Part 1 of a 4 part series. Produced by Phoebe Unter, edited by Sharon Mashihi and hosted by Kaitlin Prest. Additional editorial support from Nicole Kelly, Kamala Puligandla and Kaitlin Prest.
Thank you to Ellen Murphy & Steve Unterman, Isa Knafo, Lane Goldszer, Karina Solis, Mara Lazer, Nicole Kelly & Kamala Puligandla for having the conversations you heard in this episode.
Music you heard in this episode: “Beanbag Fight” and “Concentric” by Scanglobe and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” by the Velvet Underground.
This episode featured the characteristics of white supremacy culture, which were written by Tema Okun & Kenneth Jones for the workbook Dismantling Racism. There was also an excerpt from the essay White People, You Have a Lying Problem, written by Talynn Kel.
Below is a list of other texts & resources that helped Phoebe shape the ideas articulated in this series, which takes its name from the ‘90s journal edited by John Garvey & Noel Ignatiev. Many Race Traitor contributors now work on Hard Crackers.
The book Whites, Jews & Us by Houria Bouteldja, described aptly as a “polemical call for a militant antiracism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love.”
Survey for White Artists by Latham Zearfoss & Ruby T, which compiles white artists’ (very smart) responses to questions like Where do you locate whiteness within your work? What is the effect of your white identity on your practice?
The entire body of work of Mandy Harris Williams a.k.a. @idealblackfemale, a theorist, multimedia conceptual artist, writer, educator, radio host and internet/community academic who investigates the connections between white supremacy and desirability, and lovingly/brilliantly calls out all kinds of bullshit including racist algorithms.
Eula Biss’s essay White Debt in the New York Times, which talks about raising white children and responds to Claudia Rankine’s essay The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning by purporting that the condition of white life in America might be complacency, complicity, debt or forgotten debt.
The book Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mab Segrest.
The podcast/series Seeing White by John Biewen featuring Chenjerai Kumanyika is an excellent primer on the “buried” history of whiteness.
Chenjerai & Sandhya Dirks’ lecture All Stories Are Stories About Power has been extremely influential in my thinking about journalism. So has Lewis Wallace’s series (and book) The View From Somewhere, which breaks down the white supremacist construct of objectivity.
Sara Ahmed on whiteness. Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White by James Baldwin. Margaret Hagerman’s research on how white children are raised in the book White Kids. The 8 White Identities by Barnor Hesse. Tamara K. Nopper on white anti-racists.
Lastly, Phoebe wants to acknowledge that this work is not in itself an anti-racist action. It is meant only to describe her experience. She made this in the hope that it would be useful for other people confronting white culture in themselves, their communities or the world, where there’s plenty of it.
She invites white people to join *actual* collective movement against white supremacy. Check out Community Ready Corps Allies & Accomplices and Make Yourself Useful. Give reparations to Black & Indigenous people.
transcript
Kaitlin Prest:
From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia welcome to...The Heart, I'm Kaitlin Prest.
[theme music starts, a drum beating like heart]
I am speaking to you directly from my parents basement in Canada and I'm here in your ear to introduce you to this series, it's called Race Traitor.
[low voice sings with music, music is muffled and continues in background]
You know, I really, truly have no idea how you all who are listening to this perceive me, but I am somebody who has dedicated my entire career to trying to push diversity in media, who I'm somebody who says that I have progressive politics. I'm somebody whose identity is rooted in standing up for a certain kind of politics and listening to this series forced me to clock where I really am at when it comes to anti-racism and my own privilege as a white person, it kind of shook me a little bit and made me realize how many how far the layers go down and how much the work is never, ever, ever done and how easy it is to, you know, just get settled into the idea that you're doing enough. Basically, yeah. So if you're one of those people like me who pays lip service to a certain kind of politics, you've got to listen to these episodes. Here's Phoebe.
[music fades to silence]
Phoebe
As early as I can remember I've wanted to be the best. As a kid I wanted to win, all the time. In a room full of people, I wanted attention.
Ellen Murphy (Phoebe's mom):
I mean, I think it's a natural inclination to want to do those things, because I remember vaguely as a kid feeling like when I went into a room full of people thinking, you know, how am I going to win these people over? I have to be funny. I have to be engaging. I have to be. I have to be the center of attention.
Steve Unterman (Phoebe’s dad):
You really thought about that?
Phoebe:
[narrating] That is my perennially puzzled dad interrupting my mom. She's probably a big part of why I am this way.
Phoebe:
[On the phone to her mom] Okay. This is what I did too, but not everyone thinks like that.
Ellen:
Hmm, yeah, that's true.
Phoebe:
[narrating] I remind my mom, as I often do in the same way I've often had to remind myself that just because you think something doesn't mean everyone else does.
[race traitor theme music: lo-fi rock music reminiscent of Le Tigre begins]
A couple years ago, I was having dinner with my family, and even though we've been having heated discussions pretty much every time we eat dinner together for decades, it's the first time I've been able to get my parents to say anything explicit about being white. [music fades out]
They talk about their childhoods all the time. But this time I specifically asked them how they learned to be white, who taught them? And they're talking about experiences they had where they became aware of their difference from people of other races. It's so unusual. I grab my mic and stick it in my mom's face and then she doesn't want to talk about it anymore.
Phoebe:
[talking to her parents at the dinner table] Will you answer the question though? I mean, you were already talking about it but...
Ellen:
Answer what question?
Phoebe:
The question, how did you learn to be white?
Ellen:
[sounding annoyed] Oh, turn it off.
Phoebe:
Why?
Ellen:
Because I'm not ready to answer. I don't know.
Phoebe:
I'll play anything if I use it.
Ellen:
No. no. Just turn it off because I'm not sure exactly what the —
Phoebe:
You were just talking about it.
Phoebe:
[narrating] Because my parents never talk about being white. They're not good at it.
Ellen:
Well, but, but, see Phoebe, you can't just. You can't just zero in.
Steve:
I wonder if it's analogous to what I've always said about religion, that I think other people think more about me being Jewish than I do. I wonder if it's the same with race.
Phoebe:
It absolutely is. You don't ever think about being white, but like Black people don't have the...
Steve:
[cutting Phoebe off] See, that's why I have a hard time answering.
Phoebe:
[narrating] Some of the tape from this dinner, I would never play because I'm embarrassed at their lack of self-awareness. And, yes, I realize it probably makes me embarrassed because I'm also embarrassed about my own lack of self-awareness sometimes. It haunts me. When I asked my parents about their experience being white, they think I'm just being annoying. That it's this weird particular hang up of mine. Or they think I'm trying to insult their parenting. They think I'm turning on them. And it's kind of true, I'd like to think I'm turning on their kind. Wealthy white liberals who don't really question having the things that they have. But Phoebe, isn't that you too? If that's how your parents are, some might ask. And the answer is yes, dear friend, you are right. Which is also why I am trying to understand my parents, because I know that their ideology lives in me.
Phoebe:
A lot of the questions I'm asking occurred to me because of conversations I have with my friends.
[conversation begins in the background]
One circle of friends in particular. We are a bunch of cranky killjoys who like to read and to party.
[laughter and general merriment begin quietly in the background]
Phoebe:
And in this group, I'm the only white person. [laughter continues]
And these are some of the everyday type things that I hear.
Kamala Puligandla:
And I wasn't befriending white women because I didn't think that they were going to help me with my personal growth and who I wanted to become, that was the main reason. It wasn't just because I experience them as like, you know, a resource and time suck, which I did. But it was like beyond like whatever negative..
Nicole Kelly (NK):
I know I talked about, like, people who, white friends who I've lost because I'm like, oh, like I can't talk about being angry about, like racial inequality with you then I'm just like I'm not going to share those experiences with you. But then the second that I start to be like, oh, I can't talk about that with you. That's the beginning of the end of, like, really any sense of real intimacy.
Phoebe:
That's NK. And before her was Kamala, because I hear these things, I feel responsible for doing something about it, like not replicating patterns of white behavior like this myself, but also talking about it to other white people. And trying to see how white supremacy lives in me as a white person. Now, there's a lot I can see, and I'm still nowhere near done with this process, but it took a lot to get here.
[introspective synth piano and what sounds like rain falling]
I grew up in a white liberal [sounds of children playing] suburban American dream fantasy of multi-culti picture books and tame Martin Luther King Junior quotes about unity written on the blackboard.
But there was a lot I wasn't taught. I wasn't taught that the founding fathers were liars [echoes] that they wrote all men are created equal and their supposedly radical document, [sound of a bass drum that kind of sounds like a heart beating] the Constitution. But they knew it wasn't true. [heart beat drum sounds punctuate throughout these statements] They owned slaves and intentionally wrote them out of all the benefits of being American. That means we don't live in a democracy, that the property of rich white land owning men has always been the priority. I wasn't taught how their power has always been protected and that all of our systems, the police and the courts, for example, still uphold this original mission. I wasn't taught that the only rights and power poor people and people of color in this country have won were gained in struggle. That was often bloody and unfair and harshly contested. [cymbal/snare drum echoes]
Phoebe:
It wasn't like I couldn't have handled this information as a kid. This harsh toke of reality, because when I was five years old, I was told that my grandma survived the Holocaust. That Nazis in Germany put her family in concentration camps and put people like her family in gas chambers to be killed because they were Jewish. But they didn't talk to me about how when my grandma came to the U.S. after all that, she was treated like a lady in public while Black women were being spat on and that it was upheld by many people and the government as totally legal and acceptable.
What I did learn as a kid was that other people in my town were blue bloods and wasps. [musical horn sounds]
That's what my dad called them.
And that was white, white. Whereas we were Jewish, on the fringes. My Christian friends tell me things like: [phoebe impersonating a young wasp classmate] "you'd be really pretty if it weren't for your nose." [in a younger kid phoebe voice] "Yeah, I know."
At the time, I wasn't aware that I felt powerless [fun party music begins] because I couldn't access the benefits of white femininity. So I just thought I was ugly. When I go to college in California, though, where I'm suddenly surrounded by people of many races, it becomes clear that I'm actually regular white [party synth music speeds up] and feminine in more or less the right way. After all, I go to parties and hear things like:.
creepy stranger:
Hey, sexy, want to dance?
College dude:
Wanna come back to my room?
Phoebe:
If I want to end the night fucking some stranger. I just wear a slutty outfit and put on a little bit of eyeliner. And it makes me feel powerful for the first time. This eventually wears off.
creepy stranger:
Hey, Sexy. [music speeds up and then squiggles and becomes high pitched and crescendos and fades out]
Phoebe:
Ugh, get off me.
Phoebe:
I become a feminist, which also makes me feel powerful in a different way. I'm exposed for the first time to how other people see me. People who aren't white. I'm in journalism school, so I'm sent out into the neighborhoods surrounding my university to look for stories and walking around alone carrying a recorder and a microphone. In south central Los Angeles, [city sounds like traffic and wind] a historically black and brown area. I'm told a lot of things that I shouldn't be there. That it's dangerous for me that I must be exceptionally brave or exceptionally naive. [car horn honks-traffic sounds fade]
Phoebe
I do spend a lot of time listening and I learn from it and I do care about the effect living here has on the people who have lived here for a lot longer. [traffic sounds turn into ambient techno spacey music] And conveniently, my university has an organization for people like me.
White saviour-college-voice:
[high pitched voice of a college representative selling a program] Hi. Are you feeling bad about having a school police force that keeps you safe and in extreme comfort in the midst of the inner city, feeling weird about privilege but want to be known publicly as a very good person? We have a club for that, sign up here to be a white saviour tutor for black and brown kids.
Phoebe:
I become a white saviour tutor. I go into people's homes. I'm respected. I'm invited over for dinner. Parents tell their kids to listen to me. And it makes me feel like an ambassador from the world of expensive private education. And I'm proud to represent that. It makes me feel confident and powerful. [ambient techno crescendos and then ends]
We know this story, the story of someone, a white protagonist, who at the beginning feels powerless for any number of reasons. And as things change, they gain a footing. They're propelled forward in a quest for more power.
And we're supposed to celebrate it to feel good for them. When I reach what I would consider my height of white feminist power, I'm confident and I know what I want from love and from sex. As a dyke, as a feminist who feels like I'm living my politics, that I'm living a liberated life as a woman. I want to take up as much space as possible. [echoing inspirational drum beat begins]
I want to yell and tell off misogynist men. [drum beat turns into upbeat synth piano race traitor theme]
But in the years that would follow, I would see this crumble.
My understanding of myself as a good feminist, driven by good intentions and my relationship to having this power, my claim to defiance. The first time it was at a party, a party I'm throwing a celebration dedicated to women's orgasms. All my friends are white transplants living in Los Angeles. Someone brings their friends who are brown and actually grew up there. [music continues people chatting in the background]
We're all getting to know each other.
Partygoer:
Yeah. So where are you from?
Phoebe's white-transplant friend:
Oh I'm from New York, but I live in Highland Park.
Phoebe:
Yeah I'm not from here, but um, I uh live in Boyle Heights. [party music ends]
Local Partygoer:
That's kind of fucked up, that's where my family and I used to live. [heart beats slowly]
Phoebe:
[narrating] My stomach turns. I'm desperate for the moment to pass for someone else to say something. It's so uncomfortable.
[in scene] Fuck uh, I'm sorry… [heart beat ends]
White-transplant friend:
[quietly and echoing fading out] I heard that there's property that’s kinda cheap there...
[quiet rock music begins]
Phoebe:
The conversation picks back up somehow. But I'm not paying attention. My mind is flooded with questions. This is supposed to be a festival celebrating orgasm, but people are like pissed off. Is this whole thing, like kind of a joke. Is it my fault? How responsible am I really for her family getting displaced? What can I even do? Am I a bad person for living there?
[lo-fi rock theme kicks back in]
Kaitlin Prest:
Please forgive this brief interruption. We'll be right back.
Phoebe:
For weeks. I can't stop thinking about this moment.
Local LA Party-goer:
[echoes in Phoebe’s head] That's kinda fucked up.
Phoebe:
I think about what my mom would do. She would probably say that everyone else's problems are not my responsibility. I think about what I want to do, to list all the reasons why I'm not the worst kind of gentrifier. I don't go to that stupid coffee shop. I don't call the cops. I talk to some friends about it who are like, don't worry, it was just an awkward moment. You didn't do anything wrong. But I know that even if I hadn't done anything wrong at the party in that conversation, my presence in my neighborhood wasn't Okay. It wasn't Okay with people who had been displaced. And it wasn't Okay with me. [percussive horn music in background] I decided to become more committed to helping reduce the harmful footprint of my presence in my neighborhood. I join a tenant organizing group. In this community there are lots of queer women of color who speak unapologetically about white bullshit. And I learn to take things less personally, to know and articulate my privileges, to know when it's a good idea to speak and when I should shut the fuck up. I become incredibly aware of how much space I take up in a room and we all become real friends. And I feel like I'm living my politics, fighting for a better world for everyone, treating all issues of oppression as feminist issues. I feel closer than ever to a solution for my whiteness. [music gets louder and bass reverberates]
And then…
News announcer:
[archival tape] It was a white-lash against a Black president. Clinton has called Donald Trump to concede the race.
Phoebe:
It was the worst white women as a group had ever looked in my lifetime. It wasn't the worst thing white women as a group had done in my lifetime. But we had gotten caught.
News announcer:
[archival tape] I think we kind of all know the statistic that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. That's that's huge. That's kind of, um, shocking.
Phoebe:
And people were actually calling us out for our complicity in electing this abhorrent man who would make life so much more dangerous for people of color. And the liberal resistance movement was rife with white feminism.
[Le Tigre "I'm With Her" kicks in and plays in background- marchers chant “My body my choice!”]
NPR host:
[archival tape] A sea of pink knitted hats with cat-like ears.
April Goggans:
You cannot make us use the language that you use to get justice.
Phoebe:
NK and I, and another friend feel like we can't sit idly by and let the feminist movement be co-opted by these women. So we co-organize a workshop for white women trying to move away from just being good informed white people and actually giving stuff up, processing our guilt and shame and turning our privilege into something useful. [sounds of chairs moving, people cough] I'm standing at the front of a room full of 40 white people, every chair is full. I scan the room, [people quietly chat] people are whispering and checking the time on their phones. There's a lot of Jews, a few burner types, but no white people with dreads or anything. [noise of people adjusting and talking quietly in the background as the workshop is about to begin]
There are some boomers I'm worried about. I imagine there are some people in the room wanting to get credit just for being there and some looking for a get absolved quick pass. I'm a little skeptical. I'm not sure what this workshop can really teach me. We go around the room and introduce ourselves and I gloat a tiny bit internally knowing I'm not as bad as some of these totally clueless white women.
[Phoebe impersonating the voices of the various good white women participants in the workshop] Trump's election was like a wake up call.
You know, my husband and I donate to the ACLU.
I just really believe in nonviolence you know, we're going to ask for unity than what we.. Maybe there's something that we need to do among ourselves.
You know, I found myself asking, what if a pussy hats not enough??
There's been so much progress.
Phoebe:
Listen, I know, right now in this moment, I'm distancing myself from other white women acting like I'm better than them at being anti-racist. There's those people over there. And then there's me. A good one. It's an instinct when I'm forced to confront this power that I don't really want to have as a white person. This instinct to diminish it kicks in. The exceptions push their way to the surface. But I'm Jewish, but I'm queer. But I'm an anarchist, but I'm often the only white person around. I get it.
[people speak to each other quietly] Everyone in this room knows that racism is bad, and everyone knows overt racism when they see it. They would definitely call it out. But the reason we're all gathered in this room is to identify subtler forms of racism. And I'm not talking about microaggressions either. I'm talking about aggressions that are so subtle. They're like the walls of the room or the carpet on the floor.
The facilitator asked me to tack up a stack of papers on the wall. Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun wrote this list of characteristics in 2001, [sounds of paper crinkling] it's called White Supremacy Culture. The characteristics listed on the sheets of paper are damaging because they're often used as norms and standards without being proactively named or chosen by the group. The facilitator explains this. She asks us to get into small groups and walk around the room talking [people chat and discuss] about the ways each characteristic has shown up in our own lives. [Snappy percussive music sounds like a clicking clock]
Phoebe
Perfectionism.
Sense of Urgency.
Fear of Open Conflict .
Workshop participant:
…at your wedding and her response is like it's actually you are too sensitive and you're like creating problems for me and for yourself…
Phoebe:
Worship of the written word.
Only one right way.
Power hoarding.
Participant 2:
…Like a woman of color brought up wanting to talk about the way the group was dealing with each other and treating each other and it was completely dismissed. It was deemed sort of like unnecessary…
Phoebe:
Objectivity.
Either/Or Thinking.
Defensiveness.
Phoebe:
[in scene] This one reminds me of my parents, like when I questioned them and like decisions that they're making. They, like, cannot even talk to me about it.
[workshop noises of people chattering and upbeat percussive ticking music continues]
Quantity Over Quality.
Paternalism.
Right to Comfort.
Participant 3:
…I like how this is phrased as the belief that those with power have a right to emotional and psychological comfort because that really like, lays out how you can reinforce that really subtly…
Phoebe:
Individualism.
Progress is Bigger and More.
[Percussive music continues and then fades out]
Phoebe:
I end up leaving the workshop with my head spinning, feeling unmoored, like there's this whole level I haven't been interrogating that I haven't been aware of. The thoughts start creeping in about how I embody these characteristics. [ambient swirling music begins to build and arpeggiate- like the thoughts swirling around Phoebe’s head] Right to comfort. Fear of open defensiveness. I think of my inner power hungry child, how far I've come [music stops] from centering myself in every interaction I have. But I mostly filled with shame, feeling like despite my best efforts and my really good intentions, I'm back at the bottom, submerged in the cluelessness that feels inherent to being white and having to start over again. [ambient swirling synth begins again]
NK:
[echoes in Phoebe’s head] White friends who I've lost because I'm like, oh, look, I can't talk about being angry about like racial inequality with you.
Phoebe:
Maybe I'm as behind as these people my friends complain about.
NK:
[echoing] That's the beginning of the end of like, really, any sense of real intimacy [music stops]
Phoebe:
Desperate to read something talking about this experience. I searched the Internet and find this essay written by TaLynn Kel, a Black woman who writes about what it's like to navigate intimacy with her husband, a white man.
About white people, she writes: “I keep asking myself, when will they see the monster in the mirror? When will they see who they really are, what they do, how they destroy the world with their endless quest for power and the tireless subjugation of others to do it? When will they admit their fucking inability to see humanity in difference?”
[I'll be your mirror by the Velvet Underground begins]
Most of the mirrors we look in as white people will not reveal the monster. These mirrors the people we surround ourselves with, our relationships, the books we sometimes read, the shit in our Instagram feed, even the cities we live in.
They'll show us that we deserve what we have. They'll say that things just are the way they are. They'll say we're lucky. They'll say we're objectively hot. They'll say we should do what we want. They'll show us the people we've grown up thinking we are, defined by our character or our intellect or our interests and hard work and values.
I'm aware that the perspective of white people is overrepresented everywhere, but we rarely talk about how it feels when you do see the monster and what it's like to live in that discomfort. I am looking outside those mirrors in previously unexamined places, in myself and in my family history, in places I'm being asked to examine by people who love me but hate white people.
And I want you to hear me processing this because I wonder what's in there for you if you're white, and since we live in a white supremacist culture, we all deal with it in some way. So I hope there's something relevant for everyone. I am curious what would happen if all white people decided to confront themselves like this.
[I'll Be Your Mirror by The Velvet Underground continues]
This was the first episode of Race Traitor.
Next time, I'll be getting into it with my friends.
Kamala:
I think the way, I think there's a way that you expected to always get your way.
NK:
Yeah, I mean I have thought that, yeah.
[I’ll Be Your Mirror fades out- Heart theme fades in]
Kaitlin Prest:
Race Traitor is a serialized mini season of The Heart produced by Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi edited the series with additional editorial support from Nicole Kelly, Me, Caitlin Prest and Kamala Puligandla. This episode featured White Supremacy Culture written by Tame Okun and Kenneth Jones. And an excerpt from an essay called White People, you have a Lying Problem by TaLynn Kel. Find links to both texts and other resources that guided inspired Phoebe at The Heart radio dot org, The Heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi and me, Kaitlin Prest. It is a production of Mermaid Palace and is distributed by Radiotopia. The heart is now a more than 10 years old, queer and feminist institution that once in the long past went by the name of Audio Smut. If you like this show, tell your friends, review us in itunes. We need listeners to keep the show alive. And I think that there's a lot of people out there who would like this show that don't know about it yet.
So tell someone, send it to them. Send them this episode.
Follow us on Instagram at the Heart Radio. If you love this work and you want to support it with your cash dollars, we would greatly appreciate it. You can donate at the heart radio dot org. The Heart is a proud member of radiotopia, and I hope you're safe and comfy where you are.
