Yes, A White Person Can Understand What It Is Like to Be Black...

...or asian, or hispanic, etc.  And yes, a man can understand what it is like to be a woman.  A straight person can understand what it is like to be gay.

Did I get your attention?  Cool.

I've seen this question in the race conversation a lot - everybody has - and I think the answer is clearly "yes".  The important part of the question, though, is that race has nothing to do with it.

The real question is "Can one human being understand what it is like to be another human being."  Race is just one variable in our experience as human beings.  Gender is another.  Dis/ability is another, as are age and economic class and culture and religion and anything else you can think of that describes a person.  The question is, can we understand each other?  The answer is yes - it has to be yes for any of our communication or relationships to be meaningful at all.  If the answer is no, then apoia'giajds;aio hgdag;ieha.

Now, if the question is "Can one human being experience the experiences of another human being", the answer is obviously no across the board.  We can't live another person's life - we can't be them.  But we have more than just experience to help us understand other people.

We have limbic resonance.  Your mammalian brain broadcasts how you feel through subtle clues many times per second, thousands of times in a given conversation, entirely outside of your control.  Outside of my control, my mammalian brain picks up on these cues.  Happiness, sadness, anger, even things like obesity, are actually contagious in this way.  Our mammalian brains are always striving to understand and communicate with each other, and this process is not impeded in the slightest by something constructed like race or ethnicity.

We have empathy.  We have the capacity (with the exception of sociopaths or perhaps severely autistic persons) to feel what other people are feeling.  When we see a sad face, we feel a pang of sadness.  When we see an angry face, our pulse rate goes up a few beats or more.  Reveling in empathy isn't very helpful, but it is there.  We know from the research of people like Charles Darwin all the way to Paul Ekman that emotional facial expressions are universal regardless of culture.  If you haven't read Paul Ekman's books, I highly recommend them.  He has demonstrated through decades of research and facial analysis that the facial expressions that accompany emotions are universally human and entirely cross-cultural.  Culture teaches us different ways of managing those emotional reactions, but the reactions go deeper than culture or ethnicity, all the way to biology.  We are 'wired' to communicate emotional experiences and emotional states, whether we are New Guinean stone-age hunter-gatherers or Japanese executives.

We have sympathy.  This is the imaginative capacity to understand, from a slight remove, what it is like to be another person.  We can find experiences in our lives that are similar to experiences in other lives.  We can listen to their stories and imagine ourselves in those stories.  We can ask them what it is like to be in their skin and the words they tell us have meaning.  We have to be careful that we're not just projecting our own experience and biases onto the other person - but that's what listening is for!

We have imagination.  We can imagine, and understand to a degree, what it is to be a big blue alien on Pandora, or an Elf, or a cyborg, or an artificially intelligent robot, or a killer whale, or Jesus, or our parents, or our ancestors.  We started developing this capacity when we were toddlers.  We can use it to manipulate others or to help them, to build up or to destroy, but we have it.  We can walk in each other's shoes just like we can walk on Mars or the bottom of the ocean.  More information and broader experience sharpens this capacity, as does wisdom, but we have it almost from the beginning.

What we cannot do is to have the same experiences as another person.  We can't mind meld or download their experiences into our brains.  So, while I am not black, not a woman, not gay, not hispanic, etc., can I understand what it is like to be those things?  It takes some effort and imagination, but yes.   Can I have the experiences of those other categories of people?  Can I embody them?  Can I be just like them and live their lives?  Not at all - of course not!  No more than they can embody me or have my experiences or live my life.

So, the bad news is, we're just going to have to listen to each other, and actually use our capacities for understanding.

I'm A Color-Less Child Who Don't Know Right From Wrong...

Race came up a number of times in the past couple of weeks, in conversation with my mother and her partner Sandy as well as, for example, on Bruce Reyes-Chow's recent Facebook comment.  These conversations about race have all been with primarily white people, all middle-class-seeming from what I can tell.  I found myself trying to make the same point about whiteness.

When whiteness is part of a race discussion, it is the backdrop.  Whiteness is the blank, forgettable paper upon which the beautiful rainbow of diversity can be painted.  "Ethnic" means anything but white.  "People of color" is the same.

This is not some kind of "reverse racism" rant - that being said, the invisibility of whiteness is the problem.  When whiteness becomes just another ethnicity, we will have dealt a powerful blow to racism everywhere.  It is no longer a game of measurement against one ethnicity which is treated like it is the assumed position, but rather a game of comparing ethnicities subjectively and relativistically - this one is unlike this other one, but similar to this other one, etc.  With any luck, we eventually stop playing the game altogether.

When whiteness is the backdrop; when white is not just another ethnicity, it becomes the default.  It becomes the assumed basis on which we discuss race - race exists as a comparison to whiteness.

It isn't as if white is not a distinctive ethnicity, just like any other ethnicity (granted that all ethnicity is invented and constructed).  You just have to listen to...any standup comedian for any length of time, or read Stuff White People Like, to get the idea of what white ethnicity means, insofar as any ethnicity means anything.

We need to get the point where we are all people of color - only one of those colors is "pale".

Here are a couple of my longer comments from BRC's Facebook page:

 "

I think that the idea that white people are somehow "not ethnic" or have no color just perpetuates racism, and I see a lot of that in this conversation, as I do in most conversations about race. Whiteness is treated, even by most of the commenters here, as the "default" position, as if there was nothing distinctive about whiteness. It is the blank page upon which the beautiful rainbow of diversity is painted, it seems.

This is deeply unfortunate on every level. Until "white" is just another color, just another ethnicity, racism will rule the day. As long as we divide everything along lines of white vs. "ethnic" or white vs "color", we're still defining everything in light of whiteness. Isn't that what so many people have struggled and suffered so much to avoid?

As for BRC's comment - cool. I don't really understand what he means. When I'm in a group of all white people (which happens all the time as a Presbyterian) we don't even notice - again, because we're not "ethnic" , we don't have "color", we're just white people. Blank. Monochromatic. The cultural and phenotypic default setting.

And this language of white vs. color allows us to continue in that illusion, even though it is harmful to non-white people."

And to clarify:

"I think that's actually what I said - or what I intended to say. Race is an artificial construct, even if you change the terminology to "ethnicity". As long as whiteness is the artificial construct that is made the backdrop for all others, the unjust system will be propped up. If whiteness is just another ethnicity, then I believe that is a concrete move toward equality. Part of the power of whiteness is it's cultural invisibility - many act and speak as if white isn't particular, as if only "color" is particular. This is worse than acknowledging white as a particular construct, in my view, because it is all tacitly based on the assumption that white is standard and everything else is a deviation, when in truth, ethnicities are all constructs."

American Cowardice 1

Driving home tonight I witnessed two police cruisers pulling over a man in a sedan. They shined their spotlights on him, and approached from both sides. I drove past without seeing what happened next, but I imagined the following unrealistic conversation.

Drunk Guy: Man those lights are bright could you turn them down.

Officer: It's normal procedure. For our protection. So we can see what you're doing.

Drunk Guy: For your protection? What do you need protecting from?

Officer: Well you see, we don't know if you are some PCP-head or gang-banger and might go crazy on us. You could be anyone. We can't be too careful.

Drunk Guy: But you're wearing body armor and have a gun, and 3 other guys with body armor and guns, and a radio to call for help to get a bunch more guys with body armor and guns. Plus you've been trained in hand-to-hand combat and all that stuff...

Officer: Well yes, but you could be a really belligerent alcoholic...

Drunk Guy: But you have pepper spray and a taser and handcuffs, and there is a shotgun in your car. And even if I drive away you have much faster cars with bullet proof glass, and that radio again with which to call helicopters and tire spikes and, paramedics if one of you gets hurt...

Officer: Of course, but we can't be too careful...

The point of my rambling imagination is not that cops don't face real dangers, but that perhaps we've gotten our ideas of danger out of perspective. When I get pulled over for a speeding ticket I sweat. Why? Because a guy (or girl) with a gun is about to give me a lecture. Police officers certainly do get injured and die in the line of duty, but far more criminals and bystanders are shot by cops than the other way around. This is because the cops are better armed, better trained, better prepared, and usually outnumber their opponents. In other words, however dangerous it may be to be a cop, it is more dangerous for everyone else.

This is not an anti law-enforcement post. This is just what got my mind started down this train of thought. My broader point is this:

We have become a society of cowards. We have institutionalized cowardice.

Look at that chart to the right. We spend as much money on our military as the almost the entire rest of the world. Our military is the best equipped, best trained, most advanced everything. In the past century we have inflicted millions of casualties on the rest of the world while we have suffered less than 1% of the deaths we have caused.

Yet, despite our utter dominance, we live in fear.

After those police officers have got the talkative drunk guy out of his car he decides he does feel slightly belligerent. He cracks some jokes at the cops and doesn't exactly follow instructions. They push him up against the car and try to cuff him. He gets defensive.

Drunk Guy: Hey why are you pushing me!

He shoves back. The police both grab him and force him face first to the ground. He squirms, while one officer gets out his cuffs and the other pulls his taser out.

Officer: Hold still or I will taze you.

He doesn't hold still. The cop cuffing him, being bigger, stronger, in better shape, trained for this sort of thing and sober is, at most, in danger of inhaling some intense halitosis. The drunk guy keeps squirming. They taze him. Twice. For their own safety. Everyone agrees this is perfectly reasonable.

The Modern Thesis: The World Continually Improves

This modern thesis is in contrast to the ancient thesis that I talked about a while ago.  In brief, this modern thesis is our own story that we have continually told ourselves - it can probably be traced back to the Enlightenment, which in itself is a very optimistic term to use to describe any time period.  The story is that, on balance, things keep getting better, and will continue to get better.

Now, one can hardly argue against the fact that the world has continually progressed, that is, it has become better and better, for the affluent.  My life as a middle class white guy is better than the lives of middle class white guys in the past.  I enjoy more comforts than previous emperors, and will on average expect to live longer, with greater access to information and entertainment.  And that's even with massive student loans to repay.

Even though one could say that as a middle-class white guy I have lost power and privilege in the last 100 years by way of liberation movements among non-white non-guys, I maintain that this loss of privilege makes my life better, not worse.  The more privilige I lose as a middle-class white guy, the more the facts of my white-ness and my guy-ness mean less difference between my life and other lives, the better.  All things being equal, I would like to be able to live my life and not benefit from evil.  In my position, that means I have to lose privilege and others have to gain it.  Cool, let's do it then.

Even supposedly losing privilege, I'm pretty well-off, especially compared to those in a similar position who came before me.  As long as I maintain this self-centered idea of "progress", the modern thesis makes perfect sense.

***

"Though in this case, as I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war.  I would not subscribe a penny to it, let alone a son, were I a free man." -Tolkien in a letter to his son Christopher in 1945

***

During Tolkien's writing career, from the 1930s to the 1960s, he took many opportunities to point out the problems with this modern thesis, and certainly never seems to have bought into it.  He saw the world as a place with progressively less green and more noise.  People worked hard for useless things and were quickly forgetting what was of value.  Machines that were supposed to serve us instead enslaved us.  Life became a commodity and beauty became subject to convenience.

I haven't encountered much in his writing that said he was primarily thinking of what we now call the "third world" or "two-thirds world" or "global South" when he expressed his dismay and disgust with modernity.  He was speaking from his own experience - fighting in a World War and coming home to his beloved England to see the countryside bulldozed and replaced with ugly buildings and concrete and polluted air.

Tolkien was not an environmentalist in the modern sense, though his ideas and values overlap with some of theirs.  He was something far more rare - a person who valued nature for it's own sake, apart from it's utility to human beings.  He mourned the death of trees as much as he did the death of beauty and craftmanship.

The real question is - stand in the middle of a vast, suburban gated community, and look around.  Then stand in the midst of a great old-growth forest and do the same.

Are we really better off trading one for the other?

***

"Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate.  (Too often the hate is irrational, a fear of anything large and alive, and not easily tamed or destroyed, though it may clothe itself in pseudo-rational terms.)" - Tolkien in a letter to Jane Neave, September 8-9 1962

America: Still Quite Firmly Racist

Tim Wise trots out a horrifying litany of evidence of racism in America.  It is staggering, humiliating and appalling to see it all spelled out like that.

Here is his article, entitled "

Black Power's Gonna Get You Sucka: Right-Wing Paranoia and the Rhetoric of Modern Racism.

Read it, and weep.