OVERCOMING RACISM: WHAT'S IN IT FOR WHITES?

Sheridan Adams, M.F.T.

What benefit can there be for white people to examine our assumptions, both conscious and unconscious, about race and about people of color? The benefit, I believe, is nothing less than our own freedom -- freedom from the limitations that come with being white in a white-dominated society. The assumptions and stereotypes we hold about people from other racial groups often distort our vision so that we don't see the real person in front of us. We see our stereotypes instead. They can also lead us to judge, fear, avoid, and disrespect those who are different from us. We can allow superficial differences in color to blind us to seeing the fundamental human similarities between ourselves and non-whites. Moreover, we miss out on the joyful feeling brought about by being in groups which are inclusive of many different races and ethnic groups. Author Louis Rodriquez puts it this way: "Race is an issue that has...kept us all enslaved -- even white people. It's a mental slavery that we're all caught in."

Since whites are the dominant group both in population and in power, it is easy for us to stay isolated within our own racial group. This isolation increases the likelihood that we will hold faulty assumptions about non-whites -- assumptions which never get confronted or challenged. For example, many whites believe that most black people are poor and prone to thievery. The kind of incident described in the following vignette is quite common: Two young black women go into an upscale boutique on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The salespeople act as though they are not there, ignoring them for nearly half an hour. When a white customer enters the store, a saleswoman rushes to assist her. While the black women are looking at the merchandise another salesperson watches them relentlessly. Finally she approaches them saying, "I am sorry, but we don't have a layaway plan." The white salesperson has fallen prey to her ignorant assumptions. These assumptions have blinded her to the fact that there are many middle-class blacks who can afford expensive clothing.

Acknowledging that we may hold unexamined racial assumptions can make whites very uncomfortable. Most of us try hard to be decent and fair-minded. We don't want to think that we are racists in any sense. It's important to remember that we all learn biases and views, including false and harmful ones, from the society we live in. It is impossible to grow up in the United States without receiving negative messages about non-whites. We need not take our racial conditioning so personally. It is not something we asked for. The fact that we hold racial stereotypes does not make us bad people or even bigots. Becoming aware of these stereotypes is the necessary first step to unraveling them. We can't change something unless we first own up to its existence. As Jack E. White, an African American writer for Time magazine, commented, "The most insidious racism is among those who don't think they harbor any."

A conversation between two black men, Harvard educator and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the actor Morgan Freeman, makes a similar point. Gates is interviewing Freeman who has moved back to the South for a PBS television series about race, Beyond the Color Line. This is their conversation:
Gates: What is it about the South that is different for a black person than the North or the West?
Freeman: I think we built the South and we know it. ..... Traveling around the country and living in different places, I could never see that any place was better racially than Mississippi.
Gates: You never experienced racism as a kid in the South?
Freeman: Yes, of course I did. That's not the point. .... You aren't going to find any less racism in the North. It's going to be more insidious and more painful. Because you are given to think, "Oh, it's different here."

Not only are we misled by our conscious and unconscious assumptions about members of other racial groups, we are also confused by the concept of race itself. Most of us, both whites and non-whites, believe that there is a genetic basis for making racial distinctions. Pilar Ossorio, a microbiologist and leading expert on the ethical implications of genetic research, writes, "In our popular conceptions, we have a notion of race as being sort of simple divisions of people -- divisions among people that are deep, that are essential, that are somehow biological or even genetic, and that are unchanging, that these are clear-cut, distinct categories of people. And that is not the case. All of our genetics is telling us that that's not the case. We can't find any genetic markers that are in everybody of a particular race, and in nobody of some other race.

"If we take the standard racial categories, and we ask: Are the people whom we call black more like each other than they are like people whom we call white, genetically speaking, the answer is no. There is as much or more diversity and genetic difference within any 'racial' group as there is between people of different racial groups." We must add, however, that even though there is no genetic basis for the concept of race, it still has great impact as a social construct and must be addressed at this level.

The motivation to challenge our racial conditioning need not be based on altruism. Facing up to our biases helps free us from false and ignorant views that have been passed on from generation to generation for hundreds of years. Thus, making an intention to examine closely our racial assumptions is as much for ourselves as it is for others.

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