Background - The need, and our response
United States society suffers from pandemic racism, racial inequality and racial conflict. Thirty years ago the Kerner commission identified racism as a "white problem." Twenty years before that, Gunnar Myrdal said exactly the same in his landmark sociological study, An American Dilemma. Yet a recent survey of research articles conducted by the Center for the Study of White American Culture looked at articles published between 1963 and 1993 on racial identity, awareness, consciousness and experience. Fewer than 7% of the articles focused on white people. The discrepancy reveals an imbalance in focus, especially since the major portion of the articles were authored by white Americans, and in 1990 white Americans comprised 75% of population of the United States.
People of color understand there is a gap. In the 1994 documentary, The Color of Fear, featuring a frank discussion between nine men of diverse racial backgrounds, Victor, an African American, emphatically tells David, a white American, that white people do not talk about themselves as white people. He says, "What I want to know is what it means to be white. What is the experience? You’re not naming it.," and "Part of being white means never having to admit it means something different from being a person of color." Instead, white Americans pontificate about the experience of other racial groups, and thus engender frustration, distrust and anger among those same groups by failing to acknowledge the impact of their own whiteness.
In 1995 a white American man and an African American woman founded the Center for the Study of White American Culture, Inc. (the Center), now a New Jersey 501(c)(3) corporation. The Center examines white American culture in the context of the greater American culture. Explicitly a multiracial organization, the Center predicates its work on the founding belief that a complete examination of white American culture must include the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders to that culture. The original Board of Trustees consisted of five persons, including founding members Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint.
The Center was created to address the lack of information and discussion of the role of white people and white culture in American society. In some venues this topic was given only marginal consideration. In others, discussion of whiteness seemed to be taboo and any attempts to broach the subject were met with hostility and denial.
Among people who were concerned about the role that white Americans might play in creating a multiracial society, few could find materials, venues and forums for discussion, and supportive organizations to assist in creating a dialogue. Within predominantly white organizations, whiteness still remained an unexamined barrier to developing a multiracial organizational culture. Some grassroots training efforts could be found, and individual scholars and practitioners within various fields were beginning to examine issues of whiteness and white culture. But little of this reached the general public. Even many scholars and practitioners were isolated from one another.
Today some of this is changing. Many people have begun to examine whiteness and white culture, and to ask what it will take for white Americans to live in a society that is multiracial. Though this growing awareness has not been due to the Center alone (far from it), we believe we have played a leadership role. In particular we have fostered the growing awareness and discussion of these issues among a broader public. The very act of our creation was an intentional statement that whiteness can and should be discussed.
This has not happened in a vacuum. The Center maintains a national network of relationships with activists and scholars who share similar concerns, some of whom have gone to considerable length to locate us. An elderly African American minister in California who, reading of our 1996 conference in the Los Angeles Times, made five phone calls, passing from person to person, to locate us and express his support. Of these stories, our network is built.
Just as our society has grown in awareness of whiteness and white culture, the Center, too, has grown as an organization. Though still small and not well-endowed, we have expanded our Board of Trustees to nine members, and over time established a reputation and track record in creating awareness and fostering discussion of whiteness. We have quietly worked with some organizations to foster internal discussions of whiteness as a factor in their organizational culture, and how it impacts their work force and their services to their clients.
We proudly continue to raise consciousness on the topic of whiteness, create forums for dialogue, bring scholarly perspectives to the attention of mainstream society, assist organizations with their internal growth toward a multiracial culture, and encourage the development of new perspectives and programs designed to help white Americans participate in building a multiracial society.
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