Black and Brown People Have Been Protesting for

Centuries. It's White People Who Are Responsible for

What Happens Next.

People hold signs and protest after a Minneapolis Police Department o5cer allegedly killed George Floyd, on May 26 in
Minneapolis Kerem Yucel—AFP/Getty Images
BY SAVALA NOLAN JUNE 1, 2020 1:32 PM EDT
Nolan is Executive Director of the Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her
IDEAS
new book is Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body. You can follow
her on Instagram and on her blog.

“How do you know you’re white?”

I’m talking to a hundred law students. The room is racially diverse and full of
people who have gotten into top law schools. They’re committed to making
racial equity a cornerstone of their work. They tend to think about race in their
daily lives. They’ve chosen to attend this evening lecture about the problematic
ways race is baked into American law and legal pedagogy. But not a single hand
goes up to answer my question—and this matters.
I often start these talks by asking several volunteers to tell me what race they
are. I then ask them how they know. Invariably, students of color say things
like, “I know I’m black because the world tells me every single day.” Or, “I know
I’m Latinx because my family is, it’s my blood, it’s my language.”

But when I ask white students how they know they’re white, the answer is
almost always the same: silence. White students often stop short, unable to
identify and articulate the cultural, political, economic and historic clues that
tell them they are part of whiteness, let alone what being part of whiteness
truly means. I let the silence grow. It gets uncomfortable. Then I step in to
suggest that this phenomenon—not the individual student—is a significant
part of America’s problem with race. It’s a major part of how we arrive at
moments like this one, where dozens of cities are convulsing with racial pain,
state violence, and the shell-shocked gaze of many white Americans asking
themselves how this can be happening again. (It is not a mystery to black
people of color.)

Remember Amy Cooper? She’s the white woman who, a few days ago, called
police on a bird-watching black man in Central Park and repeatedly
emphasized that he was “African-American” to the dispatcher. She may feel
like old news now. But her actions are deeply instructive for this new, more
convulsive moment: I bet if I asked her the same question—how does she know
she’s white—she’d respond with the same blank silence as many of my
(progressive, unusually aware) students. How do I know? Her apology, which
indicated that she doesn’t truly understand what it means to be a part of
whiteness. Critically, she said, “[I] would never have imagined that I would be
involved in the type of incident that occured.”

And that’s just it. In this country, we have thousands of white people who
consider themselves aware of the pain racism can cause, and who could never
imagine themselves inflicting it—but then do. There are countless white people
who consider themselves progressive and “good” on race issues, who scoff at
and are offended by actions like Ms. Cooper’s—but who, to their surprise, are
capable of similar actions. Any person of color who knows “good white people”
can tell you this is true. It’s how we get, for example, progressive colleagues
who nevertheless call us by the name of the other black woman we work with,
repeatedly, or comment on how pretty our hair looks when we wear it straight,
saying “It’s usually just so puffy!” On the more extreme end of the spectrum, it
is also how we get cops—people who presumably have dedicated themselves to
a life of service—literally suffocating black people like George Floyd as they beg
for their lives. It is also how we get these moments repeatedly.

One cause of this recurring confusion—and the ensuing harm—is white

people’s general lack of fluency around race, especially their own. White people
often don’t understand that they are as “raced” as any person of color. They
can see that a black person, for example, is deeply embedded in what we call
“race,” and lives a life impacted at nearly all levels by race. Indeed, this idea is
almost axiomatic. But they often can’t draw the same conclusion about
themselves, or white supremacy, which is how they come to be raced in the first
place. And they generally don’t know what to do with this new knowledge if
and when they have an aha moment, except feel guilty and let that guilt push
them deeper into silence. Will Ms. Cooper have a true and deep aha moment
now, or no? If she does, what will she do with it? As a person of color, I’m
pessimistic on all counts.

There is a grotesqueness and a horror to our racialized world right now. Things
have never been great. But the deluge of pain, the torrent of willful blindness
amid violence—from the brutally racialized impact of COVID-19 to the fates of
George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others, from the actions of Ms. Cooper to
the inaction of so many white people—is both deeply chronic and freshly acute.

Maybe I see signs of hope amid the horror—I see more white people publicly
mourning the recent losses of black and brown life, and some progressive white
people I know have committed to explore their role in white supremacy
through tools like the exercises in this extraordinary book. (Whether they will
do it remains to be seen.) I myself feel brave enough to speak, here and now,
despite how speaking out has hurt me in the past (losing relationships, hearing
racial slurs, etc.). I fear, though, that the outcome is predictable: white silence,
and black pain, perhaps forever, often rooted in good white people’s blindness
to how they are (unwitting) agents of white supremacy, too. Until a critical
mass of white people begin and continue the work of anti-racism with their
own lives, then uprisings and protests will function more as expressions of
black and brown pain than as inflection points in the culture. After all, black
and brown people have been resisting, uprising, and protesting in this country
for centuries. If that were enough, it would have worked already. The missing
link is white people doing deep, honest, and ongoing inventories (and clean-
up) of their own relationship to white supremacy.

Phrased differently, it is white people (especially progressive white people)

who are responsible for what happens now. Either they work to understand—
and change—how white supremacy moves in and through their lives, hearts,
minds, and spaces, or they decide they don’t have time, they’re too scared, they
can’t deal with it, or, like Ms. Cooper, they linger in the fallacy that they could
never be involved in a racist incident. Either they accept that they have
inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to
them, and they are now responsible for paying the taxes on that inheritance, or
the status quo continues. I hope they will become radicalized by this moment
and begin to fight fiercely for racial justice; but more than that, I hope they
start at home, in their own minds and hearts. As I tell my students: a white
person rushing to do racial justice work without first understanding the
impacts, uses, and deceptions of their own whiteness is like an untrained
person rushing into the ER to help the nurses and doctors—therein probably
lies more harm than good.

One thing though: don’t ask me how to start. That’s part of your work, too. The
answers are all around you if you are willing to look and listen.