In 2017, the year of the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right Rally,” like many philosophers who write and teach about whiteness, I was threatened, doxxed, and harassed online. An antisemitic, alt-right, white supremacist student who was a graduating senior registered for my class just to troll me. On the infamous r/The_Donald subreddit, he posted a picture of my classroom and captioned it “I’m not spending this semester learning about how white people suck. This professor is a racist who hates white people.” The post went viral overnight. Without violating Reddit’s content policy, the student made it clear who I was, where I taught, and where I lived. He identified me as a Jew. He posted an image of himself brandishing an AR-15. Reading through the thread you could sense his excitement at being fed by hundreds of other trolls. The trolls recommended he try to get me fired by filing a racial discrimination claim against me, which he did. One troll offered an oddly specific way to get me to stop speaking about whiteness–“Tie a plastic bag around his head.”
Although well-intentioned, my University’s response was inadequate. Our student conduct handbook was written before the internet. Many who tried to help me made things worse by failing to understand social media and the tactics of the alt-right. Distrusting anyone else to advocate for me, I documented the hateful, threatening messages on Twitter, Reddit, and in my personal email. In one case I was flatly told about the threatening messages, “they are just online.”
While the label “public philosophy” is now popular, I prefer the simpler, older term “activist.” I accepted a long time ago that activism has consequences. But it is only recently that I’ve framed my activism in terms of philosophy’s “white problem.” Philosophy’s white problem is our white problem. By “our” I mean all us white people, whether our specialty is the history of philosophy, logic, or anything else. It doesn’t take an expert in critical race theory to see how white philosophy is or how biased we are in our citation practices.
The burden of criticizing whiteness usually falls on non-white people. Although white trolls will come hard at any of us who call out white supremacy, our skin privilege means we white people can opt-in or opt-out. Why would white philosophers opt-in? That’s a personal question. My sense is that for many white people the visibility of recent acts of white violence has stirred us. Think: the Charleston church shooting, Charlottesville, the Squirrel Hill massacre, the Christchurch mosque shootings, the El Paso shooting, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Daniel Prude, and most recently, the images of average white people holding confederate flags alongside Proud Boys and Q-Anon supporters storming our Capitol.
Richard Wright put it best: “There is no Negro problem in America, only a white problem.” “The white problem” is a conceptual framework advocated by Africana existential thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Kathryn Sophia Belle, and Lewis R. Gordon. It treats whiteness as a problem of reality, knowledge, and value. It reverses the pathologizing of Black people initiated by “The Negro problem.” It awakens us to the danger of trying to find temporary or final “solutions” to the “Jewish problem.” Fanon writes, “It is the racist who creates the inferiorized.” White existential thinkers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the earliest white philosophers to adopt the framework of the white problem. Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew is a phenomenology of the white French anti-Semite, and Beauvoir’s America Day by Day describes the bad faith of anti-Black white Americans.
When I teach about whiteness I draw heavily on both the Africana and the white existentialist traditions. I insist on the name “white existentialism,” just as I insist on the term, “predominately white institution.” It was an assignment to inventory the white spaces on my campus–a lesson plan derived from Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life–that the troll posted to r/The-Donald. My students studied white spaces as part of The Inclusion Poster Project (IPP), a public art-and-design show I founded with a colleague. For the project, philosophy and design students collaborated to create site-specific posters that would spark conversations and disrupt white spaces.
The IPP brought out more trolls who did interviews with troll factories like “The Daily Caller.” Predictably, a number of white students charged that as whites, they felt excluded. The most positive media response to the IPP came from the graphic designer Steven Heller, which buoyed my spirits at a time when I was getting it from all sides. The president of the College Republican club came to my office to try to intimidate me; white colleagues who claimed to be allies turned against me, and the then-president of the University demanded that we take down the posters. Luckily, the IPP had the full support of the Provost. The posters stayed up. The IPP is now in its third year.
Although disturbing and dangerous, the white trolling I endured was minor compared to what my non-white colleagues like George Yancy and Tommy Curry face. The violence against George Cicariello-Maher, Albert Ponce, and others is too well documented for our institutions to plead ignorance. The AAUP and APA have statements against on-line harassment. Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous writes consistently about the problem. Guides for dealing with online harassment are available at Iowa and elsewhere. The resource I’ve found most helpful is “Best Practices for Conducting Risky Research” by Alice E. Marwick, Lindsay Blackwell, and Katherine Lo. Karen Frost-Arnold’s presentation from the 2015 APA session on “Navigating the Perils of Cyberspace” is on-line. On a similar panel at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 2018 I titled my remarks “Problematizing Whiteness: Philosophical Responses to Online Harassment.”
I encourage white philosophers to adopt the framework of the white problem. Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, and Critical Thinking courses would benefit from units on whiteness incorporating the writings of Wright, Du Bois, Fanon, Gordon, Belle, Ahmed, Sartre, Beauvoir, Yancy, as well as Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Monahan, David Roediger, Tim Wise, Shannon Sullivan, and others. The epistemological issue raised by whiteness is one of ignorance. The metaphysical issue is the reality of the racial category white. The ethical issue is white responsibility for racism. The literature on whiteness has important implications for how we teach critical thinking since many white people don’t think critically about whiteness.
Adopting the framework of the white problem is especially important as universities and philosophy departments pursue institutional strategies for diversifying staff and curricula. All too often, our institutions expect diverse staff to take on diversity work. We expect women to teach gender or Latinx faculty to teach critical race theory. We act as though hiring diverse staff will magically correct toxically white environments instead of calling out white people for their actions. Many diversity and inclusion plans reproduce the logic of the “Negro” and “Jewish” problems. To reverse this dangerous logic, white philosophers should opt-in to the framework of the white problem. It places the burden on us as white people, despite our training, to criticize whiteness, in our teaching, our research, our service, and our public philosophy and activism.
T Storm Heter
T Storm Heter teaches philosophy at East Stroudsburg University. You can find him on Twitter @ Storm_Heter. He directs the Diversity Dialogue Project, the Frederick Douglass Debate Society, and co-directs the Inclusion Poster Project. His new book, “How White People Listen,” is forthcoming on the Living Existentialism book series at Rowman & Littlefield International, which he co-edits with La Rose T. Parris and Devin Zane Shaw.
Thank you for this post Storm. I appreciate your activism!
I wonder if framing the discourse about white supremacy, white privilege, and racism as being about “whiteness” rather than “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” or “racism” might be standing in the way of the effectiveness of such activism, at least with respect to disengaging some white students rather than engaging them.
Some white people are good people who want to end racism as much as marginalized people do, and most people become defensive, close themselves off from further communication, and hold on to certain beliefs even more firmly when they feel attacked.
Another consequence may be that a white person who never really thought twice about racism, white supremacy, and white privilege, and who might have been open to a discussion about the harms of these perspectives, ends up feeling and believing that they are being attacked and associated with racism, white supremacy, white privilege simply because of their whiteness, which may then effectively push them to embrace racism, white supremacy, and white privilege as a defensive act: the attitude being something like, “Well since you think I’m a white supremacist who believes in white privilege because I’m white, then maybe I will be because you’ve shown me that people like you are also ‘racist’ by thinking all white people are white supremacist who believe in white privilege.”
I am a firm believer in the value of diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism, and my concern is whether some anti-racist rhetoric may be doing more harm because it doesn’t acknowledge the concerns of at least some white students/people: that they feel and believe that they are being attacked. I think this is a concern that all activist for diversity, inclusivity, and anti-racism should consider, and I ask this question because I am sincerely wondering what the most effective approach would be for combating white supremacy, white privilege, and racism.
I think the strongest arguments against white supremacy, especially for self-interested people, such as many Americans (consider the public US response to COVID) is that it actually harms many white supremacist: 1) Consider all those who recently attacked the US Senate, they are now under investigation, have been arrested, have killed people, etc. Their racism has turned them into criminals. I would say, to this extent, it has harmed them. 2) Consider those white supremacist who vote against their own self-interest because they believe that wealthy people care about them simply because they are also white. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell could care less about anyone unless they have enough money or power to help rich people continue to accumulate wealth. 3) Consider how diversity and inclusiveness actually contributes to learning and growth, and the harm that is done to those who are not provided with safe, diverse, and inclusive environments because of racist attitudes. 4) Consider how white privilege turns people into narcissistic Karens. I would think no one wants to be that kind of person. In such ways, racism, white supremacy, and white privilege harm those who are racist, white supremacist, and those who uphold white privilege.
Yes, there is a problem with racism, white supremacy, white privilege, as well as problems with any kind of racists, supremacist, and privileged thinking, and yes, racism, white supremacy, and white privilege are the most significant problems in the US, but perhaps we shouldn’t call that a problem of “whiteness,” in the same way that we should reject any rhetoric about a “negro problem.”
Your thoughts about this would be appreciated, and please note that I am, like you, an activist who is trying to figure out what the best ways may be to combat racism, including white supremacy and white privilege.
In my experience, it helps to contextualize critical whiteness awareness within the broad work of decolonization. Whiteness is a viral construct that emerged deliberately and post hoc to rationalize and obscure colonization and then the inequalities and exploitations that grew alongside colonialism in capitalism and extractive relations to the land. When white folks learn to see whiteness as a defense, weapon, and colonizing concept in the larger history of modern imperialism, securing advantages in the brutal and alienating gyre of unfettered capitalism, and bound up with a set of other metaphysical, psychological, and political assumptions that license being arbitrary with the Earth’s order of life, it becomes clear how, despite the divisiveness and oppressiveness of whiteness, we are still all in this together. The same historical systems that compose the history and afterlife of imperialism, including unfettered capitalism and extractive industrialism, are deadly and degrading to us all, in radically different measures and forms. They keep “white” people from the good life in different ways and degrees than POC. They are oppressive to “white” people as well.
The larger context helps to allow one to be analytically precise around whiteness and its effects while not making it the main issue except in those cases where it is truly driving the entire afterlife of imperialism and the dynamics of inequality in a given instance. Otherwise, it is part of entangled systems that are driving the current order of life and humankind with it to ruin.
Good editorial. I want to ask some questions, in part because this discourse is relatively new to me. Storm writes: “The epistemological issue raised by whiteness is one of ignorance. The metaphysical issue is the reality of the racial category white. The ethical issue is white responsibility for racism.” I might add to his framing: perhaps the epistemological issue is dorsal – what is behind and above – under which one cannot see – only an other can describe it for you, maybe precisely THE “other” produced in the original construction of the category “white;”; perhaps the metaphysical issue is the construction of the category “whiteness” as a power play over the category of “others” who do not qualify as “white” – historically, in the American colonies – anyone not a landowning English man – and especially those visibly different – the invention of the category “black”. Perhaps the claim that “the metaphysical issue is the reality of the racial category white” can acknowledge, as such, the constructed character of racialization and race, and in this include that hope of transcending these damaging constructions. The last sentence I support tentatively if problematically: white privilege is relatively easy to demonstrate at this juncture for someone like me – a female of mixed European descent who has never faced exclusion or violence because of my appearance. But when we look at the category “white” and how it recently excluded many “pale faces”: Ukranians, Jews, Italians, Irish, Catholics (I have some of this going on) – how define “responsibility” for a “racism” that also dispossessed these identities? Do not all roads lead back to European and particularly English colonialism and capitalism? ALSO – an editorial issue with the APA Blog: why is Simone de Beauvoir not listed in the tags? Now that is outrageous! 😉
She is listed now!