Macklemore, also known as Ben Haggerty, is coming to campus Wednesday. Haggerty will participate in a panel titled Courage Against Racism: The Role of Music in Social Movements with racial justice activists. This conversation is timely given the publication of Pi Kappa Phi’s meeting minutes containing racist and sexist jokes, as well as the troubling racial dynamics that arise yearly during USAC elections, when undergraduates divide largely along racial and class lines.
Haggerty’s “White Privilege II,” the song that inspired this panel, is a valuable tool to address racism in predominantly white spaces because it calls for greater vulnerability around issues of racial justice. White UCLA students in particular must practice this vulnerability if we want to contribute to actively improving campus racial climate.
“White Privilege II” helped me articulate my white identity in multiracial Los Angeles. I grew up in an LA suburb where Blacks and Latinos were 3 percent of my graduating class and my closest friends were white. Looking back, I grew up ignorant of people with different racial, cultural or class backgrounds. I also never discussed the implications of living in my segregated neighborhood with my family or schoolmates.
Rather, during my undergrad years and onward, I had to make intentional decisions to learn how to engage across racial, class and cultural differences. My ignorance through this process forced people of color, such as my supportive partner, to unfairly shoulder work in teaching me the ways I benefit from whiteness.
This truth became apparent when my partner experienced exclusion, marginalization and disrespect from my high school friends. My privilege let me ignore the problem without being affected. In fact, as a white person, I was blind to the slights she experienced. I dismissed my partner’s discomfort and rationalized my friends’ behavior. My inaction almost cost me our relationship.
At a Memorial Day party last year, a long-time friend said the N-word in front of us as a “joke,” trying to bait my partner because he thought she was “too sensitive.” She was rightfully outraged. My friends insisted there was no racist intent; rather, white people could say the N-word in certain circumstances. Our taking offense was really a “philosophical difference of opinion” and “hypersensitivity.” The problem was twofold. First, they believed that racial jokes are permissible when said with the “right” intent. Second, my silence enabled bigotry and disrespect.
As white people, interpersonal politics must become the source of our engagement with racism. We cannot continue to engage in an abstract way, treating race as an argument. Rather, race is fundamental to our lives and relationships.
Holding spaces where racialized language is normalized promotes an exclusionary dynamic. By casually using racialized jokes, my friends coded the space as unfriendly to those with every right to be offended by that language. Consciously or unconsciously, my friends were actively creating barriers that fostered racial exclusivity. Relatedly, the problem with the Pi Kappa Phi incident is its effect – whether intentional or not – of reinforcing the coding of fraternity spaces as anti-Black, anti-woman and anti-immigrant.
White Bruins in fraternity spaces and beyond must question how our ignorance, silence or inaction enables the profound discomfort, exclusion and violence experienced by our friends, family and people we don’t even know. We have a responsibility to be vulnerable and admit when we make mistakes. We have a responsibility to actively disrupt silence and inaction, even if it makes us uncomfortable.
The culture we build at places like UCLA matters because our alumni enter positions of power, recreating the same dynamics witnessed on campus. Consider that 94 percent of the Senate is white, 87.7 percent of Fortune 500 boards are white, 95 percent of elected prosecutors are white and 100 percent of University of California presidents are white. Racial inequity at the highest levels, as on this campus, is often less a product of explicit racism, and more of collective practices of bias and exclusion.
In order to address these systemic issues, we must learn how to reshape our immediate spaces and personal and professional relationships. Effectively doing so requires commitment to lifelong learning processes, personal accountability and decisive action. On behalf of the organizers of the panel, I welcome the campus community to join us and continue this conversation on Wednesday.
I commend you for your bravery Kareem. The Daily Bruin tends to attract very conservative commentators, but rest assure that no matter what they say, you are awesome for daring to confront your realities being a white student at UCLA. Its people like you that will make the campus environment a better place.
What an extremely well-articulated article. The author very eloquently put into words not only how problematic the general culture at UCLA is but also how white “liberals” here perpetuate this culture.
What happened to freedom of speech?
You are confusing freedom of speech with demands for accountability. Let’s say that in your neighborhood a next door neighbor did something that was very offensive to you, like putting up a sign insulting your family. Sure, they may have the freedom to do so. But you have the right to be very angry with their actions. There are consequences for actions, including “free” speech.
100% of Democrats running for President this election were white.
JVW, I understand your knee-jerk recoil to these damning statistics, but I hope that you and other readers would look deeper. If you will check the record, every of the 20 current and former UC Presidents has been white. 100%. The portrayal in the article is both accurate and significant. There are accomplished, deserving, and skillful people of color who could easily fill the role of UC President in the last 150 year. You can offer any number of excuses. But, eventually, excuses are not enough. When will they stop being enough to convince you?
All I’m doing is matching you fact for fact. If it leads to uncomfortable realities for you, well, then that’s your problem.
What is the point of your statement? You should be mad about the statistics that I have presented. Instead, you are “matching facts”.
You should be mad about the fact that the party which fetishizes youth and diversity offered nothing more than a parade of elderly white folks as choices for President. I made no comment about the substance of your piece other than to add the fact that the progressive white people who preach diversity the loudest are quite often the ones who fail to apply it to themselves. Isn’t that aligned with your “collective practices of bias and exclusion”? Perhaps the best thing you can do, as a white person, is resign all of your positions of power and influence (including your spot at a prestigious university) so that they can be given over to the marginalized and powerless. But that would mean that you have to make a personal sacrifice, and that’s really never what you white progressives have in mind, is it? It’s always the “other” people who need to make the sacrifice, right?
My article has nothing to do with the two major U.S. political parties. Your response reflects a lot of assumptions about me, assumptions that you are projecting onto me. Instead of engaging with the content, you are trying to divert and deflect the conversation into a series of ad hominems and other logical fallacies. Again, you don’t know me at all, so I find it interesting that you are telling me what I should do. You’re the one posting anonymously. It is fairly easy to call out other people while hiding yourself. Have a nice day.
We’re talking past each other, which is to be expected. Best wishes to you.