“White Folks”

“In the early months of 2006, Lensmire returned to Boonendam to interview white folks about their feelings on race. He asked his subjects about their childhoods and families, about the role they thought race played in their own lives and communities, and about contemporary issues of race and racism. He listened but also gently prodded, interceding at strategic moments with a question or challenge. In this way he was able to elicit both the stories as his subjects told them to themselves, and some of the hidden patterns that could emerge only under thoughtfully applied pressure...

This scene, Lensmire suggests, points to a kind of whiteness that arises not only from its hate or fear of blackness—a fear that has all too often been tied, in American history, to fantasies of revenge and violence—but also from the tension between those malignant emotions and an acute awareness of black humanity. “What white people cannot live with,” writes Lensmire, “is their social role as white people in the American drama given that playing this role demands the betrayal of the sacred principle of equality. Wanting to believe in America, freedom, and equality, but confronted with the hard work and uncertainty of democracy as well as with massive inequality all around us, we scapegoat and stereotype people of color.”...

It’s a bit too glib, maybe, to suggest that the development seminars were another version of that magic rite that Lensmire had conducted back in Boonendam, where certain constructions and performances of race serve to temporarily soothe the cognitive dissonance of those whose ideals are routinely betrayed by the power structure from which they benefit. White privilege and supremacy talk is not blackface minstrelsy. But it does not seem unlikely that the prevailing language for theorizing whiteness and white people has evolved to provide psychological benefits to a very particular constituency, within very particular contexts.”