When Students Are Compelled to Have "White Privilege 101" Classes

By John McWhorter, The Daily Beast

15 March 15

When students are compelled to have “White Privilege 101” classes, we have every right to ask: Why, and for whose benefit?

f you’ve been white lately, you have likely been confronted with the idea that to be a good person, you must cultivate a guilt complex over the privileged status your race enjoys.

It isn’t that you are doing, or even quite thinking, anything racist. Rather, your existential state of Living While White constitutes a form of racism in itself. Your understanding will serve as a tool … for something. But be careful about asking just what that something is, because that will mean you “just don’t get it.”

To be sure, there is, indeed, a distinct White Privilege. Being white does offer a freedom not easily available to others. You can underperform without it being ascribed to your race. And when you excel, no one wonders whether Affirmative Action had anything to do it. Authority figures are likely to be your color, and no one associates people of your color with a propensity to violence. No one expects you to represent your race in a class discussion or anywhere else.

These are the basics of White Privilege, disseminated in key campus texts such as Peggy McIntosh’s foundational “Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” from 1988. It’s become a meme of Blue America’s mental software, recently focused by the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

But “White Privilege” is more than just a term these days. For example, some of New York City’s elite private schools are giving White Privilege lessons to their student bodies, teaching them, for example, that when affluent white students talk about their expensive vacations this could be hurtful to students of color from humbler circumstances. The Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service kicked off its community meetings in Ferguson with White Privilege teachings. There are college courses, and even a yearly conference. White Privilege is suddenly a hot topic and cottage industries have sprung up around it.

However, one can thoroughly understand how racism works and still ask just what this laser focus on “White Privilege” is meant to achieve.

“This is messy work, but these conversations are necessary,” says Sandra Chapman, director of diversity and community at Little Red School House in New York City. Okay—but why? Note that the answer cannot be, “So that whites will understand that they are the privileged … etc.” That makes as much sense as saying “Because!” So I’m going to dare to ask a simple question: What exactly are we trying to achieve with this particular lesson?

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I assume, for example, that the idea is not to teach white people that White Privilege means that black people are the only group of people in human history who cannot deal with obstacles and challenges. If the idea is that black people cannot solve their problems short of white people developing an exquisite sensitivity to how privileged they are, then we in the black community are being designated as disabled poster children.

On the American version of The Office, Michael Scott fakes a physical disability and solicits sympathy from black salesman Stanley, designating him as “disabled” by “obstacles” because of his color. “I am not disabled and neither are you,” grouses Stanley—and in the scene, he is the wise one and Scott is the buffoon. But those urging us to think about White Privilege are not buffoons.

Is the goal to urge people into activism against the conditions that afford whites their privilege? White Privilege spokespersons would surely agree. After all, the White Privilege Conference’s website noting that it is “About Creating Change.”

But two things seem hard to miss.

First, making a lot of the changes White Privilege tutors seem to suggest would tie us up into knots, especially in the educational realm. If no one asks black people to comment on racial issues, then the charge will be that whites are turning a blind eye to … White Privilege. As to discomfort from being suspected of being an Affirmative Action hire, to have any but the tiniest of criticisms of racial preferences is considered blasphemy, displaying an ignorance of … White Privilege.

I went to a private school in the seventies with white kids happily talking about their vacations and lavish bar mitzvahs; some of them had VCRs before I even knew what one was. For what it’s worth, I did not feel hurt that I didn’t live on their scale. And in any case, what good would it have done to tell these white kids to not talk around black kids about their toys and trips? Wouldn’t that have implied that kids like me were pathologically delicate, and wouldn’t the next complaint have been that white kids were holding themselves back from the black kids, i.e. segregating themselves, ignorant of … White Privilege?

Second, it’s hard not to notice that amidst the White Privilege rhetoric, the activist goal is largely implied. Obviously, no one puts it that way, but as those interested in White Privilege know so well when it comes to racism, what people say is often an approximate reflection of their true feelings and intents. McIntosh’s essay refers in passing to something as hypothetical as the “redesign of social systems” at the end of her tome, calling whether we want to seek such a thing “an open question.” The discussion hasn’t changed much since 1988. The White Privilege Conference bills itself as being about “understanding, respecting, and connecting.” Those are all admirable aims but they apply to the White Privilege teach-ins, not applying the lessons to actually changing society. White Privilege puts a laser focus on the awareness raising. The awareness raising is what it is about.

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Of course, the idea is supposedly that we need to disseminate this awareness of White Privilege before we can start on the political part of the project. But the case for White Privilege as a necessary prelude to change relies on a premise that America is a nation “in denial” about racism past and present. That premise has rhetorical punch, but doesn’t comport with reality.

Take the usual phrasing that America needs a “conversation” on race. Our country engages in an endless “conversation” about race year round, in the media, academia, and barstool talk, while schools, museums, the media, the publishing industry, and government organizations treat coverage, exploration and deploring of, as well as apology for, racism as ingrained aspects of their mission.

Many foreign observers would be baffled by the notion that this is a nation that refuses a “conversation” about race or even racism—just last year involved fervent discussions of not only police brutality, but microaggression, gentrification, the N-word, reparations, and much more. The fact that this conversation doesn’t lead to all whites bowing down to all black complaints, an outcome tacitly desired by a certain cadre of academics and journalists, does not disqualify it as a conversation.

The question, then, becomes: Precisely what benefit do White Privilege 101 lessons add to all of what there already is? (Again, “knowing about White Privilege” is not an answer.) What are we hoping will happen in the wake of these lessons that hasn’t been happening before, and crucially, upon what evidence has that hope been founded?

America is by no means post-racial, but it is not 1960 either; change happens. Example: the U.S. Justice Department has officially faulted the Ferguson police department for discriminatory ticketing and could even shut it down. I cheer that development, but the protests over the Michael Brown verdict, magnified by social media, are what created this attention. The White Privilege lessons the DOJ’s outreach body imposed just made local whites angry. What popped the lock was good Old Fashioned Civil Rights law. What’s the gain from White Privilege rhetoric?

And yet, quite often to even ask a question like that is heatedly dismissed as missing the point.

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This is what suggests that the activism part is, indeed, not the real point. There are some key giveaways. White Privilege 101 lessons require endless reiteration of key principles to retain. In many ways, taking them from words to action is such a logically fragile proposition that it must be billed as endlessly “subtle” (or “messy”)—a strange kind of pitch for something supposedly so urgent. And those questioning the whole affair are heatedly dismissed as “not getting it.” It all sounds familiar—but less as politics than as religion.

Politics is about society. Religion, however, is personal. The White Privilege paradigm seems to be more about feelings than action.

In a society where racism is treated as morally equivalent to pedophilia, what whites are seeking is the sweet relief of moral absolution. Inside they are pleading, “Please don’t hate me!” And I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an accompanying feeling of purification (redemption, even) that comes with such consultant-given absolution. I can honestly say that I would be engaging in exactly this kind of moral self-flagellation about racism if I were white in today’s America.

However, not being white, I can’t help but see it from a different perspective.

 If “I know that I’m privileged!” is a statement made largely for one’s own sense of security, then it’s unclear to me how, say, the private school programs’ White Privilege sessions are “challenging” White Privilege, as the Times story’s headline put it. Semi-coerced self-interest rather than genuine enlightenment or understanding seems to be the vehicle for this racial revelation.

And as for the black folks committed to fostering awareness of White Privilege, I frankly wish so many whites weren’t interested in this, because it ends up enabling us in some bad old habits. When your people have been enslaved for centuries followed by another century of lynching, Jim Crow and worse, the racial ego suffers. A suffering ego is ripe for using the status of the Noble Victim as a crutch; you gain a sense of worth in being a survivor of the evil one’s depredations. The Noble Victim is in control—of the conversation, as it were, of the parameters of moral judgment.

The Noble Victim, most certainly, matters. He is, in a sense, whole. But meanwhile, no one gets a job; no one gets fed; little tangible progress is actually made. The Struggle, as it used to be called, sits on hold.

The White Privilege 101 course seems almost designed to turn black people’s minds from what political activism actually entails. For example, it’s a safe bet that most black people are more interested in there being adequate public transportation from their neighborhood to where they need to work than that white people attend encounter group sessions where they learn how lucky they are to have cars. It’s a safe bet that most black people are more interested in whether their kids learn anything at their school than whether white people are reminded that their kids probably go to a better school. Given that there is no evidence that White Privilege sessions are a necessary first step to change (see above), why shunt energy from genuine activism into—I’m sorry—a kind of performance art?

Indeed, as Barney Frank writes in his new memoir: “If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.” The White Privilege movement should take heed.

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It is often assumed that someone expressing views like these has roughly the take on race of Samuel Jackson’s character in Django Unchained. Not. I am neither criticizing activism nor saying that everybody needs to just pull themselves up by those proverbial bootstraps.

I get too much hate mail from the right to submit gracefully to the sellout label. I deplore the War on Drugs, linguistic discrimination against black people, and naïve dogma that keeps poor black kids from learning to read. I support prisoner re-entry programs, supported the Ferguson protests ardently, and was behind Barack Obama earlier than many black writers. I have never voted Republican in my life.

However, I firmly believe that improving the black condition does not require changing human nature, which may always contain some tribalist taints of racism. We exhibit no strength—Black Power—in pretending otherwise. I’m trying to take a page from Civil Rights heroes of the past, who would never have imagined that we would be shunting energy into trying to micromanage white psychology out of a sense that this was a continuation of the work of our elders. I am not “being a contrarian” or “stirring up the pot”—I do not consider this a renegade position. Plenty of ordinary black people nationwide would agree with me on the difference between White Privilege teach-ins and continuing the struggle.

For that reason, I question this particular focus on sessions, modules, readings, and talks commanding whites to reflect endlessly about their privileged status. When parents are watching their eight year olds herded into racial groups for White Privilege teach-ins, they are neither racist nor “privileged” in being angry (especially since a lot of them aren’t what would have been considered “white” a decade or more ago). They deserve civil answers to their questions. The white high schooler who doesn’t get why she needs to be smilingly commanded to recognize her status as an unjustly “privileged” white person is not a racist because she doesn’t “get” it. She deserves to be given a rationale, and if that rationale is essentially a repetition of the White Privilege lesson paradigm, then we need to ask some more questions.

So let’s start this stage of our “dialogue on race” with a simple question. When our mandated diversity director says, “This is messy work, but these conversations are necessary,” we have every right, as moral persons, to ask: Why, and for whose benefit?

Why It's Impossible for the Kremlin to Lie About Putin's Weird Disappearance

By Julia Ioffe, The Washington Post

15 March 15

The president's carefully cultivated image rests on never showing weakness.

t’s been more than a week now since anybody’s seen Russian President Vladimir Putin. He had a mundane meeting with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on March 5, and then … nothing. Since then, Putin hasn’t been seen in public, and the Russian blogosphere can talk about nothing else. Their president skipped a number of events—including one with his FSB bigwigs—and the Kazakhs, with whom Putin was supposed to meet this week, said the Russian president was ill. They quickly walked it back after the Kremlin denied it. The Kremlin began fiddling with Putin’s schedule. State television began broadcasting news of meetings planned for the future as if they had already happened in order to show that Putin was alive enough to attend meetings. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s mustachioed spokesman, has been stonewalling all week, insisting that his boss is not only breathing, but “breaking hands” with his manly handshake.

Unsurprisingly, this combination—active and seemingly frantic dissimulation, and flat denial that anything is amiss—is perfect for the Internet. #PutinIsDead began trending on Russian Twitter, and the Russian blogosphere began to churn out theories of what happened to Dear Shirtless Leader, each version more ludicrous than the next.

There was the anonymous letter claiming to be from an employee of elite Moscow hospital, who said that Putin had had a stroke and was languishing in the hospital. There were the frantic messages from people who know people in the Russian Embassy in London, saying that they had abandoned London en masse and that there would be a statement in three hours—a statement that never got made. There was the (false) report of the Kremlin press service asking foreign correspondents not to leave Moscow ahead of what would be a major announcement this weekend. A former Putin aide living in Washington posited that Putin had been overthrown by the siloviki (“strongmen”) in a palace coup. Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic and Putin’s most violent cheerleader, wrote a curious Instagram post about his loyalty to Putin, “whether he [Putin] is in office or not.”

Putin was even momentarily found, in the vicinity of Ticino, Switzerland, where, a local tabloid announced, Putin’s gymnast girlfriend Alina Kabayeva had given birth. Hopes were dashed when Peskov appeared again to say that this too was untrue. By this time, he was reaching new levels of exasperation. “Yes. We’ve already said this a hundred times,” he barked at a Reuters reporter who called to ask if Putin were, in fact, in good health. “This isn’t funny any more.”

This is, in large part, a crisis of the Kremlin’s making. If Peskov can’t make Putin reappear, the obvious thing to do would be to furnish some plausible explanation, like, “The President has come down with a bad case of the flu but is following all developments and will be back at work shortly.”

But that statement is impossible for two reasons. First, manly men don’t get sick. Putin’s carefully cultivated image rests on never showing weakness, which is crucial in hypercompetitive Russia. If one shows some weakness, then one is all weakness—and therefore prey. This is why Putin never apologizes and, in the rare instance in which he reverses a decision, will do so long after the public gaze or outcry has moved on. Putin is the national leader and does not admit mistakes. It is beneath national leaders to do such lily-livered things.

The second problem is that no one would believe Peskov. The flu would become its own meme and people would parse that statement for clues about Putin’s secret death or secret stroke or secret tumor. That’s because the Kremlin has done such dissembling before. As columnist Leonid Bershidsky points out in Bloomberg View, Boris Yeltsin’s flack became expert at these tales, since Yeltsin would periodically disappear at critical times—either on boozy benders or with yet another heart attack. Putin himself disappeared for a while in 2012 after he threw out his back in a judo match, according to Belarussian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Before that, there was also a brief absence after which Putin reappeared with a noticeably puffy, stretched face. He sat in the audience at a comedy show and, as the cameras zoomed in on him, he tried his best to make his new face laugh.

Then there are the more alarming times Russian leaders have disappeared. Blindsided by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Josef Stalin famously disappeared for the first and very crucial 10 days of the war. As the blitzkrieg rolled across Soviet territory, annihilating whole divisions in its path, Stalin hid in his office, agonizing and not addressing the terrified and equally blindsided Soviet people. Fifty years later, in August 1991, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was vacationing at his Crimean dacha when hard-liners in his cabinet essentially barricaded him inside, cutting off all lines of communication. Publicly, they announced that “for health reasons,” Gorbachev could no longer lead the country. In the meantime, the hard-liners sent tanks into the streets of Moscow.

You can see why some in Russia are panicking right now—or veiling their discomfort in humor. It certainly doesn’t help that Putin’s disappearance comes at a particularly nervous time for the country. It is at war in Ukraine, its economy is shuddering under sanctions and historically low oil prices, and the opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was recently gunned down steps from the Kremlin. There is a sense in Moscow that the wheels are coming off. To Moscow’s chattering class, Putin’s disappearance confirms that impression.

As for the rest of Russia, if the buzz about Putin’s mysterious absence doesn’t make it on the television screen, it didn’t happen: for 90 percent of the Russian population, TV is the main source of news. And, even if they knew, for a majority of Russians this event would be like most other political events—that is, above their pay grade. When it comes to the intricacies politics, the prevailing attitude outside Moscow’s liberal circles is a semi-religious one, and it comes from Byzantine culture. Just as the Eucharist is prepared behind the wall of icons that separates the altar from the eyes of the laity, so it is with political maneuvers: We are but mere mortals, unable to understand such mysteries. Let the professionals handle it.

The problem is that the professionals aren’t handling it too well anymore. After 15 years in power, Putin has so personalized the system that it becomes increasingly difficult for his subjects to envision a Russia without him. Nearly half of those Russians surveyed in a recent poll said they wanted to see Putin serve a fourth presidential term, starting in 2018. This number had more than doubled from a poll a few months earlier. And it’s not just about vision. Putin’s system of “manual control”—that is, micromanaging the country—has come at the great expense of Russia’s institutions. The only institutions Putin has strengthened are the security services.

Which tells you why Russian liberals are so worried and, strangely, implicitly hoping for Putin’s reappearance. Two weeks ago, one of their main leaders was assassinated. The other one, Alexey Navalny, has basically admitted that the opposition has been neutered and marginalized. And if Putin’s gone, they certainly won’t be the ones to take power. It will be the real strongmen.