Comments on Shannon Sullivan’s Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

Abstract

Comments on Shannon Sullivan's Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-RacismShannon Sullivan provides a diagnosis for the problems with the social scripts that middle-class, anti-racist people think make them good, yet which serve support privilege and racial domination over non-whites, African Americans in particular, as well as poor whites. She identifies four strands of white liberal anti-racism behind this goodness in this order: (1) the abjection of so-called white-trash (2) the other-ing of people's history and ancestry, (3) the idea and ideal of color-blindness-especially in respect childrearing-and (4) the cultivation of guilt, shame, and betrayal.In my comments I focus on the strands of (3) color-blindness and then (2) history. For Sullivan, liberal middle-class whites put space between themselves and lower-class whites, who are identified as the believers and practitioners of unreformed, ignorant, and reactionary racial ideas. This is an easy move for liberal middle-class whites, or adopt Sullivan's phrase, people. After throwing the distant relatives under the bus, or into the red state heaths, good people put further conceptual distance between themselves and America's racial baggage by denying any connection to, or renouncing identification with, ancestral especially as connected with Black American slavery. This conceptual distancing separates them from ugly race-consciousness and sets up their embracing of variations of color-blindness.Sullivan's analysis of color-blindness is interesting because it offers another facet of the idea and ideal, one based on affect rather than narrow legalistic and normative reasoning or ideology, and its criticism adds a further dimension the objections color-blindness as an instrument of injustice and as an expression of racist ideology.Good people adopt the rhetoric of color-blindness because it semantically captures and conceptually justifies their stated desire not to race. Color-blindness is reproduced, as Sullivan explains, through their parenting. The motivation adopt this rhetoric is straightforward. According Sullivan: color blindness can seem like an attractive parenting strategy non-supremacist parents. It allows them avoid clumsy and difficult conversations about race and domination in which they fear they will say something inadequate, wrong, or harmful . . . about race or racism (86).There are three problems, according her analysis, with utilizing color-blind rhetoric and using it as parental technique when dealing with race and in family discussions. First, an individual can state a belief in color-blindness while holding racist beliefs, experiencing racial antipathy, or engaging in racist behavior. The idea even in the form of the ideal falls short. Second, color-blindness implicitly seeks a racially pure space, and thus enacts a form of domination similar supremacy (86). The supremacist and the color-blind good person falsely assume their subjective position is the universal one and seek negate non-whiteness, and more often than not, blackness. Third, adoption of color-blindness as a parental strategy forms the racial habit of not-seeing the relevant details of the lives of others. Parents don't really teach their children not see difference, but rather superficially see difference, and not see the suffering and injustices that correlate with ethnic, racial, and class differences.Good people and good families, in Sullivan's analysis, take a strange kind of pride in one's interpersonal (86). This cluelessness is part of the script of being a good person and is fully consistent with the other principles of racial commonsense-the shifting litany of ideas, stereotypes, practices, and rules about race that guides our interactions-that are evident in the case studies that Sullivan draws upon illustrate how good parents politely police racial lines. …