White Privilege/White Complicity: Connecting “Benefiting From” to “Contributing To”

Abstract

In a 1945 program to denazify Germany, posters began to appear across occupied Germany illustrated with pictures of concentration camps and an accusatory finger pointed at the reader with the words, "You are guilty." 1 Many ordinary citizens were forced to acknowledge (some for the first time) that the camps really did exist, though denial and indignation were common."We are innocent!How can we be responsible for these terrible crimes when we did not know that they existed and even if we did know, we could not have done anything?"Can people be responsible for evil they did not directly perpetrate, might not have known about, or might not have been able to affect?Intention, understood as free will, and causality are the hallmarks of responsibility.Yet intention and causality were absent in the case of many ordinary Germans.Nevertheless, Hannah Arendt, who coined the piercing term "the banality of evil" to describe how evil is perpetrated by regular people who uncritically go about their daily lives, intimates that any German who even indirectly supported Nazi ideology was responsible for the Nazi regime's evils. 2 Recently, critical race theorists have insisted that white people are responsible for and complicit in systemic racism.At least two shifts in understanding race and racism contributed to this claim.First, race is commonly understood not as biologically based, but as a socially constructed category in which racial groups are mutually constituted through normalization processes where one group becomes the measure and all other groups are evaluated as "different" or "deviant."Second, the understanding of racism has shifted from a focus on individual people and prejudiced attitudes to an awareness of institutional and cultural practices that generate and maintain it.Whiteness, as the racial norm, lies at the center of the U.S. problem of race. 3thin this framework, the claim that white people are racist is frequently asserted.White people, especially well-intentioned white people, often respond with indignant denials and resistance.In 2007, the discussion topic "all whites are racist" in a mandatory university residential life program led to charges of brainwashing and indoctrination, and the university abandoned its antiracist initiative. 4t is clearly important to understand what people mean when they maintain the claim of white complicity.One way to elucidate this is by reference to white people's unconscious attitudes and beliefs that come from living in a racist society.Barbara Trepagnier contends that No one is immune to the ideas that permeate the culture in which he or she is raised.Silent racism…refers to the unspoken negative thoughts, emotions, and assumptions about black