“Whiteness Walks into a Bar” (After Franny Choi)
When we think about race: the narratives, stories and experiences of people of colour are raised. Whiteness is an ideology that inhabits all ethnicities. Let’s not forget that.
“Whiteness walks into a bar and orders a scotch on the rocks” says the great poet Franny Choi. However, this is Britain. So, he orders a nice, cold pint! The perception of whiteness is the absence of blackness / brownness, that makes people that look like me up to nine times more likely to be stopped by police in Northamptonshire than a white person (Stopwatch, 2018/19). But white is a colour too, isn’t it? When it comes to talks about “whiteness,” not a peep is to be heard from the people it impacts most, white European-looking people. And it can’t just be left up to people of colour to talk to about whiteness. White people need to be talking about whiteness!
In the conversations about unconscious bias, as far as race is concerned, too often the focus is on the prejudice and discrimination that’s inherently built into the system. That’s fine and all, but unconscious bias also impacts white people. Whilst it’s a tool of institutional violence to working-class people, irrespective of race, bias also favours those born into the hue of lighter skin. Look at drugs, for example: Black people are routinely stereotyped as drug dealers. However, eight years of private school showed me that the worst consumers and dealers of drugs were middle-class white people. The ones whose parents were legislators, businesspeople, lawyers and judges or rich landowners with reputations to uphold. And when you watch shows like The Wire or Toy Boy, which shows Black people a certain way, you begin to see how these racial stereotypes have taken root in people’s minds.
Whilst working-class white people will struggle, their struggles won’t be because they are white.
How whiteness is peddled can be both positive and negative. There are examples of White people using their privilege for great good, and great evil: from the white clergy that marched at Selma, to groups like Extinction Rebellion, slammed for being a white middle-class movement that glamourises arrest. Arrest is racialised and a white encounter with the police is not the same for a person who is not white, loaded with history: from the Brixton Riots to Emmett Till, lynchings and slave plantations. Call it stop and search, call it police brutality; call it the Southampton Insurrection, same symbols, different uniform, be it with blue sirens or burning crosses.
Looking at Extinction Rebellion, Brock Turner and Selma (1965), here lies a spectrum of white privilege: from the freedom to protest (without thinking of the consequence of arrest) — all the way up to rape and sexual assault on university campuses, with The People v. Turner.
White Privilege is existing in society without the consequences of racism, as discussed by Reni Eddo-Lodge in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Whiteness is living in a postcolonial world, disregarding the impact colonialism has in how race (historically), and the racial neo-politic continues to permeate society: from racism on university campuses to the legacy of colonialism, stop and search and the ongoing Windrush crisis.
Whiteness is cultural appropriation and the loots in the V&A / the British Museum. It’s white British academics having more authority on racism than academics of colour, even when it’s their lived experience. Stories lodged in their throats. It’s teaching children that Christopher Columbus was an explorer, finder — not invader, rapist, coloniser, thief, slaver.
What can white (British) academics tell you about racism other than what’s in theories and articles? Whilst white British people can experience prejudice, I believe racism is about power, and when you look at who holds the social power in society (in this country), it’s whites, British, American or otherwise.
And you can bet that employer is second guessing the CVs with names like Muhammad or Asante, not Smith and Jones or even Lowell or Roberts (though those last ones could just as well be a Black person too). The legacy of colonialism in our names. The legacy of whiteness is in Tré Ventour, from the slaves of the Fontenoy Estate in St. George, Grenada. And if you want to get that loan, or that promotion, “Debroah, you should be less confrontational.” Why do Black people have to censor their mannerisms for their White colleagues? Laugh quieter. Walk slower. Breathe lighter.
I write this blog in a language I didn’t get to choose. It was given to my ancestors at the end of the sword, along with songs of Solomon like Amazing Grace and Sweet Chariot, bibles and this name that I carry. White Privilege is the freedom to choose — your language, beliefs, name, your essence of being. But you call us stupid. Whiteness walks into a bar like he owns it. The bar is any institution. Any industry. Any topic of discussion. Brexit. Black History Month. Diwali. Whiteness is an authority because whiteness built the bar for himself.
Whiteness asks:
“Where did you learn to speak English so well?”
Whiteness asks:
“Do you hate White people?
Whiteness says:
Explain to me how I can be a better person.
Critical Race Pedagogy (Theory) tells us that it’s deeper than the individual racist. It’s the system. How do you fight an abstraction? How do you get more Black and brown people into policing? Into academia or education?
However, if you don’t address the violence already there, what you’re doing is sending people of colour into a conflict, POWs with no hope of escape.
Works of Interest
Critical Race Theory — Kimberle Crenshaw (author), Neil Gotanda (author), Garry Peller (author), Kendall Thomas (editor)
Legacies of British slave-ownership — LBS, University College London.
People of the State of California v. Brock Allen Turner
People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson (O. J Simpson)
The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016) — FX (Netflix)
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race — Reni Eddo-Lodge
