And then, graduate school, and Professor Lee.
Oh, shit.
“Not all white people are white supremacists, but all white people benefit from white supremacy.”
WHAT THE WHAT?
She made us repeat it like a mantra. At least 3 times. I read Tim Wise’s
White Like Me (I have mixed feelings about him now, but I digress) and
bell hooks and
David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness and learned how our economic systems benefit from racism and we read about the
history of American immigration laws (have you ever read them?) and colonialism in the Philippines and elsewhere (yes, America has colonies but we call them “territories”), and we read about
redlining and white flight (ever wonder how black people ended up in urban centers?), and we read some
DuBois and
Omi & Winant and literature by people of color and all of the sudden I realized I had been fucking lied to.
I understood America through white eyes. I understood the world through the mainstream, polished glasses of a nice clean history of “we used to be bad now we’re not the end.”
Go team.
I discovered I was white.
“Not all white people are white supremacists, but all white people benefit from white supremacy.”
She wanted us to see that as individuals, not all white people are bigoted. But she also wanted us to see that every white person – whether they are bigoted or not – benefits from the racially structured hierarchies in America. They benefit from racism.
#AccidentallyTheWholeInternetHateMachine
They must have gotten an A+ in Asian culture class, clearly.
