An Attempt to Deal With Privilege Through Engagement - Cameron Case

I looked at both "Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism" by Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack" by Peggy McIntosh with the interest of trying to understand white ignorance with regards to topics of race and how this ignorance is directly responsible for continued oppression of anyone who is not white, male, heterosexaul, and cisgendered; and most importantly how to combat it through arts engagement. Both articles talk very similarly about the ideas of perspective and how many of the racials issues in this country lie in whites unlearned ability to imagine different perspectives. The DiAngelo piece talks a lot about how this country has created a socialization that makes whites racially illiterate, this means that many of us will grow up with strong opinions on the topics of race but that they will be for the most part uninformed opinion. This comes from the fact that our society creates little 'bubbles' that keep us insulated from anything that is outside the definition of white. These 'bubbles', as I guess we can call them, also continue to inforce to us the idea that white is normal, universal and good; all of these happening on a very subconscious level. What this privilege does is allow whites to not view themselves in terms of race or as a group identifier but rather as an individual, as DiAngelo puts it, “We move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity”. By whites seeing themselves as an individual they then are shown racism as an individual act, not one perpetrated by a group dynamic; for them there is no such thing really as the white race only the individual, how then can they be racist if they are not the individual perpetrating the acts? White people are taught racism as an individual act not as something systemic, there are the people who commit racist acts, and then there are the good plain whites who don't. Here DiAngelo introduces one of their most important points, the idea of the good/bad binary, the idea that a good person cannot be racist, only a bad person is racist. I do not commit racial acts therefore I am a good person, therefore I cannot be racist. What this creates is what DiAngelo labels as the white fragility, stating the white people have a very low threshold of discomfort when it comes to challenges of their racial views. Our heavily manufactured, segregated social lives cause an equilibrium of whiteness to be created meaning that no matter how much we might get knocked off of it, we are highly conditioned to center back to it. The thing that McIntosh supports whole heartedly in her essay is that this is largely an unconscious conditioning. Whites are taught to look at racism as something negative that happens to the other but not as something positive that happens to them. This means that while people maybe willing to help and give power to the oppressed they are not willing, in her experience to give up their power, largely because they don't see that they have it; as she puts it they are "conditioned into oblivion about its existence". Her challenge to white people is to begin to look at privilege as a backpack with a bunch of unearned resource that you can use which others can't, and begin to list for yourselves what those privileges are. I'm very interested in the idea introducing perspective and unveiling privileges to white people specifically those in communities that typically are the catalyst for racial tensions in our country. I'd like to do this through an engagement with theater introducing people to stories and characters that are outside of their own, because of this I also looked at the essay "An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer" and it left me with a few questions. The main point of the essay for me came down to this question, “Are artists reflecting upon and co-opting already formed communities – regular visitors to galleries, for example – or are they producing provisional communities that come together in experimental formations for the duration of a project?” Some of the question the were created from this for me was if you have a goal with your project how can you stay true to it while also allowing it to grow, expand, and change with the community you’re working with? Also how much does your aesthetics derive from yourself, the message you want to get across, or the community that you are engaging with? And most importantly what is the danger of engaging in a community of whites that you don't give the oppressor and even stronger voice and(the further paradox to this) how can you be sure fight the inherent racism in these communities without destroying whatever culture they might have with it? 

Work Cited 

1) Project, The Good Men. “Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism.” The Huffington                  Post,TheHuffingtonPost.com, 30 Apr. 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-                  its-so-hard-to-talk-to-white-people-about-racism_b_7183710.html.

2) McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack.” pp. 1–5.,                                                code.ucsd.edu/pcosman/Backpack.pdf.

3) Downey, Anthony(2009)'An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the                Ethnographer', Third Text,23:5,595 - 603