“To Protect and To Serve…” Who? Educating about White Privilege

To redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.
—Peggy McIntosh

If the parents of black children must have these terrible conversations,
so must the parents of white children. We must teach them to use their voice for good,
not to be apathetic, not to overlook what is right in front of them.
—Rev. Georgi Funderburk

If you are remaining silent, you are being complicit.
—Anonymous

The events of the past weeks surrounding the murder of George Floyd have generated an opening for change not seen in nearly 60 years, and it is long past time that those of us who are part of the dominant White power structure in this country recognize that the people who need to change are, in fact, us.  As White citizens, we are the main source of the racism baked into nearly every fiber of our social fabric, and I was reminded of just how “baked in” it is during a recent conversation with a good friend.  An average White, socially egalitarian liberal, she was venting her rage at the images of the peaceful protestors being teargassed to make way for President Trump’s now infamous photo-op outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, and she kept repeating “Isn’t the motto of the police ‘To Protect and To Serve’?” To which I finally replied, “To protect and to serve who? You’re not finishing the sentence: the always unspoken part of that motto is ‘To Protect and To Serve White people.’  The police don’t really exist to protect everyone; they exist to keep the current socio-economic system in this country safe and secure for folks like us.”

Now, in fairness to my friend, that piece of hidden White privilege was not always something I recognized either, and it was only through training in diversity, equity, and inclusion issues (DEI) that I learned the historical role of policing in this country for myself.  What’s more, as a fellow White, socially egalitarian liberal, it was not easy or pleasant to confront the truth.  But Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad summarizes the situation well when he bluntly points out that “the function of police are to control essential workers…ensuring that these out-groups [have] minimal freedom beyond what [is] required for them to do their jobs” (Throughline), and as a White American, I first have to recognize my role in that system every time Amazon drops off a package at my door.  Then, second, I need to be figuring out what I can be doing to change it.  As Muhammad asks, again bluntly, “Do white people in America still want the police to protect their interests over the rights and dignity and lives of black and in too many cases brown, Indigenous and Asian populations in this country?” (Throughline) Or do we want to change things in this country so that Black lives (along with the lives of all the other people of color) matter as much as White lives do?

That is why the current opportunity is about so much more than confronting the problem of police brutality.  It is about the entire spectrum of social brutality generated by this country’s systemic racism.  The harsh reality is that “relative to White Americans, Black Americans experience disadvantages—meaning inferior outcomes—on almost every economically significant dimension.  This includes earnings, education, housing, employment, status in the criminal justice system, and health” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 190).  Furthermore, this disadvantage is found at every level of economic class.  Even wealthy African Americans have statistically shorter lifespans and are just as likely to be pulled over while driving as those with less economic means.  The frank and brutal truth is that it is hazardous to be Black in this country.

Which is sin at the most biblical understanding of that word! What’s more, the change to correct it is shamefully overdue, and the simple truth is that the only way we stop this social injustice is to start dismantling the White privilege that produces it!

But to dismantle something, you first have to understand it, and “many scientists now believe that, rather than disappearing, Americans’ race prejudices have merely metamorphosed into harder to see forms” and that “the stronger portion of the hidden undercurrent of biases consists of those that remain outwardly unexpressed for the simple reason that their possessors are unaware of possessing them” (Banaji & Greenwald, pp. 170 & 187).  Psychologist call these hidden, unconscious forms of racial prejudice, “implicit biases,” and we must understand them, why we have them, and what their impact is on our existing social order if we are to have any hope of deconstructing the White privilege at the root of our society’s racism.  I have written briefly elsewhere about this topic, but it is time for a deeper dive.

The Science of Unfairness

It all starts with the fact that the brain “does a great deal of its work automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally” (Banaji & Greenwald, pp. 5-6).  Indeed, “great deal” may not adequately capture the amount of brain activity we are never consciously aware of due to the brain’s built-in filtering systems.  For example, your heart is actively beating right now, and your GI tract is busy wriggling like a worm on a hook.  Yet your brainstem controlling these actions only lets signals through to the self-awareness circuits when something, such as a racing heart or intestinal cramping, requires more deliberate attention.  Likewise, centers in your thalamus are currently busily processing the pressure on your skin from the air and your clothes (as well as the temperature and humidity).  Yet you only become aware of this data when, for instance, a change in pressure alerts you to a breeze or someone tugging on your shirt.  The brain filters this enormous amount of information because if you had to be self-aware of every heartbeat, touch of clothing, or other continuous stimuli the brain is processing 24/7 to keep you alive, the self-aware part of your brain couldn’t function.

But it isn’t just filtering that the brain does “automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally.” The brain generates many of our behaviors this way as well.  At the most basic level, this can be something as simple as tying one’s shoes in the morning while actively thinking about the days upcoming events.  Or it can be a more complex behavior such as the commute home, listening or singing along to the radio, and suddenly realizing you are in your driveway.

At their most complex levels, though, these auto-behaviors can have dramatic consequences.  The example I always give my students is the first-day-at-a-new-school moment (or any similar situation).  I’ve taught them about the three survival questions the brain’s limbic structures ask every waking second:  Is it dangerous? Can I eat it? Can I mate with it? And then I point out to them that in that room full of new, totally unknown people, they walked up to some individual or small group of people in the room first.  So why those and not others? Answer: parts of their thalamus had decided these people were either safe or could protect me, could help me get food, and/or could somehow improve my reproductive chances.  What’s more, all of it done without a single conscious, deliberate thought:  life-long friendships and future marriages the possible consequences of a quick limbic scan of a room.

The result of all this autopiloting for the current discussion is that the brain’s buried thoughts where we have no self-reflective awareness (such as the three limbic questions) can be at total, even antagonistic odds with those intentional thoughts where we are self-aware. It is these deeper, “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 4), and a good example is the utter unreliability of eyewitnesses. Simply change how a witness to a crash is asked about it—“hit” vs. “smash into”—and you will alter an individual’s description of the damage caused.  Furthermore, there is the tendency to generate false memories in certain situations; so, for instance, throw a picnic for someone and then later ask about “the blue cooler” (which the researcher deliberately made sure was never there), and the respondent will argue to the grave about “remembering” the presence of said cooler—simply because the brain has been trained through experience to associate coolers with picnics (it’s known in psychology as “availability bias”).  The bottom line is “that experts agree that the ability to have conscious access to our minds is quite low” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 61), and the consequence is that each and every one of us have some potentially pretty nasty stuff operating in our heads that we don’t even realize is there guiding our behaviors and influencing our decisions.

One such “nasty” is the bias of stereotyping, which as I discussed in Chapter 8, our brain’s do instinctively.  In fact, “it is not possible to be human and to avoid making the use of stereotypes” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 91) because we are hard-wired to categorize any and all sensory input, and we do most of it unconsciously.  The ancestral brain that automatically categorized “tan with dark spots=danger” survived the leopard to produce offspring, and that is probably why “stereotypes are usually not favorable” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 77):  our brains employed them to keep us safe from danger (or perceived danger) while evolving on the Savannah.

But we don’t live in that environment anymore, and today, it is our culture that shapes this automatic stereotyping process, starting at a far earlier age than I suspect most of us realize.  Research shows that “by three months of age [infants] stare longer at a face from their own racial group than at one from a less familiar racial group,” something they do not do at birth.  Hence, “it is clear that they acquire the preference, but they do so quite quickly after birth” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 128).  Furthermore, by the time these infants have become toddlers, research shows they are actively using various cultural cues to categorize the world into “us” and “them.”  Indeed, each of our brains is SO hard-wired for this process that you can:

create an arbitrary connection between a person and a group and provide the mere suggestion that there are others who lack this connection to self, and the psychology of ‘us’ and ‘them’ rushes in to fill the void.  Lines are drawn, whether or not the basis for the groups makes any sense, and discrimination follows (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 136).

Thus, the bottom line (and to put it bluntly) is that each of us stereotype groups of people using the input from our culture, we do so all the time, and there is not a single one of us without these biases buried deep within our unconscious minds.  Perhaps even worse, these buried biases can join the limbic system’s three silent questions to guide us to unconsciously identify what is safe, nourishing, and mate-worthy with only our own racial or ethnic group, helping to perpetuate the separations in our culture that are shaping our stereotypes in the first place.  We are simply stuck with a brain wired for prejudice, and we have to acknowledge and accept this scientific reality before we can successfully engage in the deliberate, self-reflective work to combat it.

Racism and the Myth of the Unbiased Person

I can share from observed experience that what I am about to state all too often causes White people—especially my fellow socially egalitarian liberals—to shut down and stop listening (or in this case, reading) in a mixture of denial and guilt.  But what the science above shows irrefutably is that if you are a White person in our culture, you are by definition racist because it is not possible for you not to have buried stereotypes in your brain that unconsciously guide your behavior to maintain your White privilege.  That is simply how the brain’s genetically programmed hard-wiring is going to cause a brain raised in this culture to work, and it is, in fact, worth quoting Banaji & Greenwald extensively at this point because while:

many Americans who express egalitarian views in public continue to quietly harbor, in private, racial biases that remain potent sources of discrimination…there now exists a substantial body of evidence that automatic White preference—as measured by the Race IAT (Implicit Association Test)—predicts discriminatory behavior even among people who fervently espouse egalitarian views.  This evidence is far too substantial to ignore, and indeed, it has continued to accumulate steadily. [Furthermore,] there is well-documented evidence of widespread acts of discrimination against Black Americans that have put them at a disadvantage in just about every economically significant domain of life.  [Hence,] it is reasonable to conclude not only that implicit bias is a cause of Black disadvantage but also that it plausibly plays a greater role than does explicit bias in explaining the discrimination that contributes to Black disadvantage.  Implicit bias may operate outside of awareness, hidden from those who have it, but the discrimination that it produces can be clearly visible to researchers, and almost certainly also clearly visible to those who are disadvantaged by it (pp. 178 & 209).

So now that we all know the foundational truth about racism in this country, I want to return to that “mixture of denial and guilt.”  Too often, I have witnessed many of my fellow White colleagues, when confronted for the first time with this fact about their own racism, reply “but how can I be a racist? I’m a good person; I treat everyone equally.”  It is the most common form of denial I have seen, and what I want to challenge (and have in personal exchanges) is that what is at issue is not an individual’s moral character in how he, she, or they consciously interact with others (though it obviously is for overt racists).  What awareness of my racism means is that I now understand there is no such things as an unbiased person, including myself, and that the task for me as a so-called “good person” is to become an anti-racist, to learn and discover my own hidden biases so that I can fight them as deliberately as possible in my decisions and my behaviors.  That’s the power of this truth for those of us who are White in this society.

Furthermore, I have always liked what my school’s former DEI Director, Marlo Thomas, had to say in response to the guilt many White people feel when they first learn the truth about their racism (and I’m paraphrasing):  it’s a useless emotional response.  You did not choose to be born a White person in this country; therefore, it’s not like your racism was a deliberate moral choice you made.  But now that you do know the truth, any future complicity is on you. So get on with the work you need to be doing to unpack all that White privilege! A task to which I will now turn.

Advantage in a World of Finite Resources

Setting aside the delusions of the capitalist belief in perpetual exponential growth, the reality is that our planet is a closed system, and that means the amount of resources in this world are finite.  Once the last atom of iron ore or gold or any other resource is extracted from the ground, there isn’t any more to extract (though what is finite can be recycled!), and as I pointed out in “COVID-19, Climate Change, and Other Inconvenient Truths,” just because we may not like the limitations reality puts on us doesn’t make them any less true or impactful.

I share this seemingly self-evident truth about our world’s finite resources because the foundation of the systemic racism in this country is the inequitable distribution of resources possessed and available to those of us who are White.  Any material advantage possessed by one group can only come at the expense of lessoning the amount of resources available to another group when there is a limit to said resources, and therefore, the socio-economic advantages of White Americans must come at the expense of the disadvantages this causes people of color, especially Black Americans.  Furthermore, the extra resources advantage brings makes it possible to construct systems of power to ensure the continuation of that advantage, and you get our systemic racism.

What this all has to do with the concept of White privilege is that the truth of what I have just described is so hidden in the unconscious minds of most White Americans that getting them to see it, let alone accept it, is often like trying to get a fish to understand water.  Indeed, Peggy McIntosh in her now famous essay makes the observation that “as a white person, I realized that I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage” (p. 1; my emphasis).  White Americans are socialized from birth to believe that their advantage is simply like the air they breathe, a natural part of the environment, and so powerful and deeply rooted is this implicit bias that—to paraphrase McIntosh—denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages Whites gain from the disadvantages of those with darker skins:  the myth of meritocracy must be maintained at all cost because otherwise those of us who are White might actually have to—insert gasp!—give up some of our privilege.

Imagine, for example, if the predominately White CEOs and other leaders of corporate America suddenly owned the fact that their extreme wealth comes from extremely underpaying their so-called “essential” workers? They might then have to take a little less of that wealth for themselves and give it to their workers in the form of a livable wage. Or imagine if our mostly White political legislatures and executive branches had to embrace the truth about the real source of their power? They might then have to make fair election laws, properly fund education, provide an adequate social safety net, create appropriate tax codes, and engage in other acts of social justice that would enable all Americans to thrive.  Even at the level of the individual, imagine learning that your absolutely favorite restaurant engages in discriminatory hiring practices, what do you do?

The simple truth is that when those of us who are White have to start owning, confronting, and unpacking our privileged position in American society, we are faced with the truth that I first started exploring in “Maybe It’s Pie After All” that we might need to totally change how we understand how our culture works, it’s priorities, and our role in it.  Assumptions such as my friend’s about “to protect and to serve” have to be challenged by “to protect and to serve who?” The perhaps well-meaning but cluelessly hurtful White people who claim “I don’t see color” must learn to see this untruth for what it is and what it says about their default bias about their own skin color.  The White supporters in the recent protests need to understand how their privilege gives them something their fellow Black protestors simply do not have at the march’s end:  the luxury to go home and stop thinking about the situation for a while—as well as the fact that it doesn’t even need to cross their minds to worry about being pulled over merely for the color of their skin as they drive back home from the march.

I could continue, probably nearly indefinitely.  But my intent at this stage is to incentivize my White readers to start creating their own list of unrecognized privilege and hidden assumptions—to realize, for instance, that they can shop in any store they wish without any concern of being shadowed by a clerk, that even the poorest among them will receive better medical care in an emergency room, that they are guaranteed to turn on the television or stream a movie and see people who look like them, that….  Again, I could go on; instead, I challenge my readers who are White to reflect deeply and critically in order to generate their own list.  And if that feels overwhelming or nearly impossible initially, I encourage them to read McIntosh’s list of 50 items and, at the very least, see if they can’t add to it. 

I know it is not easy work to do, owning my racism, wrestling to unpack my White privilege in order to become a better anti-racist, and even though I have been pursuing DEI work for decades now, I still have my blind-spot moments that slap me in the face.  Just two years ago, for example, while having drinks with a friend, she asked me to order another round as she headed to the bathroom, and at a nearby table, a young waitress who was Black was clearly engaged in taking two women’s drink orders.  Without any conscious thought whatsoever, I raised my hand and all but snapped my fingers at the waitress to get her attention, clearly interrupting her taking the others’ orders, and the moment I did it the conscious thought hit me:  OMG! Could I have behaved any more like an entitled White male than I just did? I had managed to be both racist and sexist, all in the unthinking flick of a wrist! I apologized profusely to the waitress when she did eventually come to take our order, but it was a deeply humbling reminder of just how powerful those unconscious predispositions can be—even when you’re deliberately working at disabling them.

Educating for a Better Tomorrow

Yet disable them we must if we are to have any hope for eventually achieving a just and equitable society, and for those of us in education, that starts at the bare minimum with each of us as individuals.  I have written about the issue of bias in schools before, but I think every teacher at every grade-level should be required at the very least to take all the race and gender Implicit Association Tests before being allowed in the classroom. I would even go so far as to argue that completion of these tests should be a condition of licensure and that Schools of Education should require a course in implicit bias as a graduation requirement.  People are not always going to like everything they learn about themselves, but as educators, we need to know what’s lurking in the dark corners of our mind if we are to actively counteract them in our work with children.

That’s because there is evidence that our unconscious predispositions and hidden biases—and more importantly, those of our students—can be deliberately weakened.  Research has shown that something as simple as an imaging exercise (e.g. imagining the properties and characteristics of a strong and successful woman) can decrease the amount of bias (in this case, toward women) as measured on an Implicit Association Test.  Thus, it is critical to know our own biases so that we can take conscious steps to weaken them in ourselves, and it is critical to know the many types of hidden biases there are so that we can help our students weaken theirs.

Educators also need to be well-versed in the nature and types of microaggressions that can be both intentionally and unintentionally targeted at various groups of students.  These seemingly “sticks and stones” moments, such as commenting on a hairstyle, may not seem like much in the moment.  But the research shows that “many minor acts of discrimination can produce effects that are likewise too small to be noticed when they occur but which, if repeated many times, can accumulate in much the same way—only with negative effects, exacting a serious toll on the targets of discrimination” (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 203) as the repeated spikes in cortisol keep the brain in a perpetual state of stress, with all the ill-health consequences that come with that.  Therefore, knowledge and mindfulness of microaggressions is a critical part of any teacher’s anti-racism tool kit.

Yet, as I state above, self-knowledge about one’s own biases and the many forms of subtle discrimination are the bare minimum for which those of us in education should be striving.  It is a no-brainer and, frankly, low-hanging fruit that our curricula should include authors of color in literature classes, children’s books with characters of color in elementary schools, and accurate and honest histories of racism in this country (I should not be 56 before learning of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre for the first time!).  Inclusion of traditionally excluded narratives in the content of our courses is unquestionably a first and necessary step toward fighting the implicit biases that harm our society.  But I would argue that doing so is not sufficient to alter the social structures in this country that determine who has advantage and who does not.

No, I think the only way we change the “have/have-not” situation that aligns along racial lines in this country is to make the deliberate decision to actively teach about White privilege.  And not just in the obvious history and literature classes.  For example, teaching in a health class that:

Black American and other minority groups [suffer] health care disparities that [result] in their receiving less effective medical care than [do] White Americans…even when minority and White patients [are] matched on socioeconomic status and when they [are] known to have the same insurance coverage (Banaji & Greenwald, p. 197).

Then explaining to that same class that as a result, a White American with diabetes will receive the earlier diagnosis and more vigilant preventative care needed to avoid the limb amputations that a Black American with diabetes is far more likely to suffer.  Or perhaps in a math class, students could learn the necessary algebra to calculate the difference in lifetime income between a White taxi driver or waiter and a Black taxi driver or waiter, given that the White taxi driver will receive 33% more in tips with each ride and the White waiter will receive 18% more with each customer.  Then teach them that this is true even when the individual receiving these services is a Black American; that’s how prevalent the White preference bias is in our culture!            

But whether it is these examples or others like them, the simple truth is that it is time we intentionally teach all our children about the unspoken White privilege that permeates our entire society so that everyone can see it for what it is.  Then and only then do I think we have a chance of achieving true racial and socio-economic justice in this land.

Coda

The journey I am promoting is long and never easy, and as McIntosh points out, “the pressure to avoid it is great” (p. 5).  Yet that pressure is not insurmountable if we understand from where it is coming, and for many if not most of my fellow White Americans—what Banaji and Greenwald call “the uncomfortable egalitarians”—this pressure comes, I think, from an error in mindset, the habit of thinking about everything as if it were “either-or.”  For example, the shoe fits or it doesn’t.  Abortion is right or it’s wrong.  You’re a good person or you’re not.  I am a racist or I’m not one.

This kind of binary thinking has its place and has proven enormously useful in science and other analytic fields.  But as that last statement suggests, “either-or” isn’t very helpful when it comes to understanding and overcoming racism because the moment we employ this kind of thinking, it threatens to derail the kind of personal and institutional work I am promoting with regard to unpacking White privilege.  And it does so because today’s society generally agrees that racism is bad, and therefore, the logic of either-or thinking plays out that if I as a White person don’t automatically deny my innate racism, I am bad by definition because I can only be one thing or another; I want to think of myself as a good person…. You get the picture of where the White denial is coming.

Yet as Parker Palmer wisely reminds us, “in certain circumstances, truth is found not by splitting the world into either-ors but by embracing it as both-and.  In certain circumstances, truth is a paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, and if we want to know that truth, we must learn to embrace those opposites as one” (pp. 62-63).  Racism is such a truth, and it is only by embracing that I, as a White person in this country, can be both a racist and an anti-racist that I can become the ally to people of color I am striving to be.  It is only by understanding that both my unconscious thoughts and my conscious thoughts guide my behavior that I can make the deliberate choices needed to dismantle the systems of privilege that give me an advantage at the expense of the disadvantage of others. Thus, it is only by recognizing the paradoxical character of my racism that I can strive to become the good person I want to be. 

Again, the journey is long and never easy, and I struggle with it as much as anyone.  But I need to work each day to unearth my implicit biases and unpack my hidden privilege, and my charge to my White readers not already intentionally on this journey is this:  join those of us who are and become someone who is both a racist and an anti-racist.  Because until you do, any real or lasting change will remain no more than a wishful dream.

References

Author’s Note: While I have quoted exclusively from the work of Mahazrin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald about how the brain generates implicit bias, I have done so only because of the accessibilty of their language. For those seeking a deeper dive into the brain science behind how the unconscious mind works, I have provided the additional references that have informed the material presented here.

Banaji, M. & Greenwald, A. (2013) Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.  New York: Bantham Books.

Battro, A. (2000) Half a Brain Is Enough: The Story of Nico (Cambridge Studies in Cognitive and Perceptual Development).  Cambridge: The University Press.

Feinberg, J. (2001) Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kotlowitz, A. (1992) There are No Children Here. New York: Anchor Books.

McIntosh, P. (1989) White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Peace and Freedom Magazine (July/August). Downloaded at https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf.

Medina, J. (2014) Brain Rules.  Seattle:  Pear Press.

NPR’s Throughline (June 4, 2020) American Police. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/869046127.

Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Ramachandran, V.S. & Blakeslee, S. (1998) Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.  New York: William Morrow.

Tatum, B.D. (1997) Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? New York:  Basic Books.