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Exploring Whiteness
In the near future, we will be adding reviews of published material and links to websites
dealing with race issues. Stay tuned.
Essay published in the Portland Press Herald, October 2000
White Privilege is ‘Invisible,’ so Few in the Majority
Recognize It
I was raised in South Korea as the daughter of American medical
missionaries. As a seven-year-old just arrived from the U.S. in
1960, I regularly encountered children my age on the streets, dressed
in ragged clothes, rattling their tin cans, begging for coins. Korea
was struggling to rebuild out of the devastation and destruction
of the war just ten years before. The poverty was immense.
Housing for missionaries was on hill compounds in the tall, stately,
turn-of-the-century brick houses built by the first missions. With
so many people desperate for jobs, every missionary family had Koreans
helping out around the home. Most Koreans believed that the Americans
were their saviors. My pale skin and light brown hair attracted
attention everywhere I went. Walking in the markets, I knew how
princesses felt, surrounded by crowds of awestruck onlookers.
What I experienced was an extreme form of white privilege. White
Americans were like royalty - highly visible, mostly revered, and
enormously wealthy compared to the Koreans around them. Despite
my parents’ teachings of respect and dignity and equality,
this conditioning instilled in me an unconscious sense of white
and American superiority, however “benign.”
Back in the States for my adult life, the last twenty years in Maine,
I have been able to apply what I learned in Korea to what I see
here. White privilege in the U.S. is nowhere near as obvious as
it was in 1960’s Korea. It is subtle, complex, and usually,
invisible to white people. How can this be, when the impact of it
is so visible to people of color?
“White is transparent,” writes Bonnie Kae Grover in an
article entitled ”Growing Up White in America?” “That’s
the point of being the dominant race. Sure, the whiteness is there,
but you never think of it. If you’re white, you never have
to think of it.” In a state as white as Maine, race is seldom
even raised as an issue. Because white people are not conscious
of race, it’s also very hard for them to notice how much a
part race plays in our society. It can be mystifying when people
of color make claims about racism, because it’s something that
just isn’t on most white people’s radar screens.
One definition of racism which I find particularly useful comes
from David Wellman (Portraits of White Racism): “a system of
advantage based on race.” Much of what is in our way as we
navigate the waters of race relations in the 21st century is not
overt acts of racial hatred. Some of the most persistent barriers
are entrenched, in both attitude and institutions, as privilege.
Most privilege is unconscious, unintentional, and invisible to the
beneficiary. That is why we are stuck, again and again, defending
ourselves saying, “But I couldn’t be racist, I didn’t
mean to.” Of course we didn’t mean to. We have no idea
we’re acting out the privilege because we take it so much for
granted that we can’t even see it’s there.
So, if we’re not doing anything on purpose, why should white
people take on the responsibility of becoming aware of the benefits
our skin color grants us? Of course the vast evidence of the harm
such a system inflicts on people of color is a highly motivating
factor. Who among us consciously chooses to be a part of a system
that is designed to hurt other people? But I think we must also
take a look at how such a system hurts white people. On first glance,
this is an odd proposition — how can privilege hurt someone
who is benefiting from it? The material and psychological benefits
of white privilege are real. The damage, I believe, is to our humanness.
It was no good to my humanity for me to grow up with some cellular
instinct of superiority, even when all my conscious beliefs contradicted
it. Simultaneously, the awareness of what has been done to people
of color has instilled in me a deep sense of shame and guilt. The
combination of superiority and shame has caused me to behave in
ways that isolate me from others and from myself. As James Baldwin
writes in White Man’s Guilt, “…the history of white
people has led them to a fearful baffling place where they have
begun to lose touch with reality — to lose touch, that is,
with themselves. ” I’ve had enough of this “fearful,
baffling place.” It’s time to move.
Anne Sibley O’Brien is the creator and performer of “White
Lies ,” a theater piece presented October 5-8 at the University
of New England. She is a member of the Maine chapter of the National
Coalition Building Institute.
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