Review of The Heart of Whiteness
For those who choose to take the trip, Professor Jensen has charted a course, in plain English, and with few pretensions, to fuller understanding of the depth of the scars that American racism has left on our humanity. It has infected our individual and collective psyches with a disease that is difficult to overcome: the disease of color prejudice, white privilege, white supremacy, white superiority, and white racism.
In the same vein as that of Lillian Smith's "Killing the Dream;" or Tim Wise's "White Like Me;" or indeed with the same skill and moving passion as the F. H. Griffith classic, "Black Like Me," professor Jensen has used his own life experience, and his considerable intellectual skills to shake not just the white conscience, but the conscience of America. And while he cannot be blamed for not solving all the problems he raised, we must all be grateful to him for having the courage to raise them, and for doing so in such a clear-minded, passionate and committed manner.
In this short volume, the University of Texas at Austin Professor, Robert Jensen, has demonstrated that he has acquired the necessary self-knowledge (the escape velocity needed to propel himself beyond the orbit of "naďve white supremacy" into the orbit of "fully self-conscious white supremacy") to break away from the comforts of white privilege. This is an important and necessary, but as he so eloquently noted, an insufficient step on the road to overcoming the disease of white privilege, and its larger manifestation, American style white racism.
Jensen has let the cat out of the bag: White humanity is just short of a fraud built on the quicksand of propped up privileges, unfair advantages, unjust prerogatives, structural injustices, four-century-old myths, four centuries of violence and genocide, and lies, all insulated and protected by a system of soft tyranny and spatial Apartheid. In short, if one understands Jensen correctly, America has sacrificed all of the little humanity it has, on the altar of skin color superiority.
As Jensen has discovered, in this his much-needed second thrust -- re-entering the old orbit of white supremacy armed with self-knowledge -- is a much trickier step than being a content, "naďve white supremacist." For, as the author has discovered, the invisible power of systemic racial hegemony is the ultimate goal, and the real name of the game of white supremacy.
Jensen makes clear a truism seldom recognized: that American racism is no longer personal. It no longer matters how many committed anti-racists we can summon to a given cause; or who hates or does not hate blacks; or how many skinheads roam the streets, the anti-racists cannot acquire (nor will they ever constitute) a critical mass in American society.
The consolidation and preservation of white privilege through systemic racist power is self-defining, self-promoting, and now all but a self-regulating and self-sustaining process. There is no longer a need to consolidate white privilege, for there can be no better consolidation than having it built in to all the structures of American power. Destroying white privilege, on the other hand, represents a "clear and present danger" to American Society as we know it. Taking Jensen's arguments to their logical conclusions, white identity, the very basis of white self-esteem, and white humanity are all built on the sand castle of exaggerated heroics, violence and color myths -- enforced meanings that favor puffed up interpretations of white history, and the de-valuing and denigration of blacks and other non-white peoples contributions.
As is implicit in this brief but deeply moving confessional, if one looks deeply enough, one will discover that systemic racism transcends and thus resists all attempts at re-adjustments designed to overcome its negative aspects. It has evolved in such a manner that it now can be seen to operate on autopilot: The laws of American social physics and of American racist power mechanics are simple and virtually immutable. They dictate that there can be no absolute black progress relative to whites; that is, that the racist system must remain in a virtual steady-state: Black progress must ALWAYS be compensated for with equal and offsetting amounts of white progress, otherwise whites become agitated and uncomfortable.
It is consider bad sport to attempt to close the absolute distance between the races -- either socially, economically, or politically. Power is the name of the game. As Jensen makes clear, it hardly matters any more what individuals on either side of the racial divide do: The script of the drama has been written, signed, and sealed through the interlocking mechanisms of racist power: lockstep, we all have learned to play out to the last letter, our respective ascribed roles. No deviations are allowed.
To step outside the racist norm as Dr. Jensen has done, is to be considered a "race traitor," and to be brutally jerked back in line and reminded that America's benign and soft racist totalitarianism is neither benign, nor soft. And, in the end, although everything is designed to look different on the surface, taking on different textures and colors, depending on the angle, the brutal fact remains that all power alignments are fixed, immutable and must stay exactly the same -- consolidated under the insulated and ever-protective umbrella of white supremacist hegemony.
Put yet another way, in the end, and at a much deeper level, all moves on the American chessboard have been pre-determined to promote, enable, and consolidate the "ways of white power," and the "ways of white supremacy." Whether it be of the "naďve" or of the "profoundly self-conscious" white supremacist sort that Professor Jensen exhibits, is really of little or no consequence.
As Jensen alludes to himself: by making a virtue out of emerging demographic and moral necessity, the white supremacists have used their favorite unconscious (conscious) tactic: that of redefining and renaming racial discrepancies - this time as multiculturalism and racial and cultural diversity -- and realigning minority interests so that they look much like the chauvinistic white supremacist imperatives they are allowed to mimic.
Once meaning has been drained, redefined, refilled and then realigned, white supremacy is then put firmly back on track; the challenge has been averted, successfully squashed: everything can then be returned to normal but with a different cosmetic look, made to look different (even positive) while at the same time remaining exactly the same. This "co-optation through redefinition and re-incorporation" is the newest systemic way of deflecting all new challenges to racist hegemony.
No matter what the moves are on the American chessboard, white supremacy remains the same old Black Hole that it always has been: a closed insular mean-spirited, evil, structurally violent system from which nothing enters or escapes that does not get altered to promote, consolidate, or enable "the ways of racism." In the end, we are all Condoleeza Rices and Clarence Thomas': closet white supremacists, pretending that we do not know how we are being used to advance the evils of a bankrupt system.
Jensen makes clear that racism, as expressed through the insular world of white privilege, is the gravity that holds the whole stinking system of white supremacy together. The idea that there may yet be an anti-racist world "out there" somewhere where whites will someday voluntarily give up their power and privileges is fanciful and a highly theoretical notion that may in the end be just another illusion, or mirage (like real multiculturalism is).
No one has yet seen, inhabited, or can even describe the steps needed to get to such a world. And while Professor Jensen has made a heroic effort to push us out of our comfort zones -- to the frontiers of a new kind of non-racist thinking and understanding -- in the end even he admits that this will not crack the nut at the center of this peculiar American disease. Even self-conscious white supremacy is perhaps too little, too late. He of course cannot be blamed for this.
What then to do?
Even though everyone seems to understand that systemic problems cannot be solved at non-systemic levels of analysis -- that is, beneath the system as a whole -- they nevertheless seem more comfortable attacking problems of racism at these lower inherently ineffectual levels (at the community and interpersonal levels, for instance) rather than at the national level. I think this is a strategic as well as a systemic mistake.
If we stopped only for a moment to think, we would realize that if any of the laws we have on the books regarding racism were ever to be enforced to the letter, without deviation, racism in America would soon wither away. And, there would be no need to have to re-enact the same ineffectual laws over and over again. "Paper or legal equality" does not work because it is not worth the paper it is written on, and that includes the U.S. Constitution. The failure to enforce a law, over time makes it a "dead letter," an inert symbolic fraud, like the flawed white humanity that has been used to underwrite it.
When will whites begin to understand, that it is not just a "lack of progress" to fail to enforce the Constitution, it is a sharp stab in the heart of American humanity; it renders the Constitution a "dead letter," a paper fraud.
Thus, the first step we need to take is to plug the holes between democratic theory and everyday American practice; between our stated ideals, which sit on pedestals to be lauded as they collect dust, and our everyday American practice.
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