WHITE PRIVILEGE, MORAL CREDENTIALING, BENEVOLENT RACISM
It has become fashionable today, particularly within left-leaning and academic circles, to “call out” others for their privilege, to insist that people recognize and “check” their racial privilege, and to denounce anyone who refuses to do so as “racist” (Maltz-Bovy 2017). Conveniently lost is the reality that not all whites get the same “mileage” out of their whiteness. A thought experiment to drive this point home:
Imagine that you are six-inches taller than the national average. This would give you many unearned benefits relative to others who were average height or below-average height. For instance, one would have a competitive advantage in many sports (Samaras 2007) or in the dating market (Stulp et al. 2013); tall people also tend to live longer (Olds 2016) and earn more money (Pinsker 2015). However, if you lived in a community where virtually everyone else is also six-inches taller than the national average, you would not gain much from your height. You would not have a competitive advantage over others in your community in terms of sports, dating, employment, etc. It may be the case that if some people of below-average height moved into your community, you (and everyone else) would have a competitive advantage over them. Moreover, in a community where virtually everybody is taller than the national average, it is certainly better to be taller-than-average oneself than to not be taller than the national average. But none of this changes the reality that, in your day-to-day life, your “extra” height avails you little vis-à-vis others in your community. Relative to your circumstances, you are average. How would one get the most utility out of being six-inches taller than the national average? By living in a community where most others were average or (even better) shorter than average. So it goes with most other unearned advantages.
As with height, the premium one gets on their “whiteness” is relational and context-dependent. Racial privilege is also intersectional: just as racial disadvantage is compounded by poverty (Jargowsky 2015), white privilege is enhanced by relative wealth. Among the people with the most racial privilege, then, would be upper-SES or upwardly-mobile whites who live in areas with large concentrations of significantly less well-off minorities and immigrants.
Again, these whites tend to be highly-educated, urban-dwelling and left-leaning. They also tend to leverage their racial privilege at a rate, and on a scale, that dwarfs lower-SES, less-educated, non-urban whites (who are more likely to identify as Republican or conservative and dismiss the racial privilege narrative).
Consider, for instance, “lean-in” feminism. As Saskia Sassen points out (2009, p.3), highly-educated women of middle and upper-class backgrounds have achieved great gains in the professional sector (particularly in urban areas). However, this has not come about due to some major change in gender roles – for instance, because men have taken on a reciprocally larger share of domestic responsibilities. Instead, native-born, higher-SES white women have been “freed up” because other women – typically women of color, often immigrants, generally paid below-market wages for their services – fulfill the traditional “female” roles within the household, such as caring for children, preparing/ serving meals (be it at home or in restaurants), cleaning the house, attending to the sick and elderly, etc. (Stack 2019).[12]
Or, consider the popularity of delivery services among upper-middle and high-SES urban residents: groceries, meals from restaurants, merchandise purchased online or in-store – transported to one’s apartment or workplace in short-order, cheaply, with the push of a button. Fulfilling these orders is grueling, high-pressure work; deliverers are exposed daily to road hazards, the elements and, occasionally, predation (i.e. being robbed). Wages tend to be very low and benefits non-existent (Rutigliano 2018). Within urban areas, the people filling these jobs are disproportionately immigrants and minorities (Haque 2018).[13]
Similar patterns hold with regards to delivering people: rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft are especially popular among the (disproportionately white) professional class because they provide cheap transportation virtually anytime, anywhere, on demand. However, while taxi jobs used to provide livable wages and benefits to low-skilled immigrants and minorities, rideshare companies are able to outcompete them on price because they subsidize rides to the point of operating at a loss (Horan 2019), outsource expenses like insurance, gas, vehicle acquisition and maintenance to the drivers themselves (Robinson 2018), and offer such low wages that contractors typically have to work well-over full-time just to make ends meet if this is their only “gig” (Gilligan 2016). Public transportation systems have also taken a hit from rideshare companies (Hill 2018), leading to cuts (viz. staffing, routes, maintenance) and/ or increased fares – disproportionately affecting lower-income and minority residents.
Or consider the “urban manufacturing” of high-quality, small-batch, specialized (or ‘artisanal’) goods sold in trendy, high-end or boutique stores — increasingly popular among the disproportionately white and left-leaning metropolitan professional class (Currid-Halkett 2017). These “American made” wares are typically produced in urban sweatshops, often by undocumented workers receiving subpar wages, few benefits, and working under horrible conditions (Sassen 2018). Similar dynamics hold for restaurants offering “organic,” “fair-trade,” “free-range” or otherwise “ethically-sourced” products: given the cost of the ingredients themselves, establishments often try to keep their prices relatively affordable (for upper-middle class people) by paying subpar wages to “back of the house” workers who, disproportionately, tend to be immigrants and minorities (Jayaraman 2013).
One could go on and on: where wealth is being concentrated in America today, minorities (and especially immigrants) are disproportionately likely to do domestic work, food service, retail, construction, janitorial, groundskeeping, security and maintenance jobs – providing the infrastructure and services empowering people from the (disproportionately white) professional class to do their work, and live their lives in relative comfort and ease (Harvey 2012). These “invisible” workers often live precarious lives (Heller & Ortiz 2017) – facing down high costs of living, uncertain employment, long hours, low wages, few benefits, poor schools, pollution, fear of crime and law enforcement…
In short, despite being more willing than most other whites to acknowledge their privilege, mid-to-upper SES whites who live in (or adjacent to) major metropolitan areas tend to exploit people of color, immigrants and low-SES workers at levels that would be virtually inconceivable to denizens of Oklahoma or Idaho – where service providers andtheir clients are much more likely to be the same race (white), and differences between classes are much less dramatic or pronounced (Berube 2018). This raises an uncomfortable question: given that recognizing privilege does notseem to have much to do with actually rectifying racial injustice — what is the purposeof this rhetoric? Why put on a spectacle of condemning privilege while enjoying greater racial privilege than most whites, and continuing to actively exploit said privilege? A disturbing possibility: performative antiracism provides a ‘moral license’ for behaviors that perpetuate or exacerbate racialized inequality.
Research in the behavioral sciences suggests that when whites explicitly denounce racism, or affirm their commitment to racial equality, they often grow more likely to act in ways that favor other whites – yet simultaneously grow more confident that their actions were not racially-motivated (Monin & Miller 2001). A similar effect holds when they observe others from their ‘in-group’ making gestures towards antiracism: it convinces them not only that their peers are egalitarians (Krumm & Corning 2008), but that their own actions and interactions are non-biased as well (Kouchaki 2011). Hence, in an environment where those who benefit immensely from racialized inequality go around denouncing racism to one another constantly — painting themselves as staunch advocates for racial justice — it would become almost impossible for these people to actually see the role that they or their peers play in perpetuating systemic racism. And in part for this reason, these same whites would promote racialized inequality all the more, while feeling incredibly self-righteous about their egalitarianism.
This is, for instance, how so many whites in the Southern Poverty Law Center consistently privileged other whites in hiring and promotion – and created or tolerated a hostile environment for minorities within the organization with racist ‘jokes,’ racialized sexual harassment, etc. (Moser 2019) – yet still managed to view themselves as champions for marginalized and vulnerable communities (Robinson 2019). Moral credentialing explains how white former NAACP chapter president and Africana Studies instructor Rachel Dolezal felt entitled to deceive people about her race, complete with a grotesque, stereotype-laden origin story and attempted hate crime hoaxes (Zavadski 2015) – yet still seemed to sincerely consider herself an advocate for the black cause. Even now that her fraud has been exposed, she continues to insist her ‘transracialism’ was always ultimately about liberating blacks from the illusion of race, rather than marking the ultimate expression of her white privilege (Oluo 2017). While these cases may represent the most extreme manifestations of this phenomenon, they may not be as unrepresentative as one may hope. Recent ethnographic work on racial activist groups suggests committed white nationalists and white antiracists often share “a common understanding of what racial identity is, and more importantly, what it should be” (Hughey 2012, p. 13). ‘Benevolent racism’ is a helpful frame [14] for understanding how these dynamics play out:
“Unlike other forms of post-civil rights racism, benevolent racism is not predicated on the usual process of de-racialization… rather than invoking the liberal ideal of ‘neutrality’ or color-blindness as a way to dodge, deny, or defend the racialized social system that supports White privilege (as with other types of post-civil rights racisms), benevolent racism ostensibly acknowledges and often condemns a system of White privilege. However, it does so in a way that further legitimizes and reinforces racist attitudes, policies, and practices in the name of ‘benevolent’ aims— i.e., in the name of supporting, empowering, and/or defending the Black community.”
(Esposito & Romano 2014, p. 69)
Consider: in areas of concentrated poverty that are being gentrified, or that lie adjacent to wealthier areas (as is often the case in urban settings), policing tends to be much more frequent and aggressive – even for small crimes (Fayyad 2017). Yet these areas tend to be strongly “blue” (Edsall 2018). Indeed, those calling the cops on people of color for things like taking shelter from the rain (Meara 2018), failing to wave at a white passerby while leaving their AirBnB (Victor 2018), sitting in their car waiting for yoga class to start (Muhammad 2018), accidentally brushing up against a white person in a store (Mays & Piccoli 2018), selling water on the street or BBQing in a public park (Murdock 2018), etc. – the people regularly seeking out law enforcement for things like loud music, loitering, ‘suspected’ criminal activity, or domestic disturbances (Levin 2015) – these tend to be relatively well-off, highly-educated, liberal, white denizens who are eager to “clean up” or “protect” their adopted neighborhood (Ingraham 2015). This is benevolent racism in action.[15] In practice, they are using police to punish people of color who are insufficiently deferent to their demands or preferences (Weaver 2018) – but their ostensibly antiracist convictions make it impossible for them to see this. After all, they often moved into these neighborhoods in the first place because they were ‘historic’ ‘cultured’ and ‘diverse’ (Hyra 2017).
Performative antiracism has also become a status symbol among urban, highly-educated elites — a signal to institutional gatekeepers that one deserves to be among other ‘enlightened’ souls (Salam 2018). In the early 19th century, there was a concept of noblesse oblige: aristocrats demonstrated that they were (morally) worthy of their privilege by performatively recognizing that they were privileged, and then pledging to use that privilege for the benefit of all – especially the less fortunate (Deneen 2018). Today, elites demonstrate their worthiness – that they belong among the Google, New York Times and Ivy League crowd – by rhetorically (purely rhetorically) disassociating from their privilege. That is, not only is performative antiracism a means through which elites conceal their own role in perpetuating racialized inequality (including from themselves), it is also a social currency used to demonstrate one’s elite status – at great cost:
In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander (2012) highlights how elites turn poor and working class whites and people of color against one another – thereby preventing the emergence of any transracial, class-based, solidarity that could threaten their own financial interests or social position. Her analysis focused on tactics most prevalent on (albeit far from exclusive to) the right, such as scapegoating minorities for social problems or encouraging a distinctly white conception of American nationalism. However, performative antiracism is another way upper-middle class and wealthy whites (particularly those aligned with the left) turn whites and people of color from the lower quintiles against one another, intentionally or not: By appearing almost-exclusively concerned with minority groups and their alleged needs or preferences, by constantly denigrating whiteness and villainizing poor and working-class whites, elite ‘antiracists’ often end up reaffirming racist narratives – i.e. middle and working-class whites’ values, interests, culture and way of life are under siege; minorities will rise up at their expense, etc. The increased prevalence of these perceptions has been intimately, and perhaps causally, related to the contemporary resurgence of white identity politics (Kaufmann 2019b; Jardina 2019).
Nor is it lost on whites from the lower quintiles that the people calling on them to acknowledge their privilege, etc. happen to be benefitting far more from ‘the system’ than they are, but do not seem to be making any significant sacrifices for the sake of racial justice themselves. Consequently, antiracism often appears to be little more than a cynical power grab (as opposed to an authentic attempt to assist the disadvantaged). The perception that race / racism is primarily being used as a political cudgel by social elites to silence[16] ‘people like them’ turns poor, working-class and middle-class whites against civil rights, civil liberties, minorities and the left more broadly. It also drives support for reactionary political leaders like Trump (Conway et al. 2017; Grossman 2018).[17]
In short, performative antiracism among white elites is both ubiquitous and highly-damaging. But what would it mean for upper-middle class and wealthy, urban, left-leaning whites to actually disassociate from their privilege? How can committed white antiracists meaningfully undermine, rather than reinforce, systemic racism? It is to these questions we now turn.