It's a white thing: individualism

The target of this exercise—I mean of the podcast Seeing White but not just it—becomes clear in the episode called "Chenjerai's Challenge". The challenge comes from Chenjerai Kumanyika and it is simply this, as a white person trying to figure out what it means to talk about shite goodness, when was white ever good?

He kind of gives the game away after that by saying, "When was America ever great?" So it's just a partisan cheap shot. It's cheap because it equates "good" or "great" with "perfect". As I've noted before, this is a popular argument with five-year-old children. It shouldn't be acceptable from anyone over the age of seven.

That part isn't interesting. What is interesting is what is underneath it all. We've been told that race distinctions are artificial. That's not as profound as the people behind the show thing because all categories—animal, plant and mineral, for example—are artificial. And the people behind the podcast while pretending to want to discredit race categories, are very determined to keep using them.

Indeed, as we see above, the point seems to be to want to paint one race category, whiteness, as always and uniquely evil. Whiteness is artificial. On the other hand, you and me, as white people have something to answer for. How does that work?

Kumanyika says that he felt this need to think of his graduation from college as a victory for black people. And then he says that, even though he tries not to, he sees every crime committed by a black person as something he is a part of.

Okay, I get that. As a guy with a thoroughly French sounding name living in Canada, I sometimes feel like I am being called upon to explain Quebecois separatism. I have a sister and an uncle who go to extremes condemning all forms of Quebecois nationalism in an attempt to make it clear that none of this has anything to do with them. When I went to graduate school, a great aunt who had never spoken to me before contacted me ti congratulate me for being the first person in my family to do so. No one on the Irish side of the family did that or felt that.

And then our host John Biewen spells it out. This is "how whiteness works in a white-dominated society, that one of our privileges, one of our benefits, as members  of the white club is that we get to see ourselves, and to be seen, as individuals." Again, I get that.

But that also raises a question for me: Why not aspire to create a society where everyone gets to experience that?

For the purposes of the people behind the podcast, the answer is that they want to use whiteness  as a category to blame you for what happened and to make you pay. When I say "pay" I mean that literally as the issue is reparations and I say "you" and not "you and me" because, as a white Canadian, I'm not a target. That's weird, if you think about it, because if there is no such thing as white goodness, why not make every white person pay.

In any case, the reason Kumanyika doesn't want white people to be able to think of themselves as individuals is because that would give them the right "to release yourself as an individual from that." "That" here meaning culpability for the historical wrongs against blacks in America.

I'll stop here because this has to stop somewhere. Suffice to say, the podcast fails because it doesn't really want to succeed. The whole thing is an exercise in virtue signalling. As I've said before, I don't think virtue signalling is evil. It's a way we have of showing others that we're in their group. This podcast is a way of showing people you are one of them or, if you are not one of them but aspire to be, of learning how to be one of them.

That's ironic, don't you think?

What white women expect

The New York Times published a series of articles called “Was that racist?” For consumers of the mainstream media most of it was a familiar shaming exercise in which white people are encouraged to believe that we are unconsciously being racist all the time. In the middle of that usual nonsense, however, there was one genuinely interesting bit.

There are many times in a day when a person is walking toward me and in my path. In these situations, we both generally make minor adjustments upon our approach. Sometimes, and especially with pedestrians who are black, as I am, there’s eye contact or even a nod. Almost always, we shift our bodyweight or otherwise detour to make the pass easier for the other. Walking courteously doesn’t take much, just soupçons of spatial awareness, foresight and empathy. In seven years of living and walking here, I’ve found that most people walk courteously — but that white women, at least when I’m in their path, do not.

The writer, Greg Howard, goes on to say that everyday day white women force him to move out of their way and that at least twice a week they force him right off the sidewalk.

Let me start by saying that I am sure this is true. I am absolutely certain he is accurately reporting what happens to him. Where it begins to go crazy is when he tries to explain it.

Do they refuse to acknowledge me because they’ve been taught that they should fear black men, and that any acknowledgment of black men can invite danger?

What?  These women successfully dominate a man who is physically stronger than them and he imagines it's fear that drives them?

Here's what I think is happening. Howard, who is a New York Times reporter is being ignored and, therefore, forced to get out of these women's way because he is successful. It's not only not racism, it's an example of how little race enters into these women's interactions and, conversely, of how Greg Howard tends to see everything through a racial lens.

What Howard does not seem to know is that white women, especially young and attractive white women, are normally deferred to by white men. Everyday, white men defer to white women by, among other things, getting out of their way on the sidewalk. The white men and women themselves probably aren't even aware that this goes on. They just do it instinctively. Is this a good thing? That's a long discussion. I don't know. What I do know is this, it is part of the unconscious  assessment women make of the men they meet on the street and it affects there subsequent behaviour.

When a white woman sees Greg Howard coming on the sidewalk (and she always sees him even if she seems preoccupied with friends or her phone) she quickly makes an assessment of him. It's a predictive assessment. That is to say, her brain scans for unusual signs and everything else becomes background. She's not doing anything unusual, we all do the same thing. Walk into your house and you will not notice all the stuff that's there everyday. Your brain has predicted all that stuff will be there and it sends a signal to relax to your body when the prediction is correct. If there is something in the room that your brain didn't predict, like a dog when you don't own a dog, and your brain will quickly put you on high alert. To return to Greg Howard of the New York Times, as a woman walks down a sidewalk in downtown New York, her brain will quickly scan men to see if they fit into familiar types. Greg Howard does, successful, college-educated professional man is the category. No threat, therefore she just keeps walking in a  straight line expecting that he will get out of her way the way all the other successful, college-educated professional men do.

Now the interesting thing from a race angle is that Greg Howard is being subjected to pressure to accept the norms of white people here. I'm sure that he knows this on some level, which is why he rankles at being treated this way.  The white successful, college-educated professional men who share the same sidewalks are used to be treated as invisible by white women. They are no more unhappy about this than I am the New York Times didn't personally contact me to respond to Greg Howard's writings. Howard coud just go along with this but he's elected not to.

The plain fact is that there will be a dominant culture. Currently, white culture dominates. Black people have had a gigantic influence on entertainment culture but the base of the culture remains white. What Howard is signalling here is that he no longer is willing to accept that. And he's not alone. The media are largely on his side of that debate/struggle. Either side might win.

A final question, why the focus on white women? White women are getting a lot of criticism lately. There is no reason why this shouldn't happen. Just about every group will have it's day of unwelcome attention someday. But why Now?

It's a white thing: Elizabeth Key

If the story of John Punch shows a bizarre tendency to shoehorn facts into places they don't fit, the way the Seeing White podcast interprets the story of Elizabeth Key shows something like willing blindness. A blindness not to answers but to questions.

We're told she was the one who got away. She is introduced through a series of quotes from historian Ibram Kendi.

Elizabeth Key was the daughter of white legislator in Virginia and an unnamed African woman, so she was biracial.

Okay, right away questions should be suggesting themselves. Questions such as, "What was the relationship between Elizabeth Key's biological parents?" "Were they lovers?" "Exploiter and exploited?" "Rapist and victim?" And "How do we know this white legislator was her father?" According to several online sources that may or may not be good, we know because he was forced to admit it in court.

Before his death, her father, her white father, basically asked her slaveowner to free her when she became fifteen. He did not do that. Eventually, she wed an indentured servant who also happened to have some law training in England. They sued for her freedom on the basis that her father was free but also because by then in the mid 1600s, she had become Christian and in English common law, the paternity or status of a  child derived from the father and it was also against English Common Law to enslave a Christian.

In 1655, colonial court ruled in her favour.

This also raises some questions. To be fair to Kendi, he didn't edit the show so he may have filled in some of the gaps the quotes above leave. That caveat aside, the line, "Eventually, she wed an indentured servant who also happened to have some law training in England," makes it sound like her choice to sue was an unlikely thing that just happened because she wed this man with legal training. But if there had already been a civil case whereby her father, Thomas Key, that suggests that this sort of case was not unheard of.

There is another detail that is skipped over rather lightly here where there is more to the story. Once he was forced to acknowledge paternity, Thomas Key arranged for Elizabeth to baptized in the Church of England. That's a slightly different story than, "by then ... she had become Christian".

Once he was forced to acknowledge paternity, Thomas Key made a few moves to try to ensure that Elizabeth would be free. He did not, however, welcome her into his house as his daughter. That's weird. He initially doesn't want to acknowledge paternity but he shows some traces of paternal concern. How did he feel about her? And how did he feel about Elizabeth's biological mother? We're told that Thomas Key was married but that his wife lived across the river. That doesn't suggest a happy sex life. So he looked elsewhere and he turned to a black woman. Why? Because she wasn't in a position to refuse him? Because he didn't think he had to worry about getting her pregnant? Whatever the answer to these questions—and I have neither the expertise nor the resources to answer them—it suggests something about the attitude whites of the time had towards blacks.

In response to this, the lawmakers in Virginia change the law so that status is derived from the mother. That's a reversal of the common law tradition that goes all the way back to prehistorical times. That seems pretty drastic. And then they pass a law that makes relations between black men and white women illegal. Why not leave the existing common law status coming from the father in place and simply outlaw all sex between whites and blacks? Well, we know the answer to that: because the white men wanted to be able to sexually exploit black women and white men were making the laws. But isn't that the real story. As I discussed in a previous post, the people behind the podcast are intent on shoehorning these facts into a Marxist mold. We can now see that not only do the facts not fit that explanation, there is another explanation that seems to be a far easier fit.

An offensive analogy

Okay, you've been warned: the following analogy is offensive. I'm doing this because the situation we are contemplating here is offensive and an offensive analogy is a good way of drawing out how it might have worked.

I've had pets that I love. I cared deeply about these animals and did my best to take care of them. But they remained animals to me. That seems to be something like what white Europeans of the 17th century thought about black Africans. Before there was chattel slavery, before there were anti miscegenation laws, before plantation farming, there seems to have already been an attitude towards people who could be defined as other. We see it in what the Japanese did to Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Filipinos and Indochinese people. And it explains what Germans did to Jews during the second world war.

People already made a distinction between white and black before chattel slavery. The people behind the podcast think that is impossible because there is no science behind the distinction and there are hard cases where the distinction is hard to make. That, unfortunately, does not make the problem go away. To see why, consider an old logical problem the Stoics posed. If I spill a few grains of salt on a table, you will have no trouble saying that is not a heap of salt. If I keep adding salt one grain at a time, however, we will reach a point where you will agree that it is a heap. But where is the dividing line between "some spilled salt" and "a heap of salt"? As the Stoics realized, there is no way to draw that line. It would be ridiculous to say that one additional grain made it a heap. And yet, there is a point where we can agree that something is a heap of salt. Categories don't need to be rooted in science or have clear boundaries to exist and, sadly, race is such a category.

Categories are distinctions we make—distinctions that are not in the world but created by human beings—for a purpose. That purpose can change. I can make a distinction between the path and the snowbanks I pile on either side and a child can come along and make a slide out of the same snowbank. We can distinguish between people on skin colour and someone else can come along and decide one group is superior to the other. We need to remind ourselves that some people think blondes are stupider than brunettes.

This is what I think we can conclude. As human beings, we easily slide into generalizations about others. Most of the time, this tendency goes nowhere spectacularly harmful. Under some conditions, however, it will, not "can" but "will". I can't prove that. It's what I believe.

How do you solve that? One way would be to try to treat people to distinguish between races and yet treat them as equal. For a long time this was derided. Another solution would be to act as if the difference between "white" and "black" was exactly like the difference between "blue-eyed" and "brown-eyed" is in our culture. And if we followed that through, we'd soon breed race out of existence. The genes that produce lighter skin or darker skin would still be there just as the genes that produce different colour eyes are still there but you'd reach a point where almost every family would have both. Why does no one promote that as a solution?

Economics?

One recurring explanation that is given for slavery is economics. Indeed, that is explanation given by the Seeing White podcast. People needed labour and so the enslaved others. The distinction between "white" and "black" was a consequence of the need to justify why some people were enslaved and others were not. Power is driven by economics and after power is achieved, racist justifications follow. Again, that's pretty straight Marxism: economics is what actually drives power structures but a bogus ideology is derived to justify the power structures while masking their real cause.

But is slavery efficient? It's easy to see why, for example, the Ancient Athenians, once possessed of slaves, had slaves work in the silver mines. Their mines were awful and dangerous places to work. And the Athenians got to be rich out of the process. But were they richer than they would have been if everyone working in the mine had been getting paid?

Perhaps it was for certain kinds of work such as sugar and cotton farming. Massachusetts was the first state to legalize slavery and yet there never was chattel slavery there. Perhaps some kinds of labour are more viable economically speaking than others?

And what role did the industrial revolution play in this? Lets remind ourselves of when and where the slave trade was most intense.

That's an estimate of the number of slaves transported to different places between 1501 and 1875. Source You'll notice that most activity is outside the United States until the 18th century. The reason that changes is the industrial revolution and cotton.

But that still leaves questions. Why was slavery used in cotton farming? The obvious answer to that would seem to be economic but it may not be as obvious as it first seems.Growing and harvesting cotton made certainly slavery feasible but it doesn't follow from that that it was the most efficient economic choice. It may have been a grim economic choice or it may have been an even grimmer racial choice. Slavery may have been the most efficient economic choice or it may have simply been made feasible by the conditions of cotton farming.

We can be fairly certain that it was not the most efficient economic choice by the end. The secessionists argued that Cotton was King on economic grounds but the war called their bluff and they lost. If the south initially chose slavery on economic grounds, it had stopped being a sound economic choice long before abolition.

I can't answer my own questions decisively. And I don't think anyone else could either. That's important because you'd need far clearer answers to these questions to reach the Marxist conclusions the people behind the Seeing White podcast have reached.

One more post on this next week.

Is the white girl moment over?

Back in the 1980s one of the women's magazines, I can't remember which one, got roasted for saying that breasts were "in". The obvious rejoinder: When are breasts ever not in? ... and yet ... there are cultures, mostly in Africa, where women's breasts are not highly valued.That said, white girls have hardly suffered from lack of attention over the years.

Some have argued that there are genetic reasons for this. That men will prefer lighter skinned partners for genetic reasons. Maybe.

Whatever the case, being desired and being taken seriously-as any teen-aged girl can tell you—are clear different things.* There was a moment that started about twenty-one years ago when white girls made a pitch to be taken seriously without ceasing to be terribly girly in a very white way. I say about twenty-one years ago because that was when this pop song became a major hit. It's a very white-girl song and that fact was underlined by having one black member in the group.



Notice how much more womanly and sexual the black woman first known as Sexy Spice and then as Scary Spice is than the terribly girly white girls with her. It's not just that she has amazing breasts it's that she puts them right in your face. This is all third generation feminism but she's going for a direct sexual vibe while all the others are going for girly. She's a Samantha Jones in a crowd of Charlotte Yorks.

That comparison is anachronistic as Sex and the City comes two years after this single was a hit. But it works because it was very much in the air. This was the moment when second wave feminism was challenged by something new. Katie Rophie's The Morning After had been published just two years earlier.

There never was a theoretical foundation for third wave feminism. I say that with such bluntness because it wasn't an academic movement. You can trace second wave feminism back to some very serious academic writing. The third wave was characterized more by a whole lot of white girls who didn't so much criticize feminism as break free from it. Whatever it might have lacked in theoretical foundation, the movement was a real cultural moment and you could see it everywhere you looked.

In that sense, the video is perfect. This is rebellion but exactly what they are rebelling against is not at all clear. The upper class as portrayed in the video had long ceased to exist by 1996. These girls revel in the role of rebels but they don't want to threaten anyone.

But they were threatening to feminists. At first, the second wave feminists thought they could simply drown these girls the way people used to get rid of unwanted kittens. It didn't work. They ended up coming off grim and humourless compared to these new girls. Next, second wave feminists tried the old trick of rushing to the head of the crowd and pretending to be leaders with laughable nonsense such as the Riot Grrrls. That didn't work either.

Sex and the City itself was an attempt to respond. Carrie Bradshaw is set off against three foils—women who are her friends but are all a little too too much in one aspect or another. On the one hand, Carrie is opposed to two third wave women, the too girly Charlotte and the too slutty Samantha. On the other hand, she clearly isn't the dour Miranda either.

It didn't work though. SATC was a huge success among women but anyone who was paying attention when men were in the room quickly noticed that not only that we vastly preferred Charlotte but that we actively disliked Carrie and Miranda. And no one is going to marry Samantha. I know, that's not supposed to matter anymore but reality really is the thing that won't go away when you ignore it.

The suicide pact

The rest of the left decided feminism wasn't helping the cause anymore. If the white girls of the third wave had proven anything it was that the influence of second wave feminists on, you know, actual women was far less than they had imagined it to be. Feminists could browbeat women into tugging their forelocks like good little peasants but they couldn't get them to actually live differently.

After a series of increasingly pathetic attempts to gain any real traction, progressive feminists decided to try a suicide pact called intersectionality. The notion behind it was that all oppressed groups were interconnected. You might reasonably wonder how that could possibly be (it can't) but you'd be apt to miss the menace it holds. For intersectionality can be weaponized. If all oppressed groups are interconnected, then anything peculiar to one cause is illegitimate. Thus we have the staggering spectacle of feminism disembowelling itself to accommodate trans women. And you have the increasingly aggressive attacks on "white feminism".

I don't see how feminism itself can possibly survive this, which is why I call it a suicide pact. I don't think the people behind intersectionality particularly care. They never saw feminism as anything but a short term goal in a larger game whose real goal is dismantling free market economies and liberal democracy.

They feel confident enough now that they have been attacking white girls for a while now. The increasingly savage attacks on Coachella, Adele, Taylor Swift and "white feminism" are evidence of this. But will it work? After all, attacks on white men got us President Donald Trump.

My suspicion is that white girls will respond not by getting behind a person as they will get behind a way of living. The universities will be interesting to watch. Currently, university is seen as an end in itself. Sometime soon, I think women, who now make up the majority of university students, are going to start asking themselves some hard questions about how this fits into their larger lives. They are going to start thinking of it as a short-term goal in a larger game. When that happens, look out.






* “A subject and a sovereign are clear different things.” —King Charles I words to the crowd from the scaffold immediately before he was beheaded on January 30, 1649.

It's a white thing: the fatal flaw

In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist ...

Joan Didion was discussing the women's movement when she wrote those words but it is a sad truth that when progressives join the struggle for the rights of particular groups they often do so for Marxist reasons. Not Marxism in the sense of bringing about communism. It's Marxist in the way the history of the oppression in question is analyzed. No reasonable person is going to argue that racism hasn't been a horrific thing in the history of the USA or that there remains work to be done in decreasing it today. What the creators of this podcast want to do is to get you thinking of the problem in Marxist terms.

John Biewen prepares us for this right at the start of the episode by claiming Americans don't care much about their history. He no sooner makes this claim that he starts to shuffle away from it. And little wonder: the obvious question, "Compared to who?", would devastate his claim. But, the double-shuffle achieves its end and now we're off to do an historical analysis.

That historical analysis, tellingly, begins by brushing off a whole lot of history. We brush right by the already established case of chattel slavery in the Caribbean and the 1619 landing of 20 slaves at Jamestown on board a Dutch ship to move to the much-discussed case of John Punch. And it should be much discussed. It’s one of those stories that makes us nauseous to read it is so horrible. But what should we conclude about “whiteness” from this story?

Here's what we're supposed to conclude.

As we’ll see, the innovations that built slavery American style are inseparable from the construction of whiteness as know it today.

That’s the big claim the podcast makes. Don’t think, the claim goes, that emancipation solved anything, that civil rights laws solved anything, so long as “whiteness” exists there can be no justice. These were steps forward but the job isn't complete until we deal with whiteness.

Meanwhile, let's turn back to John Punch.

John Punch an indentured servant ran away in the company of two other indentured servants. All three were caught and brought to court. What happens next is awful

Whereas Hugh Gwyn hath by order from this Board brought back from Maryland three servants formerly run away from the said Gwyn, the court doth therefore order that the said three servants shall receive the punishment of whipping and have thirty stripes apiece. One called Victor, a Dutchman, the other a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times with their master according to their Indentures, and one whole year apiece after the time of their service is expired by their said indentures in recompense of his loss sustained by their absence, and after that service to their said master is expired, to serve the colony for three whole years apiece. And that the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere.

Now, it might seem obvious to you what is awful and why it's awful. It certainly seemed obvious to me: the court assigned a man to perpetual servitude, aka slavery, because of the colour of his skin. This is a true story about racism and oppression that surpasses anything Kafka could have imagined for horror. The podcast sees it as something else.

Biewen tells us that "whether the Judge consciously intended this or not, his decision was a gift to rich landowners”. Notice that qualification; "the consciously intended this or not”, is an admission that there is no evidence that he intended any such thing. There is no evidence that this is anything but a racist decision by a racist judge in a racist colony. Keeping that in mind, let’s have a look the quote from Suzanne Plihcik, Associate Director of the Racial Equity Institute, that  immediately follows this telling admission.

The story of race, folks, is the story of labor. They needed a consistent, reliable labor force. And they could not have a consistent, reliable labor force if that labor force was banding together and challenging the authority of the colony.

The institution and maintenance of slavery based on race, we're told, was really a move in a larger class struggle. We're told! We're not given anything that looks like evidence for this. The claim is that slavery was a brilliant divide-and-conquer strategy that gave poor-but-free whites a reason to identify with rich slaveowners and not with the people the producers of the podcast want us to think of as their natural allies. The result is a multi-class coalition that supports the economic status quo. That’s a big part of what “whiteness” means.

That argument should remind you of something else. Think of the common progressive complaint that poor whites keep voting against their interests. Another way of understanding that is that poor whites keep voting for their interests as they understand them and not as progressives would define their interests for them. Poor whites insist on seeing themselves as having a shared with others in supporting and maintaining an America they think of as having been great and that can continue to be great or be made great again. For progressives this a problem and the name of the problem is whiteness.

Now you can understand the progressive strategy that this podcast promotes. Whatever might be said about race and racism, “whiteness” is a multi-class coalition that maintains the economic order. The argument is that the real goal of analyzing “whiteness" is to maintain political and economic power. Getting rid of whiteness, really means not getting rid of racism but overthrowing the existing political and economic order.

It follows from this that the more intractable racism is, the better.  The goal is to cast racism as an indigestible problem, that is to say, to make it impossible to achieve any progress without substantially changing the political and economic structure of the country. From this episode on, what started as an interesting podcast slowly becomes more and more tedious.

There is, I think, one more interesting point to be made. I said above that the tendency of people both poor and not poor to support the status quo is a big part of what whiteness is for progressives. There is another huge component, however, and this other aspect is where the real problem is. I'll get to that next week.

It's a white thing: starting points 1

I've listened to ten episodes of Seeing White now and I'm sorry to report that what promise the podcast had quickly drains away. At the same time, I'm not surprised that this happened. I think what is at work here is a disease in thought. That is to say, we see certain pathological patterns of thinking that unfailingly trap us when we try to think our way out of our race problems.

The first of these is what I would term racialism. That is the unshakeable tendency to see life in racial terms. John Biewen starts the show with a quote from D.L. Hughley.

Obama is what we would like to be Trump and his supporters what we are.

That's from June 9, 2016". I mention that because Hughley liked his quip enough to use it at least once more. On the Wednesday after Trump was elected, Hughley appeared on MSNBC and said this:

Obama was what we aspire to be, Trump and his supporters are who we are.

The only significant change is the tense of the first clause.

We could say a lot about that but I want to focus on Biewen's reaction.

I bristled at Hughley's we. I know it's we the people and all that. "Donald Trump and his supporters is what we are." I wasn't sure I wanted to be implicated in that "we". ... As for that "we", it seems fair to say that D.L. Hughley, who is black, is talking about a nation, for all its growing diversity, a nation still dominated by people who look not like him but like me. Seventy percent of voters were white in 2016 and fifty-eight percent of white voters chose Trump.

There's a lot in that quote. I want to focus on just some of them. First, Biewen thinks in ideological terms and he also thinks in racial terms. And he sees those two things as connected. Sometimes, as above, he explicitly and directly connects progressive ideology and race. As if the answer to, "Why did America reject the Obama agenda after seeming to support it through two presidential terms?" could only be, "Because America is too white."

For Biewen, what stands in the way of the kind of progress he'd like to see is "whiteness". And that creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance for Biewen is white. He isn't just "white", he's Anglo-Saxon white and that is the whitest kind of whiteness.

What's going on here?

Is this just Huck Finn trying to free himself from the bonds of "'sivilization" by adopting Jim as a spiritual father; that is to say, is John Biewen just the latest in a long, long line of white liberals to see a kind of freedom in escaping whiteness?

It's a white thing cont'd

I've listened to four episodes of "Seeing White" now. A lot of it is really good. I recommend it.

The question the program has us focus on is, "What is whiteness?" The question comes up in an odd way. Originally, people were more interested in categorizing those whom they wanted to oppress. To begin with, this wasn't much of a problem but, at least in the case of the United States, it becomes a problem.

Others are others. We categorize people as being part of or not part of certain groups them and we typically don't have trouble identifying these groups. Yes, you can make mistakes. But how much do you want to make of that? When travelling, I sometimes wake up in the morning not certain of where I am. If I've been in four or five different bedrooms in a  row I will often wake up before sunrise in my own bedroom on returning home and spend a little while not knowing where I am or thinking I am in another bedroom altogether. It's a disorienting experience but I would not begin to wonder whether I'm really sitting at my office desk right now as a consequence. Likewise, I have had experiences where people I thought were friends turned out to be enemies (I can't think of a single example of the reverse alas) but I don't throw the concept of enemy out the door.

Of course, we're not talking about enemies here but rather of an oppressed group. The key part of that term is not "oppressed" but "group". Suppose Jim's father swindled me out of my life's savings. How am I going to treat Jim? Let's make it more distant and suppose Jim's grandfather did me a nasty turn. How does that affect relations between us?

If we're honest, we'll admit that the less we know about others, the easier it is to hate them. If, in the example I've given above, I knew Jim for a while before I realized he is the son of the man who swindled me out of my life's savings it's going to be harder to hate him than if the only thing I know about Jim is that he's a part of the category "family of the man who swindled me".  That category move makes it a lot easier to oppress someone. The people who so casually oppressed people for so long did so because they categorized them based on ... well, what?

But the reverse is also true. If I am sitting next to someone on the plane and discover in the course of conversation that she is a cousin of mine, that will draw a closer bond between us even though I don't know much about her character. It's not the fact of the category distinction but the purpose for which we draw it that is important.

What is a category?

Where "Seeing White" goes wrong is that it repeats certain liberal or progressive platitudes (we might as easily say "clichés") instead of really dealing with the issue at hand. One of the lines repeated over and over again is that race is a construct. That's absolutely true. But the category "planets" is also a construct. As are the categories city, neighbourhood, human, bush, tree, bird and, in fact, every category that you could think of.

A category is just a grouping together of "things" for some purpose. I've put "things" in scare quotes because things only become things by virtue of being categorized. It's only when brains like ours start organizing the world that they acquire the status of thing. Their real enough—I don't have to acknowledge the existence of the meteorite that kills me in order for it to exist—but things become particular types of things when human beings categorize them for some purpose.

Black people became black people when they were enslaved. Until that moment, darker or lighter skin meant no more than blonde or brunette. "Seeing White" is very good on this point and does a very good job in showing us that while we human beings have always been determined to see people other than our own group as inferior, the practice of making the distinction on race as opposed to family, tribe or ethnicity didn't get going until slavery in the Americas.

Well, not quite. Saying "slavery in the Americas" is my touch. The show focuses almost exclusively on what happened in the United States of America. That is a blind spot I may come back to in a future post.

To return to the liberal cliché the show deals in. The argument is that there is no genetic basis for race. That's true but, unfortunately, it doesn't get us where we want to go. Or as Suzanne Plihcik is Associate Director of the Racial Equity Institute and one of the contributors to the show says:

Anthropologists finally say, and it is way past due, that race is anthropological nonsense. Is that the same thing as saying it's not real? No. Because it's real. It is powerfully real, it is politically and socially real. So we need to know how did we get it and what we say is, we constructed it.

And that is where it's going to get tricky. Not because it isn't true that race is a construct but because every category is a construct.

To make a category, you need three things. The first two are a purpose and a grouping. The third is that you need other people to go along with you. If I have a handful of marbles that I want to group some out as belonging to a group, I need to get others to see the difference. If no one else can see the difference, my "category" doesn't exist. I might try and prove my category is real by asking you to mix the marbles into the a pile of other marbles and then showing you I can separate them but that won't work because it will be the same to you if I pulled out marbles at random if you can't see the distinction I wish to make. If, on the other hand, I say I'm going to pull out all the red marbles, that is a category you can understand and will most likely accept even if there are a few in the mix where the line between red and pink is hard to draw.

Consider the following text that I've transcribed from Episode 2 of the podcast. Most of the text is Suzanne Plihcik speaking at an anti-racism workshop and the text in parentheses are voice over comments by host John Biewen to help us understand better because we only have audio.

It is statistically likely that I am closer to you genetically (Suzanne, who is white, points at a black man) than I am to you (and then a white woman).

See the problem? Biewen distinguishes based on race. He casually uses these categories in the course of a podcast whose theme is that the distinction doesn't exist.

If we want to rid ourselves of racism, we need to stop spouting the same platitudes that my good liberal parents taught me fifty years ago. The problem of racism is not an education problem. It is not a matter of, as Biewen describes the activities of the Racial Equity Institute, "dropping a whole lot of knowledge" on people. And it isn't a matter of dispensing with the category of race. As in the quote above, the show uses the distinction of race over and over again. Biewen identifies himself as "white", whatever that means, and others as "black", whatever that means.

The change has to take place somewhere else.

It's a white thing, you wouldn't understand

There has been a lot of chatter here in Canada lately about whether white people can write about non-white characters. Imagine my surprise at discovering that white people are also incapable of writing about white people.

I enlisted Chenjerai, as an African-American intellectual and a friend, to help me unpack the stories we’re telling in the series and, frankly, to give me backup—to check me. I don’t quite trust myself as a white man to see whiteness plainly and fully.

That's from the teaser for a series of podcasts on "whiteness".

Obviously, I'm sceptical. Despite that, I'm going to try and give it an open-minded listen. The teaser, although it includes a few lines that make me wonder, is actually written in clear, coherent language and that is a lot more than you can say for most of current "whiteness scholarship".