The new struggle over race

The recent conflicts  in the US over race have involved a confused mix of two very different strands, one old and one new. The new one has left many Whites like myself feeling confused - and many, at some level, angry.

The protests over the shooting of Black youths in Ferguson and elsewhere are of an unfortunately old kind: a struggle for equal rights and equal treatment before the law. Whites who have long seen themselves as allies in the battle for equal rights are quick to support protesters in this new conflict. But when Blacks protest the name of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, or the quality of the food at Oberlin, or the nature of Hallowe’een costumes at Yale; when they talk of “privilege” and “safe spaces” -- they are crossing into a different territory. 

In these protests long-time White allies, who have marched and fought for civil rights, feel alienated, excluded. Their good will in the fight for equality seems no longer to count. The Black demands seem to them petty -- how can “micro-aggressions” like bad food be put in the same league as Black lives at risk on the streets? These protesters have gained admittance to elite universities, they have won the battle for that right: why are they still complaining?

But the new issues, though they sometimes adopt the language of “rights”, are not about rights. No one has a right to name a building or determine food choices. The more telling and accurate word, widely used in these protests, is “comfort”. Blacks are demanding to feel comfortable.

This seems petty only to people who themselves feel comfortable. Yet with a little effort, we can all put ourselves in situations that give at least some sense of the significance of the movement. All of us have been in situations where we have become members of a group, yet don’t really know the unspoken rules, don’t know how to win respect. It’s a severely crippling experience. We are afraid of making a mistake that will make everyone laugh at us. If we do speak out, it may be to blurt out a feeling which falls flat and makes us seem even stranger to the other members. So most of us say as little as possible. We would like to be invisible. We keep our opinions to ourselves. We self-censor.

There is now a large body of research showing the long-term damage. Students who feel uncomfortable perform less well. Employees who feel uncomfortable do not contribute as much.  In boards of directors of major companies, new female and minority members feel uncomfortable and so don’t speak their minds. These reactions lead quickly to vicious circles: the students, the employees, the board members confirm the old suspicions that they are not as good. And then it doesn’t matter what rights they have: they are back in their old position at the bottom of the status hierarchy, unheard.

If we want to include new groups in our community, they have to feel comfortable. And it is always a messy process, because to feel comfortable they have to violate the unspoken rules of the existing in-group. They must have the space to be “off”, different, not quite fitting in. They are necessarily going to say things that we, the Whites who have set the rules of civil dialogue, find strange and offensive, that we don’t “get”.

We’re into a new phase. Equal rights have been achieved in many arenas, but that is simply not enough for citizenship in today’s society. We need equal inclusion, which has been achieved almost nowhere. That will take a lot of work, a lot of humility, a lot of misunderstanding and overcoming of misunderstanding.