drilling down

So I've been having a back-and-forth with someone who is clearly well-trained in undergraduate seminar jiujitsu, about race and privilege. (See here, here, here, here, here.)  It's an old argument. My commenter, Q, has taken a fairly conventional but fraught position:

Which is to say, maybe you should link black, Latino, Asian and Muslim anti-racist writers (or white writers deemed valuable by them) when you feel like talking about racism and build on what they're saying instead of going on white-serving, self-serving tangents about intra-tribal spats you have with other decently well off white liberals. If an aware, anti-racist, non-white person is unwilling to say that white poverty negates white privilege, maybe you should respectfully share that unwillingness. If intra-POC discourse says absolutely nothing about poor whites when they references racism, maybe you should pay heed to their fine example.

Racism, attacks on racism, and an identification of the whiteness which justifies and perpetuates racism has scarce little to do with you, particularly when you're unwilling to helpfully participate. Stop making it about you. You help with your vote, your support and paying attention to anti-racist writers who are capable of empathically, righteously and subversively discussing their experiences. If you can't do that, you help by kindly shutting up until you can work out the awareness to speak about these issues

Note, first, that the discussion was not just about racism, but rather gun control, and in fact my entire argument was that allowing gun control to be defined as an issue that pits black interests against white interests was a political and theoretical mistake. More importantly: I say that this position is fraught because it indicates the essentialism that I'm reacting against and the avoidance I'm cautioning against. The essentialism rises from the absurdity of speaking about nonwhite people as some sort of unified bloc.

I brought up the fact that, if I'm going to abandon any particular perspective on race myself and merely adopt the positions of nonwhite people, I might choice nonwhite people whose views are deplorable. I brought up Allen West in our conversation. My point about Allen West is simple: when people say "you should give up your racial arguments and simply listen to what nonwhite people say," they are suggesting that all nonwhite people have the same views. Allen West is black, and he is an Islamophobe. So when he says vile things about nonwhite Muslims, am I obliged to keep quiet, because of his greater understanding of race and racism?

Q dug deeper: "I explicitly specified the kind of people that would be valuable to link and implicitly excluded people who've internalized white supremacy to anti-black, racist ends."

Which is to say (explicitly) that no nonwhite person could arrive at opinions on race that Q finds  objectionable unless that person had internalized white supremacy. This is the height of liberal essentialism, the need to look on nonwhite people not as people, with individual agency and fully developed consciousness, but as symbols of purity, which dehumanizes and infantilizes them. I will admit to not always knowing exactly what is right or wrong when we talk about race. But I am damn sure that saying that nonwhite people can only disagree with me because they've internalized white supremacy is a terribly ugly idea.

I don't think this person is a bad person. Hell, I'm certain that s/he has a far better take on race and privilege than 99% of people out there. But this call for enlightened silence is a corrosive seduction. The truth is that all of us are involved with race, and white efforts to remove themselves from the racial dialogue-- to say "forgive me, and I'll hold my tongue"-- are really efforts to be rescued from the discomfort of race talk, to be rescued from the possibility of being accused of racism. I understand that appeal, but I think it's ruinous, and based on a host of bad assumptions. Trust me: it would be far safer for me to adopt the company line of defensive avoidance and noncommittal silence that is the common tongue of social liberalism. I risk incurring the wrath of commenters like Q because I think that trying to hide out is a kind of capitulation.

And for that reason, I have to thank Q. As unhappy as these conversations are, they are profoundly necessary.