(Opinion piece for The Student Life)

I’m writing this opinion piece to tell the world what I think about White people, and particularly White Pomona College students. Now having said that, I’m sure that alarm bells are ringing in many of my readers’ heads. But, before any of you automatically write me off as "Just-another-person-generalizing-about-ignorant-White-people," let me assure you that I’m not planning to declare all White people "racists." However, I’ve started to notice some interesting things about White Pomona students, and if you’ll bear with me, you might learn something new.

This semester, I’ve managed to orient most of my class projects, thesis, and extracurricular activities to the topic of racism and race issues at Pomona College. Motivated by my own confusing, interesting, and enlightening experiences with the topic of racism at Pomona, I thought it would be interesting to do a systematic study of what other students experience and the kinds of changes they go through while at Pomona. With the help of a survey of 257 students’ views on racism, interviews with ten White juniors, and three focus-groups with sophomores, I’ve become particularly devoted to, among other things, the cause of White people and learning about how we conceptualize racism.

But before getting into the details, let’s first try to get comfortable with the terms. Everybody take a deep breath and repeat: "White people." If you are not used to using this phrase, try repeating it loudly a few times, and also think about why it feels strange to say it. As a White person, I’ve rarely used the phrase in my life, because something about it just sounds funny. I wonder why I’ve been more apt to use the words "Asian people," "Black," or "Latino," but never talk about "White people." This is especially ironic since I grew up mostly around White people and learned mostly about the history of the [White] Western world. If you are a person of color, you may also have avoided using the term "White" if a White person was in the room, probably because you know the suspicious stares that it can bring forth from White people who hear it.

Now here’s what I finally figured out about this phenomenon. We White people can be perfectly comfortable with studying "African American" literature and history, because we acknowledge that African American people have some common histories and experiences, and we consider them to be part of a "race." Taking a "White American" history class (instead of just "American" history), on the other hand, might make some of us itch. We’d have to acknowledge that White people have a "race" too, and that we even have a history specific to our "race." (My use of the word "race" here should not imply that grouping people into "races" indicates something biologically or culturally significant about those groups as a whole. Rather, I’m including this term in its normal usage, because it’s convenient and I lack the space to discuss why the idea of "race" has been harmful throughout history.)

Now we would ask ourselves: what is the history of the White "race" in relation to the other "races" – Native Americans, Latinos, Blacks, Asians? If you are thinking about this question and not feeling even a little depressed, I’d be surprised. So there we have it: White people avoid thinking of themselves as raced, not only because it keeps us from having to be depressed about history, but because it keeps us from feeling like we should be held accountable to that history. We White people especially don’t want to feel any less entitled to the wealth we’ve acquired by this point in history. If we think about whether our comfortable situation in life has anything to do with a history of exploitation, we might start to feel guilty about what we have.

But I’m sure we can bear these negative feelings long enough to delve into a more productive and positive discussion on race, a discussion where the topic of White people is included. So when I talk about White people, I’m referring to people who, by the color of their skin and through heritage of White privileges, have certain things in common with each other. What White people often, but not always, share in common are the ideologies of "Whiteness," which include normative values, ideals, beliefs and practices that let "Whiteness" maintain its hard-to-see privileges. What’s interesting is that "Whiteness," therefore, is an ideology that not only White people use, but that people of color may make use of as well.

Despite things that White people tend to have in common, when I talk about White people, I’m still talking about an incredibly diverse crowd. Take White students at Pomona College, for example: there’s no way to generalize about the White experience at Pomona College, and my research has confirmed this. White students’ views on race, for example, run the spectrum from complete disinterest in race issues to active anti-racist concern. In between these are a range of strange and interesting views, many of which are laden with contradictions, confusions, frustrations, and anger.

As an example of how interesting White people can be, let’s take me as an example. This is not meant to be an ego-trip, but more of a confessional. My views have changed dramatically in the last four years. I once thought that racism was something that would go away as soon as we stopped talking about race. Seeing racism merely as a problem of the prejudices that people hold, it seemed perfectly logical and humane to me that our prejudices would disappear when we became blind to color. But when I realized that history itself has never been colorblind, and that we are still living in the system of inequalities created by that history, I knew that we couldn’t expect these differences to just go away.

After this, I started to become more sharply aware of inequalities in society, and I felt quite guilty about them. I lived in constant fear that I would be blamed. I wished that I had been born without my privileges, so that at least my conscience would be clear. Part of me cared about the problems created by racism, and part of me felt scared to confront them. With the guidance of a friend and some good books, I worked through this guilt and even discovered that talking and learning about race issues can feel liberating. On one hand, I feel more accountable than ever to the problems of racism, and feel much less entitled to my White privileges, but finally, I feel like I’m starting to understand racism enough to confront it. It’s a good place to be.

If you’d agree that human beings are naturally caring and empathetic people, then we all secretly really do care about the problem of racism. Despite all of our good intentions, what usually keeps us from productively working to fix the problem is that racism is such a confusing topic. Pomona students have a myriad of ways to define the word "racism," and it shows that two people, when discussing racism, are often not talking about the same thing. In addition, one individual alone might have multiple ways of talking about racism. If we grow up learning one thing about racism and we encounter an entirely different point-of-view at Pomona, we get confused for a time. If our parents tell us to be colorblind, then we come to the "multiculturalist" world of Pomona where we are taught to "celebrate our differences," and THEN we might even take a class that exposes us to the history of race-based exploitation or current structural inequalities of our society, it’s easy to get ideologically lost.

I’d argue that many White Pomona students get left dangling in this precarious and awkward place, where they may mix and match contradictory views in attempts to work things out. Both my interviews and the racism survey support this. One single person might say, "We need to treat everybody equally and judge them only as individuals [….] Well, yeah, it’s good to learn about peoples’ differences […] And then there’s inequality, which is a bad problem. School systems, for example, continue to give advantages to Caucasian students" and so on. To further complicate matters, students learn to speak the politically correct language and say things that they may not even believe or understand. What results is a campus filled with students who simultaneously care about racism, but who aren’t quite comfortable talking about it. This is both unproductive in solving problems, and generally unhealthy for all Pomona students.

People tend to say that the answer to this problem would just be "more dialog." On one hand, I would agree, but I’d argue that there’s more to it than that. If we are trying to communicate, but attempt to do so without a better awareness of the different kinds of contradictions and confusion among students, then discussion might further perpetuate the entire system of confusion. We should all try to look more deeply at our own views and what they mean in relation to prejudice, inequality, Whiteness, and privilege. If we remain keenly aware of how our views are changing, and how they’ve changed over time, then we might be able to work out our perspectives and better understand those of other people. There is also a great deal of literature to help us through this process (see the following list). The choice to confront these issues is a difficult step to take, but one that will ultimately be rewarding and fruitful.

--Janelle Orsi

• Attend the upcoming conference on Whiteness at Scripps College. Friday afternoon, April 26.
• Visit the website for Claremont SCRAP: Students Challenging Racism and [White] Privilege: www.canopyweb.com/racism. There you will find links to many helpful articles, including one written by Pitzer graduate, David Zinser. And get involved with this group and its activities!