Lisa Solod Warren’s December 16th, 2009 article (which has since been deleted) in The Huffington Post titled Two Black Role Models Done In By Hubris invoked a great deal of outrage. I caught wind of the article via Twitter where people were expressing emotions ranging from utter dismay to outright anger at – among other things – the racially patronizing tone in which the article was written. In a previous article I used Warren’s article as an example for the importance of white writers to check their privilege before embarking on writing about racial issues. However, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the aftermath.

If you ever find yourself in this kind of situation, the best thing you can do is set aside your ego and listen. The knee-jerk reaction is to go on the defensive, but the best thing is to ignore that impulse and take in what is being said to you. Even in the heat of disagreement, it is crucial to try to empathize. Unfortunately, that’s not what Warren chose to do.

Beware: The symptoms of Foot-in-Mouth Disease

First, Warren became dismissive, glibly stating:

“it seems I am being labeled by some a racist. No rationale for that but people like to call out names.” Then—not content with having only one foot in her mouth—she became defensive, saying “seems anyone who speaks about race is a racist.”

Let’s break this down one foot at a time.

If you write an article that results in a mass of people denouncing your article and possibly yourself as racist, it’s not going to be for some arbitrary reason. Though it won’t be comfortable, you need to accept the idea that you may have done what it is you are being accused. Calling the large group of people whom you offended irrational is not going to help. They’re angry for a reason, you have to acknowledge that.

No serious person is ever going to say it’s racist to talk about race. That’s nonsense. The whole it’s racist to acknowledge/see/talk about race thing desperately needs to go away. While the idea of colour-blindness may seem altruistic to some, it’s really a byproduct of white privilege. The ability to see race as a “card” to be “played” is also a byproduct of white privilege. The problem isn’t in acknowledging race but in letting race be a marker for determining a person’s worth or quality as a human being. Since Western society confers unequal privilege to those who are white, white people and people of colour experience life differently. To ignore this reality, to refuse to acknowledge race, is to willfully promote this inequality.

If you find yourself in this kind of situation and decide to respond, a piece of advice: don’t ever try to back up what you said by citing the number of people of colour that are your friends/colleagues/acquaintances. Saying something like:

“you would be surprised at the number of black people I know”

will not bolster your credibility. What will also not help is stating your political ideology as evidence of your lack of racism, even if it is “liberal democrat.” Just because you consider yourself “liberal” or “progressive” doesn’t mean you are automatically free of aversive racism. (Not to mention, the Democratic Party was known as “the white man’s party” for much of its early existence. Don’t forget, the KKK was comprised of mostly Democrats in its beginning.)

The last best hope for redemption

Even if you managed to fit not only both feet but your entire lower torso into your mouth, there is still an opportunity for redemption. You can make all the mistakes above and still manage to turn the situation around into a true learning experience. The way to allow such an experience help you grow as a person is by staying engaged.

Amongst the (justifiably) angry tweets, some including myself tried to reach out and engage Warren via Twitter in hopes of educating her on privilege. What could have transpired is a healthy dialogue on white privilege, aversive racism and how to identify and confront these within ourselves. The outcome of such a dialogue could have been Warren writing a new article about the whole experience and how she came to identify the racially condescending overtones of her previous article. She could have held herself accountable for her words. At the very least, she could have apologized.

Any or all of that could have happened, but it didn’t. Warren chose to ignore the opportunity. Her last public words on the matter (that I could find) was “I am the naive one. I never expected the post in HuffPo yesterday to go viral. I’m not a racist but it will be hard to convince otherwise.” To forgo for now the logical quagmire of trying to prove a negative, it’s unfortunate that Warren tuned out. Perhaps the sting of irony was too great; after all, her offending article was based on the alleged hubris and supposed downfalls of President Obama and Tiger Woods. If ever there was a more profound example of irony or hubris than what happened with that article, I don’t know what it is.

Final piece of advice: Start here

Peggy McIntosh’s paper White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1988) is widely considered the primer on the topic of white privilege. Despite being written over 20 years ago, much of what McIntosh says still applies to our contemporary Western society. It truly is required reading for white writers and activists who wish to seriously engage in discussions on race. Lisa Warren may have brushed off the suggestion to read it, but I hope those of you reading this article that are white will take the few minutes it requires and read it now.

Engaging with issues regarding race and racism are critical in the fight for social justice. Due to the inherent complexities of such discussions, they easily become minefields for those who would casually wander such terrain. Two salient examples of such dilettantism from this past week are Lisa Solod Warren and MTV News (Canada).

Lisa Solod Warren (www.lisasolodwarren.com)

On December 16th, 2009, an article posted on The Huffington Post by Virginia-based author Lisa Solod Warren stirred up a whole lot of justifiable anger from the public. Both people of color and whites were expressing offense to Warren’s article titled Two Black Role Models Done in by Hubris (removed from HuffPost posted in a forum here) in which the author draws racialized parallels between US President Barack Obama’s waning public support and Tiger Woods’s sex scandal. The article—which has been overwhelmingly panned throughout Internet blogs, forums and Twitter as both condescending and racist—was removed from both The Huffington Post and Salon.com within two days of its publication. I managed to find the first paragraph still online:

“In the past few weeks, the two most famous and arguably most successful black men in America have taken a huge fall. It has become clear that both pro golfer Tiger Woods, just named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press, and the American president, Barack Obama, the first black person to lead the country, suffer from a surfeit of hubris which has finally caught up with them. If both men somehow thought they were untouchable, they have been put to right. Both have crashed to earth and it may well be true that they can never recover their earlier status again.”

I’m not going to spend time here picking apart each erroneous statement; that’s beyond the scope of my article (though I do strongly recommend reading Sister Toldja’s visceral commentary and response “Put To Right”: Lisa Warren and the Liberal White Hood). What I want to discuss is Warren’s first mistake in writing the article, which is what many white authors tend to do when broaching the subject of race: neglecting to check her privilege.

For white people wanting to become sincere allies in the fight for racial justice, they need to acknowledge the white privilege that underscores their position in our racially stratified society. It’s not an easy process, and to be honest it is a life-long one; but constant mindfulness of white privilege is fundamental in order that white journalists become allies. In order for a white person to write about race with any credibility or competency, they need to go through the same personal confrontation. Otherwise, they are setting themselves up to repeat the same racist attitudes with which they’ve been programmed throughout a lifetime of privilege.

I and many others don’t believe that Warren was being intentionally offensive in her writing, but then again racist thought, or a racist perspective, is seldom intentional. Part of the definition of white privilege is color-blindness. It could have been in the most well-meaning of spirits that Warren set forth to write the article, but the consequences of her words were hurtful and offensive. Intentions can be good and sincere, but they don’t mean a thing if the resulting work leads to exacerbating the situation instead of helping it, which brings us to MTV News.

I’m not a fan of MTV by any stretch of the imagination (I don’t even get cable). I only became aware of MTV host Aliya Jasmine when she posted this on Twitter back in late November:

“Speaking @ Diversity conference for high school students in Toronto this morning. Canada is multi-cultural, but does RACISM still exist?”

I find the very framing of the question extremely troubling. To me, and dare I say most adult Canadians not living inside a bubble, the existence of racism in Canada is not open to debate at all. Racism’s existence in Canadian society is an absolute fact. Though it doesn’t get reported nearly as often as it occurs, racist violence in Canada does get occasional newspaper coverage. While they ostensibly aren’t as prevalent as they were back in the early 90’s, Canadian white supremacist and neo-Nazi skinhead groups are still around. Stories of racism amongst members of our military and first responders still creep up in the media. In fact, a 2007 Canadian study found that “fifty-nine per cent of Quebecers admit to being racist to some degree [while] only 47 per cent of those outside Quebec say they are racist to some degree.” The very idea that racism’s existence in Canada is up for grabs is as offensive and ignorant as if asking “did Nazi concentration camps really exist?” The answer to both questions is an overwhelming and document-supported YES.

On its December 14, 2009 Canadian edition, MTV News broadcast the footage from the November 17th conference Jasmine mentioned in her tweet. It was sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Diversity and had a panel of young adults, including Jasmine, talking to a group of high school students in Toronto about prejudice. For its newscast, MTV News aired some of the students responding to the question “does racism still exist in Canada?” (Watch the newscast online — it’s the fourth segment.) Engaging students on issues of racial justice is critical, and while MTV News may have had good intentions with this piece, they ended up doing more harm than good.

The first student’s response to the question is “wherever there are a lot of cultures and races, there’s going to be discrimination.” On the surface that appears to make sense. But research has shown that differences in skin color itself does not logically lead to racism. Diversity trainer Jane Elliot’s “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise demonstrated that “prejudice and bigotry [are] an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors.” While the young student can’t be faulted for her answer, the people at MTV News didn’t help at all by repeating the falsehood, thereby perpetuating the myth that racism is a natural consequence of diversity.

MTV News’s naiveté is not surprising considering the source. Let’s be real: the network which brings us “Jersey Shore” is not going to engage complex racial issues with any degree of competency. Regardless, their dilettantish attempt at discussing racism gave nothing to their young viewers to actually think about. Worse, their “shucks, ain’t it a shame racism is still around?” puff piece reinforced the misconception of racism as something natural, prompting viewers to conclude that it’s human nature to be racist — which in turn makes them less inspired to fight back against racism and more likely to embrace it. This is clearly not helping.

The young students can’t be blamed for their naiveté because they’re not being given the tools needed in order to think critically about racism. Their minds are being hamstrung from identifying or understanding racism in the present because they are not being taught racism’s roots in the past.

As I mentioned in my last article, I am currently working on a documentary film titled A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada. One of the recurring themes in Canadian life my film sets out to confront is the general denial about our (Canadians, that is) slave past. During its first 200 years, Canada—like the US—relied on slave labour; and like in the United States, it was a prevalent part of our society. Yet despite its pivotal role in the establishment of the first colonies in Nouvelle France (now Québec) in the late 1600’s and ubiquitousness in day-to-day Canadian life until its abolishment in the 1830’s, Canada’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and its slavery of Aboriginal and African people completely escapes mention in our history textbooks and classrooms.

The result of this is slavery’s total absence from our national historical narrative and our collective social conscience—except, of course, for the bits that make us look and feel good vis-a-vis the American Civil War and the fight to abolish slavery there. Canadians, for the most part, are kept ignorant about the roots of racism and white privilege in our own country.

If we’re going to be serious about ending racism, we have to get serious about educating young minds about the various forms of racism and how they manifest. We also need to talk openly about white privilege and how it persists. Through teaching a more complete (and less biased) history, we arm students with the tools and knowledge to better engage complex issues like systemic racism and white privilege and to hopefully solve them rather than contribute to their insidiousness.

I’m going to try to improve the frequency in my postings. However, since I am still settling into my new job and new apartment, it’ll take some time. For now, I’ll be republishing my Race-Talk/Huffington Post articles.

However about a year ago I got hip to a few trending topics for people working in the film and television post-production world: #editingandpost and #postproduction. These quickly proved to be useful tools in relation to my day gig as an editor at a visual effects company. As I started to enter into initial production (the phase I am calling my gathering of interview material) I decided to not only set up this site/blog, but also use Twitter as a means to spread awareness. Through this I started to engage other people on Twitter who post on social justice issues, especially those pertaining to #racism.

It was through this medium that I met Jamaal Ra’Shon Bell from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. He invited me to be a guest contributor for Race-Talk.org, a new online magazine/blog which aims to “revolutionize thought, communication and activism related to race and equality.” It is very new, having officially launched just this past week, but already has a swath of great articles that I encourage you to go read… NOW!

I am honoured and feel privileged to be offered an opportunity to contribute to such a project.