Finally, a movement is disrupting white innocence
I am the passenger in the car with my husband of nearly 30 years. He is Black; I am white, a historian who has spent my career studying issues of race. “You can turn here,” I tell him, suggesting a shortcut that I often take in our rural county in central Ohio. “Are you crazy?,” he responds. “Those are small backroads. What if the car broke down?”
The moment offers just one small reminder of how much I take for granted, of how — even after years of living with a Black man and raising two Black children — I don’t experience the world in the same way as they do and still don’t always recognize the limits of my own perspective. It is one small example of phenomenon that James Baldwin describes as “white innocence.”
In the 1960s, as African Americans were marching in the streets, Baldwin despaired of whites’ unwillingness to recognize the depth of racism and the reality of the Black experience in America. This “white innocence” was not neutral or passive as Baldwin described it. It was an active form of willful ignorance, a voluntary amnesia, about the policies, practices and histories that oppressed Blacks and expanded white power and privilege.
White people, he wrote in his 1963 masterpiece,
The Fire Next Time, “have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” To Baldwin, whites’ unwillingness to grapple with the country’s actual history and practice of systemic racism was a key barrier to creating a more equitable society.
In the years after the civil rights movement, white innocence only intensified, as it became even easier to dismiss the existence of systemic racism after the passage of civil rights laws that supposedly rooted racism out of public and institutional life. Indeed, a 2011 study found that whites felt that by the 1990s, it was they, not Blacks, who faced the greater bias and discrimination in American society.
But something has begun to change. In the weeks since George Floyd’s death, whites across the country — in cities, suburbs, and small towns — have joined and even organized protests against police brutality and racial injustice. In the overwhelmingly white, small city of Mount Vernon, where I live, more than 700 people showed up to protest George Floyd’s killing and to demand an end to police brutality.
That’s 700 primarily white people carrying signs proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” in a town where a few years ago a police officer referred to Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization. In Mount Vernon, an online community class that I helped organize about the history of racism filled to capacity within eight hours of being announced.
Attitudes are changing, too — today the number of Americans who see racism and discrimination as a
“big problem” in the U.S. is up 26 points since 2015, to 76% of Americans, including 71% of whites. The Pew Research Center reported recently that 60% of whites now express support for the Black Lives Matter Movement, up 20 points since 2016.
We are, in short, witnessing a disruption to white innocence. The current moment has challenged the capacity of whites to continue to deny the reality of systemic racism and to obscure the actual history of the country with mythic tales of freedom, liberty and opportunity.
Undermining white innocence will not be easy. It means changing school curricula that ignore or minimize America’s history of racial oppression. It means challenging political narratives that insist that it’s racist to even talk about race and that portray racism as the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise egalitarian system. It means confronting patterns of residential and school segregation that allow whites to maintain nearly all-white social circles and to never have to grapple with the limitations of their perspective.
And it requires that we reckon with the nation’s founding myths — myths that ignore how America’s vaunted freedoms were built on the twin pillars of slavery and settler colonialism. White Americans have far too long refused to acknowledge the reality of racism. It is time for white Americans to challenge themselves, their families, churches, politicians, teachers and institutions to end the crime of white innocence.
Renee Romano is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History at Oberlin College.