Can You Please Shut Up About White Supremacy?
Not today. Reading Tim Wise and Baynard Woods
This month’s #RaWBC selection is Tim Wise’s Dear White America. It was written in 2012, and it was a letter to a “New Minority.” He writes to a white audience about whiteness. I recently also read a book called Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness by Baynard Woods, which is a memoir by a Southern-born white journalist describing how whiteness has influenced his life.
There is a whole set of white authors and creators who are examining whiteness and white supremacy from the inside: Wise and Woods, Debby Irving, Robin D’Angelo, John Biewen, Tema Okun, Jim Grimsley, and more. These white authors are challenging white people to see that understanding how whiteness works is fundamental to dismantling white supremacy.
We, white people, can easily fall into the trap where we believe that racism is a Black problem and then we look to Black writers to fix it. We can be “allies” in their liberation struggle, but we can’t see how understanding and dismantling whiteness has anything to do with it.
This approach has gotten us nowhere.
We need to see how whiteness operates as a system of domination and also see how our own liberation is tied up with ending white supremacy.
I, personally, have a hard time putting my attention here. I will order a book by a white person about whiteness, and it will sit on my shelf for months and years, unopened. Maybe I think that I already know everything about being white?
I sometimes cringe. Tim Wise and Baynard Woods are vocal strident anti-racist authors. My instinct is to want both authors to tone it down. Could they just shut up?
There is a talking point on the right: If white people on the left would just stop talking about white supremacy, it would just go away. To these people, modern racism has been made up by left-wing white politicians in order for them to pretend to be doing something. To the right, maybe racism existed in the past, but MLK and LBJ ended it before most of us were born, so could we all just shut up about it?
Instead, lefty white authors like Tim Wise and Baynard Woods can’t seem to open their mouths without seeming to say that everything is about race and blaming white people for everything.
Some critics on the left say much the same thing but from the other side (see Rogue 4 Gay’s comment below and Aunty Jean’s essay here). They say that racism exists, but white people talking about it will never help. To them, people like Wise and myself are out there “preaching” just to hear ourselves talk.
So which is it? Is racism over? Or is everything about race? Should white people shut up? Or should we talk more? Is talking about race from a white perspective productive? Or is it useless navel-gazing?
Both books are by white men, like me. The more they write, the more I cringe.
Why do I cringe?
I agree 100% with what both men are saying about how whiteness operates in the United States. They both have an insider’s perspective and write from personal experience. In my view, there is legitimate truth here. Why do I still want them to shut up?
Fear?
Whiteness is enforced with violence and threats of violence.
Both men are saying that many of the foundational beliefs that I learned in grade school about the United States are not true. And further, they are saying that white men like me have been and continue to be agents of fascism and genocide.
Those are fighting words, and maybe I don’t want them (or me) to get beaten up.
Perhaps I cringe because I share so many of the same identities with Wise and Woods. I identify with their paths through life. But both of these guys are loud and ready to piss people off. It is scary.
I need to lean into my fear.
Hey, fellow white folks:
Are you ready to talk to other white people about race? Even and especially when it makes everyone including you uncomfortable? Because
(1) Racism exists.
(2) White people benefit from it.
(3) White people are hurt by it.
(4) We will never dismantle it without talking about it.
So, no I don’t think they should shut up.
I think I need to cringe even more and read and write even more about and against white supremacy. When I feel afraid, that might be a cue I’m reading or writing something important.
Tim Wise opens his book with a fantasy. He imagines a typical 4th of July scene where the town is decked with red, white, and blue. Marching bands. Hot dogs. Fireworks. And he goes up to the biggest, baddest, most patriotic white guy he can find and tells him to “get over it.” He says, “that was so long ago, why are you even bothering to celebrate?” Wise can only assume that if the big bad white guy didn’t punch him, he would at least get super defensive and yell at Tim about the United States being the greatest country on the Earth and “how dare you say anything different?”
Wise goes on to say the same white people who venerate the founding fathers also want Black people to “get over” slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, lynching, and 450 years of discrimination.
We, white people, are only about “getting over” history that makes us uncomfortable. We want to enshrine the other stuff.
White Americans actually seem to live to celebrate history. We love reenactments and the 4th of July and so forth. But we don’t love all history. This is why our collective obsession with genealogy can feel off to people. We sometimes use history and genealogy to reinforce the myths on the one side of history that makes us feel good.
I felt okay until they started talking about genealogy, my favorite hobby.
The core of the white narrative is that the United States is a land of opportunity and a meritocracy. Wise wrote Dear in 2012 in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, which saw massive losses of assets for most people in the USA. The narrative of meritocracy didn’t explain the failure of people to be ready for the housing crisis. It was a crisis for white people, as well as for everyone else.
Wise mentions how what we called the Great Recession actually had been going on in Black communities for many years. It was only when white people were affected did it get a name and attention. Predatory lenders had been focusing on Black communities with sub-prime loans for a long time. According to Wise, the media never reported on it because white people were sheltered from the effects.
The predatory lenders had honed this technique of getting Black people into bad loans and then they eventually moved on to white communities when they ran out of Black people. When it all came crashing down, much of the blame was put on Black “irresponsible borrowers,” while many of the hardest hit were actually in white communities.
Wise talks about how to be white is to believe a set of lies that set us up to not be ready to accept reality. When we can’t accept reality, and times are hard, we look for someone to blame.
In 2012, Wise looked around and saw the rising Tea Party. The Tea Party took a look at an economic crisis and they doubled down on the patriotism narrative. They blamed Obama.
Whiteness operates by misplacing blame.
Are we unprepared for adversity because of the stories we believe?
Is this why climate change feels like such an existential crisis? Because white people have always been sheltered from other crises? But climate change is affecting everyone. How can we blame anyone but ourselves? White people will find a way.
Despite reading a bunch of books about whiteness, I find myself subconsciously doubting it exists. I was raised to be “colorblind” and treat everyone the same. I loved that one part of Dr. King’s speech. My understanding was that other people had a race, and whiteness seemed to me to be the absence of race. We were the one group that did not experience racism, and I assumed that the goal was for everyone to become like us.
The goal of integration was for all of the other races to become part of society. I didn’t think of “society” as white, but it was and is. I erroneously thought we could end racism by everyone assimilating into the white narrative — which included buying into our mythical version of history and honoring our heroes.
Perhaps this is why white Americans are fascinated with genealogy. We like the myth and we want to amplify it.
Tim Wise mentions how Toni Morrison says to be white means you don’t have to hyphenate. Everyone else does.
I think white people would love for colorblind integration — we would welcome anyone who acted white and gave deference to white norms and ideals. It has happened before with Italian, Irish, and Jewish people. Tim Wise talks about “white normativity,” and how we question anyone who challenges that.
Wise is talking about the ongoing demographic shift in the United States away from a white majority. The demographic shift is combined with shifts he sees in the economic, cultural, and political arenas. It is a perfect storm of undermining the white normativity we are used to.
His essay was written in 2012, but it could have been written yesterday. He was presaging the right-wing talking point of “Replacement Theory,” where blowhards like Tucker Carlson drone on about the end of America because of the loss of a white majority.
It is straight out of the 2012 playbook that when COVID hit, we started to see white people get very concerned about how history is taught in our schools. A crisis asks us to either double down on the lies or accept the hard truths. A crisis asks us to take responsibility or assign blame. We, white people, overwhelmingly have gone in for lies and blame.
Wise talks about the Tea Party slogan of “taking America back.” He says this is pure and simple racism dressed up as nostalgia. “When would we take America back to?” He asks a Tea Party critic of his in an email exchange. She says 1957.
Wise looks at the Tea Party goals of low taxes and limited government, and he points out that in 1957 the highest tax bracket paid a 90% income tax, and we had huge government programs. What was different in 1957 was that the whole huge government apparatus was set up to almost exclusively benefit white people.
According to Wise, working-class white people only got into limited government after benefits started to be parceled out on a limited basis to non-white people.
In another echo of 2012, Mr. Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” functions as another racist dog whistle that has white anxiety written all over it.
The danger of this mythological United States history is that it leaves us completely unprepared to face challenges. We are sold the idea of the importance of the individual in history, specifically the white male individual as the prime mover of history. In fact, the existential problems we face as a nation, like climate change, poverty, corporate greed, pollution, inadequate health care, violence, and such, all require collective action and collaboration skills. The lone white problem solver myth never actually worked, and it is failing us dismally now.
Wise says that Black folks have generally not been able to buy into the individualism and meritocracy myths. They know the system is skewed and people have to work together. They know they have had to work twice as hard.
The belief in meritocracy is a set-up for white people to have an existential crisis if we fail. It also leaves us unable to imagine collective solutions and assign blame correctly.
To Tim Wise, the white historical narratives have failed us as a nation and hurt white people.
Wise talks about the Tea Party origins as coming from the ranting of a spoiled rich white guy. I can’t help but notice that another spoiled rich white guy is ranting today. In both cases, white people are being manipulated by a rich charlatan who is peddling myth.
I have focused on Wise’s book, but I think this is a good point to bring in Baynard Woods. He is about my age and our lives have followed similar paths. We were both brought up in conservative religious households, we both embraced environmentalism, we both loved the hippie counterculture, we both became teachers and writers, and we have both written about ourselves as white people.
His life has been something of an amplified version of my own. I was raised white in Wisconsin. He was brought up white in South Carolina, the first state to secede in 1861. I subscribed to the Earth First! journal. He started a pirate radio station. I went to a few Grateful Dead concerts. He sold his possessions and bought a van to travel the country. He took a lot of drugs and got arrested. I tried drugs but focused mainly on getting good grades. I teach at a private Montessori school. He taught at a D.C. charter school. I visited George Floyd square weeks after he was killed. He reported on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and risked his life.
I like Baynard Woods for some of the same reasons I like Hunter S Thompson. His book puts me in situations I would not otherwise have been in.
Each chapter of Woods’ book tells stories from his life where he reflects on how whiteness has operated in his life. At the end of each chapter, he makes a generalization about whiteness. He builds a picture of what it has meant for him to become aware of how whiteness works.
A chapter that stood out to me is where he rereads the seminal hippie book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I read this same book way back when and I had wanted to be a Merry Prankster. Woods had read the book during his own counterculture phase, but then on rereading the book later he discovered that his hippie heroes were racists. He came to reevaluate the hippie movement as mostly a white people thing.
To him, it was a bunch of white people who were rebelling while still participating in the system. It was sanctioned rebellion. The hippie movement, with all of its focus on individual freedom, seemed like a recycling of the American white narrative of glorifying individualism. Woods compared the hippie movement unfavorably with the Civil Rights movement, which to him was clearly about collective change.
Woods’ story is a lot like my own. Perhaps this is another reason why I cringe and avoid these books. He comes to the conclusion that his upbringing was racist, his ancestors were racist, his community was racist, his friends were racist, and, ultimately, he was and is racist. Racism is a pattern of behaviors that he continues to struggle to remove from his life.
I cringe because I don’t want to acknowledge my own racism and these books by white folks hit a little too close to home.
I cringe because their stories are calls to collective action. My instinct is to want to wallow in self-blame and individual action (like recycling, buying organic, and buying an electric car).
I cringe because their stories interrupt my lone white guy narrative.
I cringe because racism hurts white people as well as Black people and I want to ignore that and think of anti-racism as “helping” other people.
I cringe because we are in a race war and the white people are using race-baiting MAGA narratives to gaslight everybody else. I don’t like conflict and I don’t want to be in a war.
I cringe because both men are taking up space and I can sense that part of my own project of writing about antiracism is also a desire to be seen and reassured.
Tim Wise says “equity is the last and only remaining hope for this experiment we call the United States,” and he asks, “what if we were taught the history of white allies?” He asks us to imagine a United States where we are taught the real stories of real people fighting for equity as the legitimate national narrative.
This is why we need to care about the stories and, for me, the genealogy, because the true stories drive out the harmful myths.
Here is a sampling of Baynard Woods’ quotes about whiteness.
For most of my life, whiteness was the freedom not to notice my race. (p. 14)
Whiteness had created boundaries so close around me that I perceived them as my own skin. (p. 22)
Whiteness was part of America’s conspiratorial agreement on what mattered and what counted as success, including the color of our skin. In all these decisions that were supposed to determine my future, the skin color of the people I would be around mattered to my parents, although racial criteria were never directly mentioned. Still, whiteness influenced where we lived, how we dressed, and everything about our lives, insisting that we do each of these things in accord with its silent dictates… (p. 32)
Whiteness is also a lie we tell to save face when we have failed. (p. 40)
…whiteness is a fantasy that tries to minimize our failings and maximize our power. (p. 48)
Whiteness is the belief that the freedom of white people is more important than the safety of people who are not white. It is the freedom to deny race even as you see it. (p. 58)
Whiteness is the freedom to ignore its threat. (p. 65)
Whiteness is a conspiracy of both silence and violence. (p. 76)
And time would show that my whiteness allowed me to f**k up without consequence. (p. 85)
The fantasy of love in this sort of racism [white owner with enslaved woman] is not incidental, it is an essential feature. If we can tell ourselves that the people we oppress love us and are happy about it, then we can justify that oppression. (p. 95)
When white boys rebel we expand white freedom. Whiteness has always sent the outcasts out to colonize new territory… whiteness demands expansion. The lie must be passed on, the fantasy enlarged. (pp. 99–101)
Whiteness is immediate forgiveness and even assistance [in this case academically]. (p. 114)
It s difficult for white people to think about whiteness; it is like walking into a hall of mirrors where each lie reflects all the others. (p. 132)
There are more. So many more. Each one is backed up by experience. As I read the book, I kept dog-earring pages and underlining sections. Woods is drawing a picture of whiteness for us using the pointillist technique to create a coherent image out of hundreds of personal stories.
Tim Wise has written a lot since 2012. He is also a regular voice on podcasts and TV. He speaks on campuses and writes here on Medium. He knows about white supremacy and how it fits into the growing threat of fascism. He pisses white people off and that is a good thing. I’m looking forward to reading more of his stuff, especially his memoir.
Baynard Woods is a compelling writer. On the book cover and elsewhere his name appears with a line through it. He said that he has come to see his name as a Confederate monument and he strikes through his name in order to publicly acknowledge that. I’m ready to read more of his work.
Note: throughout this piece, I have referred to white supremacy in terms of the Black/white dynamic. This is partly because of the nature of both books being written by white men from the South, where whiteness exists primarily in contrast to Blackness. Partly it is also a shorthand because I don’t like the term BIPOC and I don’t want to bother to spell out every group affected by whiteness. Believe me, I know, whiteness as a system of domination has been weaponized in many ways against many groups of people.
If whiteness has been weaponized against people, how could an awareness of whiteness be weaponized in the war for people? Our awareness of how whiteness works can be a weapon in and of itself. What are we going to do with this weapon? What is the cure?
The cure is action. It is not wallowing in self-pity.
What action(s) can I take to dismantle white supremacy?
I wrote a short piece a while back about my opinion on Replacement Theory and being part of Tim Wise’s new minority:
Thank you to Laura M. Quainoo for joining me in starting this book club.
We have reviewed a book every month for the last eight months, and we both need a break from the schedule. As of today, RaWBC will be going on a hiatus from monthly picks. If you have a book that you want to review on your own, you are welcome to use the tag. The tag will be an invitation to others to interact with the same book.
Post-publish edit:
One of the things I will miss about a synchronous book club is writing my essay without having read the other essays. With this book especially I was curious what Laura’s take on the book would be. I was not disappointed. You can and should read her essay here. She takes time to address the “elephant” about this book and Tim Wise and other white antiracist authors and speakers. The elephant is the question: why should white people get accolades and book deals while saying the same things that Black writers have been saying for years? It can seem like another example of white people taking things. It can seem like “white-splaining” and getting paid for it.
You can read her response, which says (among other things) that white people have something unique to add to the conversation by being insiders.
My response is to ask you to consider if criticizing white people for sincerely trying to examine whiteness doesn't sound like a MAGA talking point? The biggest thing white supremacy hates is a race traitor. I think Wise and Woods qualify as race traitors.
One of the ways whiteness works is by attempting to control access. Any time people are deciding who can say or do what and where they can say or do it, that sounds like a system of oppression to me. We do need white voices in the fight against racism, but we don’t only need white voices. We need everybody.
© 2023 Andrew Gaertner. All rights reserved.
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