IV. ACCOUNTS of FEELINGS
Race and race relations have always been points of concern in American society, and as such, have evoked a number of emotional responses from individuals. Thus it is easy to imagine that white people might undergo a number of emotional responses to race.
In order to examine the various emotional responses participants had to the topics of race and race relations, the researchers scanned the transcripts for instances in which participants explicitly named a feeling or emotion that they felt in relation to racial experiences. Emphasis was placed on reports of feeling that the participants themselves had experienced.
Participants sometimes made references to how other people felt, but the secondhand nature of these references was considered to be less reliable than firsthand reports. In other instances participants were clearly feeling something other than neutral as they spoke about various topics, but their conversation focused on the topic and not the feelings underlying it. The researchers felt the process of identifying emotions secondhand from participants' reactions would also be unreliable. Thus we limited our analysis to firsthand accounts that named specific emotional reactions. Altogether, twenty-six (26) instances of firsthand reports of feelings were found.
The accounts can be divided into two groups: those which expressed negative feelings, and those which expressed positive feelings.
A. Negative Feelings
Media images would have us believe that the principal negative emotions experienced by Americans, including white Americans, are fear, anger and hate. Indeed each of these emotions have been connected to race at one time or another by both white people and people of color.
1. Fear
If the popular image were to be believed, white people are most fearful of young black men. Some white people believe that a number of young black men are being unfairly stereotyped. Other white people believe that a disproportionate number of black youth, compared to white youth, are part of the juvenile justice system and therefore criminals. Regardless of belief, white people find it easy to visualize the face a male black youth filled with hate, fear and contempt. The media feed this image incessantly.
Oddly enough, none of the focus groups invoked the image of the young black male criminal as a direct point of conversation. One group, the third one, spoke about race riots and life in the projects1, though with little convincing authority or knowledge regarding the latter. But the perceived criminality of black male youth was, at best, only indirectly implied in these conversations.
No doubt many of the white people in the room did harbor fears of young black men. Perhaps these fears are highlighted only when young black men are present. The strength of feeling may depend as well on other matters of neighborhood, time of day or night, dress and demeanor, and personal acquaintance.
In a setting of all white people, the fear of young black men may have been less on their minds than other fears. Or it may have been that we did not reach the level of intimacy and trust needed to talk about deep-seated concerns. It is unlikely we did during a single two-hour session.
However, four participants did name other fears. One young woman was afraid of being fired for having an interracial relationship outside of work. Two participants expressed fear of a future in which white people were dominated. In the words of one,
I feel afraid only because you can have a white-dominated culture or you can have a black-dominated culture, it's essentially who's in control. Who has the power?
The other feared retribution, saying,
I'm scared what they might do with [power] given the fact of what my group has done with it.
A mother worried about her children's future,
I guess if I'm frightened about [the year] 2050, it's because I see this fragmentation coming to the point where, will there be cohesion in our nation for my children? Will they be part of a nation that has any cohesion? And I increasingly worry about that. I don't know if there will be.
While only these four participants directly named fear and worry, other participants seemed to share their concerns. In the first account, the fear of being fired was based on the role of whites as racist. Racist white reaction is something familiar to us, though not a positive role model of whiteness.
The three remaining accounts concerned fear of the consequences of assuming a new role, one in which whites do not have power to control the situation. There is a tacit understanding in this fear that new roles must be created for whites. But there is also some trepidation, as if to say the new role of whites might not be entirely of our own making.
No other fears were directly expressed by the participants.
2. Anger
The popular image of white anger is that it stems from defense and loss of privilege at the hands of people of color. Five accounts discussed anger. Two participants expressed anger toward "the government." One person felt stiffed,
Person 1: It's become a prime thing for the government to get involved in. It's become a major issue for our major employers, and everybody kind of gets the feeling that they're getting stiffed.
Person 2: Don't say both sides.
Person 1: (animated, with vocal agreement from other participants) Yeah, everybody. Everybody feels they're getting stiffed.
The other expressed frustration with government involvement in race classification and race-based policies.
One man expressed aggravation with having to name his race as white when racial mixing has occurred and racial purity is a known myth. The same participant later was angry. Speaking as if to an imaginary accuser, he exclaimed,
I get angry. I didn't do a thing. I was not here. If I was here I'd probably be one of those people running the Underground Railroad or whatever.
Finally, a woman said,
It angers me when I hear people call black people 'niggers' or anything else derogatory....it makes me angry.
Of the five accounts of anger, only one had people of color as its target. One person felt accused by people of color of past crimes. The other four accounts chose the government, society and forms asking for race, and finally, people who call black people bad names.
Most people are aware that the government, at the policy-making level, is still largely in the hands of white people. The two participants who expressed anger at the government were angry about this policy-making level. Society in general and the ubiquitous race check boxes we find on forms are also largely a product of white people. We put racial categories in the census, on school applications, on loan applications, etc. Finally, who might be calling black people names? White people, obviously.
In none of the four accounts did the participant name white people or white culture as the target of their anger, but in all four cases the object of their anger -- governmental agencies, society, white racists -- are comprised largely and disproportionately of white people.
If we were to imagine ourselves part of one white race, it might be said we are angry at ourselves. But we are afraid to name it as such.
3. Hate and Dislike
What do white people hate? 'People of color,' the media again would have us believe. Four participants spoke of hate and dislike. One hated the fact that race affected her. Another hated that he could be so comfortable with being white, saying it was "one of the things I also dislike, or have come to dislike about being white." A third participant disliked naming people as black or white,
...whether you say on the phone, 'I'm white,' or 'I'm black,' doesn't mean anything really. It sets up some expectations that sometimes I don't, I wish we didn't do that to each other.
The same participant later said she hated the use of derogatory terms for black people.2
The participants hated or disliked race, whiteness, racial naming, and racial name-calling. The first person spoke of her inner experience of race, a white experience. The second person spoke about whiteness. The third person suggested terms seen and used millions of times everyday by whites (i.e. the terms "black" and "white") be dropped from use. Finally, the same person hated people calling blacks bad names.
In all four accounts, the object of the participant's hate was some activity or circumstance that lay in the hands of white culture. There was no account of hate that had people of color as the object. It was largely a matter of hatred by white people of things controlled by other white people.
These accounts did not include direct mention of the roles of people of color. By relegating people of color to the background, participants seemed to be expressing the sense that the things they hated were not caused by people of color, and could not be cured by them either. They were largely white people's affairs.
4. Discomfort
On seven occasions participants discussed feelings of discomfort, disturbance, uneasiness and feeling bothered. One woman was bothered by her awareness of color. Another woman was disturbed because people will hate you for having friends of another race. A man reported feeling uncomfortable in a West African country when he was one of few whites. Another man reported always feeling uncomfortable with white friends who condescended to black people. A participant reported feeling uncomfortable with whiteness. Another participant said they felt uneasy about describing what feels good about being white. A woman is bothered when her black friend tells her of being followed by store security guards.
The objects of these feelings are more varied than the objects of fear, anger and hate. People of color figure more frequently and prominently in the accounts. Participants are made uncomfortable when surrounded by black people in a foreign culture, when told about discrimination by black people, when witnessing white condescension before black people. A black dating partner jeopardizes the white partner's social position in white society.
One reference was made to the general idea of race and racial difference, by the participant bothered by being aware of color. Other references were made to whiteness and white culture. A man is bothered by his friends' condescension, another is uncomfortable with whiteness, and a woman is uneasy describing what feels good about being white.
It seems both black people and white people, black culture and white culture, issues, etc. can be a source of bother or discomfort to white people. The concept of racial difference itself can be discomforting.
Interestingly, when black people are agents in the participants' accounts of discomfort, the participation of the black person(s) is not seen as threatening or improper. Black people in these accounts are citizens of a country, a friend, bystanders in a conversation, and a boyfriend. None of these roles carries a sense of an adversarial relationship between blacks and white.
In accounts that reference black people, the thing that discomforted the participants was not the presence of black people per se, but the reaction of other whites to that fact. Other whites get disturbed when white women date men of color, a man is discomforted by his white friends, and white security guards follow a participant's black friend.
In one account only, when the participant was in West Africa, did white reaction not figure in. The account of this participant involved self-reflection and awareness of whiteness through being dislocated from the surround of white American culture.
5. Guilt and Shame
Guilt and shame are two emotions often named as part of white experience. Four participants made reference to their experiences of these feelings.
One participant who maintained an interracial romance in secret expressed concern, saying she thought "Oh my God, I'm living a lie." Three participants expressed a sense of guilt or shame for white culture. Here one participant, rather than answering what feels good about being white, said,
I think we're much more likely to say 'You know it felt good when someone thought I wasn't white.' And it gives a tremendous guilt almost... It's like there is a privilege that we operate with every single day and assume it, and at the same time there's a guilt about it.
Another participant said,
In terms of the question which we're having so much difficulty with, you know, 'What feels good about being white?' I don't think personally that's ever felt good to me...I don't feel bad about being white, usually. Although there is the guilt factor sometimes that's quite conscious.
A third participant said,
I also don't want to be put into the white box because the white box I'm ashamed of. I feel inordinately ashamed of what the race, of which I was born a part, has done.
Taken together, these four statements were the most direct references participants made to guilt and shame throughout the discussions. The first statement involved a personal feeling of guilt felt by the girlfriend, directed at a significant other of another race. Whiteness and blackness, which together created a hostile environment for the couple, are only background to personal decisions.
Each of the next three statements target whiteness as its object. Individual white people and people of color are not explicitly involved. The first participant spoke about "a privilege" and said "there's a guilt about it." The second participant spoke of "the guilt factor sometimes that's quite conscious." The third participant was "ashamed of what the race of which I was born a part has done." People of color are not even mentioned in these statements. White individuals are absent as well. Guilt is felt about some amorphous aspects of white identity and white history.
Not all participants experienced feelings of guilt and shame. One participant spoke of his feelings on the matter:
I'm not happy with a lot of things whites have done. I'm also a Christian and I'm not happy with a lot of things Christians have done. And I'm a Protestant and I'm not happy with a lot of things Protestants have done to Catholics in Ireland. But I'm happy to be all three of those. I don't feel I have to be on a guilt trip because of it, because I'm accountable to me. I'm not accountable for who went before. And I think we give [our children] values to live by, and I think that's part of what makes me happy with what I am.
If we take this participant at his word, that he did not experience guilt from his whiteness, he is nonetheless aware that feelings of guilt are an issue in white culture. Otherwise, he would not have felt compelled to say "I don't feel the need to be on a guilt trip," as if also to say that some other people, quite possibly both black and white people, might think that he should be.
The participant hints that he has worked with the issue of guilt in the past. He suggests that while white people (and Christians and Protestants) have done bad things, he can still feel good about himself if he can impart to his children values that would keep bad things from the past from recurring in the present and future.
Feelings of guilt about the role of white culture in America are a sensitive matter for many white people. Articles and book chapters have been written on the topic of white guilt. We discuss it with each other, often in oblique terms. We experience it or we don't. But even those who don't experience feelings of guilt directly still acknowledge the presence of guilt feelings as an undertone in white culture.
6. Rejection
Three participants told of feelings of rejection. One participant felt that her black neighbors were stand-offish. Another participant reported being in training when the guest trainers were militant black people. Finally, a participant reported feeling assaulted by the working world, which proved to be very racist in her sector of it.
Two of the three accounts involve rejection by black people while the third involves rejection by whites.
7. Embarrassment
Two participants told of moments of embarrassment. One man was embarrassed by the condescending behavior of his white friends toward black people. The second participant, a woman, was embarrassed when confronted by black militants from a poor neighborhood,
I was, and I think probably with good reason, a little embarrassed about being white because it just, the situation in that community was really bad.
8. Pity, Disbelief, Jealousy and Unexcitement
One participant reported he
felt terrible about the black people who were in unfortunate situations. I really felt for them... I don't know if I felt pity. It was more feeling sorry for people who are in that situation where they feel trapped, or where I felt they were trapped.
Another participant was disbelieving when hearing stories of white discrimination told by a black friend. While apparently accepting the factual accuracy of her friend's account, she added, "it's really unbelievable to me."
A woman reported that her racial and ethnic identity seemed insignificant to her. She added an interesting note, saying she
consciously, any number of times throughout my life have been very jealous of people with some sort of distinctive ethnic, racial or religious background that I don't have.3
Finally, in describing how it felt to be white, the same speaker said, "I feel unexcited about it most of the time."
B. Positive Feelings
Racially positive images of whites in the media portray us as partners with people of color upholding the colorblind society. We did find positive feelings that whites experienced regarding race and race relations.
1. Happiness
Three participants reported feelings of happiness. One woman was reporting a social encounter from the previous day to a friend. The woman said,
they asked me was she black or white and I couldn't remember. And I was so happy I couldn't remember. I thought, 'Gee, I've made a real breakthrough.'
A second woman described the Christening of her godson,
I had never been in a Black Baptist church before, which is a wonderful experience...I just, I thought it was a blast. And I was, I can do this. This is fun. I mean it was such an uplifting experience to go to a church like that. Yeah, it was great.
Finally, a third woman said,
I was in a training program where I was definitely in the minority and it was wonderful because... we had learned to trust one another and it was a really wonderful experience.
The first account above concerned the loss of recall for a person's skin color. The participant did not name the race of the person she later told her story to. It may have been a person or color or a white person, the story is plausible either way. The second and third accounts tell of situations in which the participant is in a numerical minority amidst a large group of people of color.
It is notable that people of color figure directly in the experience of two of three accounts of happiness, a positive emotion. People of color were far less present in participants' accounts of negative feelings.
The three stories have the common theme of release from a consciousness of race. In all three instances, this loss of consciousness was framed as an unusual event, not one common to the daily experience of white culture.
2. Comfort
The same participant who had spoken of the happiness she found at her godson's Christening also remarked,
and I was the only white in the entire church...But I didn't feel uncomfortable.4
A second participant described a different kind of comfort,
...when I was growing up, white was just plain old white. I don't remember being conscious of anybody being particularly ethnic. We were all just white. And I think there's a kind of comfort that goes along with that, which I guess on some level I really like cause, it's a lot being comfortable.<
A third participant expressed a sense of comfort in a round-about way, saying,
When you say to me in [the year] 2050 white people are going to be the minority, that is not a particularly threatening thing to me given the places that I've lived.
The participant had lived in two areas, Atlanta and Miami, where white Americans were a numerical minority. He described a pluralistic culture achieved in each metropolitan region without undue conflict. Finally, a participant voiced his feelings on being white,
I'll say I feel good about being white because that's what I happen to be, and I have to be comfortable with myself, or be very uncomfortable.
The first and third participants found comfort in situations involving a majority of people of color. The first participant found comfort during a specific event, a Christening. The third participant found comfort from having lived in multicultural metropolitan areas that did not experience conflict. Whites in these areas were outnumbered by people of color.
The second participant found comfort in fully assimilated white culture, i.e. a culture that included only white people, among whom even ethnic differences have disappeared.
It seems there are two approaches to finding comfort as white people. One is to immerse ourselves in a pluralistic style of living, making contact with other cultures in a way that is genuine. The other is to immerse ourselves in an unadulterated whiteness, in which no color, not even pale Scandinavian or olive Mediterranean, exists. One approach, the former, is multicultural, and the latter approach is monocultural.
The fourth participant seems to have found another source of comfort. He began with the understanding that he needed to be comfortable with himself. From this, he reasoned that since he was white, he needed to be comfortable with that as well. In this account, the participant places an emphasis on comfort as an inner quality that allows him to accept his whiteness.
3. Love and trust
Two participants spoke of love and trust. One mentions these feelings directly, in connection to a multiracial training program she attended,
What I really loved was that I, we accepted each other, we learned to love and trust one another.
A second participant mentioned family as a source of love,
I think how I feel about being white. The only way I can sort of get my mind around it is that I'm very pleased to be a part of my family...
4. Feeling Complimented
Finally one participant reported being flattered and complimented when a young Hispanic child wanted to know if she was white, and seemed to want her to be part of his culture.
C. Overview of Emotions and Objects
When the researchers designed the focus groups, we were interested in looking at white culture. It seemed to us much of the dialog among whites about race focused on the actions, activities, presence, and intent of black people. Far less focus seemed to be on white people, on ourselves. So, we designed our questions to look at this little known area, and asked white people how they felt about their experience in a country with race.
We had no idea if people would be able to answer these questions. In retrospect, we feel the participants were able to give us answers. That these answers often concern whiteness and white culture should not be surprising, since our questions were designed to elicit this. What was most pleasant and surprising was that participants found the questions meaningful to begin with.
We seem to carry a lot of baggage about our whiteness. White Americans experience fear, anger, hate and guilt over various aspects of white culture. We sometimes direct these feelings at white-dominated institutions. Other times, we direct our feelings at white culture in some general way.
All the negative feelings we experience about our culture can add up to a heavy load. It makes sense, and it often seems so, that white American culture has also developed culturally shared patterns of defense against these emotions. Defense patterns such as denial and projection, for instance, are often named as components of the psyche of white Americans.
From the media and from personal discussions it seems often white Americans do not view themselves as having racial concerns or negative feelings about white culture. Our focus groups have told us in a collective way that negative feelings exist among white Americans regarding our culture, and these same feelings are readily shared and understood by other white Americans.
Negative feelings of white Americans are often discussed when the object is people of color. So it is not negative feelings concerning race that is, per se, an unexplored topic. Only when the object of the feeling becomes white culture and whiteness does the topic seem to falter. As a conversational topic, other than in a discussion group such as ours, the expression of feelings by whites toward white culture and whiteness is often frowned upon and seen as "very opinionated."
However, in our focus groups where we created a safe atmosphere, people were able to talk. When they did talk, they named negative emotions nearly three times as often as positive ones.
Accounts of positive emotions differed from those of negative emotions in an interesting way. People of color were much more present in positive emotions. Often they provided a means for the participant to escape from whiteness and become a universal being in a world where race no longer mattered. Even without the direct presence of non-white people, escape from whiteness and the positive feelings such escape engendered was a theme.
It would seem that being white has its emotional drawbacks, but these drawbacks are not readily acknowledged, discussed or understood in the everyday life of white Americans.
1. One participant said, "The majority of us are good people. I can take you into the CCC, CCP project in Paterson, if we don't get killed on the way in. The people that are going to kill us are people that are going to kill you no matter where you are, you know what I mean. It's not because they're there. There are a lot of good people who live in fear in those projects."
2. This was reported by a different participant from the one reported in the previous section on anger who was angered by racial name calling. Both reports came from the same interval of conversation, however.
3. White Americans generally see themselves as not having a race, and racial identity is not felt or expressed. Often white Americans are the product of marriages between ancestors from several European ethnic groups. They represent an amalgam of formerly separate cultural identities. Emerging from this process of ethnic assimilation among whites is a generic sort of white American, who may sometimes refer to himself or herself as a "mutt." The new white American has lost his or her ethnic identity as well. White Americans in this position might sometimes take on the identity of white American. Alternatively, and more often, they assume a regional identity such as southern, Appalachian, or Yankee, or a pan-regional identity as simply "American."
4. Many white people can describe a time in their life when they formed a genuine relationship with a person of color. Of this number, somewhat fewer will share in the larger community of color surrounding their friendship. White people often mention these experiences as emotionally meaningful and fundamental to their view of race.