Among the Palefaces

It was with bemused curiosity, then, that I approached the Whiteness Project, an “interactive documentary short” brought to us by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow, under the aegis of PBS’s POV, which bills itself as American television’s longest-running showcase for independent nonfiction films. After all, it’s hard to think of two entities that bring more unassailable authority to the subject of whiteness than PBS and guys named “Whitney.”

For many years now, white people have been the equivalent of the goofy sitcom dad. It’s okay to take shots at them, since it’s assumed that they run everything, to the detriment of everyone else (our black president notwithstanding​—​though he is, in point of fact, half white). You see it most recently in films like Justin Simien’s Dear White People, a campus comedy of manners that spends much time sending up white people. The script, written by Simien, who is black, was honed over several years on his DearWhitePeople Twitter page, where he celebrates #TokenTuesdays (group shots of smiling white people with one black friend) and tweets out Caucasian-tweaking zings such as “Dear white people, dating a Black person doesn’t count if it pisses off your parents.”

But though Simien is enjoying the white-hot spotlight now (sorry, my white privilege at work), he had to stand in line behind white people (what else is new?) to make fun of white people. There was Norman Lear, whose lovable bigot Archie Bunker, for all his bite, was still the butt of the joke. And there was cracker comic Jeff Foxworthy (“You might be a redneck if you’ve ever climbed a water tower with a bucket of paint to defend your sister’s honor”). Most notably, there was Christian Lander, whose “Stuff White People Like” franchise for years kept white people snorting their Aprihops India Pale Ales from their noses as they read of white people: liking black music that black people don’t listen to anymore, picking their own fruit, being offended, eating hummus, wearing bangs, and buying sea salt.

Granted, Lander’s wasn’t a taxonomy of Wal-Mart-America’s white people​—​the ones you see wearing their best sweatpants-and-slippers into the store, their shopping carts overflowing with refined sugars and heavy carbs, as they frantically comb the shelves for Bacitracin ointment to apply to their eighth-grade daughter’s newly inked neck tattoo. No, Lander was Jeff-Foxworthy-in-Warby-Parker-glasses, classifying a particular genus of precious, rarefied, fussy white person​—​basically, Slate readers.

But the point is that fussy white people like to laugh at themselves, enjoying as they do the security of those who love themselves, even if they secretly hate themselves after sitting for years in their overpriced universities, enduring God-knows-how-many Critical Race Theory classes in which their Associate Professor of Indignation (who is often white) lectures them about how white people have ruined the world.

And that’s where Whitney Dow and the Whiteness Project come in. 

Even though its awkwardly constructed subtitle​—​Inside the White Caucasian Box​—​makes the Whiteness Project sound like a charity MMA match at an Aryan Nation picnic, make no mistake. This is a Serious Project, and Dow is a Serious Person. It might sound like self-parody, but it is not satire. This is Deadly Serious. Don’t take my word for it. Take Dow’s. “I am deadly serious about this,” he wrote on that most serious of platforms, Twitter.

In his lengthy “filmmaker’s statement,” Dow offered that “most whites see themselves as outside the American racial paradigm and their race as a passive attribute. Subsequently, they feel that they do not have the same right to speak about race as non-whites.” Therefore, this project “hopes to bring everyday white Americans, especially those who would not normally engage in a project about race, into the racial discussion​—​to help them understand the active role their race plays in every facet of their lives, to remove some of the confusion and guilt that many white people feel around the subject of race and to help white Americans learn to own their whiteness.”

Or, as he put it less grandiosely to Vice, “If whites are going to participate in changing the racial dynamic, they have to deal with their own s— first. And they also have to be allowed to be fully vested participants in the conversation. If every time a white person opens their mouth about race, someone yells, ‘You’re being a f—ing racist!’ at us, we can’t do it. White people don’t have a lot of experience talking about their race, so they’re going to say a lot of dumb s—.”

Dow, of course, is indisputably correct on the “dumb s—” score. But I’m not sure what planet he’s inhabiting in which white people don’t have a lot of experience talking about race. In fact, despite the serially recurring call for a “national conversation on race” after every flashpoint event like Ferguson, many seem never to stop talking about race. You can clearly do it in Whiteness Studies classes across the nation’s campuses, where guilty-white instructors assist students in swapping out their Klan hoods for hair shirts. Or you can experience campus life on Amazon, by picking up books with titles such as White Like Me, or Understanding White Privilege, or Interrupting White Privilege, or Challenging White Privilege, which is not to be confused with Dismantling White Privilege.

Or you can attend the annual White Privilege Conference, which trains our nation’s educators to end it, not mend it. Or you can subscribe to their peer-reviewed Journal for Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, which contains articles like “Signified Honky​—​Stories in the Key of White.” Or you can visit Diversity Inc.’s website, which has an “Ask the White Guy” column, in which the white guy answers questions such as “Is Trayvon today’s Emmett Till?” and “Is the Oxford English Dictionary Definition of Racism Too White For You?” Or you can read “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” the three-part series in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, noted white person.

Or since the critical race theorists of yesterday are the BuzzFeed staff writers of today, you can take any number of online “privilege quizzes.” Taking BuzzFeed’s, I scored 69 out of 100, making me not overwhelmingly privileged, but still privileged enough that BuzzFeed’s quizmasters, who have never met me, felt compelled to tell me, “You’ve had a few struggles, but overall your life has been far easier than most. This is not a bad thing, nor is it something to be ashamed of. But you should be aware of your advantages and work to help others who don’t have them. Thank you for checking your privilege.”

Dow, however, is endeavoring to bring other kinds of white people into the conversation. The kind of white people who’d take a privilege quiz are Christian Lander’s white people. Dow wants to bring in Jeff Foxworthy’s. And so the Whiteness Project is not a traditional documentary at all. There’s no sequential narrative line. Rather, it is an ongoing series of interviews, posted online, with (mostly) regular ol’ white people talking about their whiteness. Earlier this month, Dow posted the first 21 of what he hopes will total 1,000. (It was widely and errantly reported that he’d posted 24 interviews, but that was an honest mistake, since white people tend to look alike.)

While Dow intends to strike out across the country for future installments, all 21 of the initial interviews are with citizens of Buffalo. Which seems as good a stop as any to take white people’s temperature. Not only are white and black populations more geographically segregated in Buffalo than in most American cities. But Buffalo has been home to many quintessential white people and things: Millard Fillmore, folk singer Ani DiFranco, polka music, NHL hockey, and Buffalo wings​—​a staple food that white people often ingest while watching black professional athletes physically exert themselves for the entertainment of white people screaming imprecations at their flatscreens through blue-cheese-dipping-sauce-smeared lips that are as white as their privilege. 

Each Buffalonian in Dow’s series is shot from the chest up in front of a stark white background, as if for an Avedon portrait. With neither names nor backgrounds given, they ostensibly say white things about being white; Dow has pared 30-minute interviews down to about 90 seconds each, so as to extract the maximum whiteness. Still, it’s hard not to notice that what they say about their whiteness tends to line up with what they think of affirmative action and preferential hiring and how they feel about talking about race in front of black people. In Dow’s biosphere, whiteness is all about blackness. Whether they’re coached in this direction or just naturally head there, we don’t know, since the questions they are answering are never asked on-camera. But the latter scenario makes some sense. What else do white people talk about when asked about whiteness? In my four-plus decades of being a white person, I’ve never had a single conversation with another white person about what it means to be white.

To cut to the chase, the interviews themselves, for all their salt-of-the-earth honesty, are a bit of a snore. Sure, an occasional interviewee steps into the bear-trap of racist awkwardness. The worst of it comes from a girl who resembles Amy Winehouse’s less drugged-up sister, who has soda cans rolled in her hair like hot-curlers. “I really don’t have a lot of black friends,” she offers, “but I do have a lot of gay friends and that’s kind of a similar construct.” She worries that her gay friends would be offended at the word “gay,” just as in front of blacks, she says, “You can’t even talk about fried chicken and Kool-Aid without wondering if somebody’s gonna get offended. It’s always like walking on eggshells, isn’t it? I don’t know, you just don’t know where the line is.”

But most approach the issue with a more anodyne befuddlement. Plenty decry quotas and minority hiring preferences and the ridiculousness of reparations​—​the usual Caucasian curmudgeon’s shtick. One bushy-eyebrowed Jack-Germond-type gent facetiously suggests he’d be for reparations since he had ancestors who were sold into white slavery. So if other groups are set for payouts for events that occurred hundreds of years ago, “I should be in line, too, huh?”

Others proceed tepidly, giving it their conscientious white-person best, speaking of the need for color-blindness and treating people as equals, or noticing how there’re not very many black people in their IT workplace. A good many seem to be taking their cues from the Grievance Group Guild, whining of their own victimhood. An otherwise attractive white woman with purple hair, a skeleton tattoo on her chest, and “trouble” tattooed on her neck is herself pleading for special-victim status based on her looks, saying, “I don’t get the same treatment as a normal white person does. I get discriminated against just as much as a minority. .  .  . I’m not clearly a minority, but I am.”

I could go on, but why? You get the idea: 21 yobbos with varying opinions who are not used to expressing them in front of a camera. They probably sound the way any other 21 yobbos of any color would if they did the same. And while the commentariat strives to invest great meaning into the worst of these, I don’t see how that can be done. Even soda-can-hair girl isn’t representative of white people. Just as she’s not representative of people with hair.

Of course, that beacon of light and nuance, the Twitter-verse, passed swift and ferocious judgment: @chrisalie3 tweeted, “this whiteness project s— just reaffirms that racial ignorance is alive and kicking.” While @herwittythought tweeted, “because we need them to tell us to get over it in a different way.” General sentiment was probably best encapsulated by a Guardian headline: “The Whiteness Project Will Make You Wince. Because White People Can Be Rather Awful.”

Dow, for his part, seemed slightly wounded by the backlash, telling New York magazine, “I expected white people to be outraged, and what’s actually interesting to me is the biggest critics of the project are white progressives on the web.” Surprised by white progressives’ expressing sanctimonious outrage? He clearly doesn’t get out much.

The blowback is all the richer since Dow has impeccable social-consciousness credentials. He has a black co-producing partner (whom he’s forever mentioning), who for a time in college lived in Dow’s family’s house. Together, they made the knotty and compelling Peabody Award-winning documentary Two Towns of Jasper, examining the 1998 death of James Byrd, who was dragged behind a truck for two miles by three white men. Dow is from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended an Ivy League school. He’s had an audience with the queen herself (Oprah).

Dow is hardly a white supremacist. Quite the opposite. So the criticism from his own (@emdawgz1 tweeted, “Mr Dow. .  .  . Sometimes when getting your a** kicked .  .  . it’s best to just curl up in a ball and wait for it to be over”) is almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. Almost. For if his online critics are playing to form, as shrill, short-sighted, and willfully myopic as you expect the Twidiocracy to be in the middle of a race-related feeding frenzy, Dow is just as selectively dishonest in his Whiteness Project.

The project’s interviews come without editorializing from Dow, unless you count the bumpers at the end of each minute-and-a-half episode, which flash statistical pronouncements intended to bloodlessly drive home the sorry state of white people in America. To his credit, Dow names the source from which each figure came. But when I delve into them, it becomes apparent that, while he never outright cooked the numbers, he often goosed them to tell a story that didn’t necessarily reflect reality.

After one interview, he reports that 60 percent of white Americans say “race relations are ‘generally good.’ ” The implication being: O, ye clueless white people. But in the very same 2014 CBS News survey that Dow quotes, 55 percent of blacks said the same​—​a mere 5-point difference and a fact that he doesn’t bother mentioning, though CBS did: “Whites and blacks are nearly in agreement in their views; majorities of both call race relations generally good.”

After an interview with a gruff, tank-topped bar owner who expresses distaste for minority-hiring preferences, Dow informs us that 26 percent of white Americans say minority business and education successes are due to racial preferences. Sounds pretty uncharitable of white people, or at least one-quarter of them. Except when you go to the Pew survey he references, it clearly states that, while a majority of white respondents said affirmative action in college admissions is a good thing, “significantly more people worry about the fairness of the programs .  .  . [and] Black-white differences on this question are much smaller than on the question of whether such programs are a good thing or not.” Forty-three percent of whites figured they were unfair, and 35 percent of blacks agreed. 

After interviewing soda-can girl, Dow tells us that 70 percent of white millennials “did not grow up in families that talked about race.” Translation: White people are ostriches with their heads in the sand. But when raking through the MTV survey he used as a source, one discovers that maybe those millennials didn’t get the stern racial talking-to because “84 percent say their family taught them that everyone should be treated the same, no matter what their race. . . . [A] belief in equality has become this generation’s ‘first commandment’​—​true across all races.”

But wait, there’s more! After one interview, Dow tells us that 75 percent of white Americans say their social networks are entirely white. Obviously, white people are out of touch. Except the same Public Religion Research Institute survey found that 65 percent of blacks also reported their social networks are composed entirely of people who are black, which is presumably even harder for them to do, on account of there being fewer people to choose from.

In another epiphany on race relations, Dow tells us that only 10 percent of white American adults believe most whites are racist, while 38 percent believe most blacks are racist. Message: stupid white people! But go to the same Rasmussen Reports survey that Dow cites, and just one paragraph above that statistic lies this one: “Among black Americans, 31 percent think most blacks are racist, while 24 percent consider most whites racist.” Could it be true? Who knows? It’s just one more poll. But if we take this poll at its word​—​as Dow himself saw fit to do, at least partially​—​more blacks think blacks are racist than think whites are racist. 

I’ve now given you five instances of Dow thumbing the scale when presenting data, but for good measure, here’s one more. Smack in the middle of the Ferguson conflagration​—​the marquee race-relations fiasco of 2014​—​Dow relies on a New York Times survey that found three-quarters of white Americans say they come into contact with either “a few” or “no” black people on a regular basis. But the Times was kind enough to break that survey out by race. While blacks weren’t asked how many white people they come into contact with, they were asked other questions, which turn out to be illuminating. 

When asked how comfortable they felt talking race with someone of another race, 81 percent said they felt either very or somewhat comfortable. When asked how race relations were in the United States, only 44 percent said “generally good.” But when asked how race relations were in their communities, “generally good” shot all the way up to 73 percent. Even after Ferguson, one of the most controversial police shootings of our time, when asked if they thought of police more as friends or enemies, only 13 percent of blacks said they saw the police as enemies.

So according to Dow’s own sources, black and white America aren’t nearly as far apart as our race-hustlers of both colors suggest. What they can agree on is the increasing uselessness of the “national conversation” on race, the one that Dow and others strive so clumsily to jumpstart, which does more to divide than unite. Perhaps the conversation we should have is a conversation about ceasing counterproductive conversations, instead addressing each other as individuals rather than as grievance-group blocs each intent on blowtorching the other with our respective briefs of historical injustice. Only a philistine would be antitolerance. But tolerance suggests empathy, which isn’t about asserting ourselves, but seeing through the other guy’s eyes, even if he has cataracts. Empathy means tolerance as defined by Voltaire: “What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error, let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly​—​that is the first law of nature.”

Not to go too touchy-feely​—​we white people can get emotive​—​but I regard the last word on the subject as belonging to Brian Eno, an uber-white person, ambient music producer, and Roxy Music alumnus, who inadvertently stated an ideal race-relations philosophy when discussing a cappella singing. I never much cared for Roxy Music​—​way too white for my taste. Nor have I ever liked ambient music​—​music white people listen to when they need an excuse to drink. (I prefer Leroy Carr and Black Boy Shine’s “Bad Whiskey Blues.” Call Christian “Stuff White People Like” Lander and have him file me under “black music that black people don’t listen to anymore.”) But Eno once said: “When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness, because a cappella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings​—​to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.”  

Or, to frame it more earthily, I could turn to the Whiteness Project’s comments section. There, among all the spittle-flecked “conversationalists” who have joined the National Race Invitational, who call each other “filthy white pieces of s—” and “whiny parasites” and “dumbass” and “old white retard” and “Browntown” and “anime-loving neckbeard” and “nigga” and “mentally retarded” and “dumber than a kindergartner” and “cracka,” was this rare bit of wisdom from “Lily the cat”:

“Stop! I can’t take it anymore. People listen to yourselves. We are going backwards as a society and nation. .  .  . Seriously, life is not about this petty, idiotic crap. .  .  . Okay, my rant is over. Starting loving more and hating less. It is later than we think.”

Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.