Last time, I talked a bit about authoritarians, people who sound entirely unlikeable with their bigotry and small mindedness. Here’s the thing, though: a feature of this personality type is a lack of self-awareness. Nobody thinks that they themselves are authoritarian. Indeed, it’s not a binary trait, but a scale, so we’ve all got lots of these traits.
We all think we’re good and moral but the Milgram experiments showed that most people will obey a guy in a lab coat to the point of electric shocking somebody to death. Any one of us could be in that obedient majority. We think we’re against racism, but so do people with a high degree of authoritarianism. We are all against what we recognise as racism, but dog whistles that we haven’t decoded seem like common sense. In short, part of the process of fighting systemic racism includes learning to recognise it and learning to become less authoritarian.
A lot of white people in the US have zero non-white friends. Indeed, people also tend to be limited by gender, class and age. And yet, to become better people we need to be able to interact with and listen to people who are different from us. We also need to practice not taking up too much space and not speaking over people.
This kind of de-centring does not come automatically. It takes practice and in the mean time, there is a risk of being annoying and/or counter-productive. White folks tend to want to re-explain things that a non-white person has already said (something I’m doing right here) or to explain the ‘white perspective’ to people, often in great detail. Or sometimes white people take up a lot of emotional space, in which we get upset by racism or our own guilt or whatever and want to be comforted. It’s hard not to do these things – we’ve been trained to act this way from our extreme youth. I often find it very challenging to avoid taking up too much space in a discussion.
However, it’s possible to practice listening and learning online. If you’re on twitter, follow @deray, @RE_invent_ED and @Nettaaaaaaaa. I feel like reading these feeds provides an incredible opportunity to learn. I’d suggest resisting the urge to reply, argue, or take up space. And rather than rephrase something good, retweet it – amplify their voice rather than taking over.
You can’t fight racism until you learn to recognise it, and this is one way to learn to do that. It is one tiny step on a long journey to a better world.
