Are You Sure You Want to Say That White People Are the Lone Agents in Human Affairs, the Main Characters, the Sole Movers of History?

putting all the blame on white people is just another way to make white people the protagonists of human affairs

Just a few days ago a young Asian woman was murdered by a man who followed her home from the subway. Tensions for Asians in New York City were already high; a month earlier, an Asian woman was pushed in front of a subway car in another seemingly random attack. The attacks, and the response to them, can’t help but recall the #StopAsianHate campaign last year, which was inspired by a perceived wave of anti-Asian attacks. And the conversation about these attacks is similar to that earlier discourse in that many people are saying these two murders - conspicuously committed by men who aren’t white - are ultimately attributable to white supremacy. At present I’ve only seen this crop again on social media, but I’m sure the essays will follow. University of Colorado professor Jennifer Ho has been on this corner for some time, but she’s far from alone. There are multiple problems here. For one, the statistics typically shared on social media are not entirely trustworthy, and there are also those who pretend not to understand the concept of proportional representation. But my issue is more philosophical.

I wrote about this last summer, and you can get the long-form version there. My question is the same: do you really want to advance a vision of the world where white people are the prime movers of all events, even if you always declare our actions to be bad? Because I don’t think you really do.

Anyone objecting to this frame, that white people are ultimately responsible for crimes committed by people of color on people of color, is usually assumed to be an aggrieved white person, someone who finds it insulting to their white feelings. To me it’s pretty much the opposite: the insistence that white people are ultimately responsible for everything bad in the world is immensely insulting to people of color. It casts them as the victims of history, consigned to a role of powerlessness and anonymity, in contrast with the white people who rule the world and make history go. Like so much of our ostensibly progressive racial discourse this frame ultimately portrays people who aren’t white as children, blameless and weak. And it fits comfortably in a broader recent milieu of unthinkable levels of condescension towards people of color generally and Black people specifically. American liberalism has responded to calls to respect Black strength with paternalism and mawkish affection that simply consigns Black people even more deeply into the role of haplessness.

Here’s the thing, you guys: I am quite certain that almost anyone would rather be the empowered villain than the powerless, blameless nobody. And that’s the role that this narrative - which, like all liberal narratives, is primarily espoused by white people - casts us as. Sure, in some vague sense we’re considered to be the bad guys. But we’re also the movers and shakers, the people who make things happen, the main characters. Attributing all racial violence to whiteness simply deepens our culture’s historical obsession with white people. I never quite know the specific mechanism that’s supposedly at play here - if a person of color walks up to an Asian stranger and punches them, is white supremacy literally overwhelming their conscious mind, in this telling? - but in the broader view I am certain of the impact of all of this, which is simply to advance the white ego.

There’s a coffee shop not far from where I live that often will put a chalkboard out in front, with the heading “Black Excellence” on top and a list of Black accomplishments underneath. (The employees, conspicuously, appear to all be white.) And I often wonder what message people are taking from that sort of thing. Is it that Black people are excellent? Or that Black people are the ones who need to have their accomplishments listed for white people’s approval?