SCOTUS and SElf-INterest
Today's Supreme Court ruling regarding affirmative action is crushing, even if not surprising.
There has been outrage and no shortage of analysis about the implications of the ruling. And there’s no doubt it’s a racist ruling; the life opportunities of entire communities are going to be further limited because of it. It’s outrageous. It’s also another example of why it’s important to shift how we engage in antiracism work.
Our current framework for understanding antiracism doesn’t provide a path for racial justice, and that’s because it relies on us, white folks, doing something for other people, even if it’s using our privilege "for good" or choosing to fall back and follow or listen to people of color. Yes, some movement can be made, but it doesn’t result in lasting change. It’s just not as effective as it needs to be. That’s because it creates and maintains the space for whiteness to continue to bribe those of us who are considered white.
That is what the ruling is today: a racial bribe. More specifically, the enforcement of our founding racial bribe.
When the landowning elites in Virginia needed to divide the multiracial working class after Bacon’s Rebellion, they did so through the creation of whiteness, a made-up category of human beings that they would prop up and grant privileges to while oppressing and dehumanizing those that fell outside its purview. Being white became a requirement for access to the promise of America. The Supreme Court played an instrumental role in that. The case law is riddled with Supreme Court decisions that shaped and defined whiteness. The Supreme Court guaranteed that whiteness maintained its value for those who were counted among its ranks. The only thing it required in return was acceptance of its hatred for communities of color.
Today, the Supreme Court just reminded us that it pays to be white.
The question, then, is: are we willing to accept the bribe? It’s not just that the wages of whiteness, to borrow du Bois’ term, are consistently worthless; see the work of Heather McGhee and Jonathan Metzel for more on that, but our acceptance of the bribe comes with a cost to our very soul. When we accept the workings and logic of whiteness, we are knowingly injecting the hate, division, and disease that come with it. Are we okay with that?
This is where our antiracism must begin, with the understanding that the first person to benefit from it is us. We have to realize the path to racial justice begins with healing from the damage whiteness has done to us. Then we can fully and confidently stand in solidarity with communities of color to state that whiteness will no longer be tolerated. We have to come from a place of our own self-interest.
What might that look like in the face of the SCOTUS decision? Here are three things that move us in that direction:
Recognize/Honor/Celebrate the impact that diversity has had on your own life. The reality is that we all benefit when we are exposed to differing experiences, worldviews, and perspectives. One of the most insidious aspects of whiteness is the way it limits our experiences.
Craft / Champion policies and practices that explicitly require exposure to and knowledge of systems of oppression and how to combat them. This is pretty simple: we need to require critical literacy from our leaders and organizations.
Recognize/Reflect/Refine. It is imperative that we are aware of the constant tug of whiteness. That’s the recognize part. When we do recognize it, we have to reflect on how it is impacting our behavior. That’s the reflect part. And then, finally, we refine our behavior to further racial justice.
My hope is that in the face of yet another act of violence in the name of whiteness, we, white folks, can finally become actors in the struggle for racial justice and do our part. This starts with ourselves and recognizing how we benefit from rejecting the bribe of whiteness.
