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IMPACTS OF RACISM ON WHITE AMERICANS IN THE AGE OF TRUMP Edited by DUKE W. AUSTIN BENJAMIN P. BOWSER Impacts of Racism on White Americans In the Age of Trump · Duke W. Austin Benjamin P. Bowser Editors Impacts of Racism on White Americans In the Age of Trump Editors DukeW. Austin Benjamin P. Bowser California State University, East Bay California State University, East Bay Hayward, CA, USA Hayward, CA, USA ISBN 978-3-030-75231-6 ISBN 978-3-030-75232-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75232-3 ©The Editor(s) (if applicable) andThe Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To the rainbow of people for whom “Black Lives Matter”, who cut through cynicism, me-ism, and hopelessness to imagine a better us, and who put their bodies in the way of racism. To Arvie AustinWinsor, Duke Austin’s late grandmother, and to all of the 675,000+ Americans killed by COVID-19 during the writing and production of this book. Foreword For forty years, ever since President Ronald Reagan declared that “Racism in America is Dead,” Benjamin Bowser and his colleagues have been telling a different story. ForWhite Americans, it is a startling story about the damage done to us by our own racial assumptions and policies. Now is a time when we can and must, with renewed attention, learn from the knowledge these authors bring us, for we are in the midst of a crisis; the actions and violence ofWhite racists threaten our democracy. In 1980 when Benjamin Bowser and Raymond Hunt published the first editionofthisbook,ImpactsofRacismonWhiteAmericans,mostWhiteAmer- icans did not imagine that racism had negative effects on their own lives. In fact, few White Americans believed racism was still an important force in American culture, damaging the social fabric in large or small ways. Hadn’t the civil rights movement corrected the racial wrongs? A common consensus among Whites was that racism, then understood as victimization or discrimination against people of color, had been reduced, and America could keep moving forward toward its national ideals. But in thelate1980s,manyWhitepeoplebegantoseethroughthelensofprivilege thatpermeatedlifeinAmerica,conferringonWhitestheadvantagesofbeing born White in a society that favors Whites. Racism was recognized by many ashavinganupside,whichisexemptionfromracialdiscrimination.Manyof us began to understand that a certain amount of power accrued to us even if vii viii Foreword wewerepoor.Wehadcomparativelymorehelpinlifethanpeopleofcolor— in matters of respect, acceptance, pay, housing, healthcare, and legal protec- tions—that we got because we were not being discriminated against racially. Ibegantosuspectthatthesespecialassetsmightnotbeverygoodforus,and not very good for our character as individuals. I did not realize the extent to whichtheywereactuallybadforusormightberuinoustosocietyasawhole. BenjaminBowser,RaymondHunt,andtheauthorsforthesecondedition of Impacts, in 1996, expanded the counterintuitive evidence that privilege is a liability for White people. They collected research on the ways in which racism, in the form of White privilege, negatively impacted even privileged Whites, as well as everyone else. As authors, they collaborated with many other scholars to demonstrate yet again how racism works against Whites’ wellbeing in many different areas of U.S. culture, institutions, and lives. They gathered research on the damage done by the powerful to themselves throughsmallandlargeracistdecisions,policies,andactions.Theirdiagnoses of racism’s pathologies have stood the test of time. NowBenjaminBowserandDukeAustinhaverealizedthatthesetimescall for a further edition of Impacts to reflect the unprecedented effects of racism intheTrumpEra.Iagree,andasIwritethisinFebruaryof2021,thedeadly attack on the United States Capitol carried out by violent racists illustrates more fully than ever before the “impacts of racism onWhite Americans.” The attack on the democracy we live within, carried out by White racists carrying Confederate flags, threatens the American governmental structure that is now intended to serve people of all colors everywhere in the nation. OneimpactofracismonWhiteAmericansisthatitmadethismobofWhite attackers feel entitled to force White supremacy on the democracy that is constitutionally charged with holding us all. The White racist insurrection was and is a threat to U.S. national security and therefore the security of all of us who live in and depend on this albeit incomplete democracy. Howdiditcometoinsurrection?Thisisakeyquestionthechaptersinthis new edition “Impacts” help to answer. The answer is that racism insinuated itselfintoWhitecultureandcooptedmanyofourminds,actions,andideals. ThoughthiseditionofImpacts wasforthemostpartwrittenbeforetheattack on the Capitol, still its chapters give us the authors’ current understandings ofhowtheirfieldsofknowledgeshowracismbeingperpetuatedbyWhitesto thedetrimentofthemselves,afflictingeventhemostpowerfulandapparently safest members of our society. The costs to White people are documented in chapters on income, housing, health, foreign relations, gender, education, athletics, and universities’ admissions policies. In most cases, what I think is being documented is not unconscious White privilege, nor conscious White Foreword ix supremacy, but rather what as I see as a middle ground of White control, consistently resisting the sharing of power, consistently evading the question of what might be “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Racism percolating in society led to theWhite mob’s attack on the capitol that threatened the nation’s most politically powerful White legislators, and it was White racism and violence in the temperament of Trump, the most powerful man in the United States, that incited the mob to attack theWhite seat of government.Their Whiteness has allowed most members of the mob to get away with their attack, suffering little punishment as of this date. But mostpeopleofallethnicitiesfeeldamagedbytheracistattackbyWhitesthat has undermined the nation in which they, for better or worse, wish to live. In the wake of the insurrection, this book can serve as an encouragement for White people to analyze our own psyches as well as our workplaces, schools, families, and media for the harm done by our habitual taken-for- granted racial ideas. What are racism’s impacts on us? Are they good for us? Do they help us? Are they bad for us? Do they work against us? Are there some ways we can lessen dominating behaviors and attitudes that we feel are most damaging to us, our communities, and our quality of life? Are there ways we can come to understand better what we are doing? I will tell here a story of healing that involves sharing power with those I wastaughttodominate:students.Ilectured;theylistened.Itested;Igraded. I was a strict grader and a respected teacher who “knew what she wanted.” That was all right for the teaching of English usage and grammar, but when it came to the wider worlds of human experience, I joined with other college teachers from four different fields to create an American Studies curriculum that students devised for themselves.We lectured briefly for part of the time, but they taught each other most of the time, identified what they wanted to study, and told each other about what they found.They taught us.Word got out, and all of the students wanted to take our courses. Students and faculty of color could identify what they wanted to study and say. We evaded subtle hierarchies of race in the curriculum, the teaching roles, and in the whole climate of the classroom. I feel the older system had cost all of us as teachers. The racism of the hierarchyinwhichWhiteteacherssetalltherulesandstandardsparadoxically cost me, a White teacher, peace of mind. It made me feel tense, vulnerable, unprepared,onguard,neverknowingenough,nevergoodenough,exhausted bythestrainofsoloteaching.ThoughIwasaverypopularteacher,IfeltIwas never“ontopofit.”NowIthinkthatbeing“ontopofit”wasaraciallybased ideal of superiority—knowing more than all the students about everything. I thinkthefeelingthatImustbesuperiortothemwasbasedonsubtletraining x Foreword in social and racial life; I had to be able to look down on others. Did I think training in White “excellence” was detrimental to me? It got me “ahead” in White structures, but now I think in many ways it was indeed detrimental to my growth and development. It was training in keeping racialized Others out—keeping out unlicensed Others’ thoughts, ideas, knowledge, cultures, and humanity. So the classroom was an excluding place. For this reason, I understand every chapter of this book as an invitation to look at how my deeper self-interest as a White person may be served by getting smarter about structures of dominance in and around me. White certainty about who and what counts in education had cost me heavily.The freedom to connect multiculturally and across lines of age is emancipation. Sociallyawareteacherswhousechaptersfromthisbookknowthatlearning about racism can make Whites who are new to the subject feel confused, defensive, offended, angry, indignant, resistant, and fearful that if they share racial power, they will lose the lives they have become accustomed to. The authorsofthisbookaregentlewithsuchnewreaders.Instructorsmaynever- thelessseesomedistressinWhitereaderswhoareunpreparedtoimaginethat racismhurtseventhem.Thisisnotareasonforeducatorstoavoidthesubject. Many White people who feel invulnerable now will later have to weather timeswhentheyrealizetheracialsystemswerenotgoodforthemeither,and theywillwanttoknowhowtobeginactingonthatknowledge.Thechapters in this book will support them to change without blaming them for systems they did not invent. I have a debt of gratitude to these editors who, decade after decade, care- fully and persistently provided us with scholarship confirming that a racist society is not good for anyone. I feel indebted also to these many authors who have opened up the question of how the dominants may pay a high pricefordominance.Maywehaveafourtheditionthatcontainsbetternews. Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D. Founder and Senior Associate, National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Wellesley College Wellesley, MA, USA Foreword xi Peggy McIntosh is a Senior Research Associate of the Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College. Dr. McIntosh is the Founder of the National SEED ProjectonInclusiveCurriculum(SeekingEducationalEquityandDiversity),which she co-directed with EmilyStyle forits first 30 years. She is the authorof the influ- entialwork,“WhitePrivilege:UnpackingtheInvisibleKnapsack”(1989).Sixteenof herworksonprivilege,education,andpsychologymaybefoundinthebookofher essaysOnPrivilege,Fraudulence,andTeachingasLearning:SelectedEssays1981–2019 (Routledge, 2019).