Dealing with race

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Glenda Buya-ao Claborne

That is why I think it was stupid for Clinton's race advisory board to have highlighted the term "white privilege" in its 121-page report submitted to the president a month ago.

Angela Oh, one of the seven members comprising the board, conceded in The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour a month ago that the board realized that the term "white privilege" is potentially divisive. But the board used it anyway because there was not a better alternative term in the existing literature or discourse on race relations in America.

"We as a nation need to understand that whites tend to benefit, either knowingly or unconsciously from this country's history of white privilege," the report stated.

Substitute "whites" with: males, heterosexuals, beautiful people, perfectly healthy people, brainy people, rich people, etc. and we can see no end to the possible sets of people for whom doors are opened and the corresponding sets of people for whom doors are slammed shut.

It is a hard and painful fact of life, but inequalities abound.

In saying that, I am not arguing for a passive acceptance of injustice as if there is nothing we can do about it. I just happen to think that we seem to be fighting inequalities without thinking about our basic assumptions of equality and justice and the boundaries defining these concepts.

We talk about leveling playing fields and breaking glass ceilings, but it seems that we have measured these largely in terms of numerical strength, power positions and status levels. These, at the expense of our deepest human need to be related to as a person equal in worth, dignity and purpose as anybody else, regardless of race, sexual orientation, religion, physical condition, class and status.

True. True. True. Social structures and those who have power to shape those structures matter a lot. But numerically matching members of disadvantaged groups to members of privileged groups in power and status settings does not necessarily distribute goods equally nor does it confer dignity equally.

I know it is an outdated, maybe even dead, idea to inject the notion of freedom from self as the only true basis and measure of equality and justice. But I will argue that we can never achieve equality and justice unless we begin with the basic assumption that each person, white or colored, is potentially a racist, a bigot or a pervert.

That assumption is the only true level playing field.

From that assumption, there is no point romanticizing the oppression of one group and vilifying the privileges of another.

From that assumption, we can begin to see that there is no clear-cut black and white racial divide. There are Asians against blacks, blacks against Asians, Asians against Latinos, Latinos against blacks, vice-versa. Moreover, there are Asians against Asians, blacks against blacks, Latinos against Latinos, ad infinitum.

Oh, please, don't give me that crap that it is precisely because of the white man's privilege that we colored peoples are at each other's throat.

Don't we feel cheap and ugly defining our identities along a black and white divide, measuring our success against a reference point called white privilege, and commiserating with each other based on our common perceptions of oppression by an abstracted class of people called whites?

Don't we feel imprisoned by the very definitions and reference points that we use to explain everything about us?

There are far more oppressive forces than any privilege per se any white person can ever have. I will call two of these forces "white discomfort" and "colored rage."

White discomfort translates, on one end, into a fussy guilt and condescending sympathy. On the other end, white discomfort translates into perceptions of colored peoples as envious, opportunistic, chipped in the shoulder, soured grape, lazy and irresponsible.

Colored rage translates, on one end, into a debilitating self-hate and alienation. On the other end, colored rage translates into a hatred of and sense of entitlement to the white man's privileges.

Our discomfort and our rage pervade the social structures that we are striving hard to make more equal and more just. Our discomfort and our rage are draining us of grace, humor, sincerity and kindness.

We might be building castles that can contain us all but we hardly know each other nor do we enjoy being around each other.

Glenda Buya-ao Claborne is an undeclared graduate student and can be reached via e-mail at Glenda.Buya-ao.Claborne@wildcat.arizona.edu. Her column, Sitting on the Fulcrum, appears every Monday.