There is a funny phenomenon I have come to recognize among white people who are socially conscious, kind-hearted, liberal, or left-leaning—which is to say, among white people who do not want to be racist. Most often, this happens among white people who grew up in predominantly white communities and have little experience socializing with people of color—which is to say, 90% of white people.
I'm not sure if this phenomenon is new, since the various "racial reckonings" of the past twenty years, but it has existed as long as I have been an adult.
Socially conscious white people really do not want to be racist. Whether because they genuinely care about not harming others and being a good person—or because of the social repercussions in socially-conscious circles for someone who is perceived as racist. When I say socially-conscious, I am also recognizing that these spaces usually have an overlap between performative social consciousness and genuine social consciousness, which is typically not differentiated. Some white people want to be perceived as anti-racist by other white people entirely as a status symbol, while others genuinely want to dismantle systemic racism—or at least not actively perpetuate it.
Remember, 90% of the average white American's social network is other white people, and 67% of white Americans exclusively know other white people. The socially conscious liberal or left-wing white person is not exempt from this statistic. America is racially segregated at the level of neighborhoods, religious congregations, workplaces, schools, political organizations, social clubs, and community groups. The fact that I live in a racially diverse neighborhood and work in a racially diverse workplace is uncommon among white Americans.
This means that, while that socially conscious white Americans really do not want to be racist, their opportunities to interact with people of color can be quite limited, especially among wealthier white people. This is where the phenomenon I am discussing arises.
White people, by and large, are not used to talking and interacting with people of color on a regular basis, which makes every conversation with a person of color a notable moment. It's easy to appear racially sensitive when there are no people of color in the room. The moment you are talking to a person of color, there is now the risk that you something you say will be taken as racially insensitive. There is now the risk that someone will call you racist, and others will listen.
The Paradox of Being Overly Concerned with Not Saying Something Racist
This is where the paradox comes in. White people who don't care about racism will be uncomfortable and fearful when interacting with people of color due to negative stereotypes about those groups. White people who do care about racism (or purport to care) will be uncomfortable and fearful when interacting with people of color due to social anxiety and a fear of being called racist. They might fear that the person of color will call them racist, or just fear that their own incompetence will result in saying something harmful. Unconscious bias and stereotypes about angry Black people, fiery Latinas, etc. also contribute to these fears. Caring about racism does not deprogram your brain from learned stereotypes.
The outcome is that white people will sometimes be so concerned with not appearing racist in an interpersonal interaction, that they will be incapable of acting relaxed, open, welcoming, and genuine towards any person of color they interact with. The opportunity for a genuine social connection or friendship is blockaded by a wall of cold formal nervousness. It's not difficult to pick up on when someone is afraid of you, or is at least experiencing fear even if you are not the source. The outcome ends up being the same as if they were just afraid because they thought any random Black person they talk to is going to mug them. Mutual trust cannot form across such off-putting discriminatory behavior.
The outcome is that a lot of white people will still only be truly comfortable when interacting only with other white people, even if they donate money to anti-racist organization, march for Black lives, and read books about systemic racism. The outcome is that even progressive socially conscious white people will be terrible at talking about race and racism in an earnest thoughtful way, because between every single word is the fear of messing up. The fear of being racist, projected onto and manifested as, a fear of people who aren't white; especially a fear of Black people.
I'm white and have had this problem too
I grew up in a community that was very predominantly white. To my knowledge, there were no more than five Black people. Nobody was latino to my knowledge, despite a predominantly latino neighborhood being nearby. Nobody was South Asian. Nobody was an immigrant. Nobody was native, or a pacific islander. It was mostly white people, and the second largest racial group was East Asian people. The largest division ethnically was whether you were Irish Catholic or Jewish; and this applied to the few people of color in the community as well, as most of them were multi-racial or adopted by white parents.
The community was so racially homogeneous that I barely learned how to recognize racial group distinctions as a child. The sample sizes were too small to do pattern recognition on. Darker skin wasn't a Black thing, it was an Eric thing. It was only as a teenager that I started to become aware of race, after white boys started fetishizing a friend of mine for being half-Chinese. I had these moments of thinking "Huh. People are treating her differently because of her eyelids. I guess the people with Asian parents do have different eyelids." I had another embarrassing very Autistic moment where someone mentioned that someone was Black, and I literally responded with "Wait, he's Black? I guess his skin is darker, but where's the line between that and a tan? His skin isn't as dark as Eric's, and I think Eric is Black?"
As an older teenager, I became aware of social justice, and systemic racism. Being a justice sensitive Autistic person, this was the most horrifying upsetting thing I had ever learned about. The murder of Trayvon Martin was my real "racial reckoning" moment. My white friends were confused by how up in arms I was about it, and my parents acted like I was asking to be robbed and murdered by going to Roxbury to join a protest. I had now become a white person who is very concerned about racism and not perpetuating racism—but who still rarely interacted with people of color besides a small number of people I'd grown up with and knew well.
Then, I went to college, and it was still a predominantly white college. I think it was something like 79% white. There were fewer than 25 Black students on a campus of 1300 students. It was a liberal arts college, though, so we talked a lot about systemic racism and social justice all the time. It was incorporated into orientation, the classes, the events, the commencement speakers, and the culture. It was a campus full of socially conscious white people who interacted with their peers of color on an infrequent basis, and I absolutely exhibited the paradox.
Nobody wanted to be racist or to be perceived as racist, and if one of the few students of color accused someone of racism, it would be a big deal. The result was that these students of color were very socially isolated, and I, among many white students, struggled to have relaxed normal genuine conversations with them, and form normal social bonds, due to so much anxiety and fear around inadvertently being racist, which had an ultimately racist outcome. I made a small number of friends of color in college, but none whom I was particularly close to. The feedback I got was that I was good at articulating information about systemic racism, but piss-poor at actually being normal and chill when talking to people of color. I managed to earn some amount of respect, due to how I "collected" white people putting their feet in their mouths, but my fearful anxious demeanor was still off-putting and alienating. I was still exhibiting racist behavior despite putting inordinate effort into being an Anti-Racist Ally.
It was only after college, when I began working in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood among predominantly coworkers of color, that I started to recognize this pattern of behavior and work to unlearn it. I started training myself to stop thinking "dontberacistdontberacistdontberacist" every second that I was talking to my coworkers. I had to stop doing that, because 40 hours of every week I was a racial minority in my workplace, and it's just not sustainable to keep up that paradox.
Even still, it was only after moving to Philadelphia that I really started being able to talk normally to people of color without this intense formal work-appropriate tone and distance. I only started making close friends of color once I lived in a multiracial city in addition to working in a multiracial workplace. When interacting with people of color became a completely normal every day, any context, regular experience. When seeing and interacting with a person of color became something that was not notable.
Learn to talk about race, and not just racism
From here on out, a lot of things I'm going to say will be phrased as prescriptions for white people. If you are a person of color, you can decide for yourself if you feel like spending your time reading all that.
Race is a part of the daily lives of people of color, while white people try to make race not a part of our lives if we can avoid it. We might know the problem with "I don't see color" but we still too-often treat "color blindness" as the goal for how we should behave. White people will use euphemisms and dodgy language to hint at someone being a certain race without outright stating it. White people will avoid discussing race, even when it is the topic of conversation, and will try to find something to serve as a parallel to race that we can talk about instead—often derailing the conversation. Intentional or not, the mindset is clearly "If I don't talk about race, then I can't inadvertently say something racist."
However, the speech-actions performed by this linguistically avoidant behavior end up being racist. Derailing or shutting down conversations about race and racism, speaking over people of color, refusals to acknowledge one's own place in the fucked up caste system and how it shapes our lives, and avoiding getting too close to people of color lest they see enough of you to see the dark original sin of racism stained upon your soul.
What I eventually realized, living in Philadelphia, is that a white person acting weird and subtly racist around people of color is not at all notable, special, or unique for people who experience racism. It's every single day, and the bulk of interactions with white people. What's more notable is when a white person is humble and self-aware enough to see their own whiteness, while also just being chill and normal about everyone else's races too.
White people are terrified of being accused of racism, but rarely thick-skinned enough to pause, consider, and just say "well damn, I fucked up there. My white ass said something stupid. I'm sorry about that and I appreciate you talking to me about it so I can improve." Too often, white people will be defensive, trying so hard to avoid one negative mark on their record of racist behaviors; rather than just listening when criticized and being open and honest about having made mistakes in life, and demonstrating the ability to grow.
White people will struggle in any conversation about racism to genuinely think in-depth about the topic, because to do so requires thinking about race, which opens the possibility of seeing a racist thought inside oneself. Looking in the mirror is scary, but if you don't, you'll never see where the shit is that you need to scrub. The anxiety interferes with engagement.
It's easy to performatively state "as a white person, I can never understand what it's like to be Black." It's much more difficult, but rewarding, to genuinely try to empathize with a specific Black person in your life and imagine seeing things through their eyes, to see yourself through their eyes. It's important to be humble enough to know that you will not be correct, but if you do not try, then you are failing to have empathy for the people of color in your life in the same way that you have empathy for the white people in your life.
A part of getting better at talking about racism, at talking to people of other races, is getting over fears of talking about race. Learning to say "I'm white. You're Black. She's Asian." Learning to let those statements just be neutral. These are socially constructed categories, but if you can't just look at what racial group people are stuck in, then you can't look at what race is affecting. A part of how I got better at this, was the fact that at my job, library patrons will mix up staff of the same race. This leads to confusing interactions where a patron will insist they previously had a conversation with you that you cannot recall. I had to learn how to say "an elderly Black woman mistook me for Sarah because we're both white, and it caused some confusion" and have that not feel like a big deal. It happened so often, I had to learn to recognize it and say "I think you might be mistaking me for my coworker, let me ask her if she remembers this conversation." I also needed to learn to be humble enough to say "I mixed her up with another elderly Black woman, which was dumb of me, and I should know better given how often I'm mistaken for Sarah."
A part of how I got better about this, was when Black coworkers would ask me to describe the appearance of a patron, and I would find every possible way to describe them except mentioning their race. Every time, they'd give me a funny look, and say "is he Black?" with a tone of "why are you wasting my time talking in circles?"
I started getting better at having close friendships with people of color when I became able to casually talk about race-related things, like how Black men are usually taught more about hair care and grooming by their parents than white men. It's not a racist stereotype, it's just a true and neutral thing that white parents are less likely to teach their sons about hair care. The reason is that hair care products tend to cater to hair types more common among white people, so there is less need to teach your kid specifically what products to use and where to find them. White parents can just say "here, this is called shampoo, it comes from the store. It's soap, but for your hair. Use it like soap." Chances are, their kid will be able to pick any random shampoo off the shelf and it will be correctly formulated enough for their hair type to safely get the job done. "White men be having dry hair" isn't racism, it's a neutral observation, and if I can't engage with that conversation topic without feeling intense anxiety, how can I engage with a far more complicated topic like redlining?
I so often see other white people exhibit this pattern of only ever speaking to matters of race in the form of highly rehearsed carefully phrased miniature speeches which cover every possible disclaimer and caveat. You can't have a conversation that way, and it makes everything you say come across as fake. You need to be willing to misspeak and correct yourself. Many of my readers are white trans people, and can probably empathize with how off-putting it is when a cisgender person emphasizes your pronouns in every sentence, speaking only in carefully considered sentences to ensure no possible mistakes are made. Or when they make a mistake, and spend ages apologizing. Wouldn't you rather they just mess up and casually accept a correction?
Often, in the middle of a conversation about race or racism, a white person will just blurt out a paragraph about how they always try to be a good anti-racist ally with lots of caveats; which simply has nothing to do with the specific topic of conversation. The concern of being perceived as non-racist ends up interrupting the conversation.
Racial Perception Filters and White Whispering
One manifestation of this white anxiety paradox is that white people will shut down when a person of color says something, but be very receptive when a white person says the exact same thing. This is something I recognized a long time ago, and how I came to be a "white whisperer" mediating conflicts surrounding racism. A white person would be saying something dumb and racist, and a person of color would be putting in an extraordinary amount of effort to educate them, to no avail. The white person's fears and anxieties in the interaction were making them shut down and not truly process any of the words actually being said by the person of color. The reasonable frustrations audible in the voice of the person of color would be taken as aggression and anger; despite inordinate efforts to remain calm.
I learned in college that when this happens, I could listen to what the person of color was saying, then calmly say to the white person "I think what [person of color] is trying to say is [exactly what the person of color just said]." The white person would calm down, consider what "I" had "said" and then apologize to the person of color and thank them for the education. Because the conversation did not directly concern my own life, I was able to be rather emotionless in tone, and because I'm white, the white person was receptive to listening to me.
The most extreme cases would be when the topic of conversation is a white person having said or done something hurtful to the person of color, who is asking for an apology. But this also happens in more mild situations where the "perception filter" just causes white people to pay less attention when a person of color is speaking. Like the perception filters in Doctor Who, who do not make someone invisible, just make people's attentions skim over them.
The perception filter is fueled by unconscious biases, but also by anxiety and defensiveness that bubbles up before there's even a conflict. The result is that, in meetings where white people are the majority, I learned the importance of noticing when a person of color has been ignored, and saying "I agree with [person of color]'s point that [exactly what they just said]." I don't just do this for Ally Points, but because ignoring an entire person's contributions to a conversation is detrimental to the group. If someone makes a good point, it deserves to be heard, and the group as a whole will benefit. I genuinely believe that diversity is essential for the health of the human species, and so yes, I care about not alienating a racial minority from a group I am in, but I also am being self-serving, because too often that person is very intelligent and has a lot of good things to contribute, and their contributions are wasted and ignored due to the white anxiety perception filters.
Derailing to Paler Parallels
This also manifests as an annoying phenomenon where a person of color will begin a conversation about race, and a white person will want to participate in that conversation, but due to fear of misspeaking to matters of race, will instead speak about parallels. Instead of talking about white people, they'll speak of "people who work in tech." Instead of talking about white people, they'll speak of white straight people. Instead of talking about white people, they'll speak of WASPs.
Or perhaps a Black person is talking about being followed around a store, and a white trans person will start talking about being stared at in public. It's certainly a parallel, since they're both social microaggressions involving being looked at in a hostile manner, but it's also a topic change.
The unfortunate inevitability that tends to happen, is another white person will join the conversation and speak to that parallel, and so will another, and then the conversation stops being about race and the person of color who started the conversation is pushed out of the conversation completely. Any attempts to bring the conversation back on topic will be ignored.
What a Black friend of mine pointed out to me the other day, and what led to me being inspired to write about this, is that the only thing which halts the derailing of the conversation is when the person of color says "I feel like I am being spoken over as a person of color by all the white people in the room." Only when it becomes implied that white people are being racist will they shut up and pay attention, and yet quickly they will shut down and become defensive rather than simply pausing and leaving time and space for the person of color to speak to the original topic.
At this point, the conversation is not going to get back on topic. The white people have shut down and are now solely concerned with defending their honor as non-racists, and the person of color is probably going to get so emotionally exhausted that they won't have it in them to continue the original conversation.
If the white people had been brave enough in the beginning to just talk about race matter-of-factly, enough to say "white people, such as myself," then this might not have happened.
Cycles of Social Segregation
White people have pretty much always, as a large-scale group, worked to avoid interacting with people of color while insisting that we are not racist because of it.
In November of 1985, riots broke out in Elmwood Park, Philadelphia, where one Black family and one mixed-race family had just purchased homes. Today, Elmwood Park is known as "Africatown" and is very predominantly Black, but at the time, it had been a white neighborhood.
In an interview with the New York Times, 23-year-old white rioter Jacques Dumas had said:
It's not a question of whether we can live together. It's just more than obvious that we can't. No one has anything against this family.
The rioters were vandalizing these houses, committing arson, destroying their property, but "nobody had anything against them." The mayor declared a state of emergency, due to the intensity of the violence.
In the LA Times' article on the riots, we have this quote:
“You know what happens when colored move in,” said an elderly man a few houses down who has lived on the block for 50 years. He pointed his thumbs toward the sidewalk.
Most whites insisted that they are not racists.
“The difficulty,” said [Leah Gaskin White, executive director of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations.], “is that the persons do not want to see themselves as racists, since racism is not a term that seems to be popular in the 1980s. If this were the ‘60s, it would be called racist.”
Even while protesting the integration of their neighborhood, white residents did not want to see themselves as racists. They weren't racist, they just didn't want to live in a racially diverse neighborhood. They just didn't want to live alongside Black people.
In 1980, Elmwood Park was only 0.2% Black. Out of 7000 residents, 20 were Black, and they were renters. In 2020, Elmwood Park was 82.09% Black and 3.89% white. Sure, it has been 40 years between those numbers, but the demographic shifts were rapid across Philadelphia as white people fled the city in the 1990s.
White people are so unused to living among people of color, that when Black people move in, they insist they cannot live together, lash out, move away, and continue to live in white bubbles that reinforce the idea that they can't live with people of color. White people insist this is not racist.
White people grow up in white bubbles, do not learn how to interact with people different from ourselves, and become very anxious when we do interact with people of color. Then, we shut down, avoid them, reinforce our isolation in white bubbles where we feel "safe" as in we do not feel anxiety from being outside of our element, and then our social circles continue to be 90% white, and we don't gain experience existing in a multiracial environment, we don't learn how to talk about race, and the segregation continues.
Whether you are a racist rioter in Elmwood Park who moves to Montgomery County to avoid living near Black people; or a socially-conscious white liberal who never makes friends of color because you seize up whenever you talk to a Black person for fear of saying something wrong and drawing ire; the paradoxical outcome is you're still afraid of Black people and avoiding them because of it. You're still perpetuating social segregation, all the problems that come with it, including creating this very anxiety in the first place.
If we all lived and worked in multiracial neighborhoods, we would learn how to live together comfortably, we would form genuine relationships and bonds, we would help each other out, and we would share resources that create better schools and living conditions for everyone.
Gentrification is the big topic I have not touched on here. The elephant in the room. The truth is, that today, white people are moving into Black neighborhoods, and unfortunately, it's not resulting in many of us actually talking to those neighbors and forming genuine relationships. Many of them do not want to be our friends any more than the reverse. Generations of earned mistrust and resentment are another barrier. I unfortunately think that if you asked most people in America if they want to live in a multiracial neighborhood, most people might say they do, but they wouldn't mean it. Because if you asked them if they'd want the demographics of their own segregated neighborhood to change, they would say no, or maybe the socially conscious white liberals would say yes with the caveat that they would only accept other highly educated wealthy people.
We need desegregation, racial integration, and a multiracial society. So many of the problems in our society are created entirely by the hoarding of wealth in white bubbles. However, I do not have the answers for how to do it in a world where the racist housing market reinforces segregation by class and education status; and racial disparities in wealth (due to generations of systemic racism) means that the existence of middle-class white people in a neighborhood inherently displaces working-class Black people.
All I can contribute to the process is this: Dear other white people, be less afraid of race. Let yourself be open to fucking up, and owning up to it. Learn to speak directly to matters of race without parallels, euphemisms, tangents, or caveats. Learn to speak original thoughts and observations, and not just catchphrases. Stop playing it safe and making your top priority your own self-image. You need to learn to pay attention and listen, overcome the perception filters, and be natural and genuine in your interactions with people different from yourself. It's okay to be disliked or perceived poorly, and being overly concerned with your own moral report card results in coming across as fearful and fake.
Our friends, neighbors, and colleagues of color are full human beings with worthwhile things to say that have nothing to do with whether or not you are a Good White Person or a Bad White Person. Ground yourself, and engage. Engaging and listening does not mean agreeing just because of someone's identity. In fact, an honest disagreement that comes from genuine engagement is a good thing. I'm Jewish. I love disagreeing with people; it just needs to come from a place of having genuinely listened with an interested mind. Silence the intrusive thoughts and anxieties that says "dontfuckupdontfuckupdontberacistdontfuckup" so loudly you can't hear the person in front of you.
We must not be avoidant and fearful. It is not your fault that you were born in a segregated world; but it is your responsibility to learn to overcome that fear of difference that was instilled into us from inside those white bubbles. We cannot create a multiracial society when we are only chill and normal while talking to other white people.