[Julie Steiner]

[Cross-posted with Andrew M. and Bill]

Martin, I'm far more interested in "what is" than "what if." Talking about hypothetical situations is not as enlightening as listening to actual lived experience.

I am white. My husband is American-born Chinese. One of our daughters is very dark-skinned, and she jokes that her features look as if I made no genetic contribution to her whatsoever, except that her hair is dark brown instead of black. Our other daughter has skin even paler than mine, but her eyes look East Asian enough that she can't pass for white.

I look very different from my daughters, and when they were young, other white moms we encountered in suburban parks often asked me one of these three questions, before introducing themselves:

1. "Are you the nanny?"
2. "Are you their REAL mom, or are they adopted?"
3. "They're beautiful! Where did you get them/From what country did you adopt them?"

The fact that so many felt they needed to know these things, before proceeding to any other sort of social niceties, suggests that since they couldn't size up our family's social status at a glance, their number one priority was to gather more information before deciding how friendly they wanted to be with me.

This wasn't racism. It was classism. Many college-educated moms are insecure about the social status they lose when society sees them only as someone's mom, rather than as someone in a prestigious, high-paying career. I experienced this myself, and it was a real identity crisis for me, but some other women took it to the point of a horror of mistakenly treating someone else's hired help as their own peer.

Classism also recognizes that there is social capital for white families to gain when they engage with non-whites, because it might later be trotted out as useful proof that they are not racist. I often suspected that these moms were pumping me for details to include in a subsequent report to their real friends, about how nicely their children had made friends with children who were not 100% white, and what that implied about the niceness of these white moms themselves.

In the vast majority of our interactions in parks, nobody cared about race enough to mention it, and the kids and moms and nannies just enjoyed each other's company. But if things had started with one of those three questions, things were going to remain little awkwardly self-conscious and how-do-I-look between the adults for the whole time.

Changing topic a bit:

When out in public, our light-skinned daughter is frequently approached by East Asian women and asked what product she is using to lighten her skin. Light skin, especially in women, has long been associated with high social class in many Asian and European cultures. Think of the hats and gloves and long sleeves that fashionable European and American men and women used to wear, either to avoid tanning or to avoid showing it. Also think of the more recent pejorative terms "redneck" and "farmer tan," which connote a man of low social class. Only in the 20th century did a suntan become associated with the financial means to indulge in outdoor leisure activities; before that, tanned or sunburned skin tended to be associated with not having the financial means to escape menial labor in the fields.

Again, a lot of society's racial attitudes are actually class attitudes. We are social animals, and we rely on stereotypes to assess our relative positions in the pecking order as quickly as possible. Since accusations of racism (or even just implicit bias) can cause white people to lose social status quickly, it is understandable that many, many white people are anxious to avoid all suspicion of that. But some go so far to proclaim themselves racism-free that they actually say that if Black and brown people would just stop bringing up race and accusing the nice white majority of bias, we would all live in peace and harmony and mutual goodwill. Sam Harris said something along those lines in the video you pointed to recently, and it struck me as a particularly naïve, head-in-the-sand, self-exonerating attitude. It is a flat denial both that significant injustice exists, and that white people have any obligation to surrender the advantages that they may have unknowingly been enjoying at others' expense. Harris made a point of saying that more white people than Black people are victims of police brutality, but he neglected any mention the fact that most people of any race who become victims of police brutality (outside of protests) have tended to come from social classes with few resources, whom the police feel they can push around with impunity. It seems hugely relevant that a higher percentage of Black people than white people are trapped in similarly vulnerable social classes. Harris ignored this completely. He instead asked why the Black Lives Matter activists weren't advocating for those white victims, or making songs to remember their names, and he implied that this was very, very unfair of them--as if the BLM activists are the ones guilty of racism, not the white majority. This is ridiculous. One could as well ask why Sam Harris wasn't advocating for those white victims, and couldn't be bothered to use his platform to publicize their names. And I think the answer is that the social class gulf between him and those white victims keeps him from empathizing with them, or worrying that what happens to a poor white drunk of below-average intelligence might happen to him.

White communities have long enjoyed the social, political, and economic benefits of excluding non-whites from opportunities to compete in business and to acquire the kind of property that builds intergenerational wealth. Those disparities will not miraculously vanish if Black and brown people just stop talking about them. Or if the white majority stays focused on hypothetical intellectual exercises, rather than listening to firsthand testimony about lived reality.