THE NEW RACISM
Like many schools, CalArts has a diversity initiative. Recently, University of California Irvine psychologist James Cones, Ph.D., led the CalArts faculty and staff—of which I am a part—in exercises aimed at raising personal awareness about race. We were challenged to uncover hidden biases, overcome fear, and raise empathy. Brought to our attention was the need for white people to truly understand what their whiteness means in a multicultural society.

We were shown how polite disregard for race, along with rampant political correctness, can actually reinforce the gap between whites and nonwhites, trapping us in old prejudices. An article by Elizabeth Denevi, called “Whiteness,” introduced the idea that discrimination now exists in a more subtle form than ever—called color-evasion or aversive racism. Aversive racists have “internalized the espoused cultural values of fairness and justice for all, at the same time that they have been breathing the ‘smog’ of racial biases and stereotypes pervading popular culture,” notes Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author and president of Spellman College, in the article. The notion of “color-blindness,” so present in the design community, often allows people to ignore each other’s racial identity. Discrimination can still exist—it’s just hidden from view, unchecked and unchallenged.

Shelby Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who focuses on race relations and multiculturalism and author of the book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, pushes the point further in his writings. Steele speaks about the role of white guilt in keeping blacks out of the mainstream. Essentially, he postulates that whites want to be inclusive of blacks in order to get rid of whites’ stigma of racism, while blacks want to keep playing the race card in order to leverage this stigma. “White guilt, which I think defines liberalism, is a response to the stigma that white Americans bear for practicing racism for four centuries. Whites live with this constant pressure of having to demonstrate to the world that they’re not bigots, and this manifests itself in many facets of American life,” says Steele. He adds, “The educational system has been taken over by identity politics, and every identity’s wonderful except the white one. Whites have no right to an identity, to a racial identity. To say I’m white and I’m proud is to be a Klansman. But we encourage precisely that kind of thinking in minorities.” As long as this unhealthy relationship continues, there’s no hope for diversity. In fact, diversity itself is a white-guilt phenomenon.

Being white and the privileges that that brings segregate and distance whites from nonwhite people. It creates an “us” and a “them” that most white people would never consciously approve of. Of the CalArts Diversity workshop attendees, 32 out of 45 were white. Feeling fear and guilt over a situation we didn’t create was abandoned, replaced by a desire to connect with others as human beings, eschew assimilation, and celebrate our differences.

RECOMMENDED READING:
Denevi, Elizabeth. (2001) “Whiteness: Helping White Students and Educators Understand Their Role in a Multicultural Society,” Independent School Magazine, Fall 2001.

Babb, Valerie. (1998) Whiteness Visible, New York University Press

Frankenberg, Ruth. (1993) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, University of Minnesota Press

Helms, Janet. (1992) A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life, Content Communications

Kivel, Paul. (2002) Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, New Society Publishers

Singley, Bernestine. (2002) When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, Chicago Review Press

Steele, Shelby. (2006) White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Harper Collins

Tatum, Beverly Daniel. (1992) “Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom”, Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 62, Number 1

Wise, Tim. (2005) White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son, Soft Skull

WEB RESOURCES:
“Everything Old Seems New Again Or Is It? Recognizing Aversive Racism,” by Bradley Scott, www.idra.org/newslttr/1996/Feb/Bradley.htm

The American Enterprise Online, “Live” with Shelby Steele, http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.19044/article_detail.asp

To read the entire article, “Whiteness: Helping White Students and Educators Understand Their Role in a Multicultural Society” ,by Elizabeth Denevi, visit www.nais.org/publications/ismagazinearticle.cfm?ItemNumber=144319