Listening to Black Voices While White
By: Katy Preen
Tags: Empathy, Race, White Feminism, Education, Intersectionality

In this age of female empowerment (yeah, I know, we ain’t there yet), it’s encouraged for women to speak up on their experiences and argue their corner if someone tries to shut them down. Given the preceding decades in which we were expected to just hover around looking nice without embarrassing the men with our inconvenient opinions, it’s definitely an improvement. But patriarchy isn’t the only axis of oppression, and it’s easy for white women to forget their relative privilege as well as highlighting the disadvantages they face.

When women speak up, it’s often nice, white ladies that get heard.

So when a non-white woman says something that white women don’t want to hear, there can be a backlash. And it is so easy to end up feeling like the wronged party in need of an apology and victory over our detractor. But just because you feel aggrieved, it doesn’t mean the beliefs behind it are valid. It’s good practice in any disagreement to examine one’s own position and whether our views are really as solid as we feel they are. Is there any way that you could possibly be in the wrong? Why is this person angry with you? Are they even angry with you personally, or is it a criticism of a group you happen to belong to — and does that need examining?

Too often, white women will see a criticism by a black person of something they do which is problematic, and they’ll explain in return exactly why the black person is wrong and how they’re being too sensitive, etc, etc. It’s not problematic for the white woman, but she’s not seeing how it could be for someone else. In many cases, she’s choosing not to see it. She still wants to carry on doing the thing without getting told off by those sanctimonious black people, so she’ll come up with excuses as to why they’re wrong and she is right.

It’s exactly the same minimisation and denial of the problem that white women would recognise if it was done to them by a man elucidating on some feminist issue — although there are a ton of white women who will downplay and deny these issues because their privilege gives them the illusion that they are ‘honorary men’. They don’t care about oppression that doesn’t harm them, and they’re not used to being told what to do or think (which is how it comes across to them).

I’ll let you in on a secret: I almost did it myself the other day.

I read Using Reaction GIFs of Black People is Much More Problematic Than You Might Think by Naomi Day and I felt attacked before I’d even got past the headline. I love using this type of GIF, and I don’t see the problem with it, so it must be some PC snowflake nonsense, right? It’s not like one of the things I care about, which are totally valid and real, unlike this. Aren’t they just ruining social justice for all of us by making ridiculous demands? Why can’t they just be reasonable and stop feigning victimhood? What about the real victims, like me, a nice, white woman?

OK, maybe I exaggerated a little there. But I was unconvinced by the headline, and I felt it didn’t apply to me, or at least it shouldn’t. Two paragraphs in, and I was internally rolling my eyes at the idea of reaction GIFs being ‘digital blackface’. Like, I get it that white people thoughtlessly appropriating things from black culture is wrong, especially when it involves the equivalent of blacking up. But extending that to GIFs of black people? I jcouldn’t accept it in that moment, and I read to the end of the article feeling confused and angry. I was ready to give it both barrels in the reply section, but it was the reading of other white people’s comments that made me stop and think better of it.

I like to think this isn’t like me, that this is a problem with those other white people — and so I thought my discomfort must be justified this time. I took on board the points in the article, and I still wasn’t convinced. But my reaction to it wasn’t a logical one, it was all emotion. I felt bad not just because I was being told that I shouldn’t do something I like doing, but because the article was saying I was wrong about something. Strangely, I’m happy to accept that white people in general are the oppressors; and that our everyday actions, biases, and unconsidered thoughts put us at an advantage compared to black people and other groups. This feeling of being more clued up on racism than the average person actually made it worse because I thought I knew better.

This conflicted with the knowledge that an oppressed group is the best narrator of their own oppression, so I was doing some rather artistic mental gymnastics by this point. I wanted to do and think the right thing, but I also wanted to argue back that the author was wrong on this thing. Did I think they were actually wrong? With hindsight no, but in the moment, yes. But it wasn’t a genuine critique of their point. It was just because it forced me to take a look at myself and see things I didn’t want to see.

And besides that, I still wanted to use those GIFs in my tweets. I didn’t want my fun taken away. Maybe I could acknowledge the problem and get on board with the argument, but I was feeling resentful that I was being forced to give up my precious internet laughs. And I pondered the idea of not using these GIFs because others might think badly of me for it. But the fear of getting caught is not addressing the actual issue, and it’s still a solution driven by my feelings and not a genuine desire to change.

I went from dismissal to curiosity to resentment to superiority to empathy to indifference to annoyance; all in the space of one article. And it’s not a particularly long read. It hit a nerve, and I’m glad it did, because it got me questioning a lot about myself, as well as the original premise of the article. I was so quick to jump to a rebuttal because the subject matter was inconvenient to me. And as a white person, I have the luxury of merely seeing it as an inconvenience.

I didn’t want to listen to what this writer had to say because they were criticising something that I liked, and I think a similar thing happens for other white people who don’t get it when a black person points out why their thing is problematic. The comments on the article were full of white people talking over the author’s point, which kinda proved that they do have something worth saying. None of them had a substantive argument, and they followed a predictable pattern.

It was exactly the same pattern that I find in comments on articles regarding feminist issues that I have strong feelings on. It will be a well-written, informative and relevant article on a women’s issue, which is difficult to get taken seriously most of the time, and then the trolls descend to make it worse. I was thinking like a troll because I hadn’t engaged with the subject and refused to step outside of my own thinking. I would not like it if someone did this to me. I needed to care about an injustice outside of my own experience, and it was way too easy not to.

Instead of analysing what the black person is saying and understanding the discomfort we white people feel, we instead look for ways to put the blame on them and get them to shut up about it. That way we don’t have to do any difficult self-reflection or change anything in our lives. We can just carry on as before and ignore what we think is a trivial non-issue. That made the bad feelings go away, job done.

It’s so easy to do because white people are so rarely challenged, which creates a sense that people have no right to challenge us. And when we’re being challenged on something that we think is harmless or beneficial, it pisses us off because we think we’re doing the right thing — and this person is stealing our thunder and telling us that we’re doing everything wrong when we just know that we’re right.

Our thoughts are solely with ourselves and the mild annoyance that someone has expressed concern about a thing we like doing, saying, wearing or whatever. None of it is with the person who is harmed by stereotypes or dilution of their culture. It’s all about us as white people, and we even have the brass neck to claim we’re somehow oppressed by occasionally being told to stop and think about the messages we’re sending.

It’s hard for us to shut up and listen, because we’re not used to having to do it. As white women, we’ve been told that we should speak up and stand up for ourselves. But that needs to be balanced with awareness and the ability to recognise when someone is more of an expert than us. Sometimes we will listen with a closed mind and disagree with every single thing the messenger says and just dismiss it. We’ll come away from the discussion with the same beliefs we went in with. But it’s possible to listen, disagree and also think about what we’ve heard, still keeping our original values but taking on board another perspective. This is the first step to understanding why marginalised groups have issues with things that we enjoy, and also the first step in deciding what we want to do about it.

It takes work on our part, and we do need to do the work. It’s a good thing; it gives us more knowledge and wisdom, and it also helps us stop getting pissy at every little comment about how white people can do better. Because we can do better; I mean, seriously, we’re hardly even trying. But all we have to do is actually not that much. Just stop, don’t say anything, and actually digest what we’re hearing. It will make us uncomfortable, we will come up with a hundred reasons why we’re right and definitely not changing our ways for anyone. But we have to go through that process to achieve understanding.

The trap most white people fall into is they don’t get past the uncomfortable stage. They feel the pain, they don’t like it and they return to their existing beliefs and behaviours. It feels safe and good. But it’s OK to be uncomfortable. It’s OK to feel resistance to new ideas, especially those which go against everything we’ve known. But to truly develop as a person we have to sit with the discomfort and figure out another way to dissipate the pain. We can work through it, challenge our own ideas and feelings, and be more knowledgeable at this end. It’s hard work, and it hurts, but it won’t harm you.

White people have to deal with their discomfort. Because that’s all it is. For someone pointing out why our thing is harmful to them, the stakes are higher. And they deserve to be listened to. In spite of the many oppressions we still face as women, we don’t know the half of what non-white women are dealing with. And unless we engage with issues outside of our own experience we won’t ever know. And we’ll be bitter and suspicious and inhabit a miserable superiority that isolates us. Discomfort is good — it means there is something to learn. And all we have to do is shut up and listen.