... go along with that, even some people of color.

White people pretending we don't have to worry about race is part of how white supremacy remains the default.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:33 PM on January 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


When we speak with a satiric voice, in mimicry of the unredeemed neighbor, aren’t we having it both ways? Allowing ourselves to express ugly, disreputable feelings and thoughts, under cover of mocking them?

So it appears the thing where people say ----ist crap but it's supposedly OK (it's not really OK) because they're saying it ironically? Has been around since before a lot of hipsters were born.
posted by Bentobox Humperdinck at 12:54 PM on January 9, 2015


I guess I could just see Obama saying stuff like this in a speech, so I sorta think Wolff is reinforcing popular opinion rather than challenging it. That's the heart of my frustration with things like this.
posted by yaymukund at 1:34 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Should he not have told this story? Would it have been better for him to have said nothing? White people's stories of their own racism are a part of the story and, really, the only part of the autobiographical part of the story we have much business telling right now. I don't see a problem with telling it, except that big platforms like the New Yorker could and almost certainly should be choosing non-white voices to promote to their largely white, upper-middle-class readership.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:54 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


The essay contains evidence that Wolff is 69: he references being at Oxford in 1970 at the age of 25. He is a first-wave Baby Boomer, born in 1945. Wollf, languagehat and I are all white men of the same age cohort, who experienced the cutting edge of the transformation of civil rights in our country. Born into a Jim Crow society--where James Baldwin could be stopped by the doorman trying to enter a white-only apartment complex to which he had been invited--we have watched since the early 1960s as the structures of institutional racism have been dismantled in large part, with our own enthusiastic support. But the persistence of individual racism where black folks are concerned is something that each of us has had to confront, especially as we have matured, the realization that the "malarial protozoan" of racism towards black people is deeply embedded like herpes zoster in our individual consciousness. It is not there merely because of "white privilege;" it is there because we grew up in a society that was not in any way color blind, especially and particularly where black folks were concerned. Immersed in that millieu, it was impossible not to absorb the "protozoan" or virus that blacks were "the other" and, despite our own best efforts to be color blind, the effect of racist jokes of yore, etc., is, in fact, an all but ineradicable stain: irrational prejudice that does not disappear of its own accord.

Wolff's essay is a measured and intelligent admission of something that many white folks simply refuse to admit. It is--and should be--sobering to realize that despite your best efforts not to, one still views black folks differently. I share Wolff's sorrow, because his experience resonates with my own, especially because I came of age in the Deep South at the height of the civil rights struggle, when sit-ins and freedom riders were the staples of the network evening news of that pre-cable era. The soul work, however, is always a work in progress.

It is wrong, in my judgment, to suggest that the essay represents "white dudes like me patting each other on the back and saying "yeah, we're really making progress on this now..." Au contraire: it is an essay by a senior citizen of intelligence who recognizes that he has not made the only progress needed today: in his own head.
posted by rdone at 2:05 PM on January 9, 2015 [14 favorites]


> I can admit this problematic thing about myself, so really it's not as problematic as you may think.

This has nothing to do with Wolff's essay, it is entirely in your own head.
posted by languagehat at 2:23 PM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


I guess I could just see Obama saying stuff like this in a speech, so I sorta think Wolff is reinforcing popular opinion rather than challenging it. That's the heart of my frustration with things like this.

I get that frustration, but it's important to remember for a large portion of the US population the things that Obama says in speeches are far-left and unacceptable and treasonous, especially when he comes to talk about race.

And to be honest, Wolff is pretty pointed about calling out his fellow white self-identified liberal and not-racist-because-I-remember-sympathizing-with-the-Freedom-Riders-and-I-voted-for-Obama peers.
But even blinkered by alibis we can’t blind ourselves entirely to the reality that the jolly mixed-nuts company of friends in television commercials is almost nowhere to be found in our schools, our neighborhoods, or our churches. In spite of all our self-absolving explanations and narratives, we know better, and our discomfort with what we know makes us resentful, even angry. We feel it as a kind of accusation. Thus whenever an unpleasant fact is put before us, we call it a race card.

Here are some race cards: our country has the highest incarceration rate in the world—and young black men have an incarceration rate six times that of young white men. Which is to say that a young black man in this country is, by a degree of magnitude, many times more likely to go to prison than a young white man in Sweden or Italy. This gives a whole new cast to the notion of American exceptionalism. Here is another race card: crimes committed by black men are punished more severely than comparable crimes committed by white men, and crimes against black people are punished less severely than crimes against white people. This is hardly news—the statistics get trotted out every year—yet it is all the more shameful for being old hat. We have settled into a comfortable relationship with a justice system that is palpably unjust.

And who is making the judgments that seem, in aggregate, so obviously biased? People like me, many of them white, middle-aged and older, therefore with enough time on their hands to sit in a courtroom for days or weeks on end. I assume that they’re civic-minded, that they intend to be absolutely impartial, and that they believe themselves free of any inclination to be harder on a black man than on a white man. But they aren’t. The pattern of outcomes is consistent, and the story it tells is of good intentions betrayed by some reflex or habit of mind that the decent juror does not recognize in himself. We have to assume those good intentions; if we can’t, our case really is hopeless. But the juror is under an equal obligation not to be lulled by the decency of his motives into a false confidence in the impartiality of his judgments. And what is true for the juror is true for the rest of us. No one is proof against the effects of a history and culture that have kept us apart and still keep us apart.
posted by joyceanmachine at 2:56 PM on January 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


I've heard this story before. The white parents whose white kid has a bff at school the parent has not yet met. The white kid goes on and on about the bff never mentioning race, so the parent is surprised that the bff is not white. It is a story centered on whiteness.

I was going to reply to this sarcastically out of frustration but instead I will point out the story you have heard before is mentioned in only one of 28 paragraphs, in an essay titled "Heart of Whiteness"
posted by Hoopo at 2:58 PM on January 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


No one is surprised that you're racist, but you.

Thanks, Errant. Very succinct, and sums up a recurrent reaction I have reading white pov stuff about perceiving racism.
posted by glasseyes at 3:09 PM on January 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think what bothers me the most about the metaphor of contagion is that—beyond simply denying agency—it's actually construing the infected, "stained", joke-telling person as a victim, trodden beneath the hooves of racism playing the role of one of the Four Horsemen. Like, he's analogizing it to contracting malaria. Which seems to yet again serve to make white people the central characters in the story.
posted by XMLicious at 3:30 PM on January 9, 2015


"These little girls, unconscious of each other in this one way, revived the vision of a possibility that I hadn’t been aware I’d stopped believing in—a land not of races but of brothers and sisters."

My discomfort with the "my kid doesn't see race" anecdote is that, at least for the times I've heard it, it is always centered on whiteness. From a white perspective (parent and child). The white parent is amazed their white child doesn't see race. The white parent doesn't seem consider that maybe their child's friend experiences this differently.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 4:06 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


joyceanmachine: "I get that frustration, but it's important to remember for a large portion of the US population the things that Obama says in speeches are far-left and unacceptable and treasonous, especially when he comes to talk about race. "

I'm saying that if the president can get away with saying this stuff, I'd hope that a white, respected writer would try to go a bit further. Wolff, unlike Obama, is not constrained by a) the mandate to represent popular opinion or b) dial it down because he's a black president. Isn't that why we want privileged folks to speak up in the first place?

I think a lot of this boils down to whether you believe in the "moral arc of universe bends positive" line that Obama loves to parrot. If you see our country's history as a steady transformation from institutionalized racism to individual racism, then yeah I can see your perspective. I just don't buy that premise.
posted by yaymukund at 4:23 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


(The *"arc of the moral universe bends towards justice", which is commonly attributed to MLK but was apparently said by Theodore Parker.)
posted by yaymukund at 4:44 PM on January 9, 2015


If you see our country's history as a steady transformation from institutionalized racism to individual racism, then yeah I can see your perspective. I just don't buy that premise.

I don't either, and I'm not sure how you're getting that from what I'm saying. Given the vitriol popular conservative media figures unleash on Obama whenever he says anything on race, as well as what I've personally heard conservatives say about Obama and race, I'm not also sure why you think Obama is "getting away with it."

And to be clear, I do not think that Wolff would agree with the idea that institutionalized racism is over in the US. He is explicit about this in the rhetorical climax of his essay, where he says, straight-out that the institution of justice in this country is shitty and unjust because of white people who think they are not racist. Again, here is the quote:
This is hardly news—the statistics get trotted out every year—yet it is all the more shameful for being old hat. We have settled into a comfortable relationship with a justice system that is palpably unjust.

And who is making the judgments that seem, in aggregate, so obviously biased? People like me, many of them white, middle-aged and older, therefore with enough time on their hands to sit in a courtroom for days or weeks on end. . . . But the juror is under an equal obligation not to be lulled by the decency of his motives into a false confidence in the impartiality of his judgments.
I mean, I'm not gonna die on the hill for this essay. I don't even like it that much, because it's navel-gaze-y as hell*, written in a prose style that bores me, and it doesn't really think about the many white people who don't have good intent, and who the fuck is this "we" you're talking about Wolff? Not everybody reading it in the New Yorker is white. And it would have been much better for him to acknowledge better that it is super-important for white people to listen to what black people have been telling them for a LONG-ASS TIME, because white "allies" like him have been ignoring what black people say for a LONG-ASS TIME.

tl;dr: I'm not a fan of Wolff and don't like his writing style, and white people don't deserve cookies for not being racist, but some of the criticism of him in this thread does not seem to be actually based reading on reading the essay. That bugs me.

* There's an interesting argument that maybe the front part is so damn boring because Wolff approaches this essay like the fiction/memoir writer he is, rather than as a journalist as seen in the post that Errant linked to, because one way to read the opening is that it is all about getting the white, older reader to invest in reading this -- all those little cultural signifiers, the telling of the little story about the letters so that you can feel cool that you're hanging out with somebody whose novels you've read and admired or heard discussed on NPR. You can trust him! He is like you! And then pointy sticks.
posted by joyceanmachine at 5:05 PM on January 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


"These little girls, unconscious of each other in this one way, revived the vision of a possibility that I hadn’t been aware I’d stopped believing in—a land not of races but of brothers and sisters."

My discomfort with the "my kid doesn't see race" anecdote is that, at least for the times I've heard it, it is always centered on whiteness. From a white perspective (parent and child). The white parent is amazed their white child doesn't see race. The white parent doesn't seem consider that maybe their child's friend experiences this differently.


Yea nonwhite children "see race" pretty quickly. I did. I remember being a small child and having other (white) children point out inanimate objects I was the same color as - paper bags, school desks, various nuts. And then there's the stuff the parents and teachers said. It's hard to learn you're a "different" person when you're still learning that you are a person. I used to lie in bed at night and wish I woke up white. I don't remember a time that I held hands and ran around and didn't notice white kids had it easier than I did.
posted by zutalors! at 6:26 PM on January 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


Also, I feel like I should mention that I don't know anything about Tobias Wolff and have no previous context for his work or his person. Knowing that he's speaking from a reflective position of advanced age and that he is a novelist first, as opposed to an essayist or journalist, does change my reaction to it somewhat, although I still stand by a lot of what I said. I was just going off of the text itself and the publication hosting it. I continue to not have any strong feelings about the person as a person. His prose style does still annoy the crap out of me, though.
posted by Errant at 8:29 PM on January 9, 2015


In addition: I do very much appreciate this discussion and am glad we're having it. My admittedly inflamed original comment was the third in the thread, based only on reading the essay and not on anyone else's input. I am very grateful for the contrasting viewpoints, and I'm learning a lot.
posted by Errant at 8:36 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


The white parent doesn't seem consider that maybe their child's friend experiences this differently.

And that's sort of what he's talking about. In the sentence that follows the anecdote about his daughter's friend, in 1982 or whatever when that particular thought occurred to him.
posted by Hoopo at 11:01 PM on January 9, 2015


It is wrong, in my judgment, to suggest that the essay represents "white dudes like me patting each other on the back and saying "yeah, we're really making progress on this now..." Au contraire: it is an essay by a senior citizen of intelligence who recognizes that he has not made the only progress needed today: in his own head.

Just for clarification: I was talking about mefites in this thread, not the author of the essay.
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:39 AM on January 10, 2015


joyceanmachine: "Given the vitriol popular conservative media figures unleash on Obama whenever he says anything on race, as well as what I've personally heard conservatives say about Obama and race, I'm not also sure why you think Obama is "getting away with it." "

Do you think Tobias Wolff should temper his speech for fear of pissing off Obama-hating conservatives? I'm just saying if Obama is saying this stuff, then it's not a profound political act for Wolff to repeat it.

joyceanmachine: "And to be clear, I do not think that Wolff would agree with the idea that institutionalized racism is over in the US. He is explicit about this in the rhetorical climax of his essay, where he says, straight-out that the institution of justice in this country is shitty and unjust because of white people who think they are not racist."

You can believe that institutional racism is still around, and also believe that everything's been steadily improving and will continue to steadily improve.

If you're not questioning this sepia toned narrative about progress, if you're still ending your essay with MLK and avoiding any mention of black power to avoid alienating your core audience, then you're not actually confronting the difficult parts of our history.
posted by yaymukund at 11:01 AM on January 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


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