Good intentions a white anti-racist do not make

By Elizabeth K. Gordon

What happens when a well-intentioned white person, lacking anti-racist grounding, tries to “help”? Many things, few to none of them helpful.

That’s what Kent State photojournalism senior Beth Rankin demonstrated with “I am not a white bitch," published in a recent issue of The Daily Kent Stater. Besides attracting death threats from white supremacists, who according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch circulated her address and work schedule on the Internet, the opinion piece drew the ire of the student group Black United Students (BUS) and inspired blogs entries like “Why I hate white anti-racists.”

Describing herself as “a straight, white girl who will always do everything in her power to support the plight of all minorities,” Rankin told WACAN that she certainly had not foreseen all the fallout from the March 13th column. Nor did she, when we spoke to her in May at the end of exam week, have much hindsight.

“I still feel like I would have said the exact same thing.”

Rankin opened her column by characterizing BUS, which was formed in 1967, as “one of the largest and most powerful student groups, able to turn campus upside down with a single phone call” and “immeasurably powerful.” She criticized the group for making her and her Palestinian boyfriend feel “incredibly unwelcome” at a Russell Simmons concert co-sponsored by the organization. In addition, Rankin related how twice in her five years at the university, while working as a photographer for BUS’s magazine Uhuru, she had been called “a white bitch.”

Immediately after complaining that BUS “has showed its muscle numerous times over the years,” Rankin went on to speak for white students who oppose racism: “We support your cause; now can we please be embraced the same way you embrace your black peers?” She characterized this failure to embrace her, as well as BUS’s goal of advancing “black-owned, black-operated businesses and universities,” as racist.

Lest her view on the matter be considered a nuanced individual response, Rankin brought in, in a follow-up column “Perception is Key,” corroborative evidence, namely the views of other white people. “After my column ran in The Stater,” she wrote, “numerous voices came forward and said either similar things had happened to them or that they, too, perceived BUS negatively.” “On this campus,” she concluded “perception is very important.”

It would seem she means the perceptions of whitefolks: that theirs are not only important, but in fact central.

White perception is the reality and remains the reality in the absence of some expansion of perception (preceded by an apparent contraction that white privilege causes us to experience as a painful loss of something we have come to feel entitled to). But like so many, Rankin is not yet on the first rungs of that ladder. “I want to stop hearing about white people who go to their [BUS’s] meetings and leave hurt.”

And, for this to happen, BUS needs to change, not the white students? No wonder a consensus response from the executive board of BUS sounded a lot like racism 101. That response, also published in The Stater, pointed out that “It is an elitist attitude to think you are doing us a favor by taking time out of your day to help the minorities.” And far from helping, the group explained, Rankin’s column “opened the door for racism to grow.” Because BUS members could not be reached for comment (having gone home, apparently, for the summer), their published response will have to speak for them.

The mistake that many "liberal" whites make is thinking they are doing minorities a favor by stepping in and offering their help. What ends up occurring is one group of people try to help another group of people without taking into consideration the other group's history, background or culture. While you may empathize with minorities, without having been in our position, you cannot have sympathy for us.

The letter ended by asking Rankin to “stop promoting the [racist] ideals you THINK you are fighting against.”

“All of that is complete and total bullshit,” Rankin told me. “Their entire column just proved my point.”

That failure to embrace again, or, as the “Resist Racism” blogger characterized it in “Why I Hate White Anti-racists,” a failure to give the good white people who show up cookies. “Of course, people of color should be extra-nice to white people who deign to come and help us out with our ‘plight.’ We should give them cookies and be very grateful. Because of course, racism isn’t their responsibility.”

While admitting that her limited bad experience isn’t comparable to a lifetime of racism, Rankin insisted that “it doesn’t take much to develop empathy.”

Well, maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t; maybe different people develop it at different speeds. Maybe an agape heart, as the Christians call it, can take in a good deal in just a moment. However, without a theoretical perspective and some grasp of history, what becomes of that opened heart? Does it recoil from the intensity? Does it reject the reality that what one has felt once or twice or twenty times is felt by others twenty times a day? Does the empathy die in very human, very understandable, very deadly denial?

Sometimes it does. And this is a tragedy that ought to further motivate white anti-racists.

In a column after the column that brought her so much attention (including stories in local off-campus print and TV news), Rankin wrote about the sexist behavior of one of Kent’s fraternities.

The fraternity members didn’t like what she wrote. So all of them donned blackface and lined up on the frat’s front lawn shouting, “Kiss my white ass Beth Rankin!”

Disturbing. Was that racist? I asked.

“No, not racist,” she answered, “just ignorant.”

BUS thought it ironic that “when a white person says anything, it is taken as the gospel, but when a minority speaks up, he or she has to constantly fight for the right to be taken seriously.”

Rankin’s perceptions are taken seriously. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch seemed to accept at face value Rankins’s characterization of snubbing as racist. They said white supremacists in the blogsphere were “outraged by Rankin’s pledge of support for civil rights despite her own experiences with reverse racism.” Perhaps they meant there to present the supremacists’ thinking, not, as it seems, to accept the phrase and its assumptions at face value.

At any rate, Rankin herself dislikes the term. “We can’t sugarcoat it by calling it reverse racism,” she told me. She preferred to call what she had experienced “the new racism,” and what Black United Students describes as nationalism as “the new segregation.”

With their work clearly cut out for them and no seasoned white ant-racist allies in sight, BUS sponsored a March 26th public discussion [audio report of meeting] in response to the controversial column. According to Kentnews.net, about 100 students attended. Kent Pan-African Studies professor George Garrison, who moderated, was quoted by Kentnews as saying the meeting “could be one of the most important meetings of my 13 years being here on this campus.”