I'm reading an article about black students at Spelman College debating the use of the N-word. I started imagining what I would say if I had been standing in that circle and any of the kids turned to me and asked my opinion on the subject. What do you think, white interloper?
First I imagined I would nobly demure and recuse myself from interjecting my white male opinions into a fight that wasn't mine. Then I thought of how slippery and irresponsible that answer would be. No. In this fantastical fugue, I was going to lay down some truth.
What I would tell those students is that while I generally deferred to and agreed with the conventional rules on the word itself, the larger issue it hinted at was whether they wanted white people to be real or nice.
Real, I would explain to the Spelman students with whom I was inventing a full fucking conversation, means honest. Choosing to conduct the racial dialectic with a white audience that is primarily "real" would mean that you'd prefer to hear hard truths. That you'd prefer that white civil society not talk out of both sides of its mouth; or pay all the right lip service and then perpetuate harmful behaviors; or simply move racism to an unspoken level that was more inaccessible than it was before.
The pro of honesty is that it saves time and lets you know where you stand. The con is that white people have consistently demonstrated that they cannot engage in identity discussions in a benign way en masse. Their entitlement is too great; it just gets violent really quick. Counterproductive.
The other option is politeness. Being nice. What that means in practice is making white people terrified to say or do the wrong thing. It's the option where white people do lie to you, hold their tongue, think racist thoughts that you know are in there, but outwardly conform to social expectations.
Here's the thing. I think this is the better option. For one, it allows black people to whistle past the graveyard to some degree. They don't have to be even more exhausted by racism than they already are. I think one of the major harms of modern racism is simple distraction — making you constantly have to shift focus and deal with / overcome identity issues. (Conversely, one of the most important aspects of white privilege is never having to slow down to think about it.) With polite whites, at least black people can expect that in meetings and on job interviews, they're not going to be made the butt of Rat Pack stage jokes. Which lightens the cognitive load meaningfully, I'm sure.
More importantly, I think an important transformation happens when you make conscientiousness the norm: you promote an impulsive, lizard-brain thought to the frontal cortex. Racism, fundamentally, is a bestial, tribal thought. Lading it with the risk of social opprobrium makes the white person access it with higher-order thinking, which has a positive knock-on effect. Like a cookie-riddled web page, loading the thought or action with your higher brain calls up all that stuff that, if you're a well-meaning white person, you've stowed away for moments of interaction like this. A lot of times, that's what brings empathy to the conversation, and bridges the gap to the point where actual relationship is established and the racial framework gives way to an interpersonal one. (I'm positive it's the same for blacks talking to whites, too, but I assume the average black life is full of way more white interactions than the other way around.)
I'm making a lot of presumptions here about the nature of white people's latent, reptilian racism, but they ring true. Policing that entire area of speech with your shame-o-meter makes you think about the impact of your words more; which makes you consider your words more; which over time affects your thoughts; which over time affects your actions and deeply-held opinions.
I don't know how obvious this point is; maybe very. But I have a feeling that the reason our society has generally chosen to force whites to fake it until we make it in terms of racial tolerance — and thus render race into a landmine we're terrified to set off, for fear of social scorn (see: latter-day SNL) — is because the alternative is whites getting riled up about racism, and very quickly becoming violent.
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