White PrivilegeA Workshop for Beginners *
* Although (because) they’re the inventors of white supremacy and also the experts in profiting from it, white people are also specialists in not knowing whiteness – hence ‘for beginners.’
The life-threatening (deadly) consequences of white supremacy are the daily lived reality of people of colour globally, yet they remain invisible to those who “believe themselves as white” (Ta-Nehisi Coates). Those who benefit from white racial privilege don’t see (read: un-see, read: ignore) whiteness permanently. Given the comfort which comes with it, not surprisingly white people naturalize their privilege; although unearned, it feels normal to them, as much a given as unremarkable.
In utter denial, white people demand “black labour for proof” (Patricia Schor) of systematic and everyday racism, of the effects and real-ness of white supremacy, but they also demand the time and labour of people of colour to educate them about their own whiteness.
Audre Lorde: “Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might better be used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”
Goal of the workshop is to “return the problem of whiteness to white people” (George Yancy) and open the uncomfortable space for those with white racial privilege to do the work, self-examine, educate and confront themselves with their privileged, which also always means oppressing, position.
The workshop takes the form of a reading-listening session. It will use texts by writer Claudia Rankine and by scholar Peggy McIntosh to name the norm and understand white supremacy as systematic, as a political fiction and investment, as a technology of domination, as terror, as spatial and necro-political operation.
Confronting (white) privilege will only be possible, I believe, if we address as clearly as is possible the here and now of our conversation, of our gathering. Given the location of the workshop, in an art institution in a manor house on Herengracht in Amsterdam’s center, it will be necessary to discuss the role of culture and its institutions in the reproduction of white supremacy as well as the complicity/agency for resistance of those working in the field.
The reading materials can be found here:– Claudia Rankine: In Our Way – Racism in Creative Writing (2016)– Peggy McIntosh: White Privilege and Male Privilege (1988)
Picture via Deniz Unal / do you mind; and as well via Zubeyda Muzeyyen / DJ Haram.
