BLOGGING AGAINST RACISM: THE STEREOTYPE OF THE ANGRY BLACK PERSON

When I was five years old, my family moved back to the U.S. from an expatriate community overseas.  In my pre-school and kindergarten overseas, I was used to playing with children of different races.  But in my new "whitebread" community in the U.S., everyone in my kindergarten class was white except for one black girl named Tara. 

I started in my new kindergarten in the middle of the year, but I had no problem making friends right away.  I was a conventionally cute little white girl and my parents had met some of the other little girls' parents already.  I fit in.  But for some reason, Tara was an outcast.  I vividly recall an incident my first week of school when I was sitting around a table with a group of girls, including Tara, over graham crackers and milk during snack time.  The other girls were being horrible to Tara.  At one point, Tara coughed and said, "Scuse me."  The girls immediately pounced on her for being "so stupid."  They asked her if she didn't know how to say "Excuse me" or if her mouth wasn't built so she couldn't say "Excuse me" properly.  Later I asked one of my new little friends why they had been so mean to Tara, and my little friend explained nonchalantly that she was just "horrible" and "dirty." 

When I described the incident to my mother, she set her jaw grimly and explained that the other girls didn't like Tara because she was black.  I didn't believe her because it didn't make any sense.  I was convinced that Tara must have done something terrible to warrant such treatment from the nice little girls who were my friends.  Nonetheless, I followed my mother's instruction that I should be "extra nice" to Tara. 

A couple of weeks later, I approached Tara and presented her with an invitation to my birthday party.   I felt virtuous and kind, going out of my way to such an extent for a little girl no one liked.  But Tara didn't take it that way. She yelled that she would never, ever go to my birthday party and that she hated me.  ("I hate you! I hate you!")  I was hurt, and completely baffled.  I had never uttered an unkind word to Tara.  Why on earth would she lash out at me like that?  I quickly concluded that she must be just as terrible as everyone said she was.  It, of course, never entered my mind that she associated me with her tormentors, who were all my friends, or that she perhaps resented the fact that I had never said a word to defend her. 

Years later, after spending more time in happily integrated expatriate communities overseas, I returned to the U.S. again for boarding school.  My boarding school actively recruited disadvantaged minority kids through the "A Better Chance" program.  A lot of the white kids, mostly raised in privileged liberal circles, were as shocked and confused by what seemed like hostility from the minority kids as I had been by Tara's response to me. 

And thus begins the stereotype of the "angry black man" or the "angry black woman."  The stereotye hinges on the notion that black people are oversensitive, unreasonable, and quick to anger.  The stereotype takes no account whatsoever of the possibility that the anger might be justified in some way.  But, man oh man, put yourself in Tara's shoes, living a lifetime of constant berating and slights for no reason other than your race, starting in kindergarten (if not earlier) and what you have is not irrational anger -- it's righteous indignation.

Check out the rest of Blogging Against Racism day here at Chris Clarke's blog. Don't forget to look in the trackbacks of his post for all the other blog entries. 

   

Comments

[Ann]

Poor Tara. I'm white, so I can't even imagine, but I wasn't exactly a boy magnet in high school (my penchant for dressing like a truck driver probably didn't help, I don't know how boys were supposed to even know I was a girl under all those clothes) and I remember once this guy Ben asked me out on a date while we were sitting next to each other in class. Ben was one of those guys that was never serious about ANYTHING, and nobody ever asked me out anyway, so I assumed he was making fun of me just by asking. I gave him about the dirtiest look I've ever given anyone and said NO, just the one syllable, then didn't speak to him for the rest of class. Later I overheard his friend asking him "so are you and Ann going out," and Ben just quietly shook his head no. I thought, aw, crap, that was really mean of me. But after a while it seems logical that nice gestures are actually mean ones in disguise, and if you're a girl who is repugnant to boys or a black kid who is repugnant to white kids and you KNOW it, it's hard not to be mean right back. I hope Tara found some white friends eventually.

[Zan]

When I was in public school we only had one black kid. I don't remember on incident where he was mistreated. He had many friends. I remember he even asked me out once but I said no because I liked someboy else. I think we had a different view fo race because it was small town VT. Not a lot of racial issues up there. My uncle had never even seen a black person until he was 5 or 6. He didn't even know they existed (being raised in a small VT town). When he went to visit his brother in NJ he was shocked. He would stop stare and point wondering why they looked that way. Needless to say, it was very embarassing to his mother to have her son pointing at every black person in the street saying "Look, Mommy."

I was the ugly duckling in school and the boys were horrible to me for a time. I know how it is to be suspicous of everyone.

[Naomi]

Right on! Thank you all for saying what I intuit, but hadn't quite been able to articulate. It's hard when well-meaning gestures are not reciprocated; remembering my own socially inept 7th grade self really helps.

[L.]

I have kind of an opposite, parallel story. I also grew up in a `burb with just a few token black kids, but no one teased or ostracized them. We had all completely internalized the message from our parents and teachers that color didn`t matter, and we were all human, so we could all be friends whether we were black or white or yellow or blue. Yay! Free to be you and me! Kumbaya!

Except... the world outside was a bit different from what we had been led to believe. So when we were high school seniors, and Ivy League schools were literally calling our black friend and ASKING HER TO PLEASE APPLY, some of us white kids with better grades and SAT scores wondered, "Huh? Why is she so special, and we`re not? Color doesn`t matter....what`s going on here?"

It took us a while to realize that color doesn`t matter, except when it does. (Happy ending: my friend grew up to be a college professor -- a certified role model, making the world a better place for women and people of color. I came to understand why helping minorities is necessary to address patterns of social inequality. The other white kids who never came to understand this, and continued to resent our friend for getting her "special treatment," stayed in the boring close-minded suburb and are now rotting away at dead-end jobs.)

[bmmg39]

I'm of two minds here. I think a kindergartner can be excused for putting all white people into one box, but I like to think that as we get older we don't blame the ugliness of a few (or many) on a whole people.

I've tutored some A Better Chance students for the SAT (they weren't the least bit hostile), and so I'm guessing the ABC program is for middle schoolers and high schoolers. At that age, most people hopefully realize that there are enough villains out there without seeing them where they don't exist.

boy genteel

[The Happy Feminist]

Yeah -- the boarding school issues (it was a high school kids who were, I guess, alumni of the A Better Chance program) were a little more complicated than what I explained in the post.

Also, I don't think Tara was in any way at fault for lashing out at me. I am not necessarily prone to "white guilt" but in that case I believe that she was right to be angry at me because I never did anything to help her and I continued to hobnob with the people who were so awful her. I forgive myself because I was only five. My point was that I only saw her anger as irrational and jumped to conclusions that she herself was at fault for the cruelty people inflicted on her. I think on some level or another white adults often arrive at the same beliefs about blakc adults.

[Sea Ganschow]

Have you checked out United to End Racism? There is good information and a listening exchange model to assist in healing from the hurts of white racism. It clearly lays out that people of color are targets of racism and also end up internalizing the false information about themselves. White folks are not born racist but even in well-intentioned households end up being "infected" by media, schools, etc and it's mainly our minds which get "infected" by racist conditioning.

UER uses listening exchange for everyone to discharge the hurst of racism whether as one targeted by or one hurt by being born into an oppressor role.

I am a young black woman that grew up on both sides of the spectrum. I spent the first "formative" years of my education career in the inner city. There, mostly blacks and latinos resided. I never saw white people outside of my teachers and the news casters on television.

The summer I was to go into the 7th grade, I moved to Brea, CA. It was a culture shock but I was excited about the opportunity to learn about another culture. First off, my family was 1 of the 3 black familes in the entire nieghborhood. Secondly, my junior high had a popultion of 1, as it relates to black people(s). That 1 person was me. No black teachers, staff, coaches, students, just me. My school was predominantly white and boy did I notice. Sure, I made some friends but I always had the feeling that they resolved to be "friends: out of fear as though I was violent. I wasn't. Every day I had someone wanting to touch my hair or my skin or telling me that, "you people can do so much with your hair..." or "I wish I had NAPPY hair like you..." Enraged cannot begin to describe the feelings of mistrust and bitterness that I developed over the years. (many of these comments came from techers).

High School was worse, there were teachers and students/parents that were openly racist and yelled White Power when I would walk to school. I had older white men who I assume thought that just because I was black (never mind that I was underage), that I wanted to be sexually come-on-to and they would stop thier benz's and jag's and ask me (a 14yr. old) if I needed a ride home. Racism on every level. (keeping in line with the idea that black women a insatiable sex creatures, CREATURES? WHO IS THE REAL CREATURE?).

Till this day I have color issues. When, as a child I could've loved anyone. I think that our differences a people should be celebrated and dialogued about.

Today I work in the corporate world. I make an attempt to speak to white women and they look away or won't acknowledge me at all. HELLO, AM I INVISIBLE??? I don't have to say hello to thier white male counter parts because before I can open my mouth they are staring at my breasts or legs, DAMN!,AM I HUMAN OR AN PLAYBOY SPREAD?!? I am tired of being stared at, eyes rolled at, whispered about, ignored, the whole 9. Yet whites have tokened the phrase, Angry Black Woman. But the way I'm treated 1) I wonder who is really angry, and 2) ask yourslef if you would be angry too.

I don't want anyone to feel gulity, I guess I don't know how to repair this abridged gap between our people. But at this point anger is filling me and hatred threatens to follow. Damn, I'm just tired of dealing with it. I wish we could live on separate worlds. More than angry though, my humanity aches and weeps.

[The Happy Feminist]

Wow -- thank you so much for your comment to this post. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to go to school and have people yelling "white power" when you walk in. That's dreadful.

This line of your comment touched me in particular:
Till this day I have color issues. When, as a child I could've loved anyone.

Thank you so much for being so honest about your experiences and your reactions to them. I can speculate about what it's like to have grown up like the girl in my post, but it's not the same as hearing from someone like you who has had experiences similar to hers.

[Thought this was interesting]

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Napsack

by Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there is most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women's studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us".

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area that I can afford and in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

6. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization", I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

12. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes or not answer letters without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color, who constitute the worlds' majority, without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

18. I can be sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge" I will be facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings or organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.

23. I can choose public accommodations without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my race will not work against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.

26. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color that more or less matches my skin.

Elusive and fugitive

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; ones' life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.

For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

Earned strength, unearned power

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically. Privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally say as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their "Black Feminist Statement of 1977".

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden system of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.

This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.