White Privilege by Shannon Sullivan;

Author:Shannon Sullivan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509535309
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2019-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

I think that Kim is wrong in saying that what language is used when talking about race—or just about anything else—is superficial. Language matters because it embodies different concepts and ideas, different ways of understanding the world. For example, it is not an exaggeration to say that different worlds are implied when calling someone “Indigenous” rather than “Native American.” The term “Native American” assumes and implicitly endorses the perspective of white European settler colonialism, in which Indigenous sovereignty is a non-issue. The West supposedly has been won, the so-called Indian Wars are over, and “Native Americans” now are one racial group among others in the United States, rather than a sovereign Indigenous people who continue to struggle for their land and right to self-governance (Rifkin 2017). The different worlds contained in language also explain why racial microaggressions are significant. “Micro” doesn’t mean trivial, as some critics of the concept of microaggressions claim. “Micro” distinguishes aggressions that are not spectacularly violent (for example, a white person’s calling a Black man “boy”) from the ones that are (for example, white people’s lynching of Black people). Both types of aggression perpetuate an anti-Black world, and both contribute to Black morbidity and mortality, albeit at different paces.

But Kim also is partially right. Language isn’t enough. White people who say they are against racism and white privilege generally haven’t put their money where their mouth is. I mean that both metaphorically and literally. Metaphorically, where is the substance or the action to go along with the words? Words alone, without anything else, are relatively easy. They can be used by good white people as a “get off the hook” card. As long as they use the right words, then nothing else needs to be done. Especially not anything that would involve actual money, such as making available affordable housing, adequately funded public schools, fair and livable wages, and so on. The money to back up good white people’s words also is literal. Really challenging white privilege would mean concrete action against the problem of the racial inequality of wealth in the United States and other white privileged countries. (South Africa particularly comes to mind on this point.) Kim is right about the problem of good white people’s hypocrisy. It’s not that lower-class white people aren’t racist; they sometimes, perhaps even often, are. But so are middle-to-upper-class white people, we just don’t tend to see it. We are really good at recognizing racially offensive behavior and speech when it comes from white lower-class people, but we often misrecognize racially offensive behavior and speech when it comes from middle-to-upper-class white people (Preston 2009, 129).

Even though there is something to Kim’s charge of political correctness, that doesn’t necessarily mean that anytime white people try to learn about racial injustice, they are trying to dump white guilt on other white people. This sometimes is how the PC charge works, and the effect (whether intended or not) is to dismiss issues of racial injustice, including white people’s knowledge about it.

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