Saturday, June 20, 2015

You Want To Know What's Wrong With The Younger Generation?

This is who is teaching them:
I definitely experienced this. There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors... and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn't have biological children because I didn't want to propagate my privilege biologically.

If I was going to pass on my privilege, I wanted to pass it on to someone who doesn't have racial privilege; so I planned to adopt. I disliked my Whiteness, but I disliked the Whiteness of other White people more. I felt like the way to really end racism was to feel guilty for it, and to make other White people feel guilty for it too. And then, like Dolezal, I wanted to take on Africanness. Living in South Africa during my junior year abroad, I lived with a Black family, wore my hair in head wraps, shaved my head. I didn't want to be White, but if I had to be, I wanted to be White in a way that was different from other White people I knew. I wanted to be a special, different White person. The one and only. How very White of me...
 Beverly Daniel Tatum has written that White people don't choose to identify as White because the categories to choose from are loaded from the start. Traditionally, one can identify as a colorblind White person, a racist White person or an ignorant White person: those are the three ways White people get talked about as White. If those are the options, who would choose to identify as White? And so White people identify as "normal" and "Irish" and "just American" and do not self-identify racially. And that leaves us with a society in which only people of color have a race, where only people of color seem to be responsible for racialized problems. It makes it hard for all of us to know and tell our racial stories -- because White people think we don't have any. And it makes it hard for us to own our history, because we don't see it as ours.
 Many White people also feel like we don't have culture, and this isn't a coincidence.
University of Penn professor.

2 comments:

  1. You can tell when "White People" are "privileged", because they have the time and resources to support their "White Guilt".

    The rest of us poor Crackers are just trying to feed our families and pay our bills. Just like normal people. Ain't got time for Crocodile Tears, y'know?

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  2. I have reason to believe at least one of my high-school teachers was a Communist agent. When she claimed "Humphrey was always in league with the bosses!" that should be a clincher.

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