Irving, the author of “Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race.” Instead of listening and offering support, they tend to make the conversations about themselves, said Ms. Oftentimes, they’re just not equipped to do it, said Debby Irving, a racial justice writer who is white. Many white people are uncomfortable talking about race or defensive against accusations of racism, according to academics. Living among and interacting with people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, scholars tell us, is supposed to help us understand one another better and bridge racial divides.īut building meaningful relationships across the color line can be difficult, in large part because race remains a touchy subject. That complicates an ideal that many hold dear: integration. “You live in a society that’s constantly giving you messages of white as the ideal,” said Robin DiAngelo, the author of “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.” So a white person can develop a close bond with someone who is black but still come away feeling superior to African-Americans and harboring racist stereotypes, Ms. So how could someone with so much exposure to black people still use blackface? How could he do something that reflected - under the most generous interpretation - such obliviousness and insensitivity to a well-known symbol of America’s racist history? “I have a lot of African-American friends that I went to school with, played ball with, and I suspect I’ve had as much exposure to people of color as anybody.” “I was in public school during desegregation,” he said during a news conference, at which his discomfort discussing race showed at times. Northam has been deeply apologetic for his racist missteps and said he has a lot to learn, but he did give a nod to his black friends the day after the racist yearbook photo surfaced. Northam’s friends declared was a virtue of those in their community.
That’s why, after a white person’s proclamation that he has black friends often comes an insistence that he doesn’t see color, a trait that some of Mr. This thinking, scholars say, is steeped in complicated social factors, from a reluctance to have blunt conversations about race to a failure to acknowledge racial difference altogether. Cohen was thoroughly mocked on social media, but his response revealed a common line of reasoning: Why would anyone share a laugh, meal or kiss with black people if he thought poorly of them? How could he invite them into his home if he saw them as inferior? The subtext was clear: Some of my best friends are black. It was accompanied by a collage of photos of Mr.
Trump’s attorney at the time, Michael Cohen, tweeted, “Just because I support doesn’t make me a racist.” In other words, they’re offering, on his behalf, the “some of my best friends are black” defense, which has so often been relied on by those facing accusations of racism that it has become shorthand for weak denials of bigotry - a punch line about the absence of thoughtfulness and rigor in our conversations about racism.Ī recent example: In the wake of President Trump’s comments that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 Charlottesville, Va., white supremacist rally where a participant killed a counterprotester, Mr. Northam’s defenders are channeling a tried and true myth: the belief that proximity to blackness immunizes white people from having attitudes that are rooted in racism or doing racist things. It’s highly unlikely, they say, that he would put a photo on his medical school yearbook page of a man in blackface standing next to someone wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe. That’s why those who knew him well say he could not have had any bigoted intentions when he darkened his face with shoe polish to dress like Michael Jackson for a dance contest in 1984.