I am always a little cautious when writing on racism.
As a white man who’s formative years were molded in the UK, a notable, one time colonial power, there should be a check on my “white ‘splaining.” But surely human beings are capable of empathizing with those whose ethnicity or country of origin differ from their own.
Some podcasters have the ability to faithfully imagine the experiences of “the other.” If we always use identity when doing a project, we’d lose out on much of our history. Culture should be a conversation, not a monologue.
But we need to be careful of “White ‘splaining” which can occur when some white people hear a person of color complain about racism. They may immediately explain, in a condescending tone, why the person is wrong, and “getting too emotional” or “seeing race in everything.”
Some of the biggest headlines about race recently have featured some form of white ‘splaining:
• Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin engaged in legislative white ‘splaining when they blocked their black Democratic counterparts from honoring a former NFL quarterback during Black History Month because he was “too controversial.”
• Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam white ‘splained when he referred to slaves as “indentured servants from Africa,” after having to apologize for a yearbook photo of a person in blackface while admitting he once wore blackface at a Michael Jackson dance contest.
Of course, becoming a victim of “white ’splaining” can be infuriating. Imagine a plumber trying to tell a pilot how to land a plane.
But in his book “White Fragility,: antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence.
These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
Back to journalism, history, writing or directing. The outsider’s take can offer its own equally valid perspective. There is almost never just one side to a story. Think about the great art that would be lost if we always carried out this rigid methodology. If a man can’t write about a woman, then Tolstoy doesn’t get to conjure Anna Karenina.
Though you gain something through “lived experience,” you may lose something as well. You may find it harder to maintain a critical distance, which can be just as useful as experiential proximity. You may become blinded to ideas that contradict your own or subconsciously de-emphasize them. You may have an agenda.
A person who tells the story of her own family might, for example, glorify a flawed father and neglect to mention a delinquent brother-in-law.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. warned, “whenever we treat an identity as something to be fenced off from those of another identity, we sell short the human imagination.”
The belief that “lived experience” trumps all other considerations would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, in stories to be illustrated by people who looked like ourselves, to be reviewed and read only by people who resembled ourselves.
If we all wrote only from our personal experience, our films, performances and literature would be reduced to memoir and transcription.
Above all, when I write or communicate, my white experience shapes my worldview, and they are not the most important experiences in my writing and my world.
As a white person, I have to constantly educate other white people. I am committed to anti-racism work, and is part of my everyday life.
This is Ken Scott Baron with the National Association of Black and White Men Together, Thank you for listening.
