Excerpts on Whiteness

All of these quotes are taken from an article “How Do I Live in This Strange Place?” by  S a m a n t h a V i c e of R h o d e s University in South Africa.
accessed from the blog Africa is a Country  with a link to the article. Its worth reading in its entirety, (with the caveat that white people have inherently talked enough about everything in South Africa, so it might be more worth your time to go read something written by a nonwhite voice. whatever)

I think possibly, I came to a related conclusion after living in Stellenbosch for six months. Something about backing away slowly from International Development, and trying to stay in my own context. Except my own context is Fresno, and the people I love most are at FIRM, where I am still white (knowing I am not Hmong or Lao or Cambodian or Hispanic or Chicana). Reading it now, I like her conclusion of silence and humility, and that the solution to whiteliness is not mandating all bearers of whiteness jump in politically to attempt to rectify all past and ongoing injustices...

And in South Africa, the working and effects of privilege are starkly apparent; one cannot in good faith pretend they do not exist. Deciding how to live decently with this recognition is one of the main moral tasks facing all white people and the task I explore in this paper. How then is one to be a good person and live well under these morally dubious conditions? One way in which South Africa perhaps differs from the standard account [invisibility] mentioned above is that it is impossible for anyone not to be aware of his or her race... While one’s whiteness might still constitute the unacknowledged norm, as the invisibility thesis claims, that one is white rather than black is always present to oneself and others, barring an impressive feat of willed self-deception.

 My interest, then, is in white South Africans who are aware of their whiteness and,... see themselves as a problem, because they know their selves to be constituted by habits of white privilege. 18 In the rest of the paper, I have these people in mind when I refer to whites, not those who are blatantly and proudly racist. Alcoff asks, “what is it to acknowledge one’s whiteness? Is it to acknowledge that one is inherently tied to structures of domination and oppression, that one is irrevocably on the wrong side?” 19 I think the answer to Alcoff’s question in South Africa is fairly obviously “yes.” Whites in South Africa ought to see themselves as a problem. How does one live knowing this, among the very visible effects of one’s moral offenses?

... to explore it further it will be helpful to put guilt aside and concentrate on shame. ... In standard accounts of the moral emotions, shame differs from guilt in being essentially directed toward the self, rather than outwards toward a harm one brought about.25 Shame is a response to having fallen below the standards one sets for oneself, whether moral or not. One’s very self is implicated in a way that need not be the case with guilt, which is a reaction to what one has done, not primarily to who one is...Shame is the recognition that one ought not to be as one is, and it does not, I think, depend on the claim that one could be different to how one is.

....

... I do not think that it is possible for most well-intentioned white South Africans who grew up in the Apartheid years to fulfill their moral duties and attain a great degree of moral virtue. 38 We cannot after all stop being white, although we may try to minimize our whiteliness, and have a duty to do so. There are the justly famous exceptions, and we probably all know people who are simply and quietly good in ways that allow them to transcend their whiteness. I am not making any universal or necessary claims about the possibility of happiness and virtue for white South Africans. For most of us, however, attaining them will be difficult, for most of us are not good enough to become exceptions.

.....

I seek an appropriate way of living with white shame that is nonetheless private and does not assume that every person ought to respond only as a political animal, and that every response need be an outward action. For the very reason that every aspect of life in South Africa is so politicized, we should allow space for forms of expiation and self-improvement that do not demand a public gesture or political activity

...

To be morally successful, a certain restraint on our parts is required, which I now suggest we think about in terms of humility and silence. This restraint is, I think, appropriate to the South African context in a way it might not be elsewhere....

So, recognizing their damaging presence, whites would try, in a significantly different way to the normal workings of whiteliness, to make themselves invisible and unheard, concentrating rather on those damaged selves. Making pronouncements about a situation in which one is so deeply implicated seems a moral mistake—it assumes one matters politically and morally beyond the ways in which everyone matters equally. One needs to learn that one does not. One would live as quietly and decently as possible, refraining from airing one’s view on the political situation in the public realm, realizing that it is not one’s place to offer diagnoses and analyses, that blacks must be left to remake the country in their own way. Whites have too long had influence and a public voice; now they should in humility step back from expressing their thoughts or managing others.

...

 Whatever else it is, whiteliness is surely a lack of humility.

...

My attempt in this paper to think through being white would then be a professional and personal breaking of pernicious whitely silence; “making strange” what was previously “just the way things are.” 

The relevant kind of silence is therefore a political silence, silence in the political realm, rather than a professional silence or the stifling of all conversation with others in which race or privilege, for instance, is the topic. For once again, shame, regret, or guilt would be the expected responses to knowledge of one’s whiteliness and insidious connection to injustice. This knowledge seems to recommend silence in the political realm as the morally decent policy: One would remain silent to prevent one’s whitely perspective from causing further distortion in the political and public contexts, where whiteness is most problematic and charged. Thought of in these terms, silence is a response to the inevitability of going wrong and an expression of humility.

Unlike many other colonial legacies, which whites should certainly feel uncomfortable about, our history of injustice is recent, part of living memory, something whites benefit from in direct, unmediated ways—and therefore something that implicates each one’s sense of self now. My argument for the appropriateness of feeling shame and of responding to it with silence and humility depends not on some ancient wrong done in our name, but of our own ongoing wrongdoings and their visible effects. Once again, then, the best moral response is to accept shame as both appropriate and troubling, and to turn one’s attention to the self with silence and if possible, humility.

Living decently in this land even under these conditions will be difficult. In a country beset by continuing injustice, it will be hard sometimes to discern when it is appropriate to maintain silence, and when that would indicate, rather, an inappropriate disengagement or obsession with moral purity. Perhaps gross injustice is being done, and whatever one’s race, whatever the context, one should take a stand. 49 Furthermore, one would still be compelled to make small gestures and utterances; there are demands every day for private acts, not of charity but of justice (whitely ways of thinking in this country confuse these two). But knowing how best to respond to these occasions is also difficult when whites still have economic and social power, which infects every encounter. White South Africans face daily and tenacious moral tests that show themselves up as inadequate as much as revealing the deep structural and systemic injustices of the country. However one acts, shame is never far away, for so many interactions seem charged with power or racial dynamics. It is hard to be comfortable like this and hard to resist the thought that for most white South Africans it will be almost impossible to lead a good life.