{"id":1392,"date":"2022-03-21T10:00:50","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T10:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/?p=1392"},"modified":"2022-03-21T11:17:45","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T11:17:45","slug":"on-white-privilege-and-anesthesia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/on-white-privilege-and-anesthesia\/","title":{"rendered":"On White Privilege and Anesthesia"},"content":{"rendered":"

America has, once again, entered a period of public racial reckoning. No single event has brought us to this place. A malignant presidency and the January 6th<\/sup> attack on the U.S. Capitol have tested the resilience of our republic. A global pandemic coupled with an economic recession and accelerating climate change have pushed us into a\u00a0 world few recognize. Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName, and other social justice movements have invited white people to return to James Baldwin\u2019s disagreeable mirror\u00ad\u2013 the mirror that shows white people the parts of ourselves and our histories that we would rather not feel.<\/p>\n

The social value of whiteness is usually discussed in terms of privilege\u2013 that special class of systemically conferred and culturally nourished advantages that benefit white-looking people. The etymological roots of privilege (\u2018private law\u2019) point to its capricious nature. Whiteness confers unearned advantages across a variety of situations. Whiteness calms police officers. It enhances credibility, reliability, and trustworthiness. Whiteness gets people\u2019s attention. It signals leadership. It makes white employers think you are a \u2018good fit\u2019 for the position. The meme-worthy request to \u2018check your privilege,\u2019 invites us to make visible those unearned advantages we are socialized to ignore. When we interpret this request narrowly, as simply an invitation to make visible privilege\u2019s hidden value, we do the work of the head not the heart. This is not accidental. White people are more comfortable considering what whiteness does for<\/em> us, than we are feeling what it does to<\/em> us.\u00a0 But, we need to feel the damage because racism doesn\u2019t just live in our thoughts, it resides comfortably in our hearts, guts, and bodies. It has weight.<\/p>\n

My recent book The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance<\/em><\/a> (2021) attends to the weighty dimension of what white supremacy does to us. \u00a0Weights are measured in kilos, ounces, or carats. The weight of whiteness is measured in the costs and losses to our collective humanity. Black, Indigenous, and people of color feel the weight of whiteness daily. Claudia Rankin felt the weight when white men repeatedly cut in front of her as she waited to board her flight. Breonna Taylor felt the weight when the Louisville police battered down her apartment door and shot her eight times. Some white people recognize the weighty imprint of whiteness on people of color’s lives. However, when we are asked to attend to the weight in our own being we become confused and resistant. I don\u2019t know what you are talking about! I don\u2019t feel any weight. Whiteness doesn\u2019t feel heavy for me at all! <\/em>These responses are significant. It\u2019s not that white people feel nothing at all. We feel something. What we feel is numbness. Privilege anesthetizes us to the damage within us. White people\u00a0 are numb to the fact that we have surrendered our humanity in the name of belonging.<\/p>\n

I want to invite you to a \u2018weighty conversation,\u201d one that asks white people to consider the how the habits of whiteness contort our humanity. My invitation summons white people to take up relational<\/em> understandings of how the violence done to communities of color depends on white people being psychologically, morally, materially, spiritually, and epistemically disfigured enough to allow that violence to continue generation after generation. Mab Segrest describes the numbness as the \u201canesthesia of power.\u201d Consider how desensitized white spectators attending slave auctions, public lynchings, and other acts of violence had to become for the violence to continue. Think about how these atrocities continue today under different names\u00ad\u2013 our increased tolerance for the incarceration of immigrant children, school shootings, human trafficking, and police violence against Black and Brown communities.<\/p>\n

The language of anesthesia helps me to understand why it takes so much time and labor to name and feel whiteness\u2019s weight. The anesthesia of privilege can be broadly understood as anything that allows white people to look away, stop listening, disconnect, dissociate, distract ourselves, or otherwise break the connections we have with other beings. The everyday anesthetizing habits of white people appear as inattention, lack of interest, or indifference to the concerns, needs, lived experiences, and traumatic histories that communities of color repeatedly put before us. Most white people are so habitually hooked on whiteness that we can\u2019t imagine what it\u2019s like to live without anesthesia.<\/p>\n

White privilege and supremacy rely on white ignorance, distraction, and anesthesia to function smoothly. We anesthetize ourselves when we blame marginalized groups for the injustices they suffer and for \u201cmaking us\u201d feel guilty about it. We desensitize our hearts when we fail to be fully present for people of color when we are in one another\u2019s company. White talk, white fragility, and white defensiveness are anesthesia, and so is ignorance. Segregation is anesthesia because it breaks human connections geographically and spatially. We anesthetize ourselves when we confine our lives to white spaces to avoid the discomfort of moving through locations where our whiteness feels raw and exposed. \u00a0We numb out when we consign racial violence to the past and offer accounts of what things are better today. The mantra \u201cI don\u2019t see color,\u201d numbs us to the fact that race is often the first thing noticed about somebody. The anesthesia kicks in when we act as if some people\u2019s lives, neighborhoods, cultures, histories, and well-being matter more than others. The myth of meritocracy makes white people unresponsive to the reality that people of color work three times as hard to get half as far. These anesthetizing habits of whiteness permit white people to move through the world on a less-vibrant emotional register, half-awake, uncurious, and oblivious to the fact that the insensitivity to our own insensitivity contributes to people of color\u2019s continued suffering.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m convinced that our collective survival depends on white people having the courage to leave the comforts of whiteness long enough to attend to the weight of our own brokenness\u2013 long enough to break the habit of choosing anesthesia over knowledge. The uncertain nature of these times offers the opportunity to slow down long enough not only feel and hold space with the weight that breaks us, but also to cultivate the sensitivity required to cut through the anesthesia. The weighty conversation is not optional. There is too much at stake.\u00a0 \u00a0White supremacy banks on white people\u2019s fear of the weighty conversation. So long as we are numb to the weight of whiteness in own being the violence will continue.<\/em> White supremacy does not want white people to feel its weight because if we realized its true costs; that is, if the price of whiteness were presented to us as an actual bill, then we would realize that the racial contract that Charles W. Mills describes is really a suicide pact.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo by Alison Bailey Women’s March in Washington, D.C., 2016<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"America has, once again, entered a period of public racial reckoning. No single event has brought us to this place. A malignant presidency and the January 6th attack on the […]","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":1395,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Alison Bailey \"On White Privilege and Anesthesia\" on Open for Debate","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[157,332,333,331],"custom_author":[330],"class_list":["post-1392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-for-debate","tag-race","tag-usa","tag-white-ignorance","tag-white-privilege","custom_author-bailey-alison"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8KPlM-ms","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1088,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/the-lies-they-tell-us-facing-up-to-the-uks-ignorance-of-racial-oppression\/","url_meta":{"origin":1392,"position":0},"title":"The Lies They Tell Us: Facing Up to the UK\u2019s Ignorance of Racial Oppression","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"December 28, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"In May 2019, I travelled to UWE Bristol, to speak at the Critical Theory and Feminism Conference. 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Amina, as politely as possible, tells the white woman not to touch her hair.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2022\/10\/dunne-0_0_image001.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2022\/10\/dunne-0_0_image001.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2022\/10\/dunne-0_0_image001.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1693,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/a-case-against-the-argument-from-collective-amnesia-and-forgetting\/","url_meta":{"origin":1392,"position":3},"title":"A Case against the Argument from \u201cCollective Amnesia\u201d and \u201cForgetting\u201d","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"May 15, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"The term collective amnesia is often used to analyse cases or states in which morally, socially and politically pertinent knowledge, such as knowledge about historical injustices, is (arguably) absent or unavailable in a society\u2019s collective memory. 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