a multi-part series of posts about what straight allies can learn from Critical Whiteness Studies

As I wrote in part 1 of this series of posts, I’m taking a summer course called Critical Perspectives on Whiteness. I explained:

In addition to helping me start working through my own relationship to White privilege, Whiteness, and racism, this course is helping me think more deeply about the role of Straight privilege, Straightness, and heterosexism. Because I’m conditioned not to recognize so much of the privilege I receive as a white person, I’ve been finding it helpful to use my experiences as a gaylady and outsider to Straight privilege as a tool for trying to see White privilege. And that, in turn, helps me to think better about Straightness and Straight privilege.

The first part of this series focused on the dangers of turning the debate over gay marriage into the emblematic issue of the gay civil rights movement. The second part considers a second danger: “straight heroism.” This third and final part focused on anti-heterosexism as charity and discusses what to do / what not to do as a straight ally.

antiracism as charity / anti-heterosexism as charity

Hook adds a third danger: Antiracism as charitable act. He explains:

What I am referring to as ‘charitable’ instances of anti-racism do not result in a levelling of the playing field, in a necessary increase in the equality of society, but instead in the affirmation of a different order of privilege. They involve a trade-off: the declaration of a past racism – or admission of racialised privilege – is offered on condition that the speaker, the agent of the declaration, is able to claim the position of the redeemed subject, or gain something by way of liberal social capital.

There is a danger, he argues, in doing “humanitarian violence” through charitable antiracism: It turns the antiracist into the benefactor, the Other into the subservient recipient of charity. “We” must rescue “them” from “their” cruel lives.

Biko writes:

[White]liberals, leftists … are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism … these are the people who say that they have black souls wrapped up in white skins … They want to remain in the good books with both the black and the white worlds … They vacillate between the two worlds, verbalizing all the complaints of the blacks beautifully while skilfully extracting what suits them from the exclusive pool of white privileges … [The white liberal] claims complete identification with the blacks … [H]e moves around … white circles … with a lighter load, feeling that he is not like the rest of the others. Yet at the back of his mind is a constant reminder that he is quite comfortable as things stand.

I struggle to make peace with some of what I’ve seen from Straight allies because so much of allied behavior also smacks of charity. Being pro-gay–being a true ally–means being willing to give up Straight privilege that results in unfair and unequal distribution of resources and benefits. Pro-gay behavior that is not accompanied by an effort to redistribute unfairly distributed resources is behavior that does not work in the service of gay rights. I’m giving these clothes to charity because they don’t fit / they’re not fashionable / I want room for better clothes! What? Work to change the institutional forces that construct and maintain poverty? I just told you that I gave clothes to charity!

what not to do / what to do

Here’s what South African activist Andile Mngxitama has to say about what he wants from Whites:

for myself, as a black person, I don’t want:
(I) Acknowledgement of whites’ culpability
(2) Disclosure and remorse for what happened during colonialism and apartheid
(3) I wish for no dialogue
( 4) Whites owe me no apology or washing of feet
(5) Please, not another conference on racism
(6) No pledges confirming our collective humanity.

For myself, as a gay person, I don’t want:

(I) Straight allies claiming space on the public stage of gay civil rights when it comes at the loss of space on the stage for queers. If your words and actions are silencing gays, then you need to step aside.
(2) The suggestion that I might get farther if I tried to look a little more “mainstream” (read: straight). It makes you sound like you want me to “pass” as straight, which is something that I have chosen not to do.
(3) The suggestion that gay rights are better served by “mainstream” (read: straight-looking) queers and queer couples than by non-normative queers and queer couples. It makes you sound like you prefer your gays to be as straight as possible.
(4) To be asked my opinion on a gay rights issue by a straight ally, only to be interrupted and argued with before I’ve finished giving my opinion. If you really wanted to know my thoughts, you’d spend your time trying to understand and not trying to show why I’m wrong.

As a result of the readings and discussions I’ve had as part of my summer course on Whiteness, I am currently at a complete loss for how to proceed as a White antiracist. I’m confused and frustrated and anxious and sad–which, I think, is precisely how I should be feeling as I explore my own complicity in a system that unfairly benefits me through no effort of my own.

I have a hard time believing that my own uncertainty, indecision, and immobility are good things–until I think about what I want straight allies to feel about gay rights. As a straight ally, you should never feel certain or decisive about your position and role in the gay rights movement–for the movement to succeed, your role must be in flux, must always be conferred upon you by your queer peers. It’s only fair, then, that I feel the same anxiety about my role as a White ally that I want Straight allies to feel about their roles in the effort toward destabilizing and deconstructing heteronormativity and heterosexism.

a multi-part series of posts about what straight allies can learn from Critical Whiteness Studies

As I wrote in part 1 of this series of posts, I’m taking a summer course called Critical Perspectives on Whiteness. I explained:

In addition to helping me start working through my own relationship to White privilege, Whiteness, and racism, this course is helping me think more deeply about the role of Straight privilege, Straightness, and heterosexism. Because I’m conditioned not to recognize so much of the privilege I receive as a white person, I’ve been finding it helpful to use my experiences as a gaylady and outsider to Straight privilege as a tool for trying to see White privilege. And that, in turn, helps me to think better about Straightness and Straight privilege.

The first part of this series focused on the dangers of turning the debate over gay marriage into the emblematic issue of the gay civil rights movement. This part considers a second danger: “straight heroism.”

white heroes / straight heroes

In defining “white heroism,” Lacanian psychologist Derek Hooks offers the example of Peter Gabriel performing ‘Biko,’ a song about the assassination of the Black South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, at a Live Aid concert in the 1980s

before an audience of 25 million people. Despite the obvious political potential of such an act, it is difficult not to feel a slight sense of unease in watching this footage today, in an era where such political anthems are less in vogue. It seems harder now to deny that such a performance holds Gabriel himself up to the limelight, securing for the singer and his audience a kind of anti-racist social capital. One might adopt a psychoanalytic perspective here, by asking whether such a gesture, no matter how well-intentioned – and which certainly can be read as a laudable form of consciousness-raising – does not risk tipping over into an instance of ‘anti-racist narcissism’. We should not be blind to this possibility: that at the very moment in which one is fully immersed in publicly applauding the sacrifice, the heroism of an other one is simultaneously reaping the rewards of the attention thus called onto one’s self. Although he directs his comments at white South Africa, Chabani Manganyi’s (1973, p. 17) words nonetheless seem pertinent here: ‘liberalism can only be a form of narcissism – a form of white self-love’.

This is the rocky path of White Declarations, of public statements of antiracism that release a person from the responsibility to actually change behaviors, attitudes, or actions that maintain the (White) status quo. This is the joining of an MLK Day march, the writing of an antiracist letter to the editor of a local newspaper. This is the “I have a black friend” declaration, the “I have a gay friend,” the “I have a Muslim friend.”

Here's one way to be pro-gay without running the risk of having people actually think you're gay

Let’s go back to the rhetoric surrounding gay marriage for a minute. I’ve seen lots of public declarations from straight allies that go like this: I have gay friends who are in love and are happily married / who are in love and want to get married and I demand / request / suggest that you support their right to legally marry. Which is super and awesome but which risks ringing somehow false. Too often, those declarations seem a little too full of magnanimity, of I-am-open-minded-and-therefore-an-awesome-liberal, of pat-me-on-the-back-for-being-an-awesome-straight-person. This is another reason why gay marriage has become an emblematic issue: Because it’s an easy way for straight people to support gays without risking any loss of their own Straight privilege. This has even become an official part of the gay marriage rhetoric: Gay marriage helps straight marriages. Also, Glenn Beck is not threatened by gay marriage.

I believe in gay marriage precisely because I think it does threaten straight privilege. In my view, if gay marriage does not threaten straight privilege, then it’s not part of the solution. If it’s not part of the solution, it’s part of the problem.

The third and final part of this series of posts will be published on Sunday, June 5.

a multi-part series of posts about what straight allies can learn from Critical Whiteness Studies

You know, I’m taking this summer course called Critical Perspectives on Whiteness. (If the field of Whiteness Studies is a new concept for you, I’ve got some resources! Here’s a Washington Post piece about proponents and opponents of Whiteness Studies courses in universities. Here’s sociologist Dalton Conley talking about race, Whiteness, and class. Here’s Peter Kolchin’s article on the field of Whiteness Studies.) It’s a good course. A fantastic course. Maybe the most important education course I’ve ever taken.

It’s also an incredibly difficult course, because the topic is unbelievably personal. How can anti-racist White educational researchers best support a smashing of Whiteness? How am I complicit in a system that confers onto me certain unearned “rights” and “privileges” that are denied to others?

In addition to helping me start working through my own relationship to White privilege, Whiteness, and racism, this course is helping me think more deeply about the role of Straight privilege, Straightness, and heterosexism. Because I’m conditioned not to recognize so much of the privilege I receive as a white person, I’ve been finding it helpful to use my experiences as a gaylady and outsider to Straight privilege as a tool for trying to see White privilege. And that, in turn, helps me to think better about Straightness and Straight privilege.

Using Derek Hook’s 2011 article “Retrieving Biko: a Black Consciousness critique of whiteness,” I’m going to talk through some of the issues that he argues white antiracists face in coming to terms with their own complicity in racism. Then I’m going to connect these issues to what I see as similar challenges for Straight anti-heterosexists. I hope to start a dialogue! About what it means to be a straight ally! Because we need allies, and we need allies whose behaviors, attitudes, words, and actions are pointed in a productive direction!

fetishizing Martin Luther King / fetishizing “straight” queers

Lacanian psychologist Derek Hook argues that anti-racist White folks are prone to holding up and identifying with a single Black figure–he gives the example of Martin Luther King, Jr.–as a hero while simultaneously removing anything threatening or scary about that person. Hook calls this “fetishizing,” which psychoanalysis defines as

a great investment in a certain object or person taken out of a disturbing context, and that is then memorialised, instituted in a way that enables us to forget, in a manner that protects us from a far more threatening situation. We can treat the ‘I have a dream’ refrain, much like Martin Luther King Day itself, as a fetish. That is, they are a way of proving that something is not so. They are a way of proving for white America that it is somehow not racist, that a line has been drawn between itself and its racist past.

Hook explains how we have scrubbed Martin Luther King and his famous speech clean of risk and threat:

King of course is responsible for some of the most famous words in US history: ‘I have a dream … ‘.The third Monday of each January in the USA is, furthermore, Martin Luther King Day, an extraordinary mark of commemoration. These remembrances of King stand in stark contrast to his declining popularity at the time of his death, to the oft-neglected fact of his radicalism in attacking the exploitative nature of racialised capitalism. What is my point here? In many instances the institutionalisation of such a heroic figure occurs as part of a strategy of amnesia. This is a memorialisation which works as a means of forgetting. We have a selective focusing in on an isolated element which enables a wiping-out of a far more disconcerting ensemble of surrounding elements. After all, as Slavoj Zizek (2009) asks, recounting the comments of Henry Taylor: how many people can recall what followed on in Martin Luther King’s most famous speech, what came after the words ‘I have a dream’ … ?

I’m not all that fond of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, but I think Hook’s point is valid. It seems to me that fetishizing an iconic figure is a common–and often quite effective–way to simultaneously prove one’s tolerance for a non-dominant group and to refuse to deal with the aspects of that group that are scary, threatening, or dangerous. At the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Ryan White became the face of HIV/AIDS in America. Why? Because he was a white boy from suburban Indiana who had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, not through intravenous drug use or unprotected sex. His story taught America that you can’t catch HIV by hugging an HIV+ person, or by petting a cat that an HIV+ person has petted, or by shaking hands with an HIV+ person. His story taught America that HIV/AIDS is not–as much as people would like to think it is–confined to gay men and drug addicts.

Which is super. But all this learning America was doing thanks to Ryan White didn’t change–maybe it even exacerbated–cultural attitudes and policies that put non-dominant (nonwhite, nonstraight, poor, undereducated) people at greater risk of contracting and dying from HIV/AIDS. Because, see, Ryan White was safe because it wasn’t his fault that he caught AIDS. Whereas those gay dudes, those black girls, those drug addicts–well, if they catch AIDS they were asking for it. Right? Right?

The current Big Issue of the gay civil rights movement is the issue of gay marriage. It is, no doubt, an important issue–but the fact that it has become the emblematic issue of gay rights is problematic, and the way it has been taking up by straight allies has a tendency to make me uncomfortable. The subtext of the rhetoric is dangerously close to “gay people should be allowed to marry because they fall in love just like we do. Do you ever see a transgendered person or couple being tossed up as the face of gay marriage? What about polyamorous queer couples? No? That’s because that’s an aspect of queerness that’s a little too threatening for many straight allies and potential allies.

The risk, of course, is that this gay marriage rhetoric may result in the legalization of gay marriage without actually serving the interests of the gay rights movement. Insofar as queers are judged by how well they align with the values of Straightness–monogamy, gender conformity, social and economic productivity, and so on–queers will never be able to fully measure up.

The second part of this three-part series of posts will be published on Saturday, June 4. The third part will be published on Sunday, June 5.