An anthology prepared by students in Professor Gissler's 2002 seminar

White Anti-Racists
They Battle Bigotry from the Inside Out

By Jean Gordon

Two days after the World Trade Center attack, Ari Zwartjes crammed into a packed Lower East Side auditorium with 300 political activists. Zwartjes was there to plan an anti-war response to the patriotic groundswell taking hold across the country. Though the meeting drew people from diverse causes — from halting the U.S. Navy's bombing in Vieques, to establishing a Palestinian state, to freeing convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal — most of the people in the room, like Zwartjes, were white.

And she soon became dismayed.

A 24-year-old with cropped blond hair, Zwartjes said a few vocal white activists dominated the discussion, urging coalition members to patrol Arab neighborhoods to protect residents from anti-Arab harassment. For Zwartjes, who runs an after-school program at a Bronx homeless shelter, this approach was wrong.

"It was very paternalistic," Zwartjes said, explaining that nobody thought to first check with the Arab communities to find out what their needs were.

"They weren't listening to some of the people in the room who were connected with communities of color," she said.

Zwartjes is part of a growing group of grassroots activists, most of them on the political left, who view the elimination of discrimination, police brutality, belief in white superiority and what they consider other forms of racism as integral to successful social change. Recognizing that many political movements — like protests against sweatshops and deforestation — tend to attract mostly white people, Zwartjes aims to educate herself and other white activists about their own biases in order to build more effective coalitions with people of color. In a sense, they often are doing in the street what some universities now are trying in the classroom with various forms of "white studies" courses.

While the roots of white anti-racist activism date back to the 1950s and 1960s — when whites marched arm-in-arm with blacks in the struggle for civil rights — the movement's current incarnation aims to undo racism from the inside out. Based on the premise that whites cause and perpetuate racial injustice, anti-racist activists believe it is the responsibility of white people to put an end to it.

"People of color shouldn't always have to be the ones calling white people out on their racism," said Zwartjes, a native of Maine who moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, nearly two years ago after studying abroad in Asia and Central America for three years.

Within three months of the post-Sept. 11 meeting, Zwartjes formed a study group with a dozen white people in order to both understand "white privilege" — which they define as the social and economic advantages white people get because of their skin color — and to plan anti-racist workshops for white political organizers.

"One advantage to having it be an all-white group is that folks are less hesitant and guarded," Zwartjes said. "If there was an interracial training team they would try to be PC, and that's not necessarily going to move you along if you're not talking about the hard stuff." But, she added, all-white groups have to make sure they forge relationships with people of color who will give the white trainers guidance and "check up on" their anti-racist work.

"You have to have people in your life whom you are accountable to," Zwartjes said.

Former Black Panther Ashanti Alston plays this role for many white activists. A black political organizer raised in Plainview, N.J., Alston, 48, was imprisoned for 12 years in the 1970s and 1980s for his role in a bank robbery to support the Black Liberation Movement. He now teaches high school equivalency classes to former prisoners and troubled teenagers at an ex-offender organization in New York City. For the last five years, he also has teamed with a white woman to conduct workshops aimed at eradicating racism, sexism and homophobia within the activist community.

A soft-spoken man with a shaved head and a graying goatee, Alston said he was initially opposed to all-white anti-racist workshops because he thought racial bias could only be addressed in a multiracial setting. But, after running workshops for white political organizers, during which he had difficulty getting them to talk openly about prejudice, he now supports this model.

"I would ask people even just on a basic level to share some experiences in their past when they first heard the term, 'nigger,'" he said. "I think it was just too uncomfortable for them to do because I would get this silence.

"And I'm like, 'I know you all heard the word,'" he said with a laugh.

Though many of the efforts of anti-racist activists involve consciousness-raising, some of the work is purely instructional.

Zwartjes said that while planning civil disobedience actions like sit-ins and road blockages — during which protesters get arrested — whites have to be aware that black protesters may be treated more harshly by police. So, she said, whites need to learn how to deal respectfully with the police to avoid imperiling non-white activists.

Evelyn Lee, a white organizer for the Citizen's Committee, is part of Zwartjes' anti-racist training group, which meets twice a month over pizza to hammer out curriculum and strategize how to pitch their workshops to different grassroots organizations.

Their first workshop will target New York City gay and lesbian groups because most of the trainers identify themselves as "queer" — a term they use to encompass gay, lesbian and transgendered people. "We're trying to challenge the queer movement," Lee said. "Or lack thereof."

Lee described how the gay and lesbian community is divided along race and class lines, which she said undermines their power as a collective political force. For example, she believes racial differences spark the current turf war between the young gay and transgendered people of color who flock to the West Village streets to socialize, and the older, mostly white residents who routinely call the police to kick them out.

A 24-year-old with a strawberry blond bob and jumbo hoop earrings, Lee says middle-aged and older white gays seem more concerned about issues of assimilation — like gay marriages — and ignore the fact that gay blacks and Latinos assemble in the West Village because they feel ostracized within their own neighborhoods.

Though Lee wants to create racial solidarity in the gay and lesbian community, she has longer-term goals for her anti-racist work. A native of Charlotte, N.C., Lee hopes to bring her experience training white activists in New York City back to North Carolina to help organize stronger unions in the textile and furniture factories outside Charlotte.

When companies shut down American factories to move their operations to countries with cheaper labor, Lee said, displaced American workers often direct their anger toward foreigners rather than company executives. "For me it's about organizing working class white folks to understand what imperialism is doing and to unlearn racism," she said.

Lee's childhood gave her a first-hand experience about how race and class can divide people. Raised in a trailer park by a single mother who sold vacuum cleaners door to door, Lee spent most of her life poor. But by the time Lee turned 14, her mother had worked her way into a successful customs brokerage business and was able to buy a house in an upper-middle-class part of town. Accustomed to being the minority in her predominately black neighborhood and school - but equally comfortable with her black and white friends who shared tastes for rap, hip-hop and country music — Lee found the culture of the wealthiest public school in Charlotte jarring.

Lee said she was especially mystified by the school's segregation and the white students' conversations about teen cotillion balls and grunge music. "That was my first taste of people living differently than I lived," she said.

Before transferring to her new high school filled with college-bound classmates, Lee attended a weeklong retreat called Camp Anytown, a program for teens run by the National Conference for Community Justice. The camp brought together people from different ethnic, racial and economic backgrounds for workshops on racism, sexism and homophobia.

Through techniques like "speak outs," in which teenagers were divided into caucuses — male and female, people of color and whites, homosexuals and heterosexuals — the groups that felt discrimination spoke in one voice to the groups they felt inflicted discrimination. For example, the female group finished statements like, "One way I've been hurt by men is...," and "One thing I never want to see a man do to a woman is...," and delivered the messages in unison to the male caucus.

"It's more than just teaching people not to say a racist comment," Lee said about anti-racist work. "It's talking about the whole society and how it has to change."

Understanding the power and privileges of being white, Lee said, is an essential part of this transformation.

Not everyone approaches the problem as an activist. For Jeff Hitchcock, it is an academic question. The founder and executive director of the Center for Studies of White American Culture in Roselle, N.J., a resource for academics, diversity trainers and anti-racist activists, Hitchcock has seen a re-emergence of white studies and anti-racist activism since the late 1980s after the publication of some seminal works like "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," by Wellesley College professor Peggy McInstosh. The book describes how whites carry unearned advantages, like being able to trust that real estate agents won't discriminate against them, and having the comfort of being a majority in most parts of society.

But rather than emphasize the popular aspects of American white culture like gun shows, Elvis Presley mania and Harley Davidson motorcycle gangs, white studies examines how a white-dominated society has shaped the power structures of American government, corporations, nonprofit organizations and neighborhoods.

Though the discipline hasn't become a freestanding program within any university, a growing number of "whiteness" courses have cropped up within sociology, women's studies and African-American studies departments. There have also been more national conferences over the last decade on topics like "Understanding White Privilege," "What White People Can Do About Racism," "Learning How to Talk About Whiteness," and "Decentering Whiteness to Build a Multiracial Society."

Hitchcock said he got into the field because he saw a gap in scholarship about whiteness. Having worked for a minority-owned consulting firm, being married to a black woman, and having two biracial children, Hitchcock found he was usually the only white person in both his work and home life. Being a minority made Hitchcock more aware of his own culture, so he decided to examine what it meant to be white.

Though the center is devoted to the study of white culture, it is explicitly multiracial. Its Web site carries this boldface disclaimer: "Not an organization for white supremacists, as some people might infer, we are instead a multiracial organization that looks at whiteness and white American culture." He describes his work as a departure from the diversity training popular in the 1980s and 1990s that promoted what he called "cultural tourism," in which white participants were nudged to learn more about their non-white co-workers' culture rather than addressing their own prejudices. Through research, publishing books and holding conferences, his center hopes to promote an understanding of white privilege and a more egalitarian multiracial society.

"Our philosophy is that white culture is a force of central authority in our culture and white values have to be taken out of the center and replaced with multicultural values," Hitchcock said.

"There's some contradictions in the work that are difficult to resolve," Hitchcock conceded, explaining how in order for whites to unlearn racism, they have to develop a racial consciousness for themselves. "I've just decided to live with them."

Lee, Zwartjes and the members of their anti-racist training group also focus on white culture and privilege in their monthly study sessions, during which they read, talk and write about race relations, the civil rights movement and the history of multicultural political organizing.

Steve Therberge, a 21-year-old white college student, joined the study sessions and the anti-racist training group after helping plan a national conference in New York City on what he calls "the prison industrial complex." A native of Amherst, Mass., whose parents were anti-war activists, union organizers and are currently anti-prison activists, Therberge has the word "liberation" tattooed in large block letters in the space between his elbow and his wrist.

The prison conference, he said, was "a huge wake-up call" and the first time he had done "multicultural organizing." Though he had been politically active since age 14 when he joined the national food distribution organization, Food Not Bombs, Therberge said he mainly encountered white activists in the course of his work. Even after he dropped out of high school at age 16 to pursue independent study of social justice issues and join groups that were sending books to prisons and protesting Mumia Abu-Jamal's murder conviction, Therberge continued to find himself in predominately white groups.

Shortly after moving to New York City to attend Columbia University, Therberge, an ethnic studies major, joined the anti-prison organization Critical Resistance and started working on the conference. Being part of a multiracial organizing group, he said, made him realize how racial conflicts can emerge even among politically like-minded people.

"Before I came to New York I thought I was an evolved white anti-racist," he said.

Though he has some trepidation about working with an exclusively white group, Therberge believes that white people are more comfortable talking about their prejudices and privileges in the company of other whites, and can therefore move beyond them more quickly.

"Racism is not a black problem or an Asian problem," Therberge said during a break from writing his end-of-the-semester term papers. "It's a white problem."

Therberge, who has a square white cloth bearing the slogan "Another Jew for a free Palestine" pinned to his canvas messenger bag, said people are always more effective organizing in their own communities.

Jim Hayes, 68, takes a different approach. A black civil rights activist and co-founder of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, a two-decades-old multiracial organization that conducts anti-racist workshops nationwide, Hayes believes racial attitudes should be discussed in a multiracial setting.

"If you want to deal with racism, how can you have a comfort zone?" he said. As such, a team of black, Asian, Latino and white facilitators lead the People's Institute's workshops for social workers, teachers, community organizers and nonprofit groups. The trainers introduce the topic of white privilege by posing the question, "What do you like about being white?" to all the whites in the group. Once white people acknowledge and discuss the advantages they have in American society, Hayes says, they begin to talk more honestly about race relations.

Ari Zwartjes concedes that all-white training groups are only a starting point for anti-racist work, but believes that in order to be truly honest in multiracial settings, whites first need to learn how to talk to each other about their racial blindness.

"Just like men won't necessarily listen to a woman calling them out on stuff, whereas they might listen to a man, I think there's that same trend amongst white folks," Zwartjes said about whites confronting each other about their prejudices. "Which is certainly not to say that it should be only white people. But I definitely think there's a certain value in white people stepping up to work with each other."


Back to Race and Ethnicity 2002

HTTP/1.1 404 Object Not Found Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 13:42:49 GMT Content-Type: text/html

404 Object Not Found