What do black people want from me?

i am busy reading Eusebius McKaiser’s “Run Racist Run!”

It has some great and helpful insights, but this piece on white people expecting people of colour to help us not be racist i found really helpful in terms of putting words to something i’ve started to understand for a while. Also as a helpful response to those people who have tried to understand things and get involved in the race conversation only to receive push back for some of the questions they ask or stances they take. Read with ears to hear.

This is from chapter 5, titled “WHAT DO BLACK PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?!”

“I am sometimes tempted to feel sorry for white liberals. But the feeling doesn’t last for long. The temptation stems from the fact that many white liberals want to be – and many are – allies in the fight against racism, but they are damned if they do something and damned if they don’t. If they do nothing, many of us will diss their silence and indifference. On the other hand, if they try to get involved, some of us will tell them either to sit down or take a back seat, inspired by Biko’s powerful critique of the overzealous role of the white liberal during the struggle against apartheid.

White liberals aren’t enemies. Their resources and good intentions could be harnessed in the pursuit of social justice. And should be. But it remains important, as Biko articulated with clinical insight, to guard against white paternalism – telling black people what to do, leading black people or attempting to do so, thinking for black people – and simultaneously to guard against dismissing white people as a matter of course. Mutual recognition isn’t possible if there is permanent, mutual and deep distrust.

Biko’s position, however, created anxiety among well-meaning whites. And it still does. This is why you will often hear a white person, desperate to make amends, asking of black people what it is that she can do that falls between silence and indifference at one extreme, and overzealousness at the other. This is precisely the focus of this essay: How should black people respond to white liberal anxiety?

“WHAT DO BLACK PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?”

Many white South Africans, including some close friends, colleagues, mentors and mentees of mine, want to help make a contribution to social justice. Some of them are also examples of white liberals who often despair, though. If they try too hard (but sincerely so), they get a sense that even black people they had regarded as good friends might come after them, sometimes publicly. They might be accused of not being immune to the vestiges of racism, and whiteness. So it is tempting for them to despair, feeling that their efforts would come to nought anyway.

These white liberals often wonder at some point, “What DO black people want from me? How can I help? I want to help. TELL ME HOW, PLEASE!”And that’s where the temptation to feel sorry for white liberals kicks in. I mean, here is someone, not a racist troll, committed to social justice, and they seem not to have a guaranteed place at the table of black activists and thinkers and social media echo chambers aimed at dislodging hegemony. What is a good whitey to do then? Give yp and retreat into a middle-class enclave? Well, I have a few things to say to someone who feels like this, and for whom these questions surface, anxiously, daily.

YOU’RE [STILL] ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION.

In A Bantu in my Bathroom I told the story of a white stranger who tracked down my number, called me, and desperately pleaded with me to tell him what he could do to make racial amends. He was so anxious and so keen that he said he was willing to learn a local language, and even struck up a conversation with a random black person in a mall in Cape Town where he was roaming about, searching for peace of mind and heart.

I was a bit taken aback and we chatted for a while, but the reality I had to make him aware of is that unearned white privilege is so pervasive that even his attempts to make amends revealed his white privilege. Black people can’t just casually walk up to white people in a mall. The white shoppers would clutch their bags, shoot a look from hell, or walk away briskly. They might even, pre-emptively, tell the black person that they do not have any money.

So the options open to this white stranger seeking to go about puncturing privilege turn out to be an exhibition of white privilege itself. I am recalling that anecdote here because recent returns to this “What DO black people want from me?” motif required further examination of why this question is misdirected. Just as there is a rush to talk about “solutions” to racism, so too is there a rush on the part of white liberals to be given a list of things to do which release them from the bonds of unearned privilege. This request is deeply problematic.

The first problem with the question is that it instantly places a burden on me, the victim of anti-black racism, to provide whites with solutions to a historic problem in which we are both implicated. You, the white liberal, are outsourcing your role in the relationships that racism has generated to the people you are in a relationship with. You are, in effect, trying very hard, however innocent or admirable your motive, to shift the focus from yourself to the black person you are engaging. And that is, frankly, lazy. And the nature of the laziness at play here deserves exploring.

If someone who discriminated against a foreign national at their workplace is suddenly overcome with a sense of self-disappointment, it would not be praiseworthy if they sought out the victim of their xenophobia and pleaded, “What DO you want from me? I want to help. TELL ME HOW, PLEASE!”

Of course one difference between this case and that of white liberals generally, one might argue, is that the xenophobia example is a case in which someone is directly responsible, and blameworthy, for the xenophobic incident to which their guilt is now orientated. But perhaps a 20-year-old, by contrast, who isn’t directly responsible for colonialism or apartheid, but simply aware of their unearned privileges, should be commended for sincerely wanting to be a partner in the search for a more just society, a more comfortable space in which we all can live.

I am only partly convinced. I am in part convinced that any citizen who wishes to live in a society that is healthier than ours must be affirmed, heard, engaged and befriended. But it is only a partial agreement with the sentiment that a sincere desire to help deserves gentle or even generous engagement.

Take the sustained case of misogyny that runs throughout this essay collection. I am not directly responsible for the acts of a particular man, or tens of thousands of men, who rape women. In that sense, the 20-year-old white man who is not directly responsible for apartheid is in a similar situation as 36-year-old me who is not directly responsible for misogyny. And, to that extent, neither of us are like the guy who was being xenophobic this morning.

But imagine I randomly call a women, let’s say a well-known feminist, and pleaded with her: “Professor Shireen Hassim, I want to make a difference. I want to help. WHAT CAN I DO?! WHAT MUST I DO?” I struck up a conversation with a woman here at the mall just now, and am taking out the film What Women Want to learn more. What else must I do, professor?

I would hope that Shireen would burst out laughing, thank me for the call, and tell me to work on my anxiety on my own or with other “progressive” men. Of course, Shireen might be generous, and actually have a conversation with me, just as I ended up chatting to the white stranger who had randomly called me a few years ago. But I honestly can’t say with certainty that I engaged that white stranger out of recognition that the guy deserved my attention. Looking back at the experience, I suspect I froze. I didn’t want to be impolite in the company of a mentee-friend of mine who was witnessing it. What’s clear to me is that I had no duty to soothe his anxiety, and give him a list of things to do like a Catholic priest ordering a few Hail Marys and extinguishing the sins of the previous week. Similarly no women has a duty to help me deal with the burdensome fact that I have a penis, and other bodily and psychological bits, that rapists also have, and which they use to oppress and violate women.”

IF I really want to help chip away at misogyny, it all starts with me. I need to give women a break, and focus on me, in the first instance, and boys and men.

Think about why this matters. The burden of mapping my journey out of unearned male privilege should not be placed on women. Because doing so is the equivalent of telling a victim that unless and until they come up with a prescription to treat the structural and interpersonal remnants of a misogynistic society that sponsors and enables my unearned male privilege, I might simply continue enjoying that unearned privilege. That is a cheap threat. It shows I am not serious about reflecting on the ways in which misogyny benefits me, and it shows that I do not have a strong enough desire to dismantle misogyny; if I did, I would not lazily ask women to think for me. If I do not need women to think of ways in which I can oppress them, or the ways in which I can benefit from their oppression, then surely I am smart enough to also figure out how to end these injustices? I am asking the wrong question of Shireen or other women if I glibly ask them to write me a prescription for my male guilt. I am not so serious about the fight against women’s oppression if that is my approach.”