The whiteness we swim in
Sometime in the early twenty-teens, after leading failed grassroots antiracism efforts for the previous decade or so — somewhere between licking my wounds and feeling sorry for myself — I came to the conclusion that a big part of my problem was that everything I believed about race and racism was backwards and upside down. I looked around at other white people I knew, including many white antiracists, and from where I stood it looked like we were almost always recklessly confused about what racism is and how it functions.
Even with all the antiracism work and personal development I’d undertaken, I continuously found myself slipping back into my own default perspective of comfortable “colorblind” whiteness. Despite my efforts, and an extraordinary antiracist support network, I couldn’t seem to hold onto an antiracist perspective by myself without the active support of a community of supportive, usually of Black and Brown, people around me cheering me on.
And let’s face it, that model is 1) exploitative; 2) doesn’t scale; and 3) gets old for Black folks pretty damn quick.
I started trying to assemble a framework and a set of practices for myself as a white person to anchor myself in reality and to retrain myself in the way I think about the world. I didn’t realize at the time how much I was being influenced by contemporary BIPOC antiracist leaders, and specifically Black and Brown women. (You can read my acknowledgement of these thinkers and my apology for appropriating their thoughts as my own, here).
The idea of “Race as Technology” [1] has been invaluable for me to maintain my bearings and to resist a world where the system of racism and the standards of whiteness tell me that up is down, that good is bad, and that Black people dying at twice the rate of white people is natural.
I’ve since come to the conclusion that all, or practically all, white people have the same problem as we embark — and struggle to persist — on the journey of antiracism. Since this has been useful for me, I’m sharing it in the hopes that some or all of you also will find it useful as you persist on your antiracist journey.
Sunset Racism focuses on the version of racism and white supremacy that we have in the United States: the American system and the expression of racism/white supremacy, particularly as it shapes, and is shaped by, white people.
It’s my sincere hope that what I’ve found effective might be useful for other antiracist white folks. If there are opportunities, feel free to adapt this work for BIPOC or international audiences and/or to expand it to include other forms of global racism or oppression such as sexism, religious intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, colorism, and ableism. Anything here that belongs to me can be repurposed by use of the Creative Commons License here.
Trying to understand the system of racism/white supremacy as a white person.
The system of racism and white supremacy hides itself in plain sight from white people. White people, including myself and in my experience, have a hard time holding the system of racism in our minds. It’s slippery. We distract ourselves from it. We cover it up. We freak out. Everything else intrudes as more important or urgent when we try to bring our attention to it. When we do catch a glimpse of it, the system of racism seems to large, too complex, too entrenched and too scary to think about. White people, we can observe, find it harder to get woke than Black and Brown people, and even harder to stay awake even when they have an antiracist epiphany.
I submit that this is not an accident. It’s part of the design of the system of racism. White people — yes, all white people — carry the system of racism with us culturally, and we are culturally designed to keep it carefully hidden from ourselves in our own blindspots. Ensuring that this system persists, we are acculturated to lash out and behave badly when we’re forced, or force ourselves, to look at it. This can make us really tough to be around, frequently, in antiracist circles. (Robin DiAngelo’s 2011 essay “White Fragility” is a starting point to understand this better if you haven’t read it already).
Racism as Technology: The practical application of knowledge to create and maintain wealth and power for white people.
Technology is a word that means a lot of different things. Here again, I’m using Merriam Webster’s Dictionary’s: “the practical application of knowledge, especially in a particular area.”
So, I don’t mean technology in the sense of computers, or code, or silicon chips, or machines. I mean technology in the sense of systems of ideas created to advance “practical application.” This is not a new or novel concept. People invented the technology of agriculture by evolving systems of knowledge to grow surplus food and wealth.
Consider that systems of racism were invented and refined for a similar purpose: to create and protect access to surplus leisure and wealth for white people, in general, and for wealthy, powerful people, in particular.
Unlike TCP/IP and quantum computing, however, race and racism are — most emphatically — NOT based on science or math, but rather on myths, lies, and misinformation. The technology of racism has made white people who are willing to use it (and we are all acculturated to believe its use is justified) ruthlessly efficient at brutally extracting the lives, lands and liberty of whomever we designate as non-white. Rather than being based on science, the technologies of racism are based on pseudo-science, superstition, and frequently religion. Unfortunately, these are extremely effective ways to warp the consensus realities of large groups of people.
Everything else in the framework follows from this premise:
Racism (like all technologies) was intentionally invented by what we now call white people to control Black and Brown people and their lives and resources. Racism baldly, and deceptively, claims to be natural, inevitable, and perpetual, because it needs people to believe that in order to persist.
These claim are lies, but are lies massively supported by propaganda, mythology, cultural narrative, and consensus.
This is, hopefully, where the idea of Racism as Technology can help us from getting fooled again and again — or at least where it’s helped me. We all know that technologies are not natural, inevitable, or perpetual. If racism is technology, then we are liberated from the illusion that it is natural. What we are left with is the cold certainty that we, as white people, are at best complicit in the oppression of our Black and Brown neighbors, and are, at worst, actively using the technology of racism to steal their lives, labor and health.
Technologies have a purpose. Technologies are purposeful. Racism and white supremacy are not caused by ignorance, accidents, or misunderstandings: they are a system, created by people to do something.
What is the technology of racism and what was it created to do?
Here is the emerging hypothesis of Sunset Racism:
Racism as Technology is a ubiquitous, self perpetuating, decentralized system designed to make non-white — and especially Black — people accept mistreatment. To achieve this, the technology of racism acculturates, or more plainly, brainwashes, white people to mistreat, and accept the mistreatment of Black and Brown people as natural, justified, deserved and/or inevitable.
Through the technology of racism, white people are conditioned to be afraid of and weaponized against people of color. Whiteness automates our complicity in mistreatment and oppression. The technology of racism is installed in white people through a combination of misinformation, willful bad faith, fear, and in many cases through virulent forms of supremacist child abuse and acculturation. The technology of racism is a terrible deception, perpetrated on all of us, by all of us, upon ourselves and upon our children.
You, white reader, didn’t invent racism any more than you invented Facebook, or Google or the metric system. But technologies like Facebook, Google, and the metric system wouldn’t exist if people didn’t use them.
Neither would racism. If we want to dismantle racism, as white people, at a minimum, we have to learn to disconnect our minds from the network of racism/white supremacy and, on an ongoing basis, do the work needed to remove the “viruses” that network has installed in us so we don’t become part of automatic attacks and denial of services upon our Black and Brown colleagues, friends and partners.
We were automatically connected to the network of whiteness and we were not provided an unsubscribe link. We were all enrolled at birth or upon immigration based solely on what the standard of whiteness says about your or your family’s skin color — almost always without your consent.
What should white people do about it?
Let’s not step over the obvious. First, please advocate for antiracist policies. Take antiracist actions. Write antiracist laws. Elect antiracists. Protest racism and support protestors financially and politically. (For a rich discussion of how to distinguish antiracist policy, please start with Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Antiracist”).
But also, while we take action, it’s vitally important that antiracist white people also embrace the scary, difficult, and sometimes messy work of de-programming and de-weaponizing ourselves from the technology of racism/white supremacy. This takes courage, reflection, community building, and deep personal work. Without this work, even the most well-meaning white antiracists inevitably harm Black and Brown partners when we try to form or join multiracial coalitions. Interference with and the destruction of interracial coalitions is one of the main functions for which racism and, specifically, the standard of whiteness was invented. (For a great history of the history of the creation of whiteness as a legal concept in America I recommend the podcast Seeing White and specifically Episode 2, How Race was made).
Here at Sunset Racism we’ve been working on a group process for the past few years for groups of white folks to support each other in the vitally important work of deprogramming ourselves and one another from the technology of racism/white supremacy. We’ll be publishing the cookbook for this simple process as part of our creative commons license. It’s intended to be a supplement to other antiracism content and courses, and will be available free of charge to Race, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion practitioners. The idea is to create spaces where white people can coach each other, in the hopes that we can better participate meaningfully in multiracial coalition work when needed and invited.
This post was originally published in June of 2020 under the title Racism as Technology (Part1). It was archived for its problematic appropriation of the work published work of BIPOC women. The post has been edited to address this problem and for clarity and accuracy.
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Footnotes
[1.] The idea of Race as Technology (and the corollary of Racism as Technology) has been in development by antiracist and feminist thinkers explicitly since at least 2004.
Dr. Holly Jones and Dr. Nicolaos Jones trace its evolution in chronological order through at least four contemporary thinkers:
“Falguni Sheth, a political philosopher, interprets race as a technology that legitimates violence and exclusion while concealing its nature and function. Wendy Chun, a media theorist, interprets race as a technology that positions whites as human and Asians as robotic. Beth Coleman, a comparative literary theorist, interprets race as a technology that extends our capacity for autonomous agency. Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist, interprets race as a technology for creating and maintaining inequality ("Innovating Inequality").
Jones, Holly and Jones, Nicolaos. “Race as Technology: From Posthuman Cyborg to Human Industry.” Ilho do Destero. v70 n.2 (2017) 30-51 (available at: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/2175-8026.2017v70n2p39/34268).
The writings of the four thinkers cited above regarding race as technology are:
Sheth, Falguni. “The Technology of Race.” Radical Philosophy Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 2004, pp.77-98.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things with Race.” Camera Obscura 24, 1 (2009): 7-35.
Coleman, Beth. "Race as Technology." Camera Obscura 24, 1 (2009): 176-207.
Benjamin, Ruha. “Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2 (2016): 145-156.
Benjamin, Ruha. “Innovating Inequality: If Race is a Technology, Postracialism is the Genius Bar.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, 13 (2016): 2227-2234.