I'm a young, heterosexual white guy. I often wear pastel-colored Polo shirts and khaki pants that slack lazily over a pair of "Reef" flip-flops. Every once in a while, I meet my friends at Starbucks--you know, just to talk.
You've met people like me. You've seen us stopped at traffic lights on "yellow" or heard us chatting about our LSAT scores. You may have seen us at frat parties, drinking Bud Lights or doing "keg stands." You also might have seen us making "air quotes" around words like "keg stand"--when we say them out loud.
We're some of the least controversial people you know... but I have something very controversial to say.
You see, I'm also the whitest guy you know. I've been told this enough to know it's true, even if I don't quite understand what it means. Some people hint at it, whereas others just come right out and say it. Once, during a community theater play, an adult actor told me I would play a great Nazi.
As you can imagine, I didn't quite know what to say. It's as if my whiteness were a piece of food lodged between my two front teeth. Everyone hints at it, but I can't seem to get it out.
Two years ago, I volunteered to be the "Women and Minority Affairs" writer for The Chronicle. It seemed like an exciting job--when things get hairy on Duke's ethnically polarized campus, it's usually because of race issues. For me, Duke is a fascinating racial microcosm--and I wanted to study it.
I expected people to be angry. After all, how was the world's whitest guy ever going to understand race? But I also expected to be given a chance.
White people, I kept hearing, can't empathize with people of color. White privilege keeps them from ever being able to really understand cultural issues.
It was the hypocrisy of this litany that bothered me the most. It's true--I will never have to hide my voice because of an accent or hear motorists lock their doors when I walk by. I'm blessed to never have to fully comprehend these day-to-day degradations. But if it's my race alone that keeps me from understanding these racial issues, then we, as a pluralistic society, may as well throw in the collective towel. There's no point in even trying.
I wanted to think that Duke's liberal students would be able to look beyond my skin color and judge my work for its merit alone. But mine is a generation brought up on a healthy diet of Toni Morrison and hip-hop--to whom "color" is tantamount to all things cultural. Just as the color "white" is actually the absence of color, "whiteness" for my generation has become the absence of art, understanding and soul. In a world where victimization is social currency, it's the privileged white guys like me who are bankrupt. Instead of trying to realize our parents' dreams of dissolving the color line, my generation seems intent on widening it. It's one of the greatest risks to our modern effort for social justice.
But as long as white students are told that racial empathy is impossible, why should they even try to empathize? The same education that taught about "white privilege" forgot one of privilege's most dangerous and contagious symptoms: indifference. Social privilege affords more than just being able to get a bank loan or hail a taxi-cab.
It gives members of the majority the luxury of walking away from the arguments they need to hear most.
One evening, I sat-in at a small meeting at Duke's Mary-Lou Williams Center for Black Culture. The students refused to speak to me and sneered comments about the "color" of The Chronicle's staff. I felt small.
One of the administrators, the Vice President for Institutional Equity, turned to me and started to tell me a story about Duke's most celebrated history professor. Recently, she said, this black professor had taken a trip to the White House where the President awarded him for his excellent scholarship.
"He was standing in the foyer, waiting to go inside," she said, her anger building as her voice rose to a crescendo. "And a white woman came over to him and asked him to take her coat. She thought he was a butler!"
I felt a profound shame and an impulse to apologize. How could I apologize for being white? How could I convince her that I empathized with the man, that I understood her anger--despite my race?
As her eyes moistened and her head leaned towards mine, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in her pupils. I saw my pastel polo shirt and my pastel pink skin--in sharp relief to her brown eyes and dark face. I could see what she was seeing. I hadn't deserved her angry shouting, but it wasn't me she was yelling at. It was that thing--that colonizing, enslaving thing--that damn, un-removable piece of food between my teeth. It was my chronic, incurable whiteness that she found so offensive.
We had been two people having a conversation about race in America, and now we had reached a familiar impasse. As the silence between us grew deafening, I wondered, where do we go from here?
Matt Bradley is a Trinity senior.
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